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EP 211: Track your wealth - David Martinez de Lecea 

David Martinez de Lecea is a Consultant, entrepreneur and investor with a unique combination of business management expertise and deep technological acumen focused on Artificial Intelligence. David is Founder and CEO of the Startup Exirio the wealth insight app.

In this episode we talk about investment tracking, how Exirio works and how people like me can benefit through Exirio. Furthermore we talk about how he has built the startup and what he learned on the way.

Guest Links: 

David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidlecea/

David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidlecea

Exirio App: https://www.exirio.com/

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Transcript:

(This Transcript is AI generated)

David Martinez

Hello innovators and welcome back for another conversation about human innovation. Today's guest is David Martinez. De Lecea.

David is founder and c o of the Startup Exirio, the Wealth Insight App. In this episode, we talk about investment tracking, how exterior works and how people like I can benefit through Exirio.

Further more we talk about how he has built this startup and what he has learned on the way, welcome to the show, David Martinez de Lecea.

Hello David, welcome to the show. How are you doing? 

Very good. How are you? Thank you for having me. . 

Looking forward to learn a little bit more about finance from you today and of course as well the startup world.

So it's very interesting topic. But before we go into this, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you and how did you get to where you are today? 

Yeah how did I get into this? Is a combination of my academic background cause I studied computer science and I was a geek. And I've always loved technology, but when I graduated from college, being in technology wasn't a cool thing.

I didn't pay well. And at that point in time what you had to do was business. So I went into management consulting and I worked there for 10, 15 years. And it was great. Most of the time I specialize working in banking and wealth management. So then when the world evolved and FinTech started becoming a thing, I found that opportunity to put together my academic intellectual interests and my profession and start working on FinTech.

I invested in some French business. I launched one. I collaborated with others. It became an advisor and now Exirio is the conclusion of all that putting together what I know from those worlds. 

Tell us a little bit more of what Exirio is. 

So Exirio is an app that lets you track your wealth.

The problem we're solving is that nowadays people with some money, they don't have to be super rich, but with some complexity in their wealth, they can have house, they can have crypto, they can have stocks, they can have a current account, a credit card, a mortgage especially if it's people who have work in different countries, then they're gonna have multiple currencies.

So at some point in time talking to friends and talking to our co-founder everybody that we knew, especially expats that had this problem was using spreadsheet. We was, we were wondering how is it possible that in 2020 we're still using spreadsheet for this? And nobody was developing it, nobody was doing it.

So we decided to do it ourselves. And that's what we built an app to track all your wealth in one place. 

And I can tell you it's awesome for people like myself, not because of the wealth part, but it's more about the complexity. Like you mentioned, I have lived in six countries. I have still accounts in at least 4, 5, 5 countries and a lot of different currencies and everything is a huge mess.

So what I did I started an exel table. and do all the numbers in an Excel table, sometimes on a daily base, but at least twice a week for sure. where I get an overview of what's going on . 

Yeah. So we've all been there and with the spreadsheet, yeah, you need to update. You are quite hardcore in updating, but at least once a month and you need to make sure that the values produce you using a spreadsheet they're offering the, from a similar date and you need the exchange rates.

It's just a lot of work. So even the very basic version of the app, when. When we managed to solve all that FX issues was good enough, and then we've been adding tons of features that should make life easier to anybody who wants to understand what they own and how it is performing.

Yeah. 

Let's talk about a little bit about the, how did you get to the exact idea, so you have lived in different countries and you, your co-founders most probably as well. Yes. And then you just brainstormed based on, Hey, we all have kind of an exel table or so. How did you came up with the idea and.

It's been iterative, so it started just like that saying, how is it possible that we're using spreadsheet and everybody thinks that spreadsheet is better oh, but look at mine and use mine. But it's impossible to use someone else as spreadsheet. Yeah. You need a properly designed application for this.

So we decided to put some time and some money and give it a go. I reached out to some people I had worked with in, in India that work in finance and trading. So it was very easy to assemble the team very quickly. That's one that's been one of the, our CSBs have been, has been the team because we were lucky.

And very quickly we launched the prototype. We put it open for anyone to use. We keep iterating. We stay on top of users all the time asking for feedback and yeah, we already have a list of 200 things we want to develop that users have requested so it never end.

That's cool. So two, two points. I would love to dig deeper into the app and the functionalities, but as well into the funding of the company and the startup and how you started to build it. But let's start first with the finance topics. So why is it important to track it? What is your opinion that everyone, ma do you think everyone should track it?

I'm con completely convinced, but let's. . 

