The Growth Rocketship: The Future of Rewards-Based Advertising With Fetch

Haim Zaltzman: Hello and welcome to Connected with Latham, where we discuss ideas, legal developments, and business trends shaping the global economy. I’m Haim Zaltzman, Partner and Global Vice Chair of Latham’s Emerging Companies and Growth Practice. In this episode, I’m joined by Gideon Oppenheimer, Chief Financial Officer, and Dave Toomey, General Counsel of Fetch: a technology company building the daily rewards destination for consumers. Fetch rewards its users for how they shop, where they eat, and other mobile apps they use, turning everyday actions into value. In the process they deliver the most effective and measurable advertising channel to both the world’s largest and up-and-coming advertisers. Dave, Gideon, really appreciate having you guys on the podcast.

Gideon Oppenheimer: Thanks so much. Good to be here.

Dave Toomey: Yeah, thanks. We’re excited.

Haim: Dave and Gideon, before we start, I also wanted to note that you guys have two hobbies that I’m a really big fan of. Gideon, I’ll start with you. You’re an avid golfer and have been to courses throughout the country and around the world, and I’m going to ask you some questions about that coming up. And Dave, I know this was not the best year for your team, but as an Oregon Duck fan, I want you to discuss all the ups and downs of being a true football fan and playing collegiate football.

Dave: Happy to do it.

Haim: All right. So before we dive into Fetch, Gideon, tell me about the intersection of rewards and advertising. How is rewards-based advertising a model for other business platforms?

Gideon: Yeah, it’s a great question. We have a saying at Fetch — I think it was coined by our fantastic Chief Revenue Officer, Robin Wheeler — that rewards are a superior advertisement. We believe that because rewards as a mode of advertising create a mutually beneficial relationship between consumers and brands where everybody wins.

When you look at the status quo of how advertisers interact, you funnel your dollars through ad channels, the measurement is uncertain, and you’re kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that those advertisements work and that they’re effective. Instead, through Fetch, brands can fund rewards, and those rewards drive verified purchases that we can track and measure through the Fetch platform. The result is our users get tangible value, and brands only pay when we deliver proven outcomes that move their business.

That’s a shift from extracting value from the ecosystem to sharing it. We believe that’s a more durable model for advertising. You asked about business and things in general, obviously, that model has broad analogs across all industries. The best businesses, I think, are ones that grow the pie and create win-win outcomes.

Haim: So you’re basically using advertising to share the pie rather than just sell the pie.

Gideon: Absolutely.

Haim: That’s pretty amazing. By the way, if you guys coin that phrase, I want some attribution. Is there anything about your background, Gideon, that has helped you be successful in the role, particularly this sharing versus just charging model?

Gideon: To be successful in this sharing ecosystem — Fetch is effectively a network between our users and our advertisers. Before Fetch, I served as the CFO of Uber Freight, a digital freight marketplace. In my time there, the business 10x’d to over $5 billion in revenue. We did that profitably.

Before that, I worked at Coatue where I was focused on growth-stage private market investing generally across the technology landscape. Really, across both of those experiences, what they highlighted is just the importance of growth to a platform business, because if you run a network business, as you get bigger, the network gets stronger and more powerful and more valuable to both sides of the network. For us, that’s our users and our advertisers. So growth is everything.

But as we’ve — hopefully everybody, the collective “we” — have learned in the markets over the past five or ten years, there’s a difference between growth at all costs and durable, sustainable growth. So it’s important to maintain that long-term perspective. For Fetch, it’s about our users and our advertisers. The more we can create value for both sides of that marketplace, the more successful we’re going to be as a company.

Haim: So if I can summarize, as a lawyer looking at the business world, sharing the revenue versus just charging for the advertising creates a more durable and sustainable model, because the sharing creates a network effect that brings consumers back to the app, versus just charging where it’s more transactional.

Gideon: Yeah, and the sharing drives outcomes. So again, it’s the fixed-pie mindset versus the growth mindset, where by giving something back to a consumer, you can shift their behavior because consumers are smart. They understand when they’re being advertised to. So cut them in. When you cut them in, you actually build loyalty and you incentivize their actions. That drives behavior. When you drive behavior, the returns that you generate for your advertising partners are higher. You’ve now grown the pie, versus limiting within a fixed budget, a mindset where one side is trying to take from the other. So that’s the fundamental premise of what we’re trying to do.

Dave: In a tight privacy world, that really matters. 

