Acquired
00:41:38 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:41:38] S0: Yes. Our presenting partner. So today, we are sharing a story from one of JPMorgan's partners and a company that you may know, Bill, which is formerly bill.com. Right. Bill is the financial operations platform for half a million small and mid sized businesses, what they [00:41:56] S1: call the Fortune 5,000,000. They help manage and maximize cash flow for SMB companies, and Bill's Divvy Card product is what employees at those businesses use to fund their operations day to day. [00:42:06] S0: So here's a scenario that many listeners may have experienced. Someone on your team maxes out the credit line on their corporate card with an unexpected purchase. You send a wire to pay off the card so you can continue using it, but it takes two to three days to clear. Meanwhile, your team can't transact. [00:42:23] S1: Yeah. Bill solved that for its half a million customers using an embedded payment solution from JPMorgan. With API based subledgering, they can manage millions of payments in real time on any platform all with one bank account. Every bill customer gets a unique virtual account number. So the moment a payment is received, the credit line is restored. The result is a way simpler way to receive and route payments at scale.
00:42:23 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:42:23] S1: Yeah. Bill solved that for its half a million customers using an embedded payment solution from JPMorgan. With API based subledgering, they can manage millions of payments in real time on any platform all with one bank account. Every bill customer gets a unique virtual account number. So the moment a payment is received, the credit line is restored. The result is a way simpler way to receive and route payments at scale. [00:42:45] S0: And the actual numbers are awesome. Payment posting went from two to three days to seconds. Inquiries dropped 83%. Even Bill's own treasury team reclaimed twenty hours a week from manual reconciliation. For decades, these were Fortune 500 only capabilities, but Bill and JPMorgan figured out how to deliver that same infrastructure to the Fortune 5,000,000 while also improving Bill's internal operations. You can read the full case study as always at jpmorgan.com/acquired. [00:43:16] S1: And something else. If you wanna join us and JP Morgan in person, we'll be on stage at the We Are Developers World Congress in San Jose this September. Click the link in the show notes to learn more. [00:43:27] S0: Okay. So, David, how does this Oswald catastrophe lead to Mickey Mouse?
00:43:27 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:43:27] S0: Okay. So, David, how does this Oswald catastrophe lead to Mickey Mouse? [00:43:32] S1: Alright. So here's the story of Mickey Mouse as Walt would tell it. It's March 1928. He and Lillian are on the long train ride back home to LA from New York. He's struck by the bolt of inspiration for a new cartoon scenario about a plucky mouse named Mortimer who is attempting to fly an airplane just like his hero, Charles Lindbergh. And, this would go on to become the Mickey cartoon, plane crazy. So Walt shows his sketches that he's making to Lillian, and Lillian says, I like it, but Mortimer? That's too sissy a name. How about Mickey? And thus, Mickey Mouse is born. Now the real story is more likely that Walt and Lillian get back to LA, and Walt is, like, sweating. So he and Roy and Ub and a couple other animators who stayed loyal to them hole up and they start brainstorming ideas for some kind of new idea or new character that they can create to replace Oswald and turn around the studio's fortunes. [00:44:37] S0: And also, when you see Mickey and you see Oswald, it's not hard to imagine where Mickey Mouse came from. It's, like, kinda like shorten the ears, make them circles. You know, they both kinda have this white face and the black outline. [00:44:49] S1: I mean, it's really just the same brief that created Oswald. It was like, hey. Take Felix and Yeah. Do something like Felix, except this time it's take Oswald and do something like Oswald. [00:44:59] S0: And make damn sure we own it. Yes. Exactly. [00:45:02] S1: So they land on the idea of a mouse.
00:45:02 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:45:02] S1: So they land on the idea of a mouse. [00:45:03] S0: And didn't Walt claim that he sort of, like, always had a fondness for mice because there were mice that would, [00:45:08] S1: like Yeah. [00:45:08] S0: Yeah. Jump in his trash can in Kansas City while he was animating and [00:45:11] S1: Sure. Whatever. You know, it's all it's all just part of the Walt myth. Yes. And at least according to the Neil Gebler book, most likely, Ub is the one who first draws Mickey, not Walt on the train. But either way, Ub definitely was the primary animator of the first Mickey's for the whole first series of Mickey's, including Steamboat Willie. So by summer of nineteen twenty eight, we finished out the Oswald contract, and Walt and Ub and the small little Mary crew have gotten two Mickey shorts ready for production, Plain Crazy and the Gallop and Gaucho. And Walt takes them around to distributors. You know, the Walt Disney studio is well known at this point. This seems like it would be promising new IP, and none of the major distributors are interested. They're like, yeah. I don't know. Mickey. It's like Oswald. But [00:46:14] S0: Without all the, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of raving fans for it.
00:46:14 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:46:14] S0: Without all the, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of raving fans for it. [00:46:19] S1: So Exactly. Exactly. And then comes the eureka breakthrough idea. One of the gang recalls that the jazz singer, the famous first popular talkie, you know, movie with dialogue and sound that had just come out the previous fall. When they went to see it, that there was a cartoon screened alongside it. And Walt, when he hears this, puts the two ideas together in his mind of a cartoon and sound. And supposedly, he says, that's it. That's it. That's what we've gotta do. Stop all these silent pictures. Now at this point, people had made cartoons with sound, but nobody had ever made a cartoon with sound like the jazz singer had sound. [00:47:08] S0: Synchronized sound. [00:47:09] S1: Synchronized. Yes. Exactly. Where what was happening in real time in the cartoon was then played in sound, exactly synchronized in the movie theater. [00:47:21] S0: Yeah. The concept before was there's music that plays, but it's only loosely attached. And this is to the frame and to the beat of the music. Like, if you see Mickey on screen bop into something, then you might hear a xylophone on the exact same downbeat play a note. [00:47:38] S1: Yeah. It's not just that, like, there's some music accompanying this cartoon that you're watching. It's that what is happening in the cartoon feels like it is producing the
00:47:38 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:47:38] S1: Yeah. It's not just that, like, there's some music accompanying this cartoon that you're watching. It's that what is happening in the cartoon feels like it is producing the [00:47:46] S0: sound. Yes. There's a great business model lesson in this, which is with the first two Mickey's flopping, if you just do the same thing as an existing competitor who already has distribution, brand, customers, it's not enough. You need to go do something leveraging a new piece of technology or a new platform. You gotta come at it from an orthogonal way in order to leapfrog and make people pay attention to you. Otherwise, you're just, like, smaller, worse, also ran. Totally.