We're expecting you. Don't you have a seat? Ready to go to work. Hey, everybody. It's Kai Rizdahl. Thanks for listening to the Corner Office podcast. We've got another episode for you today, and this time we're talking about the finance website with more than 100 million users a year. Nerd Wallet is the site and the company. It's a place to get financial advice on credit cards and loans,

taxes, anything money related, really. A lot of its users are millennials, but the rest of us use it to. Tim Chen is the co-founder and CEO of NerdWallet. Tim, welcome with the program. Thanks for having me. So I have to tell you, we were in a meeting this morning, and we were talking about some of this stuff that's coming up. And I said, well, I'm talking to Tim Chen of NerdWallet here in a couple

hours. And like three or four of the millennials in the room went, oh, wow, nerd wallet. Yeah, I know that company, which I thought was interesting that that was the gut reaction of that segment of the audience. Yeah, it's remarkable. We reach 100 million people a year, but predominantly are known by millennials. On purpose, too, right?

Yeah, so millennials face a lot of financial decisions. If you think about it, you know,

when you get married or when you graduate from college, you're faced with this huge clustered

decisions, checking accounts, auto loans, credit cards, bank accounts, joint checking accounts,

and, you know, it really clusters

around the millennial age. Do you me a favor, would you? And tell me why this economy needs

this company right now? Yeah, money is complicated. Yes, yes, it is, man. It is. And, you know,

the thing that we try to do is we try to make it easier. And there's two huge, complicated issues with money. The first is it's extremely hard to comparison shop because everyone's different. And even the pricing of these products depends on things like your credit score. So it's very hard for someone to get a really objective,

transparent view into all the options out there. And the second really hard thing is that it's

hard to stay on top of all your stuff. I mean, by the time you have your first kid, you probably

have 10, 12 different financial accounts. And how do you know that they're the best ones? How do you

stay current? So it's hard to stay organized and keep your budgets and all that stuff. So we try to help with those things. Give me the origin story, would you, about how this company came to be? Sure. You know, nerd wallet started as a spreadsheet. So my sister asked me for help finding a credit card. And I thought, huh, I wonder what the answer to that is. And so my first thought was, let me Google that for you. And, you know, so I was kind of surprised by what I found. I mean, it was a lot of marketing material, not much financial analysis the way I would think to do it. You know, I had been working in finance at the time. So I expected something like a spreadsheet. And so I quickly

pulled together all the credit card offers from the biggest banks and sent it around. It got forded

to a few friends. They forwarded it to a few more friends. And that's kind of how it started.

Over time, we branched out into more products than just credit cards. So things like personal loans, savings accounts, CDs, auto insurance, all sorts of stuff.

But pretty much the same problem.

It's just hard to figure out apples and oranges.

Which, and this is deeply, deeply cynical, but one has to imagine that the apples and oranges and hard to figure out thing is, is somewhat a feature of the system

if you're a financial professional, not a bug. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, banks, their core

business is building a relationship with you, often through something like a checking account,

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