🎧🍌 Forage: The Trillion Dollar Opportunity in Restricted Payments with Ofek Lavian, Co-founder and CEO
Building food stamps to 10% of Instacart's revenue, why 1 in 8 American's can't afford groceries, when micromanagement isn't bad, and why everyone should travel when they're young
Forage is the mission driven payments company. Today, they help businesses accept food stamps online. Tomorrow, they’ll enable the trillions of dollars in restricted payments and US government benefit programs (like HSA / FSA, Medicare, Medicaid).
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This is a special episode, because I’m an investor in Forage, and Ofek shares everything he’s learned building the company. We go deep on food stamps, also known as EBT or SNAP, the government program that provides over $200 billion dollars per year in benefits that helps 42 million low income Americans buy food.
Our conversation gets into lessons from Ofek’s time leading payments teams at Uber and Instacart, building Instacart’s EBT program up to 40 employees and 10% of its total revenue, why he thinks “no single idea has destroyed more business value than the idea that micromanagement is bad”, and why Ofek is so passionate about helping low income Americans.
We get into the history of food stamps, market dynamics that led to low online adoption, the days Ofek thought Forage might not make it all the way to now working with the biggest players in online grocery like Uber and DoorDash, and the long-term opportunity Forage has to build the rails the government uses to distribute trillions of dollars of restricted consumer benefits.
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Timestamps to jump in:
4:53 Forage: Helping 42m Americans buy food
5:24 History of food stamps & EBT
9:26 Growing up as an immigrant family with low food access
11:39 90% of EBT recipients are elderly, disabled, or working parents
12:39 How Forage sells revenue to its customers
14:15 Building Instacart’s EBT program during COVID
18:25 Why no one built an EBT payments product
22:13 Joining Forage as a Co-founder
25:01 Why government payments are so hard
30:25 Growing 15x in six months
33:52 Underdiscussed mental health challenges of startups
37:06 How the political environment impacts EBT
43:20 Why Forage charges more than competitors
45:58 Seasonality in EBT spend
46:59 Why early investors passed on Forage
48:10 The trillion dollar opportunity in restricted payments
50:56 “ There's no single idea that has destroyed more business value on planet Earth than the idea that micromanagement is bad”
54:45 Why Forage doesn’t care about job titles
58:51 Lessons backpacking across 28 countries after college
1:02:09 How to travel on a budget
1:04:24 Importance of health
1:06:15 Saving a friends life on Mount Everest
Referenced:
Find Ofek on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Ofek, welcome to the show.
Ofek Lavian:
Thanks for having me, Turner.
Turner Novak:
I'm excited to do this. I feel like maybe we could have done it a while back, but this is just the perfect time to do it, I feel like.
Ofek Lavian:
I'm excited. I've been a huge fan of yours, and so I'm glad the day has come.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, can you just... real quick, what is Forage for people who aren't familiar?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. Forage is, in six words, we help businesses accept food stamps. And for the audience, people might not know, but 42 million Americans receive government assistance to buy food. It's one out of every eight people in the country, 12.5% of the population, and the average household gets about $700 a month in EBT.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow. You just think the average recipient household gets about 700?
Ofek Lavian:
$700 a month to buy on food. And while the food stamp program has existed for nearly a century in the US since the Depression era in the 1930s, originally, as a subsidy program for farmers, they could produce more corn and wheat, but also as a program to help people feed their families, so in the form of it might come in cereal, and bread, and other goods. And ultimately, it was four and a half years ago when the first EBT transaction started online, and Forage was founded in that era to modernize and digitize how people can use the food stamps.
Turner Novak:
So how did it work before Forage? Maybe pre-internet or you're in the store, how does that whole concept work?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. So they're called food stamps because they literally were stamps, is how they started out, it was like stamps for oranges and stamps for bread 100 years ago.
Turner Novak:
So you didn't actually get money, it was like you get a thing that is worth a loaf of bread.
Ofek Lavian:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow. I did not know this.
Ofek Lavian:
And then in the 20th century, 1970s and '80s, the big evolution was that it went to a card. So it went to an EBT card. It looks like a credit or debit card, it's a piece of plastic, 16 digit number, but can only be spent to buy food. And so funds were then loaded onto to those cards and funded every month so people could use them and spend them. And so for decades now, you could go into a store, get your EBT card, swipe it at a point of sale. And it was only in the pandemic era when stores online began to accept those funds.
Turner Novak:
So why did no one accept them online like in 2018? You'd think Instacart is a big thing, every retailer has some kind of e-commerce offering, but you couldn't pay with food stamps online?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. So the regulations were just behind the rest of the industry. So if you think internet e-commerce took off in the late '90s, early 2000s, and it was just a while until the government said, "Hey, you can actually use these funds online." There are some nuances about food stamps that make it actually particularly tricky. So unlike credit cards and debit cards, which should be used to by virtually anything anywhere from anyone, food stamps can only be used to buy food from specific retailers that sell food, specific items, so you can't use it to buy diapers, or toilet paper, or toothpaste, it can only be spent on food items, and you have to enter your PIN along with that transaction. And that's just scratching the surface, there's a whole lot of other things, like tax exemptions and other nuances. And Forage is the first private company to be able to accept EBT online. There's two other players that can play EBT online... that can accept EBT online that have existed for a very long time, Fiserv and Worldpay. And so we're the singular upstart in this space.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And I think when COVID first hit 2020, there was... I'm probably going to get this number wrong, but there was 25 stores out of a hundred thousand in the country that you could pay with food stamps online or EBT online. Is that right?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. So I was at Instacart during the pandemic and we were one of the first platforms to accept EBT online. I think today, so now that we're four or five years into the modernization, I think it's still something like 300 or so stores accept EBT online, compared to there's about 250,000 locations in store. And so we're still very, very early in the modernization effort where... our goal at Forage is to make it as ubiquitous as a credit card or debit card. So anywhere you could spend a food stamp to buy food, we want you to be able to do that on the internet as well.
Turner Novak:
Cool. Yeah. I want to try to understand it a little bit more, but I think a big first thing to talk about is why are food stamps so important to you?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, I think for a couple of reasons. I think one, biographically, my dad grew up on welfare. He was born in Iran and was a refugee that immigrated to Israel. And my family came from little to nothing and brought nothing from Iran. He talks about his parents grew up without running water in their household, and if not for the welfare and food assistance that he received, his life would've been very, very different. And on my mom's side, her parents, my grandparents, are Holocaust survivors, where my grandma spent the better parts of the war hiding in the forest around Belarus and Ukraine, joined the partisans and essentially starved for three years. And so I was born in Israel but grew up in California, and we were never allowed to get up from the table without finishing our plates. I had to see my reflection in the plate before I was full or before I could get up.
