What does the combination of the digital and physical world look like?
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This is Most Innovative Companies from Fast Company, where we speak to visionary founders to understand how they think, how they innovate, and what lessons they may have for you and the businesses that you run in every shape and size. I'm James Vincent, a founding partner at Foundr. This is a story about the importance of using your head and your heart in making decisions.

In the time that we spent working together with Steve Jobs and Apple,

Oftentimes, ideas didn't make it past because Steve had this very simple criteria that I've often shared and people have enjoyed, that an idea needs to bring to life your heart and get you excited, but make sense to your head, and therefore you understand it, you compute. And if you don't get both, you're not at great.

And so it's a simple criteria. I think it's a useful criteria for people to think about as they innovate. And if, let me give you a couple of examples. I mean, Apple products, the iPod, the dancing silhouettes are famous for having you feel the emotion of people loving their music, loving dancing, but it'd be nothing without a thousand songs in your pocket, not 12 skipping CDs.

And for iPhone, an example of that is we launched a spot called Hello, where a bunch of incredibly iconic people were saying hello. So we had from Marilyn Monroe to Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Harrison Ford to Mr. Incredible, all saying hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. And so you understood the sort of, oh, the human, how important a phone is in our lives. And so people were like, you got my heart.

But that would have been nothing had we not followed it with a campaign called There's an App for That. And so we did two, 300 ads over maybe four or five years that established there's an app for this, there's an app for that, and there's an app for just about anything on the iPhone.

And I think now, of course, that all sounds incredibly inevitable because everybody, all they do is touch apps and go do things. At the time, that wasn't incredibly inevitable. And it took a recognition that you needed to explain to the head, but also give fire to the brain.

to the heart. And I think that's a really nice way for people to understand ideas and products to understand whether they're great or not. I think my next guest in the series, Albert Sanger from Nate, he brings a whole ton of self-expression and love and passion and heart to decisions he makes. But he also happens to be a mathematician

and understands the way that machines can and should help us make decisions.

Nate is a shopping app that has gained tremendous traction. It's got incredible investors. It's created a very unique culture. So really excited to see you today, Albert, and excited to get into the chat. So welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I want to start in founder. I'm in and out of startups all the time. And I feel like the same person directed each of the startups because they all look the same and they all have kind of no feeling. And I feel like the same person directed each of the startups because they all look the same and they all have kind of no feeling.

And I can remember coming to Nate and feeling not just the way it was, but the feeling of the people, the expression of it. It felt different. Didn't feel like your average startup. Why did I feel that way as I walked in to meet you and your team? Well, this makes me very happy because we are a design first organization, which is easier said than done. Everything, not just the product or the marketing campaigns or talent related stuff, but like the...

systems architecture or the flow in which people physically move within an office. Everything is intentional. And culture is something that exists in every organization. In the majority of organizations, it's something that is sort of the result of unintentional processes, frameworks, and values. And I actually designed the culture of NAIT

the first day of the job, the values, frameworks, and processes that would constitute the Nate culture. And honestly, it makes me really happy that you got that feeling when you walked in. It's taken its own shape. I'm no longer managing it, right? It has its own monster. And it's my biggest accomplishment in my career.

So tell me about you. I remember a conversation you and I had early on, and I heard the word love used a lot in the decisions that you made in some of the key aspects of sort of what brought you here today. Every decision I've made career or geographical wise has been about a person. So I was born in Spain, in Barcelona, and then I moved to Paris because I fell in love

And so I asked my parents, you know, I said, hey, I'm in love and I need to move to Paris. I moved for love and I was 12 years old. For college, I moved to LA for love too. But in love with a different person. And I was like, you know what? I'm moving to LA. And then I moved to New York for love. I'm now married to my husband, Anthony. And basically my

career and country decisions have all been because I've fallen in love with somebody. Incredible. So the love and the passion. Then you worked at Amazon. So I'm really intrigued. This guy that's making emotionally driven decisions. Yeah.

that then goes to work for a company that is making more IQ analytical type decisions. So tell me about that step. Yeah, no, that's very fair. So where I live and what I choose to do for a living and how I contribute to society, those choices are really hard to get right if you are overly rational about them.