For right now, we get most of our users For people like you that already understand the need. There, there's enough. There's enough of you out there. But having said that, wh why is important? Look, money doesn't solve all problems. But it solves all money problems.

And money doesn't buy happiness, but it helps a lot in not having money problems. So even though we've built an app to track your wealth, our vision is to help people reach financial. , once you reach financial freedom, you do whatever you want. You probably keep working on things you're passionate about, and that's a fantastic place to be in.

If you wanna be happy, I strongly recommend sort out your money issues first, because without that it's just, it is gonna be really hard. So in order to get there, you need to know where your money is and you need to have your money working for you. , it's very easy to have money park there in a current account and not making any money or giving to the wrong provider that is killing you in fees or not knowing exactly what you do.

A lot of people say real estate is the best investment, maybe but a lot of them don't do the right math. So it could be but it's sometimes it's not. So we're trying to help you really understand how much you. Where is it and how it is performing so you can make these right decisions and be on your path towards financial freedom.

That's cool. So how do you do that with the performing? How can I, so my, my, if we just compare this to my Excel spreadsheet, I do different formulas and try to calculate what is my net worth and so on. Yeah. Are you doing this, these things as. 

Yes the net worth is the number one issue. Super easy.

We just convert everything at whichever is the latest valuation that we have. We convert it into your own currency and we'll give you a number and you have that for your whole history, for the future. And we also build the history. But once you wanna go deeper into the performance and of your investments, we calculate performance metrics for each of the investments, how much absolute money you've made.

How much is that in percentage And most importantly, which we have the only app in the market that does this will give you the analyze money, wait, return or i r r. Yeah. Which we believe is the ultimate metric that can't really compare. Cause you'll find people that say, I bought my house at a hundred, now it's worth 200.

So it's a great investment, but they forget to tell you whether that was in a year or in 25 years. So we try to, All sorts of metrics, the absolute ones and the analyze return, which tells you exactly exactly how those compare. And we also break it down if you want, into is it due to the asset itself or through currency fluctuations.

So we allow you to see that in your own currency or in the currency of the investment and just give you a lot of options to really understand how things are performing. 

Yes. , you talked already about the investment and the connection. I'm really interested in how does that work? So I have different accounts in different countries.

How do you get to know that it is working? That how do you get the data from all of this? Do I need to punch them in or do you connect to APIs? How does that work? Both. 

So the manual option is always available. You can put anything you want. And if you give me the cash flows, how much money you put in, how much money you put out with the date and the number.

I'll give you the metrics, but of course, if you are a trader and you have a complex portfolio, or you're doing a lot of crypto, that's a lot of work. Even downloading and uploading files, even though it's doable, it's a lot of work. So we provide automatic connections to. Tens of thousands of not tens of thousand, more than 10,000 institutions in the North America and in Europe and all sorts of crypto exchanges.

We work with partners to provide that. So you can directly connect your financial institution and we will pull all the historical information, all the dates, all the money, all the buy, all the sales, all the deposits, all the withdrawals and then keep that up to date without you having to do.

That's awesome. That will be for sure. The biggest question will be in the beginning, safety alarm bells . How do you keep the data safe that, let's say not every one of your employees can see your salary or what you do, and how does that work? 

It is a combination. Nobody can say this is 100% safe because there are always attacks even on Google and Apple.

But we do follow best practices. That includes very few people have access to the database. The information is of course, encrypted. The personally identifiable information like your email address or your name is encrypted twice. Everything is encrypted in transit and. and addressed. We've been running a back bounty program again.

I think we're the only ones since day one. We welcome hackers, white hackers from all over the world to attack us and try to find apps and we'll reward them when, if, and when that happens. . So we do follow all best practices and after also, we don't ask for any personal information.

If you want to open an account saying that you are mickey Mouse gmail.com, I don't care. I don't need to know who you are. Yeah. In fact, I don't wanna know it. It's less of a headache for me. Just put the numbers, I'll give you the numbers back and I'll never know who you are. 

But how does it work?

So let's say I have an account in Germany with the. German, let's say do Doche Bank, for example, in Germany. I have an account and then I can link, so I need to link to, I need to download the app. I need to link, or most probably create a profile and then I need to link this account to the app. How does that work?

Yes. So yeah you create an account with, as I, the only thing we need is an email address. I don't, we don't need any personal information, just an email address where we can send you the emails to confirm. And then yes you will go through one of the, of a third party providers of connections.

You don't give the username and password to me. We don't have it. If it's a modern financial institution, you don't even give it to disconnector. You go to Deutsche Bank, I don't know Deutsche Bank for sure, but you will go, you will log in there. They will soon as a token. And with that token, we can go and ask for the data.

