The following interview is a conversation we had with Will Sealy, CEO and Co-Founder of Summer, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $18 Million Raised to Build the Future of Student Debt Financing.

 

Will Sealy
Yeah, happy to be here. 

Brett
So, before beginning talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Will Sealy
Yeah. So I started Summer about six years ago to solve a big problem student loan repayment for over 46 million borrowers who are on the hook for $1.7 trillion of student debt. And this is an issue I’m really passionate about, I’ve been involved in for over twelve years now. My background started not only as a student loan borrower, where I saw the impact of this myself on my peers. My mother had student debt, I saw how it weighed heavily on her financial decision making. My dad actually is European. He did not have student debt, grew up in the UK, and had a lot of his educational expenses covered by the state, and I saw just how different systems handled that differently. By the time I graduated, I was very much interested in helping people navigate consumer finances, knowing just how hard it was, myself, my family doing it, and wanted to give back. 

Will Sealy
And what I realized really quickly was just how little I actually knew about it. So I was working as a community organizer out on the West Coast in the middle of the financial crisis, trying to guide people through consumer financial decisions on foreclosures, credit card debt, student debt, obviously all of those things interconnected. And Obama had just become President, and I saw that he had deputized Elizabeth Warren, who was talking a lot about these consumer financial issues, and the creation of a watchdog agency now called the CFPB, that could be a cop on the beat to help regulate these industries, but also a third leg of the stool. She always said was providing financial education and then supervision being the third leg of the stool. But I think inevitably I wanted to go be a part of that. And so I ended up applying for a role in DC. 

Will Sealy
Before the agency was officially off the ground. It was being built out of the White House and the Treasury Department. I ended up getting very lucky to get a job on the implementation team, worked first at the White House, jumped over to treasury, and then eventually was part of the CFPB opening its doors after dealing with a lot of the basics of the mortgage crisis, a question was asked what would be the next big financial crisis? And this was before people were thinking about crypto and all the other cool innovations and crazy innovations that have come out since then. But the thing that I just raised my hand on and said, a big kind of crisis, a big bubble that could burst, I think could be student debt. And Elizabeth Warren said, I agree. I think that’s a huge problem. We need someone working on this. 

Will Sealy
Can you look into it more and provide some research? So I was actually the first person at the agency that was looking into what the CFPB could do on a regulatory standpoint in student loans, and then spent the next few years writing reports to members of Congress, briefing other bodies of government on the issues at hand, and writing white papers on potential solutions so we can go more into that. But I spent a long time working on this issue and found that there was just a lot of unknowns, a lot of misunderstandings about the overall student loan space, and just decided I wanted to vote my career to solving it and making borrowers have a better path through this system that is so broken. 

Brett
And did you always think that you would end up becoming an entrepreneur at some point in your life? Or when you left the government to start the company, was that a surprise to yourself and your family and friends? 

Will Sealy
Yeah, I think it’s a great question. Not too many people start companies that necessarily started out the bulk of their career in the government. It’s not the most common career pivot, so it’s a fair question to ask, and obviously it’s a question I’ve asked myself. I will say that in college I was as interested in entrepreneurship as I was interested in politics and government. I was actually a government history major. I loved reading about the history of innovation, and I loved learning about the way the government worked. And those two things usually people split in their interests in those regards, but I found them very interesting because I felt that those are the two main ecosystems of which the outputs of both of those impact our lives dramatically. Government has an incredible way to dramatically impact our lives, and so do entrepreneurship innovations in very different ways. 

Will Sealy
But both of them are incredibly impactful on our everyday lives, and both of them are systems and ecosystems in which you could study it at the individual level and the macro level. And I found sort of every aspect intellectually compelling and kind of a puzzle to solve that’s constantly evolving. And so that was an endless amount of joy in college of just studying these two topics. But I actually ended up changing from being more of an onlooker to being a participant when there was a problem on my college campus of drunk driving. And I didn’t realize at the time unrelatedly sexual assault. And I was actually a reporter for the school newspaper, and I was documenting a lot of these incidents popping up, and the police department saying that, campus police saying these incidents are happening more and more often. And so I was again looking at it sort of intellectually curious as to why are these things happening? 

