Can Rivian avoid the EV speed bumps? with founder and CEO RJ Scaringe
31:26 Share

Most customer relationship management systems were built for yesterday's businesses. Atio is built for what's next. Atio is an AI-native CRM built specifically for the next era of companies. It adapts to your unique company's specific operational needs and scales with any business model by syncing with your organization's emails and calendars.

The best part? With Atio, you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes, freeing you to focus on what matters, building your company. Head to atio.com slash MOS for 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash M-O-S.

Hey, listeners, it's Jeff Berman. We have some very exciting news. This October 7th through 9th, the Masters of Scale Summit is returning to the iconic Presidio Theater in San Francisco for three days of big, bold ideas. We're gathering the most visionary founders, world-changing executives, and impactful investors to

to build a brighter future together. The lineup is unmatched. The audience is handpicked for impact and the energy is really anything but business as usual. Applications are officially open right now and I wouldn't want you to miss your chance. So please apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25.

Whether it's reaching your first billion, expanding globally, or trying to build a new business model, every business has a different idea of progress. This episode is part of a special series in partnership with Stripe, empowering businesses to make progress. We're at this like...

inflection point where the cars of the historical past and the cars of the future in terms of architecture, I put ourselves, I put Tesla in that category. They coexist, but the platforms are totally different. So where they end up in, let's say, five to 10 years is very, very different places.

That's RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of EV automaker Rivian. It's been a strange period for electric vehicles with consumer demand ebbing and Elon Musk of Tesla deep in the new Trump administration. I wanted to talk to RJ about how he's adapting Rivian's business in the face of all these shifts.

Rivian made a mark in the luxury SUV space. Now, as the company moves from its initial platform called R1 to lower-cost R2 vehicles, it faces a raft of new challenges and new opportunities. RJ and I discuss Rivian's recent $5.8 billion partnership with Volkswagen, the company's ongoing risk assessment for self-driving features, and how Rivian's AI-enabled technology plumbing

can accelerate the brand beyond incumbent manufacturers. You don't have to be a car enthusiast to glean insights from RJ about preparing for the future, so let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. ♪

I'm Bob Safian, and I'm here with RJ Skaringe, founder and CEO of electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian. RJ, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be on. So I have to start with the elephant in the room, who is Elon Musk. Tesla, biggest player in electric vehicles. Musk, on the cover of Time as Trump's ally.

Do you have a relationship with Elon? Are you excited about what he's doing in D.C.? Dismayed? Confused? Yeah, well, you know, at the end of the day, what Elon and Tesla have done has been incredible for electric vehicles. And, you know, I think there's a lot of noise, but it's important to remember that as a business leader, he's, of course, going to continue to be driving towards things that help electrification in the long term. And I think there may be lots of different perspectives on what are important things to do in the short term.

But I think net-net, I think it's good to have an important leader and innovator in the electric vehicle space that has a very close access to the administration. Obviously, Rivian and Tesla are...

competitors. Like, is him being focused on this government stuff, is that sort of, is that allow, like, oh, maybe he's distracted a little bit from Tesla's business? Or is it like Tesla gets extra attention, you know, maybe special treatment? Like, do you worry about either end of those things? You know, there's so many things that we could get distracted by or pay attention to in terms of external factors, things that are outside our control. We're focused on developing amazing products,

making sure that those amazing products come together in a really cohesive and thoughtful way. And right now, we're hyper-focused on the launch of our next product, which we call R2, which is a much lower-priced vehicle for us and really will represent a step change in volume and therefore a step change in revenue for us as a business. But

You know, there's definitely a lot of noise in the system these days. And I think at the end of the day, it's most important just to stay really focused on the things that we can control. It's hard because there's all these external factors like the

tariffs, which everyone's talking about what it's going to do for automakers or how difficult it might be. Although you guys, I guess, are a little less exposed than some of the other automakers. When those kind of executive orders come out against Mexico and Canada, what do you think? Are you prepared for it? Leading up to the election and then following the election, we've done tabletop exercises where we look at

what would we do under these different scenarios and planned out different tariff scenarios, different trade relationships and trade scenarios. But as you pointed out, today we have all of our products being produced in a single plant in Illinois. We're building a second plant in Georgia. So our footprint is, in terms of vehicle assembly, very U.S. centric. And then even our supply chains are also very U.S. centric. So we're

were more protected, if you will, than some of the other very large manufacturers that, you know, in a large part because of NAFTA, because of the trade relationships that have existed between the United States and Mexico and Canada for decades, have built, you know, significant industrial footprint in those countries. And it's,

It's going to be extremely challenging for them if the tariff environment is as aggressive as has been discussed. It feels like the EV market goes through these sort of waves, you know, of enthusiasm and then dips, you know, in consumer excitement and government support. It feels like...

