Changing The Game with Wilson Casado - Dan Jovevski

On the last season of changing the game, we covered the pressing issue of gender diversity and the journey of women who have defied the forces arrayed against them to carve a piece of the cake for themselves.

Now, As the second season of our podcast begins, we are going to be talking about how new ideas from forward-thinking individuals around the world are transforming society before our very eyes.

And what better way to kick things than by interviewing the founder of WeMoney?

So that’s exactly what I did, and you can check out some of the highlights from our conversation below:

Between The Briefcase and The Tool Box

Every entrepreneur has a story, and Dan’s started his by talking about her mother, an immigrant who had to raise her children while coming from a very disadvantaged socio-economical background, without having the simple advantage of speaking English.

By watching his mother do everything she could in order to raise him and his siblings, Dan learned a valuable lesson: If you want to make it in this world, you have to hustle.

On the other side, however, Dan’s father made the options at the table very clear from the start, you either pick up a briefcase, or a tool box. Dan chose neither. He had decided that controlling your own destiny was a far better way of living life.

He started to work on the things he truly loved, a plan that hasn’t really changed since he first took it on.

The Trouble Student

According to Dan himself, he was never the model student, or at least not for the most of his time as a student, mostly because he “didn’t have the attention span to be interested in the formal education system”.

He even recalled how most of his grades would always be either “Satisfactory” (as it was written at the time), or that dreaded “BE” for “below expectations, which would get one of his teachers to taunt him by saying he would “never amount to anything”.

Now, most people would be rightfully angry at such a declaration, especially for someone who was supposed to make sure that didn’t happen, yet Dan decided to take that a step further and graduate at the top of his class out of sheer spite.

As it turns out, a grudge makes for terrific fuel for people’s ambition, and not only did Dan prove his teacher wrong by becoming the best student in his class, he actually scored a spot on a US University to make revenge that much sweeter.

The fact that he had actually come to like the academic process came later as a nice bonus for his dedication.

We At WeMoney

If you were to search up Dan’s LinkedIn page and read his Bio, as I do with every guest, instead of the usual three-paragraph description, you would only find the words “Dan from WeMoney”. So, what is WeMoney?

In order to understand what any business is about, we need to know the problem it intends to solve, and on this matter, Dan started out by saying that his startup is “a social and economical wellness company.”

He then went on to explain how we have all had a bad experience related to money at one point in our lives, and the main reason for that is that most people, and especially newer generations, think about their finances on a very short-term basis.

Combine that with the overwhelming complexity of our current financial system, which has us making all sorts of complicated decisions based on concepts it don’t fully understand, and it’s no wonder we have a rocky relationship with money.

In order to solve this issue, WeMoney offers an automatisation of personal finance, to put it on “autopilot”, not only in order to avoid future headaches, but also to make it work for you and generate further income.

Something that they call “self-driving money”.

Talking Money

Okay, so that is WeMoney’s mission. But what does it actually do?

Firstly, it allows you to connect over 230 accounts to their platform and have a unified view of all your financial assets, including a monitor track of your credit health that lets you know your credit score and gives you tips on how to improve it and use it.

Secondly, it provides you a community. Have you ever noticed how there’s this unspoken rule that you are not supposed to talk about money with friends and family? How are you supposed to understand finances without talking about it?

Well, with WeMoney you can actually get in contact with people, watch how they are applying their funds and where, learn from them and ask questions in order to better manage your wages.

Lastly, it takes away all the friction of getting the best possible deal and outcome of investments and transactions. That means getting the best home loan and figuring out when to consolidate your superannuation will no longer be a frustrating process of trial and error.

Conclusion

Dan Jovevski could not have been a better guest to kick off season two of Changing the Game, not only because his story hits so close to home for me, as we both take after the extraordinary women who raised us.

Dan is a perfect example of how businesses are grown out of people noticing a necessity and tending to it, not just for their own benefit, but for others as well in providing both a powerful financial tool and a source of education that is sure to change the game.

Now comes the part where I leave you with the first creative exercise of our new season: What is a great need that you have identified in society, and what kind of innovation could you bring to the table in order to solve it?