Gary Bailey, founder of the Talent Capitalist, is a monetization & pricing expert with a deep background in financial services, accounting, pricing, and AI. He's also one of the most insightful writers on the internet in the world of pricing & monetization. In this episode, Fynn and Gary discuss Gary's background in finance and what he learned from the electronification of finance.

They go on to discuss the importance of monetization as a discipline. Gary shares his experience in valuing and pricing financial products, as well as the challenges of training young professionals in the industry. Bailey emphasizes the need for pricing education in business schools and the lack of ownership and accountability for monetization within organizations. Gary believes that pricing should live in finance, and that FP&A professionals have a massive opportunity to create value for their organizations should they lean into monetization as a concentrated function.

Takeaways

- Monetization should be treated as a discipline and taught in business schools to address the lack of pricing education.

- Finance departments are well-positioned to own and drive monetization strategies within organizations.

- The challenges of valuing and pricing financial products require a deep understanding of math and a focus on creating consistent valuation curves.

- The rapid pace of change in the pricing landscape necessitates the development of pricing expertise and the recognition of pricing as a valuable discipline.

- The lack of ownership and accountability for monetization within organizations leads to ambiguous pricing strategies and missed opportunities. FP&A has the analytical skill set for monetization as well as the available time to lean into it.

- The best argument for pricing to live in product is to treat pricing as a product itself, with a focus on making it beautiful, easy to onboard, and constantly experimenting and iterating.

- The Talent Capitalist helps small businesses recruit for the job of a 'motivation architect' and trains existing employees in this discipline.

- Monetization as a discipline involves creating value, measuring value, negotiating value capture, implementing systems to capture value, and determining the price point.

- The future of monetization in the world of AI involves AI assisting individuals in configuring their own pricing based on their unique needs and value perception.- Understanding what people want is crucial in implementing big ideas and achieving incentive alignment.

Sound Bites

"I'm an accountant at heart, and accountants like certainty."

"We had to develop a system which had hundreds of these features, like insurance, and each of those features had a value."

"FP&A has the analytical skill set to be really skilled and strong around monetization, but they are the function in the business that has the most latency in their job to go pursue that discipline with the right amount of focus, the right amount of attention."

"If you see pricing and billing and monetization as a product in itself, then the number one thing that says to do is to one, make it look beautiful, two, to onboard people onto it kind of easily. And, and then to constantly be experimenting and iterating."

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

02:03 The Thread that Unites Interests

06:29 Bringing Controls to the Banking World

10:30 Teaching Monetization as a Discipline

18:04 The Role of Finance in Monetization

23:31 The Lack of Pricing Education and Ownership

30:10 The Latency of FP&A in Pursuing Monetization

33:03 Recruiting for the Job of a 'Motivation Architect'

36:28 The Five Steps of Monetization as a Discipline

40:55 The Future of Monetization in the World of AI

58:57 Understanding What People Want: A Crucial Lesson