Yeah. The only thing we pull are the numbers. So again don't need to know, I don't ask the bank for your name or your address. I just get the numbers to be completely honest sometimes in some of the comment and note. We receive some names, which you can delete, but that's more of Yeah.

Where the bank puts the information when we call the api. Yeah. We really just want the numbers. I, we don't want any names. 

Yeah. Do I then see as well the spend, so let's say I was shopping grocery yesterday, I was buying a new phone. Do you see that as well in. , 

that's something we do not do.

And the reason being is that there are, there were already a number of applications to do this in the market. Yeah. That work quite well. So we've been trying to solve a different problem. We, yes, we do bring your, the balance of your current account and your movements, but we are not putting any effort in providing you with analysis of how much money you spent on coffee.

Or groceries. We think there's value in that. But that's not what we do. We're try, we are targeting a higher level, which is your investments and your wealth. 

So if I understand you're right, I log in and I see the bank account statement of that day or of that second. So let's say I have thousand euros on my German Deutche bank account and that's part of all the numbers that are put together in.

Exactly. And you if the bank provides, as we see also all the history, not only today, you can see all the history so you can build it, but yeah, we won't be analyzing a lot of the transactions in the current account. But if you have a broker account where you've bought shares and sold shares, and that is the information we're interested in, the investments.

Okay. Yeah. Because if you have bought something, let's say a year ago, that was a different price than if you know it to today. So then I would link my brokerage account to the app as well. And then you get the historical data. Let's say a year ago I was buying Bitcoin or whatever shares of Apple.

Exactly. We get, even if it's five years ago we get those buyers themselves, the dividends, the fees everything, assuming the broker sends it, sometimes it does. Sometimes they don't send some information, so you might need to compliment it if they don't send it. Yeah. But they send it. Yeah.

We pull all that and tell you that you have had a 12.3 analyze return on your investments or whatever it is. 

That's, How does that work with the house? You mentioned the house, like buying a house and then you, how do you, 

the house is mostly manual because most markets don't have that sort of information.

So for the house you will enter manually the deposits you made, the transactions you made and the valuation manually, which we do add which we do help you with is a mortgage calculator. So if you have a mortgage you can add the terms of the mortgage. Every month we'll automatically generate the interest payments and the capital repayments to make your life easier.

You can edit those as well if you want. And one thing that I recommend, again, this is manual, but if you want to do it better, one thing that I do recommend to people that. Invest in real estate. If you add all your income and expense transactions, let's say something breaks a window, breaks, you need to fix it, you need to change the tab, you need to pay another or you have some income because you've put it on Airbnb or you've rented it out or whatever.

If you put all that, we'll give you the real return. I know very few people who know exactly how. is the real return in their investments. Cause they say, I bought it on a hundred, now it's worth 200. And say, what about notary fees? What about taxes? Oh, that's, I dunno. What about maintenance? Ah, I don't know.

If you take the time to put it in, we'll give you the exact number and if you have a mortgage, we'll also give you the exact number. Take it into account leverage so you can truly compare and understand how you're doing. 

That's awesome. So for everyone, have a look. Exirior. That's, I guess it's on App Store or Google Store, wherever, right?

Desktop app store, Android, anything. Yeah. Yeah. 

It's definitely I was playing a little bit around. It's definitely worth it. . I might dump my whole Excel spreadsheet within the next couple of weeks. So I've set my goal to, to do a little bit of testing during the Christmas break and see how that works.

So it's very cool. 

And just to mention a few bells and whistles that maybe you or the audience finds interested. Apart from all these numbers, you can also upload your documents. So if you hope one to upload the title deed or the mortgage documents so that everything is in one place and you don't have to put everything in some of the folder.

And also, which we think is quite important you can share that information and give access to either your financial advisor or your spouse or your partner or your parents both in case they want to manage it or in case something happens to you. So you can put an emergency contact that if you don't log in three months, we'll give access to someone else.

Because again, in this profile, like you, the people, Have lived everywhere. And if something ever happens to you, of course. Nobody wants that. Yeah. Nobody will know where that money is. That's true. 

 Talking about the advising, do you give advice as well on where to invest or is it just showing you the numbers. 

Yeah. At the moment, we're not licensed to provide advice, so we cannot provide any advice. It is in the long term roadmap, there are many things we want to do. We want to advise, we want to give access to people, to financial investment opportunities. We want to help with retirement planning.

There's a million things we want to do, but yeah. Yeah. At the moment we comply with a law. No advice. . 