So we're in a little bit of a down moment when you see, you know, GM and Ford pulling back on their electrical vehicles. How much do you think about, you know, what others are doing is like a signal for yourself to kind of, well, if they're going to pull back, I got to pull back. Or is this like, this is the moment. This is a great opportunity to make up some ground. Yeah. The element of noise that's probably least talked about is

is the extreme, almost hyper-focus on the short term, I'd say across a lot of industries, but in particular, transportation, electrification. And what happens over the next month, three months, six months, 12 months, doesn't change the end state outcome in our view. We're extremely convicted that eventually everything will be electric.

And the gating factor for that ultimately is the creation of lots of interesting products to draw customers in. And if there's a very narrow set of products, it is going to significantly delay how fast we as a society and certainly we as a country make this transition. If I'm thinking about buying an electric car and I'm willing to spend, let's say, $50,000, there's very few products that I would say are highly compelling. Tesla is one of those, Model 3 and Model Y are both outstanding products, outstanding EVs.

And it's this lack of competition that's led to them having such significant market share. And I think in order for us to see electrification penetration really continue to grow, we're going to need to see different products. And that's not to say products that are the same as a Tesla. In fact, the opposite. Products that are very different. Products that cover different market positions.

form factors. And the brand position we established with the R1 products is very different than Tesla. Of course, the price points of, let's say, a Model S and a Model X are very similar. They couldn't be more different in terms of how the products manifest to the market so thirsty or so hungry for different choices. But there needs to be a lot of other manufacturers doing the same. And so to your question on

The pullback that we're witnessing from some of the other manufacturers, I think it's really unfortunate. You know, that really short-term focus from investors on the quarterly results versus like building a long-term sustainable business, I think is going to cause problems.

some companies to make decisions that optimize too much around the short term and suboptimize pretty significantly, I would say, around the long term. It's ironic, right, that sort of your competitors, in some ways, you want them to be in the business to grow the whole pie, whereas for a lot of

you know, businesses, they're happy to be able to have their competitors pull back. That's not good for you. Yeah. You know, it's funny. My oldest son asked me about this because he said, why are those for gasoline cars? Why isn't everything electric? And I said, well, there's a lot of people want different types of vehicles. So if you wanted a minivan today, there's no electric minivan you could even buy. Or if you wanted a convertible, there's no electric convertible you can buy.

And he said, well, why doesn't Rivian just build everything? And I said, that's a great idea, but we have to choose the things we're going to build. And our brand position is such that we're not going to be able to go off to every segment and every form factor. So, you know, an eight-year-old had the intuition to ask the question. And I think it's a pretty obvious gap we have, which is there's not enough choice. We need more choice.

And, you know, if the other manufacturers are not there, of course, in the short-term basis, you'd say it's from a competitive point of view, it is an advantage to Rivian. But I started Rivian because I want to help the world advance to this future state. So I think what's best for my kids and my kids' kids' kids is for there to be lots of choice, for there to be many highly successful companies in the EV space. And we talk about EVs as the singular difference between cars, but EVs

It really encapsulates a lot of things. I'm sort of implicitly assuming that these are software-defined vehicles. They have modern network architectures. They have features that can be updated regularly through over-the-air updates. And electrification, by coincidence, brought those changes along with it. So you see that in our vehicles. You, of course, see that in Tesla vehicles. I think that's going to become an increasingly large gap where the vehicles that have

much older technology in terms of software and electronics are going to start to feel really old relative to vehicles that have been architected

around a completely software-defined experience and compute platforms within the vehicle. I live in New York City. I've gotten pressure from my kids, older than yours, but they're like, we should have an electric car. But in the city, charging stations aren't easy to find. I don't have a house with a driveway. A lot of our car trips are long. It's sort of like EVs aren't really for me yet, even if I want it, right? Good call out. And

This gets back to the core question of like, what's the path to see us approach 100% new vehicle sales being electric? It's enough product choice. It's the infrastructure to support charging. It's solving these harder infrastructure issues, which for folks that live in a highly urban environment,

These are real challenges. You know, you can't press a button and it happens overnight. It's taking time. And there's only so much of that that is under your control at an organization like Rivian. I mean, is that why when you look at Musk being closer to Trump, you think maybe he'll help him, you know, move some of those things along more? It doesn't necessarily feel that way right now.