For me, it's the difference between the what and the how. Before Amazon, I was a founder. And so I had this like imposter syndrome sort of fear of like, I've never had a real job. And so I told myself after business school, I was like, I need a real job just so I can, you know, understand how the world works. And it turned out to be an amazing experience because Amazon is such a global company.

organization with tens of thousands of people and tens of thousands of businesses. It's like a conglomerate of tons of different businesses. So it gave me a very quantitative view of the world. And it was because of my experience at Amazon that I was able to sort of marry my founder view of life from before Amazon to my very business-heavy view.

Amazon Acumen to start Nate. And so that side of you, has that always been there? Most people don't know this, but I'm going to tell you because you're a good friend. I was a bit of a nerd growing up, for lack of a better word. Okay, we shan't tell anybody. I started coding at nine years old in a language called Pascal. And then I went on to do a

nationwide math competitions. And I won awards at 11 years old and 12 years old. My entire life between sort of my teenage years was all about math, actually. Wow. And then I realized it was consuming my entire life. And I went through this sort of transition in college where I realized that if I went down that path, I realized that I wasn't intelligent enough to do all the things that I wanted to do in math.

and have a fulfilling, happy life at the same time. So I made the intentional decision to stop and focus on building the life that I wanted to build. It's very interesting because there's this sort of left brain, right brain, EQ, IQ thing. It's my sort of strongly held belief that some of the finest founders, some of whom I've known, have found fairly strong ability in both.

So tell me, as those two things come together, how that has built the company that is Nate, what I might call the head and the heart. Yeah. So both of my parents had their own businesses in Spain. I grew up in a world where there was a healthy middle class. And if you want to sell coffee mugs, you build coffee mugs and you sell them, right?

So the idea that we would end up in a global duopoly of Amazon and Alibaba, collecting all your data and feeding it to algorithms and selling it to third parties and living in this sort of dystopian world is something that I wanted to stop.

I started working on Nate precisely as the antidote to that. How do I make sure that I give consumers the experience that they deserve, the agency that they deserve? How do we make sure that they stay in control of their data and at the same time have an incredibly seamless and social life they also want to have? And make sure that e-commerce is not a global duopoly. How do we do all those things at the same time with the sort of EQ, IQ framework that for

For me, the what is more sort of emotional, right? Like which society do I want my daughter to grow up in? And then now the question is, how are we going to do this, right? And you need a lot of strategy and a lot of strong operations in order to deliver that. Yeah. So I'm in Instagram or I'm in Amazon or maybe I'm in some other shopping app.

There's maybe clickbait that gets me into this app. And then I go in the app and then I'm throwing things into shopping carts. And I'm like, well, I'm busy and maybe I should just buy it. And that feels a little bit like how people shop these days. Tell me a little bit of how Nate is different to that. Yeah, I would describe those experiences that you've talked about as traps, right? If...

The machine thinks that you're into black t-shirts. They keep feeding you black t-shirts and you're never going to see an amazing red hat. That is so sad. And that's why there's so much political polarization to begin with. Their business models are not aligned with their customer.

You arrive at an interface and you're in someone else's home and that someone else has an agenda that is different from enabling you to be human and flow through life as you should, right? If you want to buy this coffee mug, you buy. You want to buy this pair of shoes, you buy. If you don't, you don't. So in order to build the antidote, you have to first give people the agency back, right?

of any time they find inspiration, which is not necessarily within an algorithmic-driven feed. It could be by having a conversation. It could be by watching a movie. It could be by walking down the street, right? And they want to take action. And the action sometimes is, I'm going to take a picture of this, right? Or I'm going to add a note to my phone. And with Nate, you can take action too. You can save that item right away.

