MoneyMasters Interviews Tom Villante and David Wiess of Yapstone

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] pleased to meet you take my hand let's go [Music] Oh from the penthouse at the Venetian Hotel and beautiful Las Vegas we bring you money masters today we have some very special guests Ville of today the founder of Yap stone and david weiss the president of Yap stone we're gonna learn today how billion-dollar companies are created - welcome to the show and welcome David and of course we have our famous panelist Kim Calhoun who's gonna be helping us dig an answer ask and answer questions so tell us a little bit about young stone what is a Yap stone Yap stone was born in 1999 and I I was an investment banker and I was in private equity and I realized that I like the table that I was at but I was at the wrong side of the table I wanted to be that entrepreneur that was kind of making things happen I started angel investing yeah and saw that there was a great great movement in terms of the internet obviously and electronic payments PayPal started to get traction and so playing poker every week sparks all sorts of ideas right gets the adrenaline going you're thinking you're doing probabilities in your head it gets ideas flowing and that's how a bunch of a bunch of us started out in LA much-much printers that ended up building some decent sized companies and we're saying you know what do you what's it what's the opportunity out there and how can we leverage the internet to to enable payments PayPal is doing it for mostly goods are there any services out there that we can we can look at that are completely under penetrated by credit cards and debit cards and everybody raised their hand and said they paid their rent by paper check everybody at the table and so you know light balls went off and we saw that there was a clearly an opportunity but you always you always wonder about a market where there's no competitors right no one owns it no elated your work yeah we really were interested and there were basically a couple of reasons why it wasn't happening so the traditional credit card business the merchant is paying the fee the merchant is paying a 2 to 3 percent fee in order to enable that transaction to happen in the property market the landlords were not willing to absorb a two to three of course no set fee on a very large average transaction thousand dollar or two thousand so that was a non-starter still mostly a non-starter even you know this this far long later and the second thing was you know just a very simple thing around not having to not having to change so fighting inertia did you're accepting checks for 150 years it worked you get a pile of checks you tick off on the list you enter to the software and that was it and so we had to