I have to imagine that in those discussions, there's going to be a point of view that's going to help guide more towards creating at least the option for

for customers of electrification. Yeah. So the first mainstream EVs and hybrid cars were small and light. When you debuted, it was with like an SUV and a truck. Bigger seems to be the trend. Is there a reason you went in that direction? When I first started the company, this is middle of 2009, the initial product plan was we were going to launch a sports car, use the sports car to build the brand, then take the brand and launch a whole series of other

products that would be more mass market. And we worked on that for a little while. And while we're doing that, I realized that the strategy we were deploying was actually very similar to what Tesla had successfully already done. It wasn't by intention. It was more by accident. It's just a very logical way to start a car business is to say, start with something that's really exciting. And so therefore a sports car and then scale from that. And of course, I'm a

a really pretty heavy car enthusiast. So starting with the sports cars sort of spoke to my inner child. But as we reflected, I realized the strategy just wasn't right. We shelved everything we'd originally started on. We arrived at this idea that the brand and the company we create should represent a lot more than just the vehicle. And we wanted to represent a

the idea of enabling, but importantly, also inspiring customers to do the kinds of things they want to remember for decades. And so really building a brand and a company around this idea of enabling life's memories. And so that meant, as you translate to like, what are the product requirements to do that? It's vehicles that can carry your kids, your pets, your gear, your friends, your stuff. And it led us to

a sibling set of products, the truck and an SUV. It had us going up against the least efficient vehicles on the road. So large SUVs, large trucks are among the most carbon intensive vehicles in terms of emissions. And then, of course, there's going to be follow-up products and creatively named, the first of which is R2, the next after that, the sibling to R2 is R3. We've done a lot of the conceptual work of what an R4 would look like and what an R5 would look like

And I couldn't be more excited about the product portfolio that's going to be built out over the next five to six years to create lots of really interesting choices for customers across different price points, but also with different form factors and different use cases.

The subtext of what RJ is saying here is that Rivian's R2 model will put the company head to head against Tesla products. That's going to be an interesting battle to see play out. So how much of that battle will be about driverless features and how much will be about environmental messaging? We'll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

The Lobatical is for any employees who have been with us for five years to take a vacation. They get a week of extra PTO. They get to pick anywhere in the world that they want to travel, and we allow that to happen for them. That's Brooke Wright, Capital One business customer and chief people officer at Local, a change marketing company that works with huge corporations in order to facilitate meaningful communication between C-suites and their frontline.

We wanted to celebrate them for the time they had invested with us. We liked the idea of a sabbatical, and so we made it us. It's the Lobatical. Local practices what they preach, caring for their employees with the same rigor they instruct their clients to enact.

My day-to-day is focused on making sure that we're living out the same principles that we're guiding our clients on inside of their large corporations. How you take care of your employees is a direct correlation to your customers' experience with your brand or product. The Lobatical is just one of the ways that local ensures their employees feel appreciated and cared for. And feeling appreciated is a principle that is shared by their partnership with Capital One Business.

We love our 2% cashback card. We can use the rewards to care for our employees. My favorite thing about Capital One, whenever I need to call, there's always a caring, helpful voice on the other end. You can't manufacture care, especially in a big company. And Capital One cares. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

I want to tell you about one of my favorite podcasts that isn't one that we make. It's from New York Magazine, and it's called Pivot. Pivot is hosted by tech journalist and dare I say friend, Kara Swisher, and NYU business professor, Scott Galloway. Every Tuesday and Friday, Kara and Scott break down the major stories of the week in tech and business and politics and more. I always get razor sharp insights, bold and

bold, occasionally crazy predictions. And yes, lots of bickering and bantering with Scott occasionally throwing in the inappropriate remark. I encourage you to listen and follow Pivot wherever you get your podcasts.