And so I come from a family where food was always something that was sacred and really important. And as I personally think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, now it's 2025, we live in the most advanced civilization in the history of humanity, and there's tens of millions of people in this country that can't eat or that need help putting food on the table. And I think it's when I was exposed to that professionally at Instacart during the pandemic where we helped tens of millions of households get broader access to food, and we conducted hundreds of UX research, and surveys, and spoke to these people and we found out that, hey, one out of five of them are actually on some form of disability making it physically harder to go to a grocery store.
Turner Novak:
Oh, I didn't realize that. So there's a lot of overlap. So I think a big thing with food stamps is you just think they're low-income, poor, or they don't want a job, and they're leaching off the government or something. I feel like a lot of people maybe have that kind of connotation about them.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. And I think what people don't understand is that 90% of the recipients are actually either elderly, disabled, working families with children. And the reality is that, unfortunately, I think a lot of people can't afford to pay for groceries. And certainly, if you take a look at the temperature of the economy and what people are talking about, people can't afford eggs, it's really, really hard to make ends meet with inflation of groceries right now. And the other thing that I think people don't talk about is about a third of recipients live in food deserts, so about 17 million people that receive EBT live somewhere where the nearest grocery store might be 10 or 20 miles away. And so the convenience and the lifeline that grocery delivery affords them is something that previously was never available, and helps ensure that every family in the country gets fed on a daily basis.
Turner Novak:
I think the interesting thing too, if I'm a grocery provider, I'm just running my business, and if you say... you said eight or six households... which one is it, one-
Ofek Lavian:
One in eight households. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
One in eight households. So if you're doing your marketing, you're making your logistics network dense, and one of eight people just cannot use it, basically, cannot use your product, so when you suddenly just say you get an extra, what is that? 16, 17% of people can suddenly just become customers, you become more profitable, more of your ads convert, you can potentially... when you're batching your orders and you're acquiring customers, and mapping out and planning where you expand, it makes you more profitable, it gives you a better business if you're one of these providers too. So it's like you're helping the consumers, but you're also helping businesses that are helping those consumers also.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. I think it's a real... and I first got exposed to this when I was at Instacart, but it's a real win-win-win, where we're helping feed American families, which is the most noble and inspiring thing that I've ever worked on, but we're also helping businesses sell more groceries. And so to them, our job is really... we're selling revenue to our partners, which is-
Turner Novak:
What a great pitch.
Ofek Lavian:
Which is great. Software business... people were buying less and less software in 2023 and 2024, and this was one thing that we were able to sell and that really resonated with some of our big customers. So Uber, and DoorDash, and Gopuff, Dollar General bought fewer things and fewer vendors, and they looked at every single thing, "Do we really need this software? Do we really need that software?" But ultimately, if we're selling something that can increase their sales by 15%, that's pretty meaningful. And I remember looking at it at Instacart.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, let's talk about that. How did you approach that? Because you were... maybe we will talk about some Uber stories, I know you're on the payment team at Uber, but then you joined Instacart, you were leading the payments team, how did this come about of like, "Okay, EBT, let's explore it," just go down that road?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. Yeah. So by way of background, I've spent about a decade in payments product management at large internet marketplaces like Uber and Instacart. And Uber was on an extreme end of sophistication where we were processing hundreds of billions of dollars of payments, and 60 plus countries and currencies launched financial products like the Uber credit card, and I think we were the first business to accept Venmo, we accepted everything from Alipay in China to iDEAL in the Netherlands. It was a really, really sophisticated team. And we had over 100 people working on payments at Uber. It's like working at a payments company within a larger marketplace company. And at Instacart, I joke that before I joined, their payments team was called Stripe. And I was the first product manager to join Instacart to work on payments, and that was in 2020, right as the pandemic was starting. And so my initial thinking was, wow, there's just so much opportunity with payments for Instacart. Everything from... we were doing crazy things, we had a fraud problem, so we weren't accepting prepaid cards-
Turner Novak:
Because I could use it to make an order and then it wouldn't actually have the money and I could-
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, yeah, we saw a ton of fraud on prepaid cards that was rampant. We weren't accepting PayPal. We were single source to Stripe. Stripe is a phenomenal company, but if and when in the rare occasion that they were down, Instacart came to a grinding halt. And so I came in. And really, my original mandate was, well, let me go and rebuild the Uber playbook. I know what it looks like to have a really sophisticated, mature internet marketplace with great payments, and fraud, and financial products. But the one thing I stumbled upon there that I'd never seen before at Uber and had never really heard of is the US government just had approved the use of EBT food stamps online. And our grocers kept asking us, "What about EBT? What about EBT?"
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Because for them, it's like, some people, it's probably like 20, 30% of their revenue.
Ofek Lavian:
Absolutely. So on average, it's 12.5 to 13% of all grocery sales, and US grocery is one and a half trillion dollars, it's-
Turner Novak:
One of the biggest markets.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. Americans spend more money on groceries than anything other than housing.
Turner Novak:
Other than rent. Yeah.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. Right. So it goes housing, and then it's like the average American's eating 21 meals a week, the vast majority of which are at home, and that's where the most dollars go.
Turner Novak:
It's probably 10 to 30% of income, maybe more than that even for some people.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. A lot more than that for some people. And our grocers were asking us for it. And some grocers, by the way, like Aldi, saw a much higher percentage of their total stores were EBT because they're really focused on affordability, we work with folks like Dollar General who have a more affordable option, et cetera, who see much more than 12.5 To 13%, they're north of 20, 25% of their sales are EBT. And so as soon as they found out that, "Hey, this is a really meaningful percent of our in-store business, we want to go and launch it online. Instacart, is that something you can enable?"
Turner Novak:
You're, "Of course. Let me try to figure it out."
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. I was like, "This is the coolest problem I've ever heard of." I get to use my passion for and knowledge in payments to go help feed low income families, that, by the way, if you remember in 2020, everyone's got stay at home orders. And so now, it's harder to go and get groceries, and people are immunocompromised, and there's a shortage of masks, and there's a shortage of hand sanitizer, and you're asking people to go 15, 20 miles away to go to a grocery store. So this was the coolest, most complex thing, and most meaningful project I've ever worked on in my life, was enabling EBT at Instacart.
Turner Novak:
So what did you do? You said there's a couple different providers, did you just go click a button and copy and paste some code. It was like, "All right, we got EBT now."
Ofek Lavian:
So as I mentioned, Stripe was our only payments provider at the time, and unfortunately, they did not have an EBT product.
Turner Novak:
Why not? It seems like a pretty big category. Why didn't they have it?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, and I'll get to that in a moment, but I had begged them to build it, and at the time, Instacart was doing something like 5% of Stripe's entire business. So 30 billion out of $600 billion were going Instacart. Now, Stripe does over a trillion dollars a year in volume. And I begged all the best payments companies in the world, I spoke to Adyen, I spoke to Braintree, PayPal, Stripe, et cetera, and none of them were going to build this EBT product. And so unfortunately, the only show in town we had was Fiserv, which is-
Turner Novak:
Public company. They just own hundreds of rolled up businesses, right?
