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In this conversation, we chat with Siddharth Batra, Co-founder at X1 Card. Sid was previously a Director of Engineering at Twitter, responsible for leading the group of teams working on Advertiser & User experience products through which Twitter Ads makes $2+ billion in revenue.
Sid has also been a Fellow at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and a Co-Founder at Mine, a web and mobile application that enables people to manage, visualize and share their purchase history. Sid has also served as a Research Assistant - AI Lab at Stanford University, and a Teaching Assistant - Machine Learning at Stanford University. Sid holds an MS in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from Stanford University.
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1’36”: Sid’s foundational experiences in technology & what laid the groundwork for his career
8’49”: Using Stanford and network thereof as the launchpad to becoming a startup founder
11’52”: Joining Twitter and learning about consumer behaviour and consumer’s relationship with social media content
15’43”: How building consumer products at Twitter formed the basis for the articulation towards Fintech
17’13”: X1 - what it is, how it started, what is a smart card, what is the software that differentiates it from competitors and the volume growth since its inception
25’38”: X1’s feature set, issuing bank, its underlying regulatory structure, and the underwriting credit policy for users
29’02”: X1’s economics and the crucial component to X1’s success vs the likes of Apple Card
33’21”: The winning formula - creating a step function better product for X1’s prime audience and then offering rich feature sets
37’10”: X1’s long term ambitions and why they are positioned better relative to other Fintechs in the market
42’13”: Channels to use to connect with Sid & learn more about X1
Sneak Peek:
Siddharth Batra: … the number one job of a credit card is to let the customer spend money. Pretty straightforward, but none of the cards in the US, they don't even show you the card number in the app or the website. So now imagine in 2023, I could be, let's say sitting on my couch, I'm on TikTok, I see an ad for TikTok leggings, I want to buy them right away, I literally have to walk up, get my wallet out, put that card number in. It's unbelievably old school. And again, this is a trivial thing. We found a way to show customers their card number in the app. And now you can imagine what is the single most used feature of the app, people want the card number out of it.
It's a very small example, but it has a very interesting ripple effect. Because we show you the card number in the app itself, when a customer applies for the card and gets approved, they don't have to wait seven days for a piece of plastic to show up in the mail for them to start using the product, they immediately go from getting approved into the app where their actual card number is available to spend instantly. A significant percent of our customers have already made their first transaction before even getting the beautiful metal card in the mail. So that's an interesting ripple effect.
The other ripple effect is that, imagine you're traveling, imagine I'm traveling and doing my touristy things and I lose my card, if I had an old school card, I'm basically done at that point, because they're not going to ship the card to me in London, they'll just ship it to me to my home address, but with X1, I press two clicks, I get a new card number instantly in the app, that card number can be added to my Apple Wallet, and then I'm basically ready to go as if nothing happened.
So that instant piece of mind is really powerful in this case. That's a very trivial example that ends up becoming really powerful and compounds as time goes on. I'll give you a more complicated example. We built this amazing product…
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