Will Sealy
What is going on? And it turned out that years before, the fraternities had been kicked off campus. Not all of them, but a predominant number of them, and they were in a different part of the college town. And a lot of people were driving out to these parties, getting inebriated, driving home, which was the drunk driving and the DUIs going up. But a lot of individual students were walking home intoxicated in dark alleys, dark pathways, making them more susceptible to incidents of sexual assault. And in talking and investigating this, I found out that the problems were linked. And I, as a reporter, started to say, well, why isn’t there a Safe Ride program that could bring people home? And so very early on in my questioning my reporting, I just kept asking. I found myself becoming more and more obsessed with the solution. It was as if I had documented the problem. 

Will Sealy
Now I saw the solution. The solution seemed so painfully obvious to me that a Seafried program could solve this issue. I kept going around asking the student body president, like, why are you not investing resources into this? I went to the dean of students and the school system and was saying, why aren’t you investing in this? Long story short, my girlfriend at the time was like, will, hey, you’re getting real excited about the Safe Right program. Why don’t you create it? And that was sort of a pivot for me. Instead of just being someone who diagnoses problems, it was like, wait a second, maybe I should be part of the solution. So it took a while. I didn’t have this sort of drive to go do it myself. I had to have a lot of people sort of wake me up to the possibility that maybe I could go do it. 

Will Sealy
And that’s where I feel like I crossed the line of being like a reporter documenting a problem to actually being an active, solution oriented person to go build something, not knowing if it would work, not knowing if it would be successful. I ended up raising about $25,000 in college. We hired about 40 people as drivers. We created like a by students for students driving system with all kinds of training. Had to figure out the legality of insurance and how to protect my employees, but also the passengers. And it was just incredibly exciting. And I think once I left college, I just knew in my heart that I was always going to be interested in the government from an intellectual standpoint and a way to help people. But simultaneously, that college experience of creating a Seafride program where were able to end up the results were remarkable. 

Will Sealy
Working with campus police, the DUI rates started to drop, precipitously this incidence of sexual assault went down. And the campus police largely credited the Safe Ride program as being the solution that they needed but didn’t have. And I think I always kept thinking back to that once I was in my professional career, I wanted to be an entrepreneur again. But when I started tackling a problem as big as student debt, it wasn’t as simple as raising $25,000 and saying, okay, I can do this. It felt far more complicated. It felt far more nuanced. And so I ended up spending about five years studying the topic in DC, working with a ton of think tanks, other government leaders, and real academics who just had so much knowledge to collect that. And it wasn’t at the time that I was amassing all this information to go start a company. 

Will Sealy
That wasn’t the intention at the time. But there was that thread in the back of my mind of, like, I love entrepreneurship. I love being at the forefront of problem solving. When you’re in the government, you’re solving something, moving it a hairline to the side for 350,000,000 people. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re trying to fundamentally change one person’s life, then the next person and the next person, and trying to find a way to repeatedly build it from the ground up. So I recognized I was coming at it from two totally different directions, top down versus bottom up. But I decided, inevitably, after five years of being in and around government, that it was time to leave and go do the crazy entrepreneurship thing again. And here I am, six years later. 

Brett
Amazing. 

Will Sealy
I love it. 

Brett
And such a cool story. Now, a couple of questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick, and because you work in government, I’ll switch this a little bit or give you two options to choose from. What CEO or leader do you admire the most and who is it and what do you admire about them? 

Will Sealy
Yeah, I thought a lot about this. There’s so many people growing up that I would read about and that I would learn from, just, like, their life and their life experience. But actually, I want to talk about a peer of mine, Jimmy Chen, who’s the Founder and CEO of Propel. Propel is a company that is just absolutely awesome. They help people navigate federal systems, not unlike Summer and what we do, but they are a free app used by millions of families around the country that are helping particularly low income Americans manage government benefits. Things like the Snap program and essentially helping people put food on their plates by accessing government programs that can cover the cost of food. And Jimmy, to me, is an inspiration because his story is one that I really appreciate, that he spent years, I think he formally might have been at Facebook on the tech side of things. 