Ofek Lavian:
Correct. Correct.
Turner Novak:
Like very old business, it's evolved over time.
Ofek Lavian:
Correct. And they had gone through M&A with First Data, they had gone through an M&A with AccuLink, which they had bolted on, it was meant to be a PINless debit product that they rejiggered into being the product here. But if you wanted to accept EBT online back in 2020, Fiserv was your only option. And I've bet my career on the question you just asked like, "Why didn't Stripe build this, and why didn't all the best... the best payments companies in the world, how could they have missed such a massive opportunity?" EBT's funded hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the largest sector of retail, which is grocery. And I think it fundamentally comes down to two things. The first is that businesses like Stripe, and Braintree, and Adyen have tens of millions of sellers around the world selling anything anywhere. And if you really look at their product suite, it's built for horizontals, it's not built for verticals. So things like Stripe Radar prevents fraud for any seller anywhere in the world, or issuing, or capital, or billing.
And if you think about EBT, it's geospecific, so it's US only product, and it's also industry specific, so it's only for really grocery and retail. And so I think just a very small percentage of their total seller base would benefit from that type of pay method. And the second thing is just the amount of compliance and work required to enable the EBT is massive. It took us years before we processed our first dollar in EBT... Oh, yeah, it was incredibly difficult to get approval from the USDA for this product, and if it were easy, they all would've done it. So you've got all their biggest customers, Instacart, Uber, DoorDash are begging them saying, "Stripe, please go build this. Stripe, please go build this." And eventually, after screaming into the void for so long, and I couldn't get Fiserv to improve their product, we had a ton of reliability issues-
Turner Novak:
Oh, really? So what's the issue with Fiserv?
Ofek Lavian:
Just outages, lack of support, built on very old tech, and every time that the system was down at Instacart, we were losing tens of millions of dollars per outage. And I couldn't get any of the modern payments providers like Stripe, and Adyen, and Braintree to build a competing product here, and so I ultimately decided, "Hey, if nobody's going to build great modern payments infrastructure for poor people, this is the most important thing I've ever worked on in my life, and there are tens of millions of people that deserve to have the ability to pay with food stamps, with dignity." And so I decided to do it myself.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think you mentioned you met the Forage team, they were going through YC. What's the story about how you ended up getting involved?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. So Forage was a Y Combinator company in the summer of 2021, and they had originally been thinking about something in the consumer mobile space, it was going to be like Kayak for grocery shopping, if this is your grocery list, we'll tell you where the cheapest place you can buy groceries is. And then they were... I think they had learned that, actually, low-income Americans know where they can buy cheap groceries, the problem is they can't spend their EBT dollars to buy them online. And Instacart famously is one of the success stories out of Y Combinator. And a partner made an introduction to Nilam, the chief business officer, and to Apoorva-
Turner Novak:
Prior guest of the show. Apoorva actually told me he wants to come on, he's going to come on too. So almost... I guess, maybe I'm being a little generous here, excited here, but hopefully, two prior guests of the show.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, that's great. And I think the world of Nilam and Apoorva, by the way, two of the smartest, most generous, kind, caring, brilliant people I've ever worked with, and I'm very proud to say they're both investors of Forage, because they deeply understand how important this is. And the YC partners introduced them to Nilam and Apoorva, and they said, "Oh, you want to know about EBT payments? Talk to Ofek, he's the guy." And so I met them. I immediately fell in love with the idea because this is exactly what I had been solving for, and the fact that there was not a modern payments solution here, they were pre-product, pre-sales, pre-revenue, they were pivoting the company from consumer mobile to payments, and I immediately was like, "This is the most important thing. I want to tell you exactly what you guys got to build, here are the problems we saw firsthand." And invested, advised, and eventually, joined as co-founder and CEO.
Turner Novak:
Amazing. Yeah, I remember we met through... I think it was as you had invested or you just started working with them, and I think that's when I met you. I think it was before you officially joined, we were just talking, it was like, "Damn, this guy's legit. He's like already built this basically." That's crazy.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. Yeah. I started working on this in the summer of 2021, and it was like everything I thought about outside of my already stressful job, Instacart, and it became increasingly clear that this needed to exist in the world. And if the best payments companies weren't going to do it, then I was.
Turner Novak:
So I'm curious then, can you just explain the process, if you tried to do it at Instacart, I think you mentioned before it took you around a year to figure it out and then going live, you said it took three years, I think you said, or something like that, from first dollar of revenue. Maybe I'm getting... you can correct those numbers, but it took a very, very long time. So what made it so difficult?
Ofek Lavian:
At Instacart, we had to go through a very grueling integration. We had a team of 40 plus people working on the integration, the government approval, having to go through each and every single retailer one by one-
Turner Novak:
You said 40 people were working on this?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, it was a massive project. And by the way, within 12 months, it grew to a multi-billion dollar business for Instacart, it was mentioned over 25 times in their S-1, over 10% of their total business. It was massive, and it was the hardest and most meaningful thing I'd ever worked on in my career. And I just knew that there had to be something better, there had to be a solution here that was easier to integrate, that offered more support with the USDA approval process, and that was more reliable.
Turner Novak:
Is that a hard process getting approved and just getting compliance?
Ofek Lavian:
Extremely. Extremely. It took us north of two years just to go through the USDA approval process. And then if you layer in on top of that the multi-year enterprise sales process to close customers like Uber, and DoorDash, Dollar General, et cetera, Albertsons, and then we work so hard to get them live, but we're a payments business, and so we're sprinting to the starting line. The day that the EBT pay method is available on your mobile app or website, you don't get to 12.5% of sales, it starts to trickle in. And for us, we estimate it could take 24 to 36 months until you hit your-
Turner Novak:
Steady state.
Ofek Lavian:
... share of wallet, exactly, when you're at your industry average 12.5%. And so-
Turner Novak:
How have you accelerated the timeline at Forage versus if I'm finding Instacart, I'm trying to build this versus if I'm just like, "Oh, Forage seems interesting, I'll work with you guys to do this." What's the difference? What do you kind of save people in terms of time, ROI, speed, et cetera, headaches saved, all that stuff?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, it's really is the same playbook that Stripe had, it's we're going to have the easiest to integrate APIs and SDKs, and be able to get you to integrate with as few lines as code as possible with the most reliable tech, and build a solution really tailored to developers. And so when you compare our solution and all of our technical documentation is online, or you're going to be handed a 200 plus page integration guide by Fiserv and get zero help, we can shave down the integration time from 9 to 18 months for some retailers on Fiserv down to a matter of weeks. Our average integration time is now between 6 and 12 weeks for enterprise.