You can send it to a friend as a gift. You can add it to one of your shopping lists that your friends follow. You can buy it right away, no matter where you find that item, right? So I think what's important is giving people the choice again. This is your life, right? And technology should be there to enable you to flow through life

but not to stop you and say, actually, look over there, right? Look somewhere else. Why? Because I'm more interested in that for my bottom line. I'm going to quote something that you said to us during our conversations as we worked together. We build machine learning products that do an action for you. We're not using machine learning products to feed your inspiration. And I think for me, as I sort of zoom out and look at the bigger picture, what's happening now is a recognition of

where and when it's useful and awesome and where and when it's really not quite as useful and awesome and actually sort of dehumanizes you in that process and isn't as satiating, isn't as expressive, isn't as fulfilling. How do you think about where machine learning products fit?

So let's break into two sort of paradigms. The paradigm that we have been living in is what can machines do for us? The paradigm that I want to be living in moving forward is what should machines be doing for us, right? In a few years, we're sort of done with the first paradigm. Now we have to decide what should machines be doing, right? How do we want to live our lives and what makes us human, right? And here's how I think about it.

There are some things that for me are absolute no-go, never, right? Imagine a machine telling you, oh, you should procreate with this person because the genes will create a much sort of stronger humanity as a result. And I'm architecting the next 100 years of humanity, right? Fuck that. We're not going to do that, right? There are other places where clearly it's helpful, right? Like a self-driving car. Like it frees so much of...

my time as a driver. Maybe I want to drive, maybe I don't. But if I don't, then at least the car sort of drives itself and I can get to places. And then there's the in-betweens. And the in-betweens are one day you may want to ask a machine what you should eat because you're optimizing for a certain sort of health benefits. You're sort of, you know, have some goals you want to achieve in your life. And a machine may tell you, look, you know, I think you should eat salmon today.

And on another day, you might just want to live your life and let your body tell you what you want, right? I don't want to live in a world where I go to a restaurant and the server already tells me, this is what you're going to eat salmon today, Albert. I'm going to be like, no. And so we need to be intentional about where machines come. And as it relates to shopping and payments, what most people don't realize is that

In the same way you have a music identity, right? There's some songs and some artists that you vibe with and some genres, et cetera. You have a shopping identity and you are not controlling it.

And there's a bunch of other companies that are controlling it, that are buying your data, selling your data, and building this profile of yours. And what happens as a result of that is that you go through life without realizing that what you're seeing is actually what these companies want you to see, which creates these sort of self-fulfilling prophecies.

So it's like being in the restaurant, the server tells you, you've got to eat salmon. Please go to the kitchen and cook it. You're like, wait, what? The machine told me what to do, and now I have to go do it? So who works for who here? I'm going to eat chicken. Please, you have a machine go and cook it for me. That's why I want machines to play.

and the execution of tasks, not in the decision-making. What makes us human is the ability to make decisions, to use your brain to make a decision. There's no other animal that is able to make a rational decision. There are plenty of places that we know, in social media and other places, that really have overused those mechanics and taken some humanity from us and led us astray from our hearts.

But with regard to shopping and privacy, and I want to just touch on that, because when I would go buy something in a shopping trap, I would go in there, buy something, and then they would sort of know all my data, put it all together and start like following me around, put cookies, right? Doing all that kind of stuff, right? So if I go on Nate, how does that not happen? When you buy something on Nate, three things happen.

The first one is that we automatically issue a single-use virtual card.

which you never see. It just happens on the backend. And the purchase is placed with that single-use virtual card. So the retailer never knows your payment method, which they are legally allowed to sell. They are single-use and nobody who buys that data will be able to then track you across other places. Second thing that happens is Nate becomes merchant of record. So on your actual card statement or bank statement, it says Nate. It doesn't say the name of the retailer.