Will Sealy
I might be wrong about that, but yeah, I think he was at Facebook but he left tech and he wanted to go work on this issue, really thinking about how tech can solve social problems. But he has this great story where he talks about how he spent years trying to innovate on the product and formally being a product person at Facebook obsessively using product best practices. And that again and again, the product failed to get adoption and he ended up almost like ran out of money, had to shut down, and kind of in this last minute did a total product pivot on how they were approaching their users. And it turns out people just didn’t even know how much was left in their Snap balance or their food stamp balance. They just didn’t know. And then there were all kinds of fees and things. So I forget the I’m going to probably botch the exacts but I think what he told me was effectively that they were able to find a way to show the balance of what was left in the debit card that you normally wouldn’t have insight into. 

Will Sealy
So that people never had an overdraft or never had an issue there and could really track every dollar down to the cent. And that was a hook that attracted people to the product and made it higher utility and led to this incredible success. It took years, but they’re now in the millions of users for having figured that out. And I just love his way to balance technology and social mission and kind of persevering through what we all know in entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things of finding that right product market fit. But when you find it, really knowing that you found it and knowing to double down and take it as far as it can go. And I’m passionate about how he looks at problems and always try to incorporate that type of thinking into my own line of work at Summer. 

Brett
It’s really fascinating hearing you talk about someone who is a peer here. I think I may need to switch my question and start asking that because a lot of times I just get the same stuff as you can probably imagine of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. But I think I’m going to switch it up and say who’s your favorite peer CEO that you admire the most? That’s a good way to frame it. 

Will Sealy
It’s a harder question to ask, but hopefully you’ll get a few more interesting answers. 

Brett
Yeah, I’m getting a bit bored of the standard one, so I’ll switch it up with that. Now let’s talk about books. Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder. And because of your answer to the last question, you have to say something besides the hard thing about hard things, please. Sure thing. 

Will Sealy
I’ll be honest. Early on a mentor of mine said we’ll start a company in something, you know because you are going to be drinking from not just a fire hydrant, from 100 fire hydrants. And it’s going to be exhausting and it will knock you down time and time again and if you can at least rest on your own expertise and the thing that you’re creating, everything else you have to learn to be successful will be that much less daunting. And that was great advice. I don’t think it necessarily is for everyone. And I think most startup advice you always have to take with a touch of a grain of salt. Just because it worked for someone else does not mean it will work for you. But I really appreciated that advice and over the last six years being an expert in the industry that I’ve built my company has demonstrably helped me throughout that journey. 

Will Sealy
The book that has helped me has nothing to do with student loans and this is why it’s been so helpful for me. The book that I would recommend is called Venture Deals by Brad Feld and a lot of people in startups are aware of this book. Brad has subtitled his book Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist which I thought was its tongue in cheek. But it made me pick up the book and I have to say I wouldn’t be where I am today without having read it very quickly. You go from being an issue area expert who knows your industry or your product to talking to venture capitalists about why it is they should put millions of dollars into your business. And it’s not like Shark Tank. In some ways it is. You’re getting a ton of questions about every aspect of your business and the thing you don’t realize is that once you get an offer, it’s go time. 

Will Sealy
You almost have to change your entire mindset from being the smartest person on your topic or your product to being on the other side of a table of a financier who’s really trying to protect themselves from everything that could possibly go wrong in what for them is a repeat game. But for you, at least for me, I was a first time Founder, was entirely new and very quickly you felt like before you get the term sheet, you’re terrified about can I raise money? Will they respect my vision? And now you feel like the bell of the ball with a piece of paper in your hand saying that you could be the recipient of millions of dollars to go build your vision. Yet at the same time, if you don’t know the terms in that term sheet plus all of the terms that are going to come in the follow up financing documents you’re really putting yourself in a precarious place. 