Haim: Actually, that’s a great segue. Not to leave the lawyers for last, Dave, I always start with the business guy because, you know… 

Dave: He’s the more interesting one. 

Haim: Well, I mean, golf is interesting, but being an Oregon Duck fan the last five, ten years has always been very interesting. So speaking of outcomes — which is great in football as well as in business — you always have the results orientation: wanting to get the results, wanting to get the consumers on, and then you obviously have the process of making sure you don’t screw up on the things that drive the results. That’s usually more tilted towards the legal role. From your perspective, we’d love to hear about what about your legal background is important in your Fetch role in providing the process to making sure the outcome works without slowing down the outcome? And secondly, how are you tested every day in making sure the process — i.e., the legal boundaries framework — doesn’t stop Gideon from going for his eagle shots?

Dave: Oh, we definitely want to make sure that happens. I’m sure every GC that you’ve talked to on your podcast says this, but I think I’m honestly still surprised at this point in my career just how many new issues I face every day. I thought at a certain point I’d be able to say, “I’ve seen it all. Been there, done that.” But there’s a weekly reminder here that that is just not the case.

The honest answer is I get tested legally every day. There’s an obvious tension between speed and defensibility. Our business moves quickly with new engagement mechanics, monetization methods, partnerships. And the law in privacy is always changing. The law in digital advertising is always evolving. So my role is to make principled judgment calls in ambiguous states, translate risk into business terms, and help them move forward confidently. If I’m doing my job well — which I hope I am — the legal team becomes a strategic accelerant rather than a roadblock.

Haim: And in terms of “accelerant,” I’m going to push you a little bit on that. Mostly because our audience doesn’t benefit of video here. But Dave was a major collegiate football player at Oregon.

Dave: He’s stuck on this. He wants to talk about this.

Haim: Yeah, he’s stronger and bigger than I am, so I’m not literally pushing him on anything, but I’m going to push that point.

Dave: Well, think of it this way. If we’re going to challenge the folks in our building to grow our user base, we need to do that in a way that our users confidently believe in what that next step is going to be. So we do that through transparency. We do that through, as Gideon talked about, sharing of rewards in exchange for the data that they’re giving us. But every new idea needs to be compliant.
Fifty states, there’s a lot of regulations, there’s a lot of new ways that we can expand our business, and we challenge everyone within our walls to come up with something new. So I’ll get requests one week that say “hey, we should be a gambling app,” without any concept of why we shouldn’t be a gambling app. But that’s the freedom that we want to give people to think and create and come up with the right next steps for us. Our job isn’t to say no; it isn’t to say yes. It’s to provide the right level of guidelines. And for doing it well — let’s steal from a different sport; think about a baseball field — there’s out of bounds and there’s out of bounds. We just need to give them a playing field. So making sure that they stay on that playing field is really important.

Haim: That’s a great metaphor. And in my own personal experience working with you guys on the multiple transactions we’ve done together — multiple financings, hybrid debt, equity — you guys are very good at that. I’ll give you guys kudos in that things go smoothly. You’re not caught up in the process. The process is always oriented towards the results.

You used to hear “I’ve seen it all.” Now, I don’t think that’s possible, particularly when we’re seeing AI’s impact on everything, which is pretty gnarly.

Dave: It’s one of the more successful superpowers of everybody on my team. If I have someone who comes in, big-chested, and they pretend that they’ve seen it all and know everything, for me, it’s a gigantic red flag. We deal with so much ambiguity. We generally know our areas; we know our people. From there, it’s a gigantic mad scramble behind the scenes to get ourselves up to date, get ourselves educated. Thankfully we have great firms like Latham & Watkins we can come to for advice, but ultimately we want to give people the space to create new ideas. And if we’ve seen them before, they’re not new ideas. The job sort of demands that flexibility.

Haim: Obviously you’re dealing with consumer privacy — and it’s a topic that’s been the battle du jour, if I may, with today’s politics, AI, and such. It’s a great segue because you guys are the leading consumer rewards app out there — or one of the leading ones. I think you’re the leading one, but I’m sure there’s other metrics.

Dave, can you talk to us a little bit about privacy? Obviously that’s got to be top of mind in everything you guys do.

Dave: It is, yeah. If you look at privacy regulations as they evolved nationwide — they could have banned PII, they could have banned personal information sharing. But they didn’t. They said they want to empower the user of their own data.