No. I get. and that also means I if we stay with that you don't need a banking license or something like that because it's all external providers. 

Correct. Our the partners that provide us with the connectivity, in some countries they need a license.

Like in Europe, they need a license. Yeah. Crypto obviously no license because that's still ongoing in the US no license. So it varies by country. But yeah, at the moment we, we don't. Yeah. Cool. We're a us, we're a US company. Yeah. And there's no license for this activity. Yeah. 

Let's go into the company.

I'm interested, so it's still a startup, right? Yes. . Yeah. So how did you get started? So you're the main founder and I think ceo. 

Yeah. I The titles don't mean much, don't mean much in a startup, but Yes, I was, no, I know. I was. Very quickly I reached out to this team of developers that I knew in India.

So they developed the first prototypes that was super quick, and my co-founder joined like a month later just because we hadn't made it official, but we had been talking about it. And yeah, so that was the core team. And then we've added a few more developers a designer that has been working great now trying to also expand in our team in the mar in marketing. It's always been a combination of good luck and keep trying but we've been very lucky with the team. I know that not all the startups have this fortune, but for us it's been quite easy to find the right. 

Yeah. Then a another thing you are not all sitting in one 

office, right?

No. We're all sitting at home or whatever they are. As I said, we want to help people with financial freedom, so we leave our values and we give people freedom to work from whatever they want. I sometimes wonder what would happen if we were all in the same. Because we, we did one trip where we all sat together for two days and it was great, and it was very productive.

Yeah. So I sometimes wonder we're all learning this new way of working. I love that people have the freedom, but yeah we still have a lot to learn on how to be the most productive with this approach. 

Yeah. I think that's, in all companies. Doesn't matter which size in the moment, everyone needs to figure out what's the right setting.

Yeah, I was listening to some podcasts of, I guess yesterday, three companies doing the same and everybody has question marks on this. Yeah, let's see. . . 

So then I have read that you have been as well in, in a, in an accelerator or incubator? No, accelerator. If I seen that 

right? Yeah. The latest one we joined Founder University from Jason Calcanis, which is a very famous angel investor.

Yeah, that was the month quite useful. So yeah, it's always good and it was a very quick program getting exposed to a lot of the things that early stage companies need, like accounting and legal and marketing and getting your first users. So that was quite good. And we're also in another program with Loyal vc, which is it's is a venture capital investment, but they also have this earlier stage program where you get to work with them monthly to go on onto the next scale.

Yeah. . 

How about financing? Did you finance all of that out of your own pocket or did you get investors in early on? 

They use, they used we started from our own pocket then. We had a friends and family round and also of early users. We really liked it. Then, as I said, we are working with this institutional investor, and hopefully we'll do our first big institutional money.

At some, in some point in 2023. Yeah. Awesome. But we are very frugal. Every little dollar counts. 

That's how it is in the beginning. . Yeah. Especially if you're a FinTech startup, , yeah. I can 

Good with money. So we know how to manage it. That's, yeah, exactly. That's the one thing we do.

Right. 

So if we go back to Founders University, if we take that example, what are the things. You expected to learn and what are the things you didn't expect but did learn? 

 I think probably things like accounting and legal. I was, expecting, maybe to be told you're doing it all wrong and you have to do it differently.

Because there's not a lot I know about US accounting and tax. Yeah. But it was, I think okay, or we weren't surprised. The other thing that we've been asking for help all the time is marketing. And that was actually super useful. To learn. How do you get your first users?

Because there people have all sorts of different opinions and you, one gets bombarded every week by people saying, oh, you, you need to buy back links. Or you need to buy press releases, or You need to buy digital ads. And it's always just pay me. Or you never grow. . So it was good to hear from people who have done it.

And right now our strategy is going to be to focus on a very narrow niche of our users. As I said at the beginning, people who already understand the need. Yeah, I don't need to educate them. People who already have the complexity in the finances or experts people of the nationalities that we provide most connectivity for.

We decided to just go very narrow on that one with very specific targeted ads and very specific targeted PR efforts. And then grow from there. Yeah, that was the learning. 

Makes sense. Talking about the American company. So you are living in Spain, if I remember. ? 

I move a bit. I'm actually a most resident in Dubai, but because I'm in Spanish and I have family that I go very often.

So how, 

how did you then open a US company 

that was easy? So that our company is all perfectly normal that you can open a company in Delaware as a nonresident is super common. And once you're in Delaware, because that's the most common. jurisdiction for US startups. Everything is easy, so putting the app in the app store.

easy, Google easy, bank account easy, actually we're very happy with a Delaware option. We've, I've worked in other jurisdictions in the past and yeah, highly recommended. . 

