Dave CEO, Jason Wilk: The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time

Dave CEO Jason Wilk explains how AI underwriting drove a 900% market cap recovery from $50M to $1.1B after a catastrophic SPAC implosion.

• Dave’s loss rate fell from 10%+ to 1.2% while average advance size grew from ~$50 to $180 — AI analyzing ~1B transactions on 12M connected accounts drove both.
• Dave guided $110–120M EBITDA for 2025, up from a $10M profitable quarter in Q4 2023 when it hit 2.1M monthly paying members — the platform breakeven threshold.
• Wilk’s thesis: a blank-check fund writing uncapped notes into every successful YC founder on their second company would be one of the best VC funds on Earth; cites Stripe, Ramp’s Eric Glyman, and OpenDoor as examples from his own YC 2010 class.
• Dave cost to serve is ~$40/year per customer vs JP Morgan’s ~$300/year, enabling a free checking account, no overdraft fees, and $5 to borrow $100.
• All PIPE investors from the January 2022 SPAC exited before the lockup expired as the stock fell 98%; Wilk says going public 6–12 months earlier would have insulated the company.
• Dave raised only $60M in primary capital before its IPO and has stayed at 300 employees; 80% of customer support now handled by AI with better NPS than offshore agents.
• FTX wrote Dave a $100M convertible note; Dave repaid $71M early in early 2024, avoiding ~$109–110M at maturity and signaling profitability before announcing its first profitable quarter.
• US neobanks are smaller than Revolut because US banking is adequate for consumers earning over $100K; the real market is the ~50% of Americans earning under $100K who get hit with $35 overdraft fees.

2025-04-21 · Watch on YouTube