Fetch is the tip of the spear on that topic. If you’re a user, we’re not part of the sales transaction. We are an after-sales motion. You come to us and you say, “I would like to exchange my data for something of value.” There’s no better argument for putting power and empowering the consumer than that. Using a service like ours that says, you know, your data is valuable, you’re in charge of it, and there’s somebody who’s willing to make you an offer for it if you want it or not.

We’ve all heard the horror stories of “I bought a car, and it followed me around, knows every place that I’ve been, and I didn’t sign up for that. I need to know what’s happening.” Good rules around that. That’s not us.

Haim: All that makes sense. Obviously, privacy is a very dorky — or if I may say, nerdy — topic we love to dwell on in the legal world. But it obviously is channeling the ultimate results. If I may, it’s one of the questions I always like to ask. Since we are talking about a very dorky or may I say nerdy topic, who is the biggest nerd at Fetch? Gideon?

Gideon: I’m not going to go with a cliché answer. I think it’d be easy to pick somebody within the tech or the product or our data team, but I’m going to, out of love, call out Jeff Lau, our Executive Vice President of Commercialization.

Just to give kudos to our commercial team — as Dave mentioned, some of the unique challenges he faces as the team comes up with lots of novel concepts and ideas on a very regular basis. They have a very forward-thinking commercial team, which is great, which is exactly what you want. Jeff is very academic, professorial, and in his role, I think bringing that lens, he’s just a fantastic foil to that group.

Haim: All right. Dave, who’s the biggest nerd at Fetch? I’ll let you define nerd however you want.

Dave: You know, I’m probably going to end up more in the cliché than Gideon is. I have a member of my team who loves Antiques Roadshow, so I was tempted to throw him under the bus. I think our Chief AI Officer, Gowtham Gundu, would be my answer.

The reason I say that is because he looks at the world in seven dimensions further than the way that I look at the world. Just the way he moves through life, the way he sees the art of the possible today, where we’re going, and the art of the possible in the future — just through osmosis, what I absorb talking to him, you know — it makes me excited about all the places we can go, the things we can do. How do I design my legal team in the future? Will I have a legal team in the future? All that stuff is kind of up for grabs right now, and it’s fun to chat with him about that. He’s so into it that it’s hard not to just geek out with him. 

Haim: Why do you say seven? You randomly pick a number or?

Dave: Because I think he’s thinking of all the same things that we’re thinking of, but he’s also thinking of the commercial output. I think he’s thinking of the historical output. I think he’s thinking of what happens if everybody just got out of the way. What happens if, instead of having to have cross-functional discussions where somebody might have a metric they’re trying to hit for a personal reason, or somebody might be trying to prioritize a certain launch over another one, what if we just lived in a world where everybody got out of their own way and we just grew the business and the business won?

It’s really powerful and impactful to be able to talk to somebody like that who’s like, “Hey, my ego’s not involved. I just want to win, and I think there’s a lot of friction here. How do we remove that friction?”

Haim: You mentioned the commercial, which leads me to the next question because this podcast is generally about legal meets growth meets the business environment, and how the process of law with growth can really channel things.

But financial strategy is key and smart use of capital markets. He who has the gold is king, so to speak. With that in mind, Gideon, if you could give us a little bit about Fetch’s financial strategy, capital markets that you rely on to drive the platform’s continued growth and innovation, and what have been the biggest obstacles? And finally, just to top it off, it’s pretty early in 2026. We’d love to hear what you’re expecting on the financial strategy slash capital markets area in 2026. It hasn’t been a boring couple of months in 2026, to say the least, so I’d love to hear it.

Gideon: That’s the understatement of the century. We’ll start with the first piece. We’ve talked about growth a lot so far, which is awesome because that’s what we think about a lot.

But really, our financial strategy: we will continue to really focus on profitable organic growth. For us, that means two things. As I said, it’s a network business. One is growing our audience, our user base. That means two things for us: both the number of users on our platform, you can measure that in monthly active users, but also…

Haim: Do you measure that daily or...?

Gideon: Well bridging to the next part, which is equally if not more important, is not just monthly active users, but the time they’re spending with us. So you could look at daily active users, weekly active users, time of session. All of those metrics are critically important. We look at all of them, and we want all of them going up.

There’s various tactics that we use to drive both the total quantum of users that are members of Fetch and how much time they’re spending with us. There are both monetary ways we could do that and in-product ways that we can do that — and both of which are our focus. So that’s category one.