And then once you launch, we also have better reliability, we help you get approved by the US government, which is a extremely complex process. It's a big reason why many businesses don't accept food stamps, is because they've never experienced having to go through hundreds of certification tests and writing a 50-page business requirements document that has to get approved by the US government. And we've really productized and templatized all that and make it as easy as possible, and then when you're live, we also drive sales to your site and help with marketing, et cetera.
Turner Novak:
Didn't you say that you submitted the business requirements thing like six times in Instacart or something? It just took forever to get it right or something?
Ofek Lavian:
I think we might've had three or four rewrites. But yeah, we submitted one and it was a 50-page manifesto. I was extremely proud of the work, it's got screenshots of every flow, it talks about your refunds and what happens when you switch your item and have... every single thing was thought about. And then you wait a few weeks and the US government comes and just starts redlining everything and saying, "You haven't thought about that. And you haven't thought about that. And actually, you can't offer free delivery. And actually, you can't do this thing." And so there are so many rules and regulations, I'll give you just one in particular. There needs to be what's called equitable treatment, which originally was intended to, "Hey, you can't make your EBT customers... we don't want them to have a worse experience than anybody using a credit or debit card."
But sometimes, we would give EBT customers a better experience and say things like, "Hey, there's free delivery or these deep discounts," and they say, "Actually, no, it's got to be equitable treatment. You can't treat them better than your credit card or debit card customers." And that's just one little nugget, but there are so many other big pieces, everything from the fact that EBT orders are tax-exempt, sales tax-exempt. So you had to build a tax engine to calculate how that works. Every EBT transaction is actually a split tender transaction. So your $100 at EBT are actually two baskets, $50 of EBT eligible goods, which is your fruits, and vegetables, and produce, and meat, and seafood, and then there's your non-eligible goods, which is diapers, or toothpaste, or toilet paper, or anything else.
Turner Novak:
Oh, so you split the order basically?
Ofek Lavian:
You actually split the order in two and when the customer clicks checkout... actually, unbeknownst to them, two API calls are made, one via Forage, the EBT networks, and one via a credit or debit card processor, through the traditional rails.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Interesting. So I guess, where are you at today? You talked about you have a bunch of customers signed, but what's the current state of the business? I know you've been working out for a long time, got a lot of people signed live, if you Google Forage right now, there's some press with some of the stuff you guys have done, but what's kind of current state of the business?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, I'd say, for us, 2021 and 2022 we're really focused on building the product and getting approved by the US government, 2023 was about focusing on enterprise businesses and signing the biggest grocery retail platforms and retailers in the country, 2024 was about getting them integrated and approved by the government, and 2025 has been really about making them successful. And so we're starting to finally see the metrics are hitting. We've been growing 50% a month for the past six months. We've 15X the business since September of 2024. We're starting to feed tens of thousands of families a day with our technology, and our goal is to be doing billions of dollars in volume by the end of the year.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think you guys have this pretty cool marketing video, maybe we'll stitch it in right here for people to watch it.
Ofek Lavian:
Let's do it.
Speaker 4:
Food is fundamental. But for millions across America, accessing fresh, affordable groceries isn't always easy. At Forage, we're breaking down barriers to make government benefits, like SNAP, work better for the people who need them the most, because everyone deserves the dignity of feeding their family with ease. We optimize for the collective good and are driven by compassion. Every day, tens of thousands of households depend on Forage to help put food on the table, and millions more rely on us each year. But we're doing more than just powering payments technology, we're making online groceries more accessible, convenient, and equitable for all shoppers. And we're empowering retailers and delivery apps to be a part of the solution. We build with purpose, always mindful of our mission. We're inspired by impact, united by passion, and dedicated to helping those in need, and we're just getting started. Our most important work is still ahead, join us and let's redefine what's possible together.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. When you showed that to me just a couple of minutes before we started recording, I was like, "Wow." It's pretty cool to just see you've been working on this and it's a real thing, and it's an awesome video.
Ofek Lavian:
We actually just finished that video this morning. And I showed it to my wife and I started crying, because the day-to-day is so tough and you feel like you're just getting punched in the face by problems and challenges and things get more and more complex. And then to see that video and see what is now my life's work and just the impact it makes, it made me really emotional. It's just such an important reminder of the important work we're doing.
Turner Novak:
It's maybe an interesting topic, you were telling me earlier, you thought the Ofek of five years ago, you were like gung-ho, "I know I'm going to start a company, I want to be the CEO, I want to build business. I feel super good about it." And then you told me as you're walking and you're like, "I feel like the Ofek of five years ago." How have you changed over the past five years as a founder?
Ofek Lavian:
I think what's interesting is the business has been doing extremely well. On the outside, we've been, quote, unquote, "successful" and we work with some of the biggest platforms and businesses in the country, if not the world, but what's funny is that the more accomplished the business has become... this job is the hardest thing I've ever done. And I'd say, I personally have probably become less confident, and more anxious and more overwhelmed. And I think something a lot of founders don't talk about is just the mental health challenges of being in this role or leaders in general, and-
Turner Novak:
So what's so hard about it? Why do you have mental health challenges? Because it seems like you should be crushing it, it seems like everything should be happy, and great, and you're in a good spot. Explain that to somebody.
Ofek Lavian:
I think the way to think about it is I think it feels like manic, you experienced the highest of highs, but also the lowest of lows. And on that journey, there were five or six times where I thought the business is going to end and it's going to be it, and I'm going to have to go find a job someday. And I'm crying in the shower thinking, "Man, this is going to really suck. I'm going to have to tell people this didn't work out. And my employees, who mean the world to me, we're about 50 people now, that took a chance on us and took a bet on what we're building and put their trust in me." So I think fundamentally, what it comes down to is I take this job really seriously, and I put a lot of pressure on myself.
And I think the more and more success we've had, the stakes just get higher and higher. And I think for me, the really amazing thing about working on a mission-driven business is that on the really dark and tough days, we remind ourselves that what we're doing is really helping make ends meet for families that need us. And I think about that as our renewable energy source. Anytime we're down, anytime we're frustrated, is think about the mission, think about the mission, because we've had our fair share of tough days.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that's the reason you started in the first place. You just clung to that of like, "I feel like I'm truly making a difference in the world, and truly making it a better place."
Ofek Lavian:
Absolutely. If you look at the theme of my career, whether at Uber, or Instacart, or Forage, actually, the thing that I get most excited about is using technology to help improve people's lives in the physical world. So at Uber, it's finding safe rides from A to B, at Instacart, it's getting groceries, and at Forage, it's helping low-income Americans. But I've had my chance to work at social media companies, or social networks, or Search, or even AI, and ultimately, that's not what gets me excited. We're going to spend a finite amount of time on this earth and I want to use it really helping people. And I think technology has a really unique opportunity to help improve the physical world for the better, and that's what fires me up.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think an interesting topic is if you look at the current state of the US, like administration and government, and you talk a lot about the mission is to help low-income Americans, a big theme of this administration is cutting expenses, cutting waste. How do you just think about this change in regime and what we're currently going through? How is that going to be impacted by the current presidency?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. I'll start with the headline, which is, we live in the most prosperous nation in the history of humanity-
Turner Novak:
Yeah, we're in the top 0.01% of any people in human history. Extremely lucky.