Why is that good? Because most credit cards these days that you have are actually also selling your data. They know everything you're buying, right? And so, but with Nate, they don't because they just see Nate, Nate, Nate, Nate, Nate, Nate. And they think, oh, wow, James has stopped buying online altogether. And somehow he's obsessed with this company called Nate. It turns out that James is unifying all of his shopping in a single place that he can control.

And the third thing that happens is that the purchase happens on our servers, not on your browser. So nobody can place a cookie on your browser saying that you bought that item. That's sort of operationally how we protect you today. And our business model is designed to make sure that our users are also our customers and not the other way around. In other words, we do not rely on selling data to other places to make money. We make money when you use a product, period.

So I'm building my own shopping identity because I'm doing it versus someone else is building a shopping identity about me and then selling that data to others. Exactly. My whole point is you have to be intentional about this. And then you can decide how much of that shopping identity...

you want to share and with who? And it could be with your friends. It could be with your life partner or your five friends or your 1 million social media followers. That's up to you who you share it with. I'm not against sharing. Sharing is a big part of Nate. It's such a social product. You can create a shopping list, share them with your friends. But the question is who owns that data, right? And what do they do with it? And so when you first download Nate, it is the most sort of crazy experience because it is completely empty.

It's blank. And you think, wait, wasn't this a shopping app? No, this is a unified shopping wallet that lets you share and shop your world without compromising your data.

in the form of an app where you shop, but it's not a shopping app in the sense that it's not a shopping trap. So it's a complete blank canvas, right? Sort of like the first time that you get a new iPhone and you didn't have an iPhone before and you open your camera roll, it's empty, right? Right. Apple is not filling it with photos, right? You go through live and you take the photos that you want. That's named.

Okay, so I download Nate and I start saying, oh, I just saw something that looks cool. I'm going to throw that in Nate. Oh, that looks cool. I'm going to throw that in Nate. It feels a little sort of Pinterest-y in a way. Is that some form of inspiration here? Is that? Totally. That's right. Yeah. You pin things. You save things. Right, right. So that, and that's it. And then they, so they throw it into Nate and then over time, tell me about how that builds. Like, how does that, because at

as an investor, right? I'm like, well, wait a second. I'm going to this place about shopping that doesn't have any shopping in it. Right. So tell me how you build that. So I get introduced. That's good. Yeah. Tell me how you build the behavior. Yeah.

Most people think that there's such a thing as changing behavior. I argue that behavior is created with a set of restrictions. And the only thing companies can do is remove further restrictions to peel the layers and find humanity in the bottom, right? And so if you think about the...

The notion of a shopping cart at a store, at a big department store, that existed because there was a restriction, which is that you have to go to cashier and check out. And so you're not going to just buy things as you see them because you have to physically go to a different place and then check out at one time, do one payment, do all those things, right? Look at the Amazon Go store as a counter example to that. You walk in, grab a sandwich, walk out. Are they changing behavior? No, they're just removing the restriction, right?

And so Nate is not a place to shop. Nate is a way to shop. And by using Nate, you realize that a lot of the restrictions are removed. So all of the things that you were doing behavior-wise, those restrictions are gone. So you're immediately going to go for a much easier path. So then what happens is you start using it more often. And as you use it, not only you aggregate all your shopping in one place, but

In the same way you aggregate all your music in one place like Apple Music or Spotify, or you aggregate all your food on DoorDash or your transportation on Uber, you aggregate all your shopping on Nate. And so you build your own version of the universe, which can expand

to the extent that you want it, to as many layers as you want it to expand. And so there's this constant interaction between the individual and the universe, and need is in the middle, and it's sort of a multiplier of that. We are just sort of the filter that enables you to interact with your universe and your universe to interact with you, because that's how shopping works, right? Like you're not shopping in a vacuum. You are shopping in the context of what you're

friends and family and movies you've watched and music you're listening to and what you're vibing with at that time. That's what it is. The more you use it, the more it becomes a true representation of your shopping identity.