Then category two is the other side of the network, which is our advertising partners. That also equates to really the amount of ways that our users can earn and get rewarded on our platform. That can be depth of coverage within a category. Within CPG companies, how many products are available for our users to earn? Or it could be different categories. Can they get rewarded for their shopping or playing mobile games or downloading other apps, or by signing up for our co-branded credit cards? So, we’re constantly looking at both the depth and the breadth of the offerings for our users.

Circling back to that first point — what is Fetch? We want to be the daily rewards destination for America, but eventually the world. That’s the strategy.

On capital markets — you mentioned it earlier — we’ve done a few deals together. You’ve seen us diversify our capital structure, do more on the debt side with both Morgan Stanley Private Credit and JP Morgan. They’ve been fantastic partners. This is less true in 2026, but obviously over the past few years, private credit has really expanded. I think that’s been an overwhelmingly positive thing for companies in our position: large, late-stage private companies that are profitable or are on their way to becoming profitable, where there now are more options other than just raising their next venture round or going public. Tapping into that has been, I think, really valuable for us. It’s allowed us to really fuel growth in a very effective and efficient way from a cost-of-capital perspective. And again, the partnerships we have with those folks have been fantastic.

You asked about challenges. I think one, just generally, is there are always shifting tides and modes of what is…

Haim: What are you talking about? Things change. Who knew?

Gideon: Yeah. There are shifts on what’s in vogue. And maybe this is changing, but — and I think certainly you could argue — I started at Fetch in mid-2023. But, you know, in 2023, 2024, and 2025, consumer internet companies were probably not the most in vogue. I don’t think that’s a controversial statement.

Haim: You’ve seen that change, obviously. Is it changing precipitously now, or are you seeing an ebb and flow?
Gideon: Jury’s still out.

Dave: I see the legal pun. 

Gideon: A legal pun. There you go. I’m bringing it. 

Haim: I like that. David, that was a good one. If you were to add an “it would be rewarding,” that would be even better.

Gideon: The building is rubbing off on me. Maybe this is turning to what we are seeing this year in the capital markets right now.

Obviously, we’ve all seen the turbulence in public markets, especially. I think investors are asking lots of questions about what durable businesses are moving forward. At Fetch, we have never thought that our moat and our advantage is the app and our software. Those are just the container. You can engineer that, others can too.

Haim: I always say your engineer is not your moat. That’s actually a great point for the audience. The focus right now on AI and the businesses it impacts, the idea is if it’s measurable or easily designed, AI can take it out. The point here is that technicals and all those things are important, but they’re not the actual moat. The real moat is — and I’ll let you finish — the consumer and their relationship with you.

Gideon: Exactly. It’s our users, the time they’re spending with us, that they choose to spend with us as Dave mentioned earlier. It’s the data they choose to give to us for the value that we give to them, for the ecosystem of advertisers, that we have curated and brought together, who want to reward those users. That’s an ecosystem. It’s a network that cannot be easily replicated.

And if users love Fetch and want to optimize for their Fetch points — who knows what happens in the world of agentic commerce? I think there’s a lot of exciting shifts underway. But if Fetch is top of mind for the user, Fetch can be brought into that ecosystem, and those shifts to agentic commerce could actually help us. 

So that was tying the change back to Fetch. But I think in that shift and this turbulence we’re seeing in equity markets, I think investors are trying to grapple with, “Well, what are the businesses that are going to be winners as the world is changing,” versus what can be replicable and what is less defensible than it once was.

Haim: Replication is a great segue to a legal question I have for Dave, but what are you expecting for the rest of 2026? Obviously, if you had an answer you were confident in, we’d all be off on an island somewhere. But what are you guys expecting? You’re not easily replicated. You’re not a software product, and so the market can come to you.

Gideon: It’s hard to say, right? To a certain degree, we don’t spend a ton of time worrying about it. As I mentioned before, consumer [focus] was not in vogue over the past few years, but that hasn’t changed what we were doing or optimizing for in any way. The business performance over the last few years for Fetch has been just objectively stellar.

So, I firmly believe that there will be these cycles; things will be in vogue, out of vogue. But at the end of the day, if we are growing our users, growing our advertising partners, doing right by them, growing our business, then it will bear out over time. That is our focus, and the markets are going to be what the markets are going to be. As long as we’re continuing to advance our business, we’re going to be fine.

Dave: There’s a lot of people in the building right now I bet feel like, “We have the strategy figured out; we have the lane figured out. We just need to put our shoulder into the sled and push for a while.”