Before the break, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe talked about Elon Musk's role in the Trump administration and the gaps in the EV marketplace. Now, RJ talks about driverless technology, environmental messaging, Rivian's $5.8 billion partnership with Volkswagen and more. Let's dive back in.

I talked recently to Peter McGinnis, who runs Impossible Foods, and he argued that sort of environmental messaging has to take a backseat to other kinds of experience. Do you think that holds true for EVs also, for Rivian? I completely do. And in fact, our whole product strategy has been built around that, which is

We don't believe that simply saying the vehicle is electric or has lower carbon emissions is a reason enough to drive significant demand and certainly to drive customers to make changes to their buying behavior from, let's say, a combustion-powered vehicle into an EV. But if the vehicle is so incredible, like so in the case of our pickup, it accelerates 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds. It does the quarter mile in 10.5 seconds. It's faster than a Porsche 911 GT3. It's

It can drive incredible off-road. It can tow 11,000 pounds and you can fit five people in it. It's like, holy cow, that is a cool thing. And the fact that it's electric is secondary to the performance, the attributes, the features, all of it together as a cohesive package. So here in California, the R1S is actually...

the best-selling premium SUV in the state of California. Not premium electric SUV, just premium SUV. So it outsells anything over $70,000 in the SUV category. And it's not a political statement. It's customers that are, you know, vote Republican, vote Democrat, are both excited about the features and the attributes of what we're putting together. And what I'm so enthused about with R2 is it dramatically lowers the entry rate

for folks to experience our products. And our average price of an R1 is over $90,000. On R2, it starts at about 45. And of course, R3 brings that down further. R4 brings it even further down. So these are things we're really excited about. You talk about the brand and you talk about the product. When you think about what makes Rivian distinctive and will make it distinctive in the long run, is it one of those more than the other? One of the things we say is,

a brand is not a feature so a brand is not a zero to sixty time uh a brand is not a storage cubic volume those are features or attributes that you know think of almost like like instruments in a large musical orchestra that have lots of instruments playing but all of them together ultimately make up what the product feels like and therefore how the brand manifests and

Brand, like music, like culture, is in many ways, it's hard to describe the single ingredient that makes something powerful or something desirable or something exciting. And there's a bit of magic to it.

And so for us, we really spent a lot of time thinking about across every single touchpoint of the business. So our retail spaces, our service locations, the products themselves, down to like, what's the floor mat material, all these little decisions need to all level up into this broader idea. And for us, the broader idea is creating a highly inviting product experience that invites people to go have the fullest version of their life. And so-

The kinds of emails I get from customers I love the most are not, I get all kinds. I get like, hey, the car's really fun to drive. I enjoy those. I also get lots of emails like, hey, I wish this was different or, hey, this was wrong. But of the good emails, the ones that are the most exciting are some version of, I don't know how it's happened, but Rivian has inspired me to start skiing again and I haven't skied in 10 years. I had one the other day. I bought a telescope and I went out to an open field and

big dark field and looked at the stars. I've never done that before. I don't know why your brand inspired me to do this. And we love that because it's the magic of what we'd hope to inspire. Somehow,

has come through with these different customers. I want to ask you about AI because everyone asks about AI. We're all focused on it, how it's going to impact the car experience. What are you doing at Rivian? Like how far are we from a driverless car world? Should we have a driverless car world? I think it's incredibly important. And in fact, it becomes, you could argue, the most important part of the business, which is the ability for the vehicle to drive itself.

And really the reason for that is consumers start to get their time back. Even if you enjoy driving the vehicle, the ability to hop on the highway or to leave your house and the vehicle take you to the office or take you to wherever you're going and have the freedom and flexibility to be on your phone, to read a book, to do whatever you like is a really nice feature.