But to be clear, what I'm hearing, I'm not hearing that you're looking to replace Amazon. It feels to me like 42% of e-commerce is Amazon or something. And look, I'm probably still going to buy a whole bunch of household products and fundamental things from Amazon. Let's say I buy my commodities on Amazon and I buy the things I love, back to love and passion and EQ. Nate, is that fair? That's fair, but it's less of a binary and more of a...

Sort of a line that is in different places for different people. So let's add some numbers to this. Global e-commerce is $5 trillion. The U.S. is about a fifth of that. So think about a trillion dollars this year. Amazon has 40-something percent. But the other 60% in the U.S. is 2 million retailers. Mm-hmm.

And every year, these retailers, for the most part, grow a little bit compared to the year before. So they think, oh, we're good. We're growing. But the reason they're growing is because more dollars are shifting from brick and mortar to e-com. But it's not because they are growing on a relative basis to the rest of the market. In other words, Amazon is growing much faster than the shift from brick and mortar to e-com compared to how these other 2 million retailers are growing. In other words...

Amazon is winning at all categories. So while your view may be true today, if we let it be like this, then eventually Amazon will have 50%, then 60%, then 70%, right? So in a future version of the world, Amazon, of course, has a big chunk of it. But when I come to the things I really care about, the things I love, that I'm passionate about, that I'm excited by, that are emotionally engaged with, I might go to Nate. Yeah, and it's not necessarily you go to Nate. You go through life.

And then you use Nate to save them or buy them, no matter where you are. So when I was saying about this spectrum, you may be a 10% Amazon kind of person. I may be a 20% Amazon kind of person. But every year, if you were a 10%, next year you're going to be an 11%. I'm going to be a 22% Amazon. You see? And so here's an example. You buy an Apple Watch, not on Amazon. You buy toilet paper on Amazon. A yoga mat, not on Amazon.

You know what? I'll just do Amazon because it's so easy, right? That's what I'm interested in. What is driving that decision? And the answer is unification because you have it all in one place. You can run your life on it. Got it. So with Nate, we give you the ability to have that unification in the non-Amazon economy that can still thrive. So you can do Amazon for whatever you want to do. And then whenever you want to...

spend time frolicking through life and engaging with the other amazing 2 million retailers in the US, you can do so in a way that is still unified. And so that's the experience you get. You get a unified shopping experience in the non-Amazon economy, which up until now has been so fragmented that people have been sort of pushed to end up

giving more of their show of wallet to Amazon because there's no other better choice.

So I'd like to just explore with you, like, what is it about the way that Nate is working and the things that you just described about, what is it about that that will appeal to these Gen Z digital alphas? Like, why will they do that rather than the TikTok or the Amazon or the, you know, and not that, and I know you said it wasn't one or the other, but what is it about the

the future generations coming up that mean that Nate is sort of a, if you'll forgive the pun, native shopping experience for them. So one thing that I'm already observing, and you probably have too, is that there's going to be, no matter how you cut it, no divide between online, offline. This is such an old concept. They're not going to understand the difference. So you've got to build on top of that.

everything is going to be a combination of things. It could be physical objects, augmented reality objects, virtual entirely, virtual objects, and an interaction of things that flow via different technologies. So that's one thing you have to sort of build on top. And now the question is,

As they flow through life in that world that is, there's no divide and there's no binary. As they flow like that, how much agency are they going to have? How much humanity is there going to be there left for them to sort of be human? Or are they going to enter in these dopamine loops and operate like machines for the benefit of the economy or a single company or whatnot, right? Nate,

is building a new category of companies. And I hope that there are more that are all about in-life shopping.