Ofek Lavian:
... and no one should go hungry in America. Full stop. And while we have a deficit and we probably spend too much as a government, there are so many other places to cut spending before we take people's food away from their plate. And I think what's a helpful reminder is if you actually look over the arc of history, over the last 30 years, EBT funding has actually increased more during Republican administrations than it has during Democratic administration. So it's increased about 11.3% a year under Republicans, and about 8.5% a year under Democrats.
Turner Novak:
I would not have expected that.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. And in turn, the reason why that happens is because it has a lot more to do with these two key leading indicators, which is inflation and unemployment. EBT tracks very closely to inflation, it's actually pegged to inflation. So in 2023, when grocery prices increased by 10%, EBT funding increased by 10%, and unemployment, so the more people that don't have income or struggling to get a job, the increase we have in EBT funding. And the interesting thing about where we are right now is we're actually at record high EBT funding, but record low unemployment. And so if you think about like, "Hey, could AI be disruptive to our economy, could it be disruptive to our labor force?" Some people are comparing it to the industrial revolution where we're going to need to retrain our workforce in this new world of AI. And I think if that even slightly moved unemployment from a record low of 4% to 5, or 6, or 7%, you're going to see EBT numbers double in this country.
And I think the other thing that is important is that EBT is not a handout, every dollar spent on SNAP actually generates a $1.79 in economic activity. It goes back to Main Street, it goes back to grocers, it goes to small and medium businesses, it goes to farmers and ranchers and ag, and it stimulates our economy. And that's why it's gotten bipartisan support for the nearly 100 the program has existed.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think too, if you just look at why Trump was elected, if you look at just like the data, it's basically people were upset about the economy and they couldn't afford food, and inflation. And if you just look at the most common reasons that people voted for Trump, it aligns with like, "Hey, we need a little bit extra help with buying food."
Ofek Lavian:
Exactly. If people can't afford to buy eggs, the economy's not going well. I don't care what the stock market looks like, I don't care what these numbers look like, the thing that matters to most families is, "Can I afford food? Can I put that food on the table? Can I make ends meet? Can I afford rent this month?" And for too many people, that answer was no. And that's a big reason why Trump won this last election. If you look at exit polls, I think something like over 90% of Americans said the economy was heading in the wrong direction, affordability was a big problem, inflation was a really big problem.
Turner Novak:
He's probably not going to screw his... I mean, you could maybe argue there's been cases where he screwed his base a little bit, but this is why they voted for him specifically.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, correct. I think what's more likely to happen is I think we're going to have conversations about what you can spend food stamps on. If you think about the Make America Healthy Again movement, we're going to have conversations around, "Hey, should you be able to buy ice cream, and candy, and soda on food stamps?" I think that's an important conversation we should have. And I think we're going to have conversations about with DOGE, I think they're going to go look and see, "Hey, are all these 42 million people, do they actually need help buying food?" And I think what they're going to find is that, yeah, there are tens of millions of people in this country that are struggling to buy food. And I think that those two things together are actually going to increase the integrity of the program and strengthen our reason to invest in it and say, "Hey, this generates $1.79, an economic activity for every dollar spent on SNAP, we're going to ensure that it only goes to healthy food," which, by the way, the average recipient today is getting $6 per day for food-
Turner Novak:
It's like two bucks a meal, [inaudible 00:40:50].
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. It's hard to buy healthy food for $2 a meal. And we're going to, I think, confirm what many people in this country know, which is that people legitimately don't have the money to buy food. And I think whether that happens in this administration or next administration, I think that the integrity of the program will increase, and it will set the stage for this to continue receiving the bipartisan support it has in the past.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I hope it does too, to your point of... I mean, I think there's some statistics of how much money gets spent on soda, non-healthy food. It's like, it should be like, let's try to make it so they're buying eggs, fruits, and vegetables versus some processed Kraft cheese or whatever, maybe that's not... ice cream, or whatever. Sometimes that's okay, maybe that should be a little bit, people are allowed to have some flavorful sugary stuff sometimes, but maybe there's guidelines of how much you can spend or something on certain categories.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. And I think this is controversial, I think it comes down to how much freedom of choice we want to give people. And for me personally, I think problem one is let's make sure that every American... that no American goes to bed hungry tonight. Let's start with that. And then a second order level question is, okay, well, what nutrients did they get, and did they eat food that was healthy for them? And did we allow them to have maybe slightly unhealthy food sometimes? But I think we still have so much work to do on just making sure people are fed that, to me, this is almost... it's an interesting but enlightened question. I think today, we still have so much work to do just to make sure people are fed.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think on the technology side too, if you want to make some tweaks to the program and enforce certain spending in certain ways, you need the right technology to do that, and Forage has an opportunity to help guide the program in the right way.
Ofek Lavian:
Totally. And I wish there were more people building in this space. I would love to... I hope that there's the listener to this podcast that's inspired because there should be 20 businesses helping improve the lives of low-income Americans. And yeah, I think one of the ways that we can help here is not just building the rails to accept these payments, but also if someday something changed in terms of item eligibility, our technology does that today, and we could certainly be well positioned there. Also, fraud is a big problem that... we're the only company that's even investing in and tackling EBT fraud, which means sometimes, by the way, we turn away a transaction because we believe that that it's not legitimate and it will result in somebody's funds getting stolen, whereas our competitors are letting billions of dollars a year, transact, and the incentives aren't right in that space. And so I think when it comes to item eligibility, fraud, and overall access, I think Forage will continue to be the market leader in this space.
Turner Novak:
When I was first investing in Forage and just trying to understand the space, it feels like some competitors almost treated it as lead gen for their other products. So I mean, talk about this being an afterthought, it's not their core business, use this but, by the way, you have to sign up for other products in order to use it, where they're making more money on it.
Ofek Lavian:
Totally. It's almost like the Gillette-
Turner Novak:
The razor blade.
Ofek Lavian:
The razors and razor blade theory, where they're treating this EBT... they give it away for a very low cost, they invest little to no technical resources, it breaks all the time, and where they actually want to make money is processing your credit and debit cards where they mark that up. And so we have a very different strategy.
Turner Novak:
You actually charge more, right?
