SF Scala: Tally Interview 9-20-16

SF Scala: Tally Interview 9-20-16

Recording: SF Scala: Tally Interview 9-20-16

[Music] hello everybody I'm Alexa crab Roe the organizer Fiserv scholar here on location at Shasta ventures it's a company funding a lot of skull eccentric startups starting with type-safe itself let's color company now light band and here we have with us tally which is using scholar and that's the company we should basically take over the financial world we're very excited about you know with having them in the community and they're helping us with this tonight's meetup and we'll have those adjacent and bread and they're all dress themselves hello i'm jason founder and CEO of tally and this is with me my head of engineering bradley hi everybody pleased to meet you we're actually really excited to be here today so can you tell us a little bit about what Ollie does and why did the juice call it dude all right well I'll do the first part what tally is so we're building a self-driving car of personal finance historically finance apps just give you data and charts and then you have to figure out what to do with it tally is building the next generation which actually makes the decisions for you and quantifiably saves you time and money so in order to do that we've actually had to build an entire Bank stack from the scrap from the ledger up so we built our entire own Bank stack using Scala and I'll turn it over to bread so you can talk about why we made that decision thank you Jason so Scala is actually an incredibly powerful tool for our type of a system I don't think it'll be uncommon to see more banks using Scala one of the strengths of it is that it allows us to maintain a reliable but scalable system such that we can maintain the transactions losing data scares us nobody wants to be losing money us so Scala allows us to achieve scale very efficiently while maintaining data quality so I talked with Jason earlier and you have this phenomenal entrepreneurial history right you basically corner to cultivating market in Massachusetts when he was a student right wishes wishes basically is amazing to me and then you did the PC diagnostic and business right so so what what makes it exciting for you to take over this gigantic market yeah so so let's let's talk about our first product so our first product is an app you put in all your credit cards and it gets rid of high APRs it gets rid of late fees and it manages all your cards for you automatically uh-huh so the banking industry is really good at taking money from our pockets and you know spending it on lavish things right and we're very motivated by the idea that we can use technology to automatically put all that money back into consumers products so into consumers pockets so what makes us so excited about this is that we can give people an app that makes their life better and saves them two hundred to a thousand dollars a year and it doesn't require any effort on their part so we think that the the banking industry is ripe for disruption and you know choosing a technology like Scala is one of the things that gives us a distinct advantage because we can build higher performance applications faster that are more secure than otherwise would not be possible without these modern technologies that sounds really exciting but like you know that like financial analysis was a lot of legacy things right here so I want to ask breath how we're going to interchange with all this old stuff right like how we're going to work with all this API is how are they going to use Scala to basically keep up with right with existing infrastructure I mean existing leg is the infrastructure is going to be legacy by default some some banks are going to be very slow mm-hmm sometimes intentionally slow but we can actually manage that so at a certain point there will be some batch oriented process processing and you have to deal with that in the meantime the consumer experience can be as fast as as you would expect it to be so you can you can transfer money and that would show up immediately in your app because you would expect that so Scala from the consumer side makes that very very easy some of the other systems that you would actually do integration with can be more complicated depending on the nature of it um so skala through it's actually I would say like some of the some of the AP is that we can consume allow us to abstract that complexity so we can build in the automatic retries we cannot build in the automatic recovery so that the user has still a graceful experience but still we can gracefully fall back and provide maybe some cache data as we recover and then we'll update it eventually mm-hmm so yes gal it gives us a lot of flexibility while focusing on the consumer experience another thing I wanted to ask is obviously there is a lot of risk in credit management and it's a data problem right so so scholar has a lot of different things to do about you know to work with data can it down a little bit you know what kind of data side tally will have what kind of data problems you might encounter and you know because the result of folks who look at skul as a data program data science language so can you tell me you know some of your ideas on the data side yeah so we're we're still a young company and there's definitely evolution to be happen to happen but right now we're focusing on the quality of the data so things like managing ledger data mm-hmm it starts off small but as time goes on it gets larger and larger and then we get to do more and more insightful things with that data mm-hmm so we'll start off we're starting off small with that we're doing our own analytics but as that involves we can start branching out to other technologies and ideally within the Scala world until to leverage that I blend to blend in to use things like spark spark it's a natural migration for us yeah that is definitely a very strong candidate mm-hmm what about type systems how will it help you to ensure consistency yeah this is actually that's a great question so Skylar clearly is one of its strong its strengths is is the type system we get to apply types to different types of actions that consumers will have to like different types of data so different Ledger's we can identify the type of ledger based on the types and that allows us to abstract how we interact with that and how do we do kind of the core financial calculations mm-hmm reliably like that's that's the fundamental strength of a functional language is that we can that is also object oriented is that we can apply the right logic depending on its type mm-hmm so and probably all you know ask Jason for closing you know basically in order to compute this world you need to raise huge amounts of capital right so you have unique into preneur trajectory so what makes you think that you will be able to raise billions and billions of dollars and what needs to happen on the technology side right to enable you to basically compete with established institutions yeah absolutely so so a finance company like ours is fundamentally driven by raising capital as you as you mentioned and we have a proven track record to do that we just closed a 15 million dollar Series A in May and all of our rounds were heavily oversubscribed so a lot more demand from investors then we have availability so I think fundamentally here's here's why tally is going to be successful it's able to make the customers life easier save them money but it's also able to give the investors that actually fund all the the balances higher returns and they would get if they just invested in banks themselves so consumers are better off investors are better off and we're able to do that all automatically so the automatic part is a key and that's completely technology enabled and if we don't build high performance and reliability into our back-end infrastructure there's no way that we can make that magic happen so without these modern technologies and a brilliant engineering team there's no way that we'd be able to pull this off well so so basically get a bill basically a much more efficient bank by squeezing out all this in efficient altec and we are making it lean and modern and kind of driving them the margins yep and in smart I mean I think that's that there's not a lot of intelligent built on a normal normal Bank stack whereas we have built intelligence that can make the decisions that people aren't capable of making but all optimized and automatically awesome this is I mean this is a great plan the hope it all works out and we will do our part in the community side and thank you very much looking forward to a partnership with talat okay Thank You Lexi thanks thank you very much thank you [Music]