Right. Shopping that happens in the context of your life. So no matter where you are, you can... Digital or physical. Yeah, it doesn't matter. And in fact, that divide... Doesn't exist. We will not know. But just for the audience, just because maybe I'll bring that to life. So there's this single storytelling universe, which is how a founder, we've always described it, right? In the future, which is both digital and physical. It's in-life shopping. It's not in-app shopping. It's not like...

shopping traps, as I think you described. Yes. Your assumption with Nate is that this future is going to happen. Yes. And I want to make sure that it happens in a way where you stay in control of your identity. Right. Right. And so by unifying all of that inspiration, whether you took action by or you don't, who cares? Nobody else needs to know. We can keep building those amazing experiences and

But it does not mean that they get to keep the data of what you're buying, when you're buying it, how you're paying for it, and selling it to each other. Right, right.

for a profit i feel like what you're telling me is that the where we're going with the next generation where we're going with technology is still requires an aggregation tool but there is it is not necessary for that aggregation to tool to be owned by someone else that's right most people think that there is this inherent conflict between

wanting to protect your identity and wanting to share who you are with your friends. It is okay to want both. And if the company tells you, oh, you cannot have both, walk out as soon as possible. Did you hear that? Like, seriously, like run. So it's not a zero-sum game. It is not. It is not. You've made to believe that it is, but that's just business model design, really. And so...

I want to make sure that you can have both seamless social life, no friction. You're flowing through life. You don't get stuck. Machines are there supporting you to make sure that you can be as human as possible. And in that process, you are intentionally controlling all the data points that you are leaving behind. So 10 years from now, we're looking back at this moment, at this interview,

And what kind of dent in the universe would you like to have made with where you're going now, which I think you've explained wonderfully today in terms of your understanding of where technology fits and privacy fits and your own sovereignty and also looking ahead to a world of both digital and physical single storytelling universe. I mean, lots of different places, but you can still carry on, but you don't have to be sort of stuck in these, right? So...

What's the dent in the universe that you would like Nate to have made? So, yeah, I mean, ideally, my children look back in time and say that was this crucial moment in the West where societies like democracy, Western democracies like the United States or European democracies were facing this tension of which data belongs to whom.

And who can leverage it for what? And where do machines come in? And where is the genesis of a decision? And so this moment in time where it feels like we're in constant trade-offs, right? If we do this and we do that, I'm going to piss this company off. I'm going to piss this investor off. Something else is going to happen. Like my voters are going to do this, not elect me again or whatever, right? Like this moment in time that my kids are going to look back and say that Nate helped

show a path where there's no trade-offs. Albert, thank you so much. That was such an awesome conversation. I really enjoyed it. We'll do it again in 10 years. Yeah, I'll see you in 10 years. So I think after my conversation with Albert at Nate, a number of things really came to light. It was a fascinating conversation, a very interesting individual that brings both sort of

head and heart, EQ and IQ. And he presented Nate as an example of an aggregator, which we all know how beneficial aggregators are because we use them every day. Most of your homepage of your iPhone is full of aggregators.

But unfortunately, those aggregators are sort of taking your sovereignty and your privacy and selling your data, using it in some other ways. And this is about actually in the future, having that for yourself. Assuming that I'm going to be stepping in and out of this very, very fluidly between

digital and physical, where am I doing the shopping? And I think his assumption is you would have this sort of Nate knapsack on your back, wherever you go and you throw it in there and you decide what you then go and buy. You decide what you do with your data and you realize who you are through your own identity creation, rather than giving that off to an aggregator, which is the current model.

And so what we get to in this conversation is a realization that when you make decisions using head and heart, they're better. But the role of the heart is to make the decision and the role of the head is to implement the decision. All right, that's all for this episode. If you're a new listener, be sure to subscribe to Most Innovative Companies wherever you listen. And if you like this episode, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.

And we also want to hear from you. So let us know what you'd like to hear more of. Send us an email at podcasts at fastcompany.com or tweet us at hashtag most innovative companies. Most Innovative Companies is a production of Fast Company in partnership with founder FNDR. We couldn't afford the vowels. Our executive producer is Joshua Christensen. Our sound design is Nicholas Torres. Writing is Matias Sanchez.

Alex Webster and Nikki Checkley helped with the production. This podcast was done in collaboration with my wonderful partners at Founder, Stephen Butler, Becca Jeffries, and Nick Barham.