#9: Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial)

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Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:00:00]:
One thing that I think has helped us be successful is we don't get caught up in it. The growth is great, but the goal is to be a multi $1,000,000,000 company. And when you're thinking about that, it's not just for the glory of saying we're a multi $1,000,000,000 company. I mean, my dad actually doesn't, glory aspect doesn't matter to me. It's the impact that comes with with that, both economic to the region, jobs, and our mission as a company, which is a social good company, a double bottom line company, in that we're able to help eventually consumer shop and save for their financial products.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:39]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs, and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. And we're coming to you live from Cleveland as well. Today's guest is actually one of the first people I have ever met in Cleveland, back when his company was still mostly just the founding team, and going by the name of Grad School Loans. Steve Masinski is the founder and CEO of Splash Financial. And worth noting, he is a formidable recreational soccer opponent as well. Splash is a national Fintech company that operates the leading student loan refinance marketplace.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:21]:
Helping people save money by accessing a network of lenders offering great student loan refinancing rates. Their goal is simple. It is to help people save on their student loan debt. Splash is one of, if not the fastest growing company in Cleveland and formally recognized as the 8th fastest growing company in Ohio by GrowJoe. Having just raised 17,000,000 in venture capital and was also named one of the top 250 private Fintech companies in the world by CB Insights. I'm excited to share the story of Steve and and Splash because I think they've flown relatively under the radar for how much they've been able to accomplish in the past few years here in Cleveland. So please enjoy our conversation. Before we dive into Splash Financial and the story behind the company, I'd love to just kinda lay the groundwork for the problem that Splash is addressing here.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:18]:
And I realize we could spend the entire episode just talking about the problem, but, could you give us a little bit of an overview of the student debt, situation as it is today? What is it exactly? How bad is it? How did we get here to where we are today?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:02:34]:
Yeah, so it's a huge problem in the country. 45,000,000 Americans have student loans making up $1,700,000,000,000 in debt. The cost of education has been rising at a credible clip and most people are financing that and post secondary education with student loans. And so, you end up with some people having half a $1,000,000 in student loan debt. Even if you're a doctor, it's a lot of debt. Rates are fairly high though the government's the main lender and to actually loans come from the Department of Education. So when you're getting a student loan, they're lending to everyone at the same level, meaning someone that maybe isn't going to make as much money or maybe they don't graduate college from a rates that could be lower. There's also a societal question of just incredible amounts of debt, some people not graduating college, that's not good for society and holding people back.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:03:41]:
So overall, student loans is just a huge problem in the country right now.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:45]:
Yeah, it certainly feels like a full blown crisis with the 1,700,000,000,000 you mentioned and, you know, many borrowers unable to pay down the principal till much later in in life. I guess when we talk about splash and and setting the the context there, can you just kinda share a bit of your own background and, you know, what inspired you to ultimately tackle this problem specifically?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:04:11]:
Sure, yeah. So Splash, we're a student loan refinance marketplace. So we allow consumers to go to Splash, fill out one simple form, get rates from a network of lenders that we source. Essentially, we shop for them, helping them get a great offer. Hopefully, save them tens of 1,000 of dollars on their debt. As an example, like this month, which is December of 2020, our average rate is well below 4% on the platform, and so if someone graduates with between 6 to 8% and then they come to splash, fill out a form, they get rates from our partner lenders, In theory, they could lower the rates by a couple percent. So my journey here is non traditional. I had a student loan, a lot of my friends have student loan debt.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:04:58]:
I'm lucky enough to have paid it off at this point, but a lot of my friends have not. Six figure debt. A lot of my friends have doctors, lawyers, and people are just struggling with with the rates and trying to figure out how much money they can save and when when we looked at the space, we thought about what are the challenges people are facing. And one of the challenges and one thing that makes splash very unique is that while there are a lot of refinancing companies, there isn't a one stop shop where if you go to a place online, you know you can get great offers from a network of lenders. And one thing that makes Flash very unique is that we've actually built technology to be able to launch banks and credit unions that maybe don't already have a student loanee finance product. So when you think of a traditional marketplace, you think of a digital connection to a company that has a product accessible. You just sort of are this middleman platform. What makes Splash unique is that we have this vertically integrated technology stack that allows us to process loans on lenders behalf.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:06:06]:
And so it allows us to bring in these banks and credit unions to compete just like a digital disruptor or digital player, and that allows us to offer really good rates to people. So question about my path to get here, we've known each other for a while and so it's like you've seen a bit of the journey and evolution. We weren't always student loan refinancing. You know, there was a point in time when we were digital savings

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:31]:
and back in the days of grad school loans

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:06:33]:
back in the day. I mean, before grad school loans, there was Lendly Link. I mean, it's, so I founded the company in 2013 with the, the main concept that cost of education is growing at an insurmountable clip and that it wasn't just a lending problem, it was a saving problem. People weren't saving enough because if you're a parent, I mean, you have a lot of things you're worrying about, but you also, this is 7 years ago, but people would, what we were pitching is people would not necessarily understand how much college has increased because you're not in that world. So when your child enters high school and maybe they're a junior and they start, you know, looking at colleges, it's sticker shock. You're like, it costs what? A lot of people haven't saved enough and so our original concept was helping them save more for their child's college education, borrow less, creating digital savings accounts before it was cool and then helping them qualify for discounts on undergraduate loans at the same time. So the migration really was based off of clear product market fit and I think that's why we've been able to both survive and really thrive, over the last few years especially. Is just a constant innovation to product market fit and a realization that as a founder you fall in love with your original idea but your original idea might just not be good you might have like a kernel in there that is right or you might be too early.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:08:02]:
And people say this all the time, being too early. We did digital savings accounts. Challenger banks are huge right now, but in 2013 that was not a thing. And so when we were launching digital savings, baby boomers, people 40, 50 years old, they didn't wanna save online, they wanna save at their bank. And so it just was early. So that meant it was wrong, we just couldn't get prop market fit with it. It might have been different today. But the evolution to student loan refinancing really just found from, was born from recognizing a need that I had, recognizing a need that, a lot of my friends had, and trying to figure out how we could differentiate ourselves in the space and the marketplace structure is very unique, especially with our vertical technology integrations.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:46]:
So so where is Splash Financial today? What's the current state of of the company? And, you know, over the past year or so, how how has it been faring in in the pretty unpredictable and difficult environment we find ourselves in?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:09:02]:
Yeah. So Splash has had some headwinds and tailwinds related to COVID. Overall, this year, we've done incredibly well. We're up to 85 people. We've raised 17,000,000 of venture capital, some great investors, Northwestern Mutual, Future Ventures, and CMFG Ventures, which is the venture cap pharma of CUNA Mutual, works with a lot of credit unions as their main insurance company, and we're trying to onboard banks and credit unions into our platform, so it's a good connection. So we've been able to grow a lot this year. Over the last 18 months, our revenue has increased about 2,100% on, MRR. We don't disclose our revenue, but it's in the tens of millions at this point, and it's we anticipate a really strong year next year and 3 to 4x continued growth.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:09:52]:
And so I mentioned headwinds and tailwinds. As a marketplace specifically focused on lending, student loan refinancing specifically for us, you're rate dependent in many ways. So as the rate environment reduces, refinancing booms. You've seen that in mortgage. That has helped us grow. On top of that, we've onboarded many additional lending partners through our digital technology. We're working on fully automated and paperless systems so that we can originate and really help people sign their loan docs in minutes, get approved and signed in minutes, which is what we aim to be doing early next year. But the, you know, the growth really has been significant, even with some of the headwinds, which are that the government temporarily has paused student loan payments and reduced interest rates to 0%, which from a society standpoint is important.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:10:42]:
I mean, that was something that needed to happen with COVID and, a lot of people lost their jobs and struggling to pay. At some point, the market will normalize and when it comes to loan refinancing, we'll be able to, when people's rates go up, we'll be able to help them save money again. So the market that we're serving right now is really people that have private student loan debt versus federal, so if there are 45,000,000 Americans with student loan debt, about 43,000,000 have federal, so there's like this 2,000,000 person gap that have private student loans that aren't eligible for the government benefits that are looking to refinance right now but next year, the market's going to explode again and so we anticipate our ability to help people, will dramatically increase, when their rates go back up.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:26]:
Got it. Yeah. And we don't have to get really into the politics of it, but I'm curious from a business perspective with the talk of, I think, effectively forgiveness of about a third of the 1,700,000,000,000 in the outstanding student loan debt. How are you guys thinking about the effect that that has on the business and, you know, ultimately the stated goal, I I think, of of what you're doing is to help people save on their student loans. So how are you thinking through, you know, a world with loan forgiveness and maybe the proliferation of alternative financial vehicles like income share agreements and, you know, that that kind of alternative options that that are there?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:12:06]:
We look at it in 2 ways. The first one is a practical way, and it's not meant to be political at all. I mean, our goal is to help people reduce their student loan debt. So some form comes in forgiveness, it comes in forgiveness, and it is what it is. But when looking at the practical side, we kind of just read the room and is something likely to happen as we're trying to build our business. There seems to be a likelihood that some level of forgiveness will happen. The average person graduates from undergrad with about 30,000 these days. If you wiped out 10,000 per person, like you said, you're talking about 3rd or 4th, you know, you're talking about like 450,000,000,000.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:12:48]:
It's a lot. That actually is Biden's proposal when he was running. His thoughts were forgive 10,000, improve things like income based repayment for people that are unable to pay. Right. There's some tax issues going on for when people get forgiveness in 20 years if they've been saddled with debt for that long. And so if that were to happen, it actually wouldn't dramatically impact our business. A lot of our loans, people with higher loan balances with advanced degrees, those don't tend to be the people that a lot of politicians are talking to in regards to forgive debts. But you know, we also think about that diversification.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:13:25]:
So this is the other way I mentioned that it's 2 ways we think about. The other way is diversification. So long term splash will diversify away from just being student loan refinancing because there is some element of political risk, regardless of if that political risk is practical or likely. You just want to diversify to reduce your risk as a business, period. So that is a way that we think about it long run, but, you know, it's really just like everyone else looking at what are the politicians thinking about and yeah what seems to make the most sense for the country and you know our our goal is to help people so if some elements forgiven we'll be there to help refinance the rest.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:06]:
There's a a few things you mentioned that I I wanna dive a little deeper on. To my knowledge, there are not too many companies in the Cleveland region exhibiting the kind of growth that you just spoke to at the magnitude of top line revenue that that you have. I guess from both a 5 year time horizon, you know, where is it that you hope Splash can be and the kind of impact that that you hope to have both as a company and also as a presence here in Cleveland?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:14:37]:
Yeah. I I think I think you're right that not as many companies are able to exhibit that level of growth. But one thing that I think has helped us be successful is we don't get caught up in it. The growth is great, but the goal is to be a multibillion dollar company. And when when you're thinking about that, it's not just for the glory of saying we're a multibillion dollar company. I mean, that actually doesn't Gloria aspect doesn't matter to me. It's the impact that comes with with that both economic to the region, jobs, and our mission as a company, which is a social good company, a double bottom line company, in that we're able to help eventually consumer shop and save for their financial products. I mean, as we think about diversification, it'll be expansion beyond just student loans and specifically what that is, we'll see based off of the product roadmap and continued growth prospects.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:15:34]:
But I think as we think about in 5 years, like we we have a plan already to grow from 85 to 185 next year. So, you know, when you're you're thinking about that level of growth in just a couple years, we were 7 people. Rewind to early 2019, January 2019, I think we were 7, 8 people. And so we've seen just like some tremendous growth. And that's that's exciting to the area. One thing that we really want to focus on is we're able to establish slash as a very large national player is trying to help the startup ecosystem in Cleveland where I think we are just behind a number of other cities. We're not behind by decades. Columbus, when I went to Ohio State and graduated in 2011, had zero startup ecosystem.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:16:28]:
Yeah. It's thriving today. You You know, you look at all the really strong companies and VC presence that Thrive brought and other VCs that have kind of come and there's opportunity for Cleveland really to be an innovator and, we want Splash to be at the forefront of that, ideally creating Silicon Valley esque environment in Ohio. If you're pairing up Columbus, Cincy, and Cleveland, I think that you have some really good companies, and I'm excited for what I view the future of these, where there will be a lot more attention in the Midwest, a lot more funding in the Midwest, a lot more VC attention in the Midwest because I think that's where the growth is as the valley gets tapped out of it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:11]:
Yeah. What one of the thematic patterns that has emerged from some of these conversations that I get to have with people here is that it seems like there's this catch 22 in Cleveland, and probably in any city that's trying to to build this entrepreneurial ecosystem, where you need to have some of those successful exits to have the kind of not risk averse capital that's willing to make, you know, the angel investments. But in order to have that you needed some people in the first place to have taken a risk on the people trying to build the companies. And, you know, it seems like splash is really kind of on the cusp of really breaking through. I'd love to hear from your perspective, really from, like, the company building side, how you've been able to to navigate the the capital environment here and just your perspective on that.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:18:01]:
Yeah. It's a challenging capital environment in Cleveland, to be very honest. When a startup founder asks me, how should I focus on raising capital in Cleveland? My first advice is raise capital in another place. Because I don't want to waste the time of the startup founder, if you're really thinking about it. Valuations in Cleveland lag. Other cities, less capital, more nodes. Your time is valuable. I can't even count the amount of nodes that we got going through it.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:18:33]:
And if a coin bounced a different way, you know, landed a a a different direction, Slash might not exist. I mean, we were able to find just an awesome angel that got a group together that put in over $2,000,000 at a time where we really needed it and we're still trying to find the core market fit and that's normal. I mean, companies don't just hit the market and have product market fit. Airbnb is now public worth I think like $100,000,000,000 or around there based on their trading, they started out completely different. They thought that their whole thing was about community and about having people stay at people's houses and like see the hosts and live with the hosts and do all this different stuff. They got turned down by investor after investor after investor, but the capital base was there. So in Cleveland, if you get turned down by investor, after investor, after investor, there's no one left to go to because there are maybe only a couple investors and a few angels that play. And so I think there is this catch 22 where funds need to be poured back into the market where there need to be more opportunities.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:19:44]:
I think that we actually need to recruit VCs into Cleveland, into the region, because I think that's what's missing is the actual ability to provide true intelligent growth capital. And I think we need to build the understanding that you're investing in the team and the people as much as you are. The product and the vision of that company is important, but also where do they want to go and where do they want to be and how hard are they going to drive. And it's hard to succeed with a great idea. Many companies fail, but if you're a really good team and you know you're very driven, I would rather bet in the person that I believe in versus the idea that I believe in. Because if you don't have the person behind it, I don't know if it's gonna go anywhere. I think Cleveland looks for both and and the idea is important and the person is important, but you just don't need prop market fit. There needs to be more of a runway to sort of find that to bring in the capital and that I just don't know if that exists here from a cultural standpoint, which is a challenge.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:46]:
When you think about the team, you know, you just mentioned you're looking to from 7 not too long ago to close to 200 in the near future, having kind of gone through the hiring processes myself, it's hard to bring on quantity of that kind of people. How are you thinking about that problem going forward?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:21:07]:
Trust the people that you've hired to hire good people because you can't interview all of them. So as a CEO and as a founder, you are like, it's my company. I need to personally know everyone that's in the company. And that's true. I mean, you do wanna do it as much as you can. We at Splash do random coffee pairings every other week. So I get paired up with people that I've never met before. Like, they're hired.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:21:35]:
They're doing an amazing job. I hear reports that they're doing an amazing job, but I didn't interview them. I never met them. I just signed off that it was an area of need. And so I think the trust of the team is what allowed you to scale up because I'm one person, our COO is 1 person, our CTO is 1 person. If everyone interviewed everyone all the time, you just would never get anything done. And then the second thing is COVID has opened up our eyes that we're gonna be headquartered in Cleveland, we're gonna hire in Cleveland, but a remote culture is here to stay. We had employee poached by Amazon.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:22:08]:
That didn't happen before. Like this just happened. You know, if we are not also looking at employees in Seattle and California and Denver and New York and Boston, Chicago, you're gonna have problems with big companies poaching talent in Cleveland, and you're gonna have a hard time scaling up. So there are things like engineering where our CTO, and chief product officer, we recruit from Guaranty Rate Mortgage. He's the largest mortgage originator in the country based in Chicago. He's based in Chicago. As he was the best person for the job and an amazing add to our team and he's helped us recruit really strong talents. So it's really just trust in the team, bringing on really strong leaders and then recruiting from there.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:22:54]:
And that's what I've learned over time because I, the more I'm involved, the slower it goes is just the truth.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:01]:
Yeah, no, it's very exciting though. I think it's a really, could be very, very cool, I think, for for the city to have that kind of company at at that kind of growth to be a part of. I feel like that's often what just from my perspective, had had been missing is, you know, you need some companies in the region that are gonna keep the the graduates and talent here in instead of being poached to to New York or SF or Seattle.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:23:27]:
Yeah. And and we need to form a stronger ecosystem because there isn't a common funding source, like not really. There's Jumpstart and there's North Coast, but there's no real high growth like top VC funding arm that connects people with a core growth mission and understanding of what everybody's going through. But out of Akron RVshare you know has seen just rapid growth as I saw recently raised Giant Round and you know, that that's totally doable to create this Greater Cleveland ecosystem because I kind of would lump Akron into that to try to, you know, pour money into the general region. But companies are here. I mean, they're really smart people working on really difficult things. I actually think the start that you're at previously, I mean with blockchain voting that will be a thing,

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:22]:
in

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:24:22]:
the future.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:23]:
I wish our competitors all the best.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:24:27]:
Yeah. You know, and so it it's just with different funding, different opportunity, maybe that would have been different and maybe that company could have been a dominant player. You know, it's always, it's a lot of ifs, but the point is that to build the best ecosystem, you have to have the best funding, you have to have like a really strong support system and we're not the worst, like Cleveland has some, but it's also not at the level that I think is expected to actually be able to grow at that level.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:59]:
I wanna bring it back to the problem Splash is working on for a second. One of the rabbit holes I've fallen down over the last year is this idea of cost disease. And you mentioned that the, really the the cost of education has just gone up to a degree that astonishes parents and people when they they actually look at the rate at which it's increased. And you have the cycle where the the goal of the universities are education and some some signal of of status where they can raise and subsequently spend virtually unlimited amount of money in in pursuit of those two goals. And so the cumulative effect is just like a a ratchet of cost increases, and it it doesn't seem to have, like, an end necessarily in in sight. And, you know, from that perspective, maybe that's actually a good, you know, prospect for for splash in some regards, but how do you think and and how is splash approaching the more, like, root cause of of some of the the problem in this space? Or is it, you know, too too tangential and and not directly related?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:26:09]:
Yeah. I mean, I'll give you my thoughts about the the challenges and sort of what's what's happening. Now we can deal with, you know, what is Flash doing related to it. Cost of education is unsustainable like the the increases. I actually do think it's near a tipping point. I think COVID accelerated trends dramatically. You see, it's a supply and demand equation. If you have unlimited demands, you know, and colleges can't can't fill that they have limited capacity, raise the rate, you know, the prices.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:26:42]:
And you know that people can pay for the prices because there's unlimited funding from the government to fund those people going to college, and it creates sort of these these challenges. So that's one thing that's been driving up the cost of education. You also, like you mentioned, have a bit of an arms race going on where whether it's prestige, whether it's the best campus, the best dining hall, the best gym, you know, it's, when I went to Ohio State, it just had invested in the new RPAC which is like an amazing gym workout facility, everything you could ever want. The reality is we lived at a resort. Like we went to school there, but it was a resort. It was everything that you could need, best facilities, best everything. And when our parents went to school, it wasn't like that. And so that's part of the rising cost of education is sort of the combined elements of just like the college arms race with government able to fund it through student loans and colleges knowing that people are going to pay for it.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:27:46]:
There are other elements where colleges don't get the same level of state funding anymore, government funding, grants, the Pell Grants, which is really like a low income grants that people get for college to reduce the overall cost for them, hasn't been increased in years. You know, like and so it used to cover a sizable portion of or a significant portion of education, now it's very very little and so there are other elements where government funding also hasn't kept up with it as it's been shifted to other things that the government's focused on. You know, how Splash thinks about it is no one company can solve every problem. There are other companies trying to solve things like you mentioned income share agreements. I personally don't believe in income share agreements. I think it's indentured servitude. Now I'll people will hear me say that and I'm going to get slapped by friends that are running income share agreement companies, but like the mission is right, the mission is to get people with to have less debt. The problem is that you end up with adverse selection.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:28:52]:
People that are very high growth, like I'm gonna go into investment banking, I'm gonna go into consulting, they're never gonna sign up for an income share agreement because their income potential is too large. People that sign up for income share agreements are the ones that are going to go into low income fields or take time off or do all these other things which is good for a debt perspective but it means that income share agreements, I think, are unlikely to stick around in their current format. I think what's more likely is trying to tie the college to put things like graduation rate, debt spirals, other things like that, so that like they actually have a reason to try to reduce the cost of education or at least tighten it. If they're not going to get the same level of government loan support, if they have certain debt levels, or if they have people that aren't able to repay their loans or or various other elements, you're going to have colleges think twice about their cost structure. But I do think that that COVID's accelerated stuff with with online learning I think that that's going to be the thing that really changes the system People are all consumer behavior, it doesn't take that much to change how people actually do things and hope is a year of doing it a certain way. That's why colleges were forcing people to go back to college because they knew if they ever put them back online, they would have a completely different cost structure, completely different expectation than people. Right. But a lot of college were forced to do that, and a lot of people deferred going to college without having the normal experience, and then they're doing digital learning and things like that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:18]:
Yeah. It's anecdotal, but my my youngest brother is a sophomore in college. And I guess there was this meme going around on the Internet where it was essentially a picture of all the streaming services annual costs about $100 a year. And then is you know, big name, you know, value league University for for Zoom is $50,000 a year. It's like what you're paying for is not purely the educational experience. It's become abundantly clear over the last 9 months.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:30:49]:
Yeah. And you'll also, I think there's potential. Let's see what passes under Biden administration. But both Biden and Obama push for free community college. Biden wants to take that to the next level to have dramatic reduction cost of public universities. I don't know if they're ever gonna get free public college push through congress, but they wanna increase Pell Grants and other things. So I think there is potential that the Biden administration will recognize that the cost of education is out of control and trying to, like that essentially, that is the illness, that is the symptom, right? So like you treat the illness and then you figure out if that's going to solve like, okay, the symptoms are going to go away if you treat the illness.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:43]:
Right.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:31:43]:
The problem with the whole debt forgiveness immunity is that that doesn't solve the illness. You're growing debt at over $100,000,000,000 a year. So in 10 years, you're at a $1,000,000,000,000, great. Are we just gonna do this again, forgive all the debt, You gotta try to figure out what the actual challenges are, address those, then you can solve the things on the back end of what's happening. I just don't see enough of that currently in the political landscape, whether you're a Republican, Democrat, doesn't really matter. I mean, everyone would understand cost of education right now is crazy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:20]:
Yeah, that's wild.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:32:22]:
And so I think that's something that needs to be solved.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:25]:
Yeah. Well, I am, I'm excited to learn and and hear about the the growth and success that you guys are having that I didn't even actually realize it to to the degree that that's actually happening. So that is awesome. Definitely rooting for you guys.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:32:41]:
Appreciate it. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:43]:
Yeah. To kinda close it out here, totally unrelated to student debt. Been, over the course of these conversations just painting a picture of people's favorite or or hidden gems in Cleveland. What is yours?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:32:58]:
I would probably say Jinko restaurant if you've ever been there. It's a sushi restaurant below Dante in Tremont. Awesome. It's a it's a great environment. You kind of feel like you're in a different place. I don't think there's another thing like it in Cleveland from a restaurant atmosphere standpoint. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to go there in a long time, but have ordered it in a few times. Yeah.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:33:28]:
I definitely think that's a very hidden gem and if you haven't been there, you should go there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:34]:
Let's check it out. Yeah. I've been tons of takeout the last last few months here. Gotta keep the restaurants around. Well, if if, if people have any questions or things that they would wanna follow-up with you about, where's the the best place for for them to reach you, Steve?

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:33:49]:
Yeah. People can just shoot me an email, passmusinski@financial.com.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:55]:
Sweet. But really, appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing your story. And again, I'm I'm really pumped for what you guys are are working on and excited to to follow along.

Steve Muszynski (Splash Financial) [00:34:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:08]:
That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so shoot us an email at lay of the thetagan, or at sternhefe, j e f e. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for our show, please email us or find us on Twitter and let us know. And if you love our show, please leave a review on iTunes. That goes a long way in helping us spread the word and continue to help bring high quality guests to the show. Takin Horden and Jeffrey Stern developed the Lay of the Land podcast in collaboration with the Up Company LLC.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:45]:
At the time of this recording, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the companies which appear on this show unless otherwise indicated. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Founders Get Funds and its affiliates, or actual and its affiliates, or any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. We have not considered your specific financial situation, nor provided any investment advice on this show. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.