Haim: That’s actually a great football analogy. Dave, has that been that way for a long time or has that changed? Actually, the next question I have on my list for you is what has changed the most from a legal perspective for you guys? And pushing that sled analogy forward, is that what you have been doing? Because Gideon mentioned that obviously consumer has not been in the fore, getting all the love from since 2023, so I’m assuming you guys have been in that push mentality for a while? Has it been extended even more so by the AI impact?

Dave: I’m going to beat this analogy to death, so my apologies to the listeners. I think we were learning how to get in our stance for a while. Sometimes you just need to learn the fundamentals before you’re ready to push. And the business itself was young. In the last few years, we’ve taken a number of big swings. 

Directly to answer what has changed the most: I think we built the muscle of flexibility. People are able to do more things. People are able to look at a problem and be like, “That’s outside the scope of my job, but I can do it.” People are able to look at a new idea and say, “Yeah, I’m limited on bandwidth, but I can also help push this forward.”

Haim: I hope my associates are listening to this right now.

Dave: It’s true. And, you know, you just saw Indiana win the national title. And what did everybody on that defense do? Their job. Without complaint. So for the associates listening, I hope that’s the message they picked up, which is you don’t need to be the superstar. You need to be the one that moves the team forward. Do your job.

And as we look at Fetch internally, that’s exactly what has happened. We’ve concretely built a new organizational structure that allows for people to do that. We’re able to take big swings without it disrupting our core business. That has been a big change. When you look at that from a regulatory standpoint, our question always becomes at what point do you get involved as the lawyer?

For me, I will jump up and down screaming that we should be there as part of the idea inception. We should be there at the front door. If we end up there at the end with a stop sign, everybody’s lost money and it’s very bad.
We have a small team. We have a lot going on. We’re ping-ponging on lots of different ideas and then see this one seems to have legs. We’re launching a credit card, something nobody in our building has any idea about from a legal standpoint. The business folks did. But we have to figure that out on the fly, meet them right there, walk the entire journey with them, providing advice along the way while we do that.

I do not think that we were in a position a number of years ago to be able to be that flexible. I think we were kind of hanging on.

Haim: One of the questions people ask me — I actually don’t think of myself as a lawyer. I think of myself as a legal advisor or an advisor who touches on legal things because the ultimate goal is the outcome. Like, I can advise on that process with the law, but ultimately it’s about the outcome ultimately. I do take that seriously. You need to really understand the business, which is why, when I’m in board meetings, I chime in on non-legal stuff. Because I think I understand it, I’m in the process. 

Dave, putting aside the legal perspective, what are the hardest things that you guys are facing? Is it the actual legal stuff, the privacy stuff, the rolling out of new features, or is it more, as Gideon noted earlier, is it more about the macro challenges that we’re facing? Where the legal stuff is not as important as executing in the face of the macro headwinds.

Dave: It’s a great question. It’s obviously a little bit of both. For a company like ours — especially a consumer app — what’s going on in the world matters. What’s going on with people’s wallets matters. What’s going on with people’s time and eyeballs matters. Are they feeling comfortable? Are they not? Is this a short-term problem? Is it a long-term problem? Is this a political problem? Is this not a political problem?

We have to keep an eye on all of that because our advice, how we move the business, is going to depend on what we think those cards are reading. As we move through those analyses and we look at the more internal elements of this, some people are like, “This is a big problem. What’s in the news? I’m going to solve it by running over here and launching something.” Do we want them to launch that? Do we not want them to launch that?

We can’t really tell them no so much as we can get them to the right decision on their own. For us, the biggest legal challenge is making sure that folks have the right information in their hands.

Haim: By the way, I want the audience to hear that again. It’s one of the more important things I’ve heard in a while. You don’t just say no. You arm people with knowledge of the risks and the inputs. Obviously, there’s certain things you say no to. There’s things that are black and white. But in the business world, those are rare. So generally, you arm people with knowledge and ammunition to be able to make proactive decisions, and you kind of have to lead them there rather than saying no.

Dave: That’s absolutely right. And the lawyers that I’ve seen fail in an in-house role are the ones who think that that is a decision that is made, and then you move on. Disagree and commit is not really something that lawyers get to do. You get to disagree and guide, and then the business will say, “We’re going to do it anyway.” Then your job starts, because at that point you have to mitigate risk. Every decision that’s made after that — now you have to agree with the principle and you have to be on the road with whatever that decision was, but you’re still working to keep people in those guidelines we talked about earlier. It’s not like, “Hey, I gave advice and they did it. It’s on them if they fail.” That’s not how it goes at all.