This has been a big area of focus for us. And when we launched our first products, we had a limited capability for what we call a highway assist feature, which is you could go hands on wheel, eyes on the road, but the vehicle drives itself automatically.

in certain domains, so in our case, highway. But on our Gen 2 vehicle, which we started working on, we designed an entire camera set. We have 55 megapixels of cameras, so more cameras in terms of the number of megapixels than any other vehicle sold in the United States today. We have five radars, including a front imaging radar, and we control that entire stack. And we can use

sort of recently emerging technologies to train the platform. So if you think of how self-driving was developed prior to, let's say, 2021, it was really heavily rules-based. But now we're able to take from the cameras all the way through the controls

And use an end-to-end training where we can train using a lot of the much more modern techniques that we've seen emerge with large language models. But using a lot of the techniques we've seen with transformers to completely change how we're developing self-driving. And the speed at which it's going to develop is much higher. We announced, I guess, a little while ago, we're going to have a hands-free feature where you can – the vehicle drive itself –

in this case on highways, but with your hands off the wheel that's coming here very soon. And you can imagine after that, we're going to expand it to other roads. And after that, we're going to go to hands-free, eyes-off. So there's a lot of really exciting features that are coming. And I want to make sure I really understand this. So the car essentially has the capability to be driven without you doing anything, but you're not confident enough yet to

It's not safe enough yet for you to actually turn it over to the car in all situations. But as that gets better, you'll be able to update the software to allow it to do that in a safe way, even without having to change the vehicle. When we release or enable our self-driving features to work, we're starting in domains for which the confidence is extremely high. It's a bit of the Wild West because there's no legal body that arbitrates that

how at what level we're able to expose these features. So it's your judgment about what you feel confident in and what risk you're willing to take? As a brand, yeah. So every brand takes this decision differently. And so we've taken the view of really erring on hyper-focus on safety and

Making sure that as before we expand the operating windows to, let's say, neighborhood roads or school zones, we want to really be robust in the solution. We're talking now about autonomy, which is one slice of AI in the vehicle. We're going to see other elements of AI.

I think artificial intelligence will impact almost every single part of the business. But as it pertains to the product, we're going to start to see a very different relationship emerge between the users of the product and the vehicle itself and beyond self-driving. But think something as simple as navigating. Imagine if you don't even know where you want to go. You get in the car and say, I'm hungry.

And the car says, well, what do you feel like? And you say, I don't know. And it says, well, yesterday you had an Italian. How about, what do you feel about burritos today? And, you know, so just the ability to like be conversational and contextual and to really start to become more of a partner in decisioning around where you go, how you get there, what's the path. You think about this route planning and the ability to be thoughtful around things like traffic. It's just going to really change. And it'll be one of those kinds of changes, I think,

where it'll happen, we won't even fully realize it's happening. And then we'll look back and be like, how did we used to live? And when you think about these applications of AI that are beyond self-driving, how important is it for you, for Rivian to be like at the forefront of those versus following along or be like, there are a lot of

habits and things that Rivian is a part of trying to or in the process of changing, you know, how much of it do you take on? Well, early on, we realized that software was going to be really important. And we had a really deep conviction around the necessity of controlling the software stack in the vehicle.

A traditional car today will have 75 to maybe 100 plus little ECUs, little computers in the vehicle, all of which come from a labyrinth of suppliers. And all those little computers have to talk. And that is what's made over-the-air updates so difficult for traditional vehicles and what has made their software and a lot of their technology stacks feel so rigid relative or so wooden, if you will, relative to what you see in consumer electronics and cars.

So what we did, we're going to control the whole software stack and we're not going to use suppliers for all these computers. We're going to make our own computers. We have all of our own computers, but it requires a really like a fundamental shift where you're not dependent on or relying on third party suppliers for software or for the computers. And that architecture I've just described is what underpins. We did a $5.8 billion project.

joint venture and licensing deal with Volkswagen Group, second largest car company in the world, where we're now providing software and electronics to enable what I just described that allows them to step massively forward in terms of network architecture and software topology. And that's, of course, what we architected. So if you don't have that, it's really hard to imagine how you properly can build AI in

So step one is you've got to get the plumbing right. You've got to get the network architecture right. You've got to get the topology of computers right. You've got to get the right levels of compute. I mean, down into the basics of like, what level of memory do you have? What's your graphics capabilities? And these are things that are going to be really hard without making a big break from the traditional model for existing manufacturers. So I say all that because I think we're at this like inflection point where