Ofek Lavian:
We are a premium product at a premium price. And the reason we're more expensive is because we've hired the world's best engineering team from places like Stripe, and Uber, and Netflix that have built the most reliable EBT payments rails. And ultimately, yeah, while our customers are going to pay a little bit more per transaction, they're going to drive significantly more in sales. And so we are obsessed with growing their top line business versus if you want the cheapest product available, like our competitors do that all day long, I'm sure you could talk to them, but I personally was not happy with that when I was the head of payments at Instacart, which is why we started Forage.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You mentioned before, interesting data that you've seen just how people use EBT throughout a month. Can you just talk about just some of the interesting trends that you just see that someone might not really be aware of, and how EBT is used based on the data that you're seeing?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. I think one of the interesting things that you see in our data is just the seasonality within a month. So EBT benefits are replenished at the beginning of each month, and we see in the first two weeks every month, families are buying groceries, they're buying their food. We see the volume going up. And by weeks three and four, the metrics start to go down, and it's really depressing. And the reason for that is because their EBT benefits have depleted by the end of the month and they're waiting for next month's benefits to come back. And so that's been one really interesting thing that we saw at Instacart and we're seeing now with our customers.
Turner Novak:
One interesting topic, talking about investing in Forage, what's a lot of the, I don't know, sentiment, feedback you get from investors when looking at investing in this type of company, this category?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. I will say, three and a half years ago, there was a lot of, when you go to Sand Hill Road, it's like, "What is EBT, and how big is it?" I got so many questions about TAM, this can't possibly be big enough. I don't know anyone on EBT, that doesn't make sense, and got written off by a lot of people. We knocked on every door in Silicon Valley in Sand Hill Road, and most investors thought, "This is just not a big enough market. This doesn't make sense." What's been really amazing is just the reception of the last few years and months, where now, I think we've really made a name for ourselves and have clearly shown success with some of the biggest partners in the world.
And that now, my conversations aren't, "Hey, yeah, there's this thing called EBT, and let me teach you about it," and explain why 42 million Americans need help to buy groceries, but it's more around, "Hey, how big can this really be? And let's dream together on what could this really look like in the years ahead." And the reception has been very different as we've just kept our heads down and have built a really big business here.
Turner Novak:
So what do you usually say when someone asks you, "How big could this really be?" What could this really look like?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. I think about our business across three horizons. I'd say, for us, act one is building the world's greatest EBT payments functionality. And we're already the market leading product but have so much more work we want to do. If that's all we ever did, I think we've got a path to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, we're looking at a multi-billion dollar business, and more importantly than that, we're feeding 42 million Americans. And so for us, that's phase one, and we're probably going to stay in phase one for the foreseeable future. I think for us, phase two is what are other ways we can help grocers and low-income Americans? And so other government benefits and other restricted payments products we hear about are things like HSA, FSA, and Medicare, and Medicaid, and if you think about it, the US government alone distributes trillions of dollars a year, unrestricted funds that can only be spent on specific things.
And ultimately, we want to help businesses expand food and health access to all Americans. And so a very natural extension for us is move up the stack and sell more restricted payment methods. If you think about... payments is largely commoditized, there's a lot of great businesses that can accept your credit and debit cards, there's very few that can accept complex payments. And a lot of these look and rhyme like EBT. And then for us, phase three is going to be about touching the consumer more directly. So how can we actually help the most price-sensitive Americans save money on groceries and work with the biggest retailers, and CPG companies, and advertisers to help low-income Americans save money on groceries while driving volume to Forage merchants?
And so if you think about it, I come from a marketplace background, and as I think about three legs of a stool, I'd say leg one is our merchants, and that's today, where we play... it's a merchant acquiring business, two is consumers, so the 42 million low-income Americans that want to spend their EBT benefits at different places, and then three is CPG companies and advertisers that want to offer unique discounts to price-sensitive Americans and actually influence basket creation and retailer selection. And I think that those three things together are a flywheel and an ecosystem that starts with helping low-income Americans save money in groceries, and feed their families, and results in our merchants selling more of their goods.
Turner Novak:
So you had once... I think we'll pull it up on the screen. You had this viral tweet once, your most viral tweet. You're not like a big X or Twitter user, but I know you try to talk about what you're doing at Forage. You had one tweet that just went super viral once. What happened with that, and what was it?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. First of all, you're the king of viral tweets, so I'm just watching you from afar and trying to catch up. But I had this reflection once, I thought about my experience at Instacart, and Uber, and hyper growth companies, and I wrote something like, "Hey, here are the 10 contrarian things I've learned working at these companies." And I've always thought of myself as a contrarian, I question everything, I'm a really curious person. And yeah, I had a couple of things on there saying that escalations are good, for example, and I remember people at Forage at the time feeling like, "Ooh, an escalation is bad," or, "We're going to have to get Ofek involved," and that means something's going wrong-
Turner Novak:
Like some kind of problem.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, it means that there's a problem. And it's like, "No, actually, you were doing your job if you escalate." Escalations are good, pull me in, I can maybe help you. And you shouldn't be... I expect things to break, I expect you to run into challenges. Like, we're doing really hard work, we're solving big problems that no one's done before, I want you to tell me when they aren't working so that I can help you. But Mark Cuban picked it up and he said something like, "A great list, but I don't agree with micromanaging." And it came from actually something that I had heard Tobi say, the CEO of Shopify, where he calls it sweating the details. And he specifically said, "There's no singular idea that has destroyed more business value on planet Earth than the idea that micromanagement is bad." And I think micromanagement is a bad word and it's very loaded.
I actually don't think that it's even possible to be a micromanager at Forage given that there was so much we could possibly be doing. The way I think about it is, for my team, 95% of the time, I'm not going to be able to see, or review, or know what you're working on, but the 5% that really, really matters, or maybe the 3% that really matters, I want to go super deep, and I want to go in the details. And I think, actually, the combination of sweating the details slash, quote, unquote, "micromanagement" and high autonomy is the recipe, where it's, "Hey, I expect you to do really great work with minimal oversight and figure it out. But when things are really tough or things are trajectory changing, put me in. I want to roll up my sleeves, I want to be in the trenches with you. I want to figure it out."
The details actually matter. And I think it's actually pretty lazy to say, "Oh, my manager cares about this and is reviewing my work. That's micromanagement." No, that's not micromanagement, that's somebody giving a shit and actually caring and reviewing your work and sometimes giving you constructive feedback. That's a great thing.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. How much would it suck to just have no one care about what you're doing? The flip side is you work for a year and you get no feedback on it at all. Your job could maybe not exist and no one will notice.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. And I think I view my role as CEO is like, I'm not going to see 95 to 99% of what you do, but for the 1% you and I get to work on together, we're going to make it amazing, and then I'm going to expect that when I'm not in the room, you're going to hold it to that standard too. And part of it's like role modeling for your team and saying, "Hey, I really, really care, and I expect excellence. And we're going to actually really, really care and we're going to get this right."
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So talking about the team and hiring, I know you've had a big lesson on hiring that you've learned so far, Forage, pre-Forage, what was that lesson?
Ofek Lavian:
I think I've learned a lot of lessons. I think one painful one is... before Forage, I was a group product manager at Instacart, I'd managed three PMs and I thought, "Man, I did great. I'm three for three. These people on my team are all phenomenal. I'm pretty good at hiring." And then we've hired a lot of people at Forage, and I've gone through the ego death of, "Man, maybe I'm not as good at hiring as I thought I was, or worse, maybe I was right about this person and I am good at hiring, but maybe I'm not as good of a manager as I think I am." And I think ultimately, being really honest. When employees are phenomenal and you celebrate them, and when certain people are not being successful, being honest about that as well and saying, "Hey, listen, because I expect you to act with autonomy and do a lot of work with minimal oversight, and we believe that there's a chance that you could be successful here." It's really up to the individual to figure it out.
And some of the people that have been the best at Forage are people that are very low ego and know how to navigate ambiguity, and people that haven't worked out are maybe those that came from really big companies and do things in a more slow, bureaucratic way. And so, yeah, I've made my fair share of hiring mistakes, and I think we're learning and we're growing. And I think if you get it right, 70% plus of the time, you're actually doing pretty well. I think the question is whether you're honest enough about yourself, whether you've done a good job building the team around you because... I think Keith Rabois said something like, "The team you hire ends up being the company you build," and really making sure that you've got the right team around you really matters.
Turner Novak:
Is there a certain type of... you hit on a little bit, but a certain type of people that seem to work best at Forage, it sounds like, autonomous, lower ego. How would you describe the people that you've hired that have worked out best on the team?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. I think the things that I've seen... the patterns that I've matched is a history of challenging the status quo and asking, "Can we do this better? Can we figure this out?" Knowing the metrics down cold, being really quantitative and thoughtful about what are the actual needle moving things we can do here. And then ultimately, the mission and the impact, and is this something that you're going to be excited about? Because there's going to be some really hard days, and if you're looking for all the perks of a big large company, you're not going to find them here. But people that are driven by the impact, and autonomy, and doing what I think is... for the people at Forage who are doing their life's work here, I think you're going to find that we're a really, really great place for people that want to be inspired and have a lot of room to grow, and experiment, and learn.
One of the ways that you can suss that out, whether people aren't going to be a good fit for us is people that care a lot about, for example, things like title. We're really not a title-obsessed culture, we care a lot more about what you do than what your title is.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It almost seems like you care about your title if you want the optics and you want to think about what comes next kind of a thing.
Ofek Lavian:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
That's important for an individual's career, but if you're working at a company with a mission like Forage, you really want people that are more aligned with completing that mission and serving that mission than what comes after. I mean, they're both important, but-
Ofek Lavian:
Totally. And I think when it comes to mission, is like that's where we can be the most competitive. I know that if you want to work somewhere that is making a difference in people's lives, Forage is going to be the best workplace you can go to. Every single day, we're going to do that, great. If there's actually other things you want to do with your career, you want to go and build out a function and hire 20 people to report to you and build an empire, we're probably not the right place for you.
Turner Novak:
You have an interesting hot take that I've been reflecting on it, trying to decide my opinion on it, but you think that people should deliberately take a break in their career and their life and just travel. Why do you say that?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. Yeah. I think everybody should take a year off and travel the world at some point. The earlier, the better. I'm Israeli, and my whole family served in the IDF, and a lot of them, it's very common in Israeli culture. And actually, most foreign cultures, if you talk to Europeans and Australians, a lot of them will take a year off... for Israelis, it's usually after the IDF, so there'll be in the early 20s, a lot of Australians and Europeans, it's after high school or college. But I think it's really important in those formative years to see the world and to learn about yourself. And I graduated college early and I took a year off before starting a job. I just traveled for nine months.
Turner Novak:
Where'd you go?
Ofek Lavian:
We visited, I think, 28 countries. We went west around the world starting in Fiji, and then New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Southeast Asia, India, Nepal, trekked to Everest base camp, and then spent a few months in Europe. And I think fundamentally, the reason why I think it's so important for everyone is, at least for me, I basically... until I traveled, I spent my whole life in school. So you think about you're in elementary school, then you're in middle school, then you're in high school, then you're in college, then you've got the rest of your life to work. If you're a 20-year-old coming out of college and you're going to retire at the retirement age, Americans, you've got 40 years to work, I think it's important to get out of the classroom, and get out of the textbooks and the lectures and experience the world. And I think travel, for me, was the first time I stopped studying subjects like biology and macroeconomics and started studying people.
And I think travel also puts you in uncomfortable situations. You're going to experience different languages, and cultures, and people. And I had no money and I was backpacking on a budget, and for me... I mean, we were taking buses around from country to country, and you're going to experience a lot of discomfort. And I think that's good, is learning how to build your own self-confidence and figure out and navigate situations. And ultimately, that's what being a founder is, that's what being a leader is, putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. Having the mindset of, "Okay, I have the tools and the confidence to figure it out and make it happen and do it with people around me," is I think really important. And that's my one wish for the world, is that everybody takes an opportunity to travel the world and learn more about themselves.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, the one key line that you said in there, so someone might hear you say, take nine months to travel, it's like, "I don't have money to do that. I got to get a job to pay back my student loans," or whatever. You mentioned you did it without much money. It's interesting parallels to a startup, you raised a million dollars and you have to go build a product and build a company and hire... your resource can train. I think it's an interesting, interesting parallel there. Any advice? So if I'm hearing this, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I don't have any money, I want to travel." Do you have just advice for somebody who just had to do that on a budget?
Ofek Lavian:
Plane tickets are expensive, for sure. Getting on a flight is expensive, but if you can get on a flight to somewhere on the other end of the world, like we did and found ourselves in Thailand, you can live off of a few dollars a day. We were staying in hostels and there's like 14 bunk beds with 28 people in the room, and we're staying there for 300 baht or a few dollars a night. And you're buying Pad Thai on the street for the equivalent of what's less than a dollar in the US-
Turner Novak:
It's not actually that expensive.
Ofek Lavian:
... for a meal. No, the US is... it's one of the most expensive countries in the world. You can go to developing countries, travel, and... by the way, my first job out of college was bartending in Cambodia. And we would bartend by night, and we got free housing out of it, and we got a few meals. And so I think travel is expensive if you do it in a luxurious way. But if you have a tight budget, there's definitely ways to backpack on a low budget. And a lot of people... like I mentioned, a lot of Israelis, and Australians, and Europeans will go and do that after high school with their own money. So they'll work a job in high school or college, and I work through college, then you'll have what little savings you have and you'll go spend it all traveling for a year. And you've got the rest of your life to make money.
And I think there's two currencies in life, one is money, and everyone's obsessed with it, and everyone's thinking about it or talking about it like, "Oh, I don't have money for this, or I don't have the ability for that." But then this other currency, which is actually a lot more valuable, which is time, you're never going to be 21 years old again, you're never going to be 22 years old again to go see the world. You might be a comfortable, or wealthy, or middle income 50, or 60, or 70-year-old, but I think about myself, I'm 32 years old, I'm a dad, I can't get up now and spend a year in Thailand, but I'm so grateful that I did it when I could. And I had little money, but I had lots of time, and I think that is truly the most valuable currency you can have.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And when you talk about too athletic ability or your body being able to just travel and put through the ring, I'll play floor hockey on a Wednesday night where you're just running for an hour and a half, and then I can't move the next couple of days. And I'm like, I'm 34, and so these guys, like NFL, it's like hockey, in the NHL, just contact, you're getting body checked for an hour and a half, and they do it 82 times in the span of half of the year. And I'm like, "Man, it is insane that there's still people that are in their 30s just going through the ringer." And I'm like, "I run for a little bit," and I walk the next day and just my knees sore, my ankles hurt, and I feel like you reach a point in life where every day you wake up, and there's just a new body part that hurts. You have a couple chronic injuries, and it's like the knees flaring up today, or the wrists, I think I'm starting to get carpal tunnel.
Ofek Lavian:
Oh, man. I'm sorry to hear that.
Turner Novak:
So I'll get... my thumb will just be kind of sore this day, perfectly fine now, and my back is a little sore right now. So that's the thing I'm feeling. But it's like, I don't know, if you're 21 years old and you're prime, physical-
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah, you don't know what back pain is when you're 21 years old, and you've got the rest of your life to have a broken back. Listen, I've got two herniated discs in my low back, I've got chronic back pain, it's something that I've been struggling with, and I've spent countless days bedridden, depressed, not being able to get out of bed. Your health is the most important thing. There's somebody today on a hospital bed that would do anything to switch places with a healthy person, and I think just not taking that for granted. And when you're young and presumably healthy, that's the time you want to go and experience as much as you possibly can.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You mentioned something... you tried to climb Mount Everest. I know there's a story there. What happened when you climbed Mount Everest?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny when I think back on these experiences, it's like, "How dumb was I? I would never go do that again."
Turner Novak:
Never try to do that.
Ofek Lavian:
It was 2014, we were traveling the world, if you remember, a Malaysian airplane had gone disappearing, and that year too, Captain Sully had landed a plane in the Hudson. I developed a phobia, fear of flying, and we wanted to go to Everest base camp, and I read somewhere that the airport to get there, Lukla Airport, is the most dangerous airport in the world. Something like... it comes down to every year or two, there's a super tragic fatal crash mostly landing in Lukla, which is basically just a landing strip in the Himalayas-
Turner Novak:
In the mountains.
Ofek Lavian:
In the mountains. You're already thousands of feet up in elevation. And from there, people will acclimate and then do a week to get to base camp. I was too scared to do that. And so I did the old road to Everest before there was a plane up in the Himalayas. So we took a bus, which reflecting back was probably even more dangerous than a plane. I remember crossing through a thousand feet foot drops on the other side, traversing the mountains, and ended up going an idyllic village through the part of the mountain range called Jiri, and spent three weeks trekking up to Everest base camp, my best friend and I, David. And along the way, at the last leg of the trip, the last week or so, we met a Danish friend. And we were trekking by day, we were bonded by this experience, we were really close to him.
And the last day of the trek, we made it to base camp, it was this amazing experience. I got emotional up there at the top, you're at the edge of the world, you're at the peak moment of our trip. And it was this stream of mine that I've always wanted to do. And I'm exhausted that night, we're sleeping, and I start hearing our friend, Emil, our Danish friend, start vomiting. And he starts vomiting violently and we realize that he's got altitude poisoning. And Dave and I have been taking our steroid pills and our altitude medication, but it turns out, Emil wasn't, and we didn't know about it. And the only way to address that once it's gotten that bad, is you have to start trekking down.
And so the day we got to base camp, we started trekking down, carrying, him and I, our own packs, plus his pack. In the middle of the night, I remember looking up and thinking, "The stars have never been more beautiful, I have never been more exhausted," and making our way down. And had it happened in the daytime, by the way, we probably would've gotten a helicopter evacuation. As you get closer and closer to base camp, you start seeing every single day helicopters are taking people down.
Turner Novak:
Just when similar things occur, and there's just-
Ofek Lavian:
Oh, yeah. Every single day, people are getting evacuated from Everest due to altitude poisoning. It's fatal. It's extremely dangerous and deadly, but it's too dangerous to do those at night. And we knew we've got limited hours, and our friend's life on the line, and it was like a split decision of, "Hey, if we don't get up right now and take this down, this might be the end of this person's life, and I'll never forgive myself, and David, you'll never free yourself." And so in those moments, it was instinctual, we jumped out of bed and started taking him down, and eventually got him down a few thousand feet in elevation. The most exhausted I've ever been in my life, and ultimately, did the safest thing and helped save our friend's life.
Turner Novak:
Wow. I didn't realize that that's what happened. It actually reminds me of, so you worked... it's like building a company, you worked super hard, you got to this point, and then you dedicated the rest of the trip to making sure that your friend that needed help made it to the other side. It's an interesting parallel to Forage, it's like mission-driven, trying to change the world, trying to help people's lives. We're getting pretty sentimental here, [inaudible 01:10:10] podcast.
Ofek Lavian:
We are. We are. I think for me, leadership is about serving others. I ascribe to servant leadership and I take my job really seriously, but I've always really cared about helping others, and whether it's helping a friend down Everest base camp or helping lift up low-income Americans around the country. When it's the right thing to do, I'm 100% all in and will push as hard as I possibly can to help others. And that's what inspires me, and that's what gets me up every day. We're going to spend a very short time on this earth, and the way I find meaning in my life is dedicating it to helping others.
Turner Novak:
Wow. This is the perfect PR scripted, just like the story arc of how this whole thing came together that we're wrapping the episode up. So yeah, I swear that we didn't plan to end with this, it's just how it happened.
Ofek Lavian:
I wish I could say that we had drafted it that way.
Turner Novak:
But yeah, this is a lot of fun. How can people find out more about you, about Forage? Anything you want to call out to just direct people towards?
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. You can learn more at joinforage.com, follow me on OfekLavian at Twitter, X. And ultimately, we always say at Forage, "We're just getting started." I still think we're at the very, very, very early innings, we have so much more opportunity to go.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think you said 0.1% market share just in EBT.
Ofek Lavian:
Yeah. We process 0.1% of today's EBT market, and so there's a lot more climbing to do.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Amazing. Wow. Talk about what a cheesy way to wrap up, and we'll throw links to just some of the stuff you mentioned in the description. You check it out.
Ofek Lavian:
Cool. Awesome.
Turner Novak:
This is a lot of fun.
Ofek Lavian:
Thanks for having me, Turner. This is a blast.
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