Will Sealy
And so I was actually reading this book after I received my first term sheet, which I turned down because I just knew instinctively that first term sheet I received wasn’t a favorable one. And it was terrifying to turn it down because I was paying for my own salary with very little savings. I had student debt. It’s a very tough place to be. And I turned it down feeling like it wasn’t a good deal. And then I went to go educate myself on what I needed to know to understand why it wasn’t a good deal, other than just gut, which is a starting point, but I wanted to do better. And I found this book, read it front to back in about three days ahead of my next term sheet coming in and night and day, I knew to get a different kind of attorney, a proper attorney who knew venture deals. 

Will Sealy
And then as I was talking to my attorney reviewing the term sheet, I just knew what questions to ask. I knew what the top ten most important things were. And I would never, ever be my own attorney in these processes. I would always rely one who would know what they’re doing. But I understood the language, I understood the vernacular. I didn’t feel like a foreigner. I didn’t feel like my head was spinning as I did days before. So I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s considering venture capital in any way. Even if you’ve already taken on venture capital, it’s worth reading for your ahead of your next round. 

Brett
And can you take us back to the day that you closed your first institutional round? What did that feel like? What was going on inside your head when you closed that deal? I felt really good. 

Will Sealy
I remember feeling like, as I mentioned earlier, turning down another offer. You don’t know what the future holds. Is this the last offer I’m ever going to get? And that was a terrifying day. But I had to trust myself and trust that my execution ability and my idea were worth more and that it was worth the risk. So that by the time I was able to ten X in the next term sheet, not that long after, maybe two months after, I was able to ten X the dollar amount and the valuation and it was just so much more of a confidence boost to recognize and value the gains made. I’ll also note and this is very interesting, but I kind of think back on this, but there was this moment where I won’t go into too many details, but I was negotiating with the investor on a few key terms that mattered a lot to me, and they were informed by the book. 

Will Sealy
I mentioned venture deals to care about, and I was negotiating and they weren’t radical terms, they weren’t off market, but in many ways they were on market. But the investor wasn’t originally giving me that option to have. And there was like this sort of toss up as to whether the deal was going to fall through over them. And I ended up holding my ground. And I’ll never forget this. He invited me into his office to have a conversation about it. In fact, I think I insisted that we needed to meet in person. And he begrudgingly said yes. I think I’m romanticizing how that was. I think I was the one pushing for the in person and I got the opportunity to meet with him face to face. And I’ll never forget that. I just reiterated why I cared about these terms. I think he saw it in my eyes, heard it in my voice, and he said, Fine, done. 

Will Sealy
We’ll do it. And it was kind of this jaw dropper. That’s it. No tussle. I thought were going to have to go tip for Tat. And he was like, no, I just wanted to see that, how you were thinking about it. And I could see that you’re serious. And I like, founders that know what they want, like, good for you. I remember thinking like, what the. 

Brett
That’S what you needed? 

Will Sealy
But it taught me a valuable lesson, which is stand up for what you believe is right in business and don’t shy away from asking for what you need. And it also taught me about the value of just an in person face to face and going the extra mile. A totally separate topic, but similarly, I just hired three incredibly competitive people in the last two weeks. All three of them are receiving multiple offers from multiple companies. Very, very coveted individuals on the sales and business development front. I took each one of them out to dinner and had a proper conversation with them about the business, why I’m passionate about it, where we’re heading, why I see them as valuable parts of our future growth. And all three have accepted. After that dinner, when some of them were already ready to go with another business and had almost made up their mind, and I kind of made a last ditch. 

Will Sealy
And one of them, I even rerouted a trip back from California to New York and went to his hometown in Atlanta. I was like, I will meet you face to face. And I think the only reason I bring this up is post COVID or as we emerge out of COVID we’ve moved into a remote environment and Summer is a remote company. We do have flexible Co working spaces where people can kind of come to whichever offices in their community if they need it. But we are a remote team. But I never forget the value of an in person face to face and showing the other party whether that be someone you’re recruiting, a client you’re trying to win over, or investor of actually making the effort to show up face to face and just how powerful that can be. 

Brett
Amazing. I love that. And that’s such a good reminder because I agree. It’s become so