The cars of the historical past in terms of architecture and the cars of the future in terms of architecture, I'd put ourselves, I'd put Tesla in that category, of course. They coexist. And the features are sort of similar. Like they're mostly the same. And it's easy to like confuse features for capability. But the platforms are totally different. And so the growth potential of those two platforms in terms of adopting to future technology is

is wildly different. So where they end up in, let's say, five to 10 years is very, very different places. And so I think we're going to see a lot of existing incumbent manufacturers work very hard, either through partnerships like what was done with us,

or through other means to move to these newer technology platforms. China has become a leading EV producer. I'm curious what the implications of that are for the car industry. How do you look at what's gone on in China and what it means for your business? Well, the world is electrifying. And the United States as a market is electrifying slower than other markets. Certainly Europe or China

But probably the singular issue that I'd say there's very clear alignment between both the Democratic side of the United States and the Republican side of the United States is that the United States needs to continue to lead in technology and to continue to really serve as an economic superpower. And in order for that to be true –

We also need to continue to be great at the world's future technologies. China also benefited from a lot of government support for EVs. If America wants to stay at the forefront in this kind of technological development, how important is government support in keeping that happening?

So China has a lot of different electric car companies. A lot of them are narrowly differentiated. The local areas or local regions for which those companies exist have provided a lot of financing. So as a result, you have a lot of very intense price competition within China to capture market share. And what is a huge market and what is a growing market, but nonetheless intense competition. A question remains around whether those products can be sold in the United States. And if so, what's the tariff?

I think we can say in the short term, there's going to continue to be not a lot of trade from the U.S. shipping products to China or vice versa, China shipping products, vehicles to the United States. But I think in the long term, everyone should be thinking about this to say, let's imagine a world where we can all compete freely, meaning we're competing head to head. And so the quality of the products, the quality of the technology,

the cost structure of the products. But what I'm describing is probably a 10-year, maybe 15-year horizon for that competitive environment to play out. And so we spend every day thinking about how do we make our products better? How do we

look at what others are doing and embrace the competition and see it as an opportunity for us to run faster. That's the mindset we built into the business. What's at stake for Rivian right now? We're in an inflection point. So we've launched our flagship products by virtue of their price being where it is. There's only so many customers of the R1T or the R1S and we're coming right up on the launch of R2. And R2 represents a really significant step change in

The nature of this business is it's a very, very high fixed cost business. And then in order to compete at the highest level from a technology point of view, this isn't something you can spend $100 million on a year in R&D and expect to compete with in terms of product feature set or quality with something like a Tesla that's spending many, many times that. And so the way we're spending capital on both building out our go-to-market side of the business and the way we're spending capital

represents or corresponds to a much bigger company and that we really grow into that as we launch R2. And how soon before I can get my hands on an R2? We've said the first half of 2026, but we haven't said exactly when, but sometime in that range. Well, RJ, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the questions and discussion.

Listening to RJ, it's difficult to ignore how much is out of his control right now, whether it's Musk having the president's ear, how the big automakers invest in EVs or the volatile tariff environment. But he's got such a clear vision for Rivian's long term business and so much conviction about it. It allows him to keep building toward the future.

I'm struck, too, by how much EVs are at the forefront of autonomous driving because they have the most updated tech architecture. It's a lesson for any business in today's marketplace. To handle bumps with agility, you want to have the most flexible tools. The conditions around us may not all be in our control, but as the saying goes, what we can control is how we respond to things. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. ♪

We've grown exponentially since we opened 10 years ago. We initially started with, I think there were 10 of us, maybe, total, which is just completely ridiculous. That's Jillian Field, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Union Market, a popular neighborhood market and cafe in Richmond, Virginia. With her growing success, now with 45 team members, Jillian has always kept sight of what really matters.

We felt since we opened that having some sort of employee appreciation event was really important to us. Every year, Jillian holds a company-wide celebration to show her staff how vital they are to the success of Union Market. Recently, she used points from her Capital One business card to host her employees at Busch Gardens Theme Park for a day of fun with family and friends.

We buy all of their tickets as well as their plus ones. It's a lot of fun and definitely a great team bonding experience. Capital One really has been great over the years. It's so easy. We could apply these points to supplies, masking tape and Sharpies and ticket receipt paper, but we like to retain them for our employees. That's been really important. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Troh. Our producer is Alex Morris. Assistant producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli. Theme music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Lital Malad. For more, visit rapidresponcesshow.com.

This episode is part of a special series in partnership with Stripe, empowering businesses to make progress.