Yeah. But how did you find that out? Did you have someone helping you setting it up? Did you go there? How was the 

process?

It's because we've been in the ecosystem for long enough, and that you always know some other founder who has done it before. So that's how we got there. Just asking. Yes. We engage legal advice. But the decisions themselves and or who to work with and on how to structure it is mostly from other founders.

Yeah, makes sense. Talking about other founders are you connected to other founders regularly? How do you exchange and understand what's going on in the ecosystem? 

Yeah, again, talk, talking to friends. We have, especially in Dubai, that's a very, I'm sure.

It exists in every city, but that's what we know. There's a very good community. There's WhatsApp groups, telegram groups, discord channels where any question you might have about this early stage staff, you ask it and you get perfect responses in, in five minutes. Everybody's so keen in helping then sometimes in these accelerator programs, you also get in touch with these people.

And again, similar slack forums. Tools like that is very easy to get advice on these things. Yeah. 

How was it when you started to apply if we just take the accelerators, how did you get into the accelerators? Because have had a couple of people who ask me, he's like, how do you do this?

How do you do this? I was just, yeah, apply. I have no. 

Yeah, you have to be ready to get a lot of nos whether you are applying for funding or accelerators or et cetera. It's just you're gonna get one, five, 10% maybe, if you're lucky. Yeah. Of yess. You're gonna get a lot of nos. Again. Ask other founders and entrepreneurs which programs they recommend, whether they've liked it, whether you can get an intro look on websites, desktop stop research.

Cause a lot of the times it's not that they don't like you, it's that you are not the right fit. So it could be, yeah, that they're looking for a specific geography or a specific sector or a specific stage. So there's a lot of research required to make sure that is the right fit. We even said no to things we were accepted because we like it.

And then when we heard the terms and the requirements, we said actually that it doesn't make sense. Yeah. So it's just a lot of hustling and trying and be comfortable with no's. 

Yeah. Talking about the future. So do you want to take the company and as well the App. 

We want to help people reach financial freedom.

So what we want to keep doing is building all this ecosystem of tools to help with that. Yes, there is a wealth tracker. Now, as I say, we would like to build also a financial planner apart from the consumer app. We are also working with financial advisors that can use it for. To help our clients.

So there, there's gonna be more development in terms of the features and applications for financial advisors. At some point we're partnering or ourselves we'd like to provide financial advice. So anything around. Retirement, financial planning, wealth management. That's where we want to be.

There's no specific goal. There's no, we don't have to be a unicorn or a decor. We just want to have impact on our users. And of course we be profitable because, A lot of people believing in us and of course we want to remunerate our investors and our employees and everyone.

But yeah, the goal is to build something we're proud of and help a lot of people. 

Yeah. That's great. Let's get into the last part of the podcast where I'm asking a couple of questions, which I ask every guest. If you could work with a project that is impacting every human being on earth, what project would you choose to work with and why would you choose that project?

I think my two passions that I wish I could be doing, but I don't know nothing about will be something on biotechnology or. Or a patient. I'm sure that somebody will argue that a space exploration is too long shot and doesn't impact everyone. So probably in biotech I think it's just a fascinating world.

So many things are happening so fast. I wish I knew something about it, but yeah. Curin, curin, malaria or cancer or AIDS sound like like the ultimate things to work on. . 

That's cool. What advice would you give to a young innovator that's just getting started? 

If I would say just do it, start and start working, especially, but you say young innovator. I think the most important thing is that Nobody has the answers. There are no visionary, or at least I haven't met any, I haven't met any visionary that knows the future of the answers. So be ready to iterate a lot, and a lot.

Start something, be embarrassed by the first thing you launch and iterate a million times. Because the staff I get from our users, no, there's no way I would've ever guessed it. Even though I've worked in finance and wealth management for so long, there's just no replacement. Of the user feedback.

Yeah. That's cool. So important. David, where can people find you and how can people contact 

you? 

Me, I'm everywhere as David Laia, L E C E A, but I'm also on the company website, LinkedIn, Twitter. Whatever, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, I'm on all of them with the same handle. And I live glued to my phone, so I'm super easy to find anything related to Exeirio.

come up super quickly. 

Yeah, and I will put the links as well into the show notes and as well to Exirio to the website and then everyone can go as well to download the app from the app stores. I highly recommend to. David, thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.

Likewise. Thank you so much. It's been fun, and yeah, thank you so much for having us.

Thank you.