Haim: Well, there’s mitigation of risk, and there’s certain waves you just kind of have to ride. From your perspective, what are the big macro trends in advertising or commerce that you’re seeing shape Fetch’s path?

Gideon: It’s a great question. On the advertising front, I’m going to give the biggest Occam’s razor–inspired answer ever, which is advertisers want two things, and it’s very simple. One, to prove the efficacy of their spend. And two, they want to have more confidence that the dollars that they’re spending are driving outcomes in their business. The more you could validate and prove that, the better. Pretty basic concept. I would argue that has always been true and it will always be true.

I think where we’re seeing that around the edges, especially recently with some conditions that are macro and obviously this is now into the political climate as well with all the talk about affordability or obviously the inflationary environment we’ve been in.

But we are seeing sensitivity around composition of how dollars are spent. The concept of working dollars versus non-working dollars. For an advertiser, that means a working dollar as something that they can directly attribute to driving a sale. Again, going back to the upfront framing of is this moving my business, and can I prove it?

The second point is around data and measurement. I don’t think this is a new concept. If you really think about how the advertising industry has shifted over decades and the step changes that have occurred, they all occur as data is able to drive sophistication, targeting, and optimization in how media is deployed. So that is the underpinning, we believe, of everything.

We’re talking about data, and obviously it’s very relevant to the world we’re talking about with AI and everything going on. Let’s talk about data. You mentioned this earlier on the privacy angle, Fetch sits on one of — if not the — most valuable consumer purchase data sets that exists in the world. We see $212 billion of SKU-level purchase data.

Haim: That’s crazy. Can you repeat that number again?

Gideon: Yeah, so $212 billion of SKU-level purchase data, level 3 data across all retail channels. So, if you imagine Fetch as a retailer — of course we’re not — but if you thought of us as one in terms of just that volume, we’d be the third-largest retailer in the United States.

What that equates to when you think about it on the user level: Our users are submitting to us that data Dave mentioned earlier. Over thirty receipts a month that they’re choosing to give to us, which allows us to see about 88% of a single user’s total spend. This is what allows us to build that holistic view of their purchase behavior and that deterministic understanding of the purchases.

We talked about what drives advertising outcomes? This is not online clicks using online proxies as true measures. This is actual real-world purchases. We believe in this data set and the concept we opened this conversation with that we take that data and also combine it with this concept of growing the pie and sharing the pie, using that to now incentivize actions. We think this can unlock the next big step change of advertising efficacy.

And that can work both on the Fetch platform — which obviously we’ve talked about in terms of the direct rewards our users can get access to and they see when they come onto Fetch — but we’re actually using it off the Fetch platform as well. You’ve seen us talk about this with some of our partnerships with The Trade Desk or LiveRamp or others — where we can work with advertising partners and they can use our data to enhance their marketing spend again through some of those DSPs or other channels.

Haim: It’s pretty cool. First of all, those numbers are staggering. Those are really step-change type numbers. And if I can nerd out, there’s a great podcast if you guys listen to it called Step Change.

Dave: Oh, I don’t do podcasts. 

Gideon: Is that what we are doing?

Haim: It’s like the Acquired for industrial changes. So, imagine a three-hour deep dives like Acquired does on IBM or JPMorgan but on something like coal. It’s actually pretty cool. 

Well speaking of Step Change, with that in mind and what you guys are seeing with full view of the consumer, let’s talk about use of capital: in your business and where you’re deploying it now. Talk to us about how you approach capital allocation and balancing demands of those different elements that are your moat to make sure that Fetch is rewarded going forward.

Gideon: I’ll start with, I think, what is our biggest strategic advantage that we have: There is no conflict of interest for us between our users and our growth. Average revenue per user for every other ads platform, there is inherently a conflict between the products, right? Why users are coming to that space and then how they monetize it. They do a great job of monetizing, the ads are seamless, we’ve all experienced it. But they are inherently not the same thing.

We have a lot of people in our company — fantastic, talented people — who come from those platforms. They bring with them those challenges and the experiences of all that tension that exists in those organizations, the push-pull.

But that doesn’t exist at Fetch. Because inherently, as our ARPU grows, that means definitionally that our users are getting rewarded more. It is unequivocally good for both Fetch and our users, and that brings this precision in terms of strategic clarity that’s super important, which is hugely helpful from a capital allocation perspective. That’s a big clarifier.

I think the biggest push-pull that we see is really short-term versus long-term. I don’t think that’s unique to Fetch. I think all companies deal with this in some way, shape, or form. But like, short-term can be the things that you put a quarter in, you get a dollar out. They’re pretty certain, they drive the business. That’s fairly mechanical. So, it could be like hiring or spend versus user acquisition, where now we have great paybacks on our CAC. We know what that’s going to look like.

Haim: Has that changed at all with the AI world? Or is it totally impervious to it because it doesn’t affect your moat. The consumers stay the same. It’s just the AI around them may have changed.

Gideon: Yeah, I think AI enhances that, for sellers especially in terms of how we’re able to arm them with tools that fundamentally just make them more efficient.

Haim: It’s reducing your CAC? 

Gideon: Exactly. But then the long-term stuff — those tech and product investments — you have to make those. They take longer. They are probably less certain and might not all work. But they are the stuff that lifts all boats when they work. So, if short-term is put a quarter in, get a dollar out, longer-term, you put a quarter in, maybe you get $1.50 out. You want to make those bets. You have to find a balance between the two. I don’t think there’s a purely scientific way to do it. It’s discussion across the leadership team, and ultimately it’s judgment.

Haim: Obviously, in order to spend capital, you’ve got to raise it. Fetch has been amazingly active in strategic role financings. We obviously did a few with you. You mentioned Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan. We did the growth facility with General Catalyst — consumer acquisition — which is the first time it’s been used in a the consumer rewards space. So I’m very excited, as a nerd — since we’ve really established that — to be part of that for Fetch.

This is it for both you and — I’ll ask you first, Dave — where do you see Fetch growing most in the near term? And I’m assuming your answers will be different, but it’s fine if it’s not.

Dave: Gideon and I talk about this a lot: the concept of value creation. What makes somebody come to the Fetch app, and then what makes somebody stay? I think the first thing that we’re going to do is continue what we’ve been doing for a while, but we’re going to continue to throw resources at that concept. A throw-away moment. You go to the Safeway, you buy something, you’ve got a receipt in your hand. What do you do with it now? You take a picture of it and send it in? Create value for yourself? Or you just lose that moment in time.

Does the advertiser lose that moment? Does the store lose that moment? How far does that lands with a loud thud on the ground? How do we create more of those moments? How do we create more opportunities for people to create value for themselves — be in charge of their destiny? We’ve talked a little bit about this. In tough times it’s nice to have a little bit of extra money in your pocket. How do we encourage people to do that? 

From the legal standpoint, it’s about trust-building. How do you show up a certain way? How do you continue to show up that way? You build that trust with them, and we’ll continue to push.

Gideon: I agree with that for sure. There’s just so many vectors for us to expand. I think we have challenges with riches, we have Champagne problems.

We have tons of runway to grow our user base. We can do a lot expanding our advertisers. There’s a lot of new categories, as Dave mentioned, that we’re excited about in terms of expanding into ways that we think we can reward our users over time — whether that’s fitness or health. I think we can continue to evolve the platform a lot.

Dave talks about some of the company-building stuff that we’ve been on over the past few years as the business has gotten more complex, and the app has gotten more complex and broader for our user base. But there’s a lot we can do in terms of now taking all of these different ways to earn, bundling them together in unique ways, delivering a fun, sleek, great user experience. So, I think there’s a lot of innovation ahead across a bunch of different vectors. So yeah, I think you’ll see us continue to be active on capital markets fronts to continue investing and growing the business.

Haim: I love the activity. Taking it off the football field, this is my favorite part of the podcast. As you guys know, I’m not the best poker player, but I’m a really good one. My kid asked me recently — or one of my kids; I guess I have two that I have to claim — what makes a really good poker player? I actually did a little research into it. The best answer I found was it’s not always winning. It’s always being at final table. Because winning, it’s random, right? All the things in life, but it’s about consistently playing the game so you’re always at the table. 

With that in mind — and trying to always get to the final table — I have this speed-poker game. I do think business is very similar to poker. It’s not deterministic like chess. The first moves you make don’t determine your path. It’s stochastic. Who’s around, who’s getting what, what the house is doing, what the player next to you is doing, and so on.

So, this is my speed-poker part of the podcast. I’m gonna ask you a few questions, and I want you guys to be as concise and as quick as you can in response. And each one of you needs to respond. Okay?

Dave: So I have a lawyer in the room. 

Haim: So, Gideon, let’s start with you. What’s the biggest professional obstacle you faced?

Gideon: Yeah. So you heard my background from earlier. I think it’s really instilling — or trying to instill — an investor mindset across an organization, now being on the operating side. I will not elaborate since we’re being concise.

Dave: Preconceived notions of lawyers and what legal departments are supposed to be. “I had a bad experience before. I don’t trust the department. They’re in the way.” And you’ve heard me today — I’m a businessperson masquerading as a lawyer. So, I want to be in that conversation; I want to build.

Haim: Love it. My next question: what’s your ideal teammate? I’m going to make you pick one of the following three traits: education, experience, and temperament.

Dave: Temperament all day.

Gideon: Temperament.

Haim: Interesting. So you’re telling me that education that my parents spent on for me? Sometimes, The debate is between experience and temperament. Those are the ones that folks…

Dave: My team’s motto is strategic velocity. I need people who are willing to lose — people who are willing to come into a company and be like, “Oh, the lawyers are a hurdle,” and then slowly, over time, build trust. The way you’re going to do that is by losing a lot.

Secretly, you’re winning.

Haim: Strategic velocity — I just love it. So yeah, you got to play the hand at the right time.

Gideon: Yeah, I think experience helps, but when you’re in the trenches, you’re in the trenches. 

Haim: This is my favorite question ever. There’s a question after this one too. But next one is what I call the poker-table question. Imagine you’re sitting at Fetch, and you get to change and adjust one thing. One thing. And I’m not going to take more than one thing — I’m warning you guys ahead of time.

Is it the game itself, i.e., the broad economy, so on and so forth? The table, which basically means the industry that you’re playing in, like you wish you could switch industries? The house, and when I say house, I mean the regulatory regime, government fiat? The stack of chips: how much cash do you have and how you deploy it? Basically your cash management. Or the other players? Is there somebody who’s not playing fair or not coordinating that’s causing a lot of upheaval and holding back the industry and/or Fetch specifically? So we’ll start with you, Gideon.

Gideon: Well, I like my answer because I get to literally do this — but it’s the stack of chips.

Haim: Fair enough. You believe Fetch is in an amazing position. You’re not going to whine about anything else. You’re okay with the regulatory environment, the government. So really, you just need more resources in order to execute as much as you can?

Gideon: I think we’re in an awesome position, and we get stronger as we get bigger. As is probably apparent from everything we’ve talked about, our entire focus is: how do we get bigger, do more, expand? So capital to do that, and we are golden

Dave: The same answer. You know, how do you add to that value-creation flywheel? More money, more value creation, more opportunities.

Haim: I see the focus. I like it. As a transactional lawyer, anyone who talks about capital and capital markets is near and dear to me. 

Dave: But is it good for you all? 

Haim: To be honest with you, everything but the broad economy is pretty good for us. You want to change the table? There’s a lot of changes that require legal. You want to change the house? We can help with that — obviously with government stuff, we can help.

And there’s been plenty of that.

One last question. The poker table question is my favorite one, but I do have one last question that’s obviously related. What’s your favorite food to eat at work and/or playing poker? It can be the same thing. Gideon?

Gideon: So fun fact, Dave is actually a phenomenal cook. So, I will go with whatever he is preparing.

Dave: I had an answer before you combined work into it. I was going to ask if whiskey is a food.

Haim: That’s why I drink it. Because I taste meat when I drink whiskey.

Dave: Nothing helps me lose at poker faster than whiskey. I would say burrito. Self-contained, one-handed.

Haim: I love a burrito. So, as a side note to the audience, all three of us live in Marin, right across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Before that, I lived in the Mission for the longest time from 2009 to 2021, so I love burritos as well.

And there’s always a contest of the top three, the top burrito in town. And, you know, it is El Farolito, La Taqueria on 25th, and then Cancún, which does double-fried ones, and it’s always open late so the drinkers really like that one. What’s the best burrito place in Marin? I know a couple of passable places, but is there one that’s out of control? 

Dave: I was going to hope you were going to ask me about the city, because I don’t know a very good one. 

Haim: Right? So, is the answer just cross the bridge and go into the Mission?

Gideon: That might be the legitimate answer.

Haim: Fair enough. Well, look, this has been an amazing podcast. I unbelievably appreciate you guys’ time. It’s been a pleasure, Gideon and Dave. As a legal partner of Fetch, we appreciate it at Latham & Watkins — all the opportunity to work with you guys and to have you on here. And for the audience, that was our Latham & Watkins interview with Gideon and Dave from Fetch. Thanks again to both of them for their valuable time.

Dave: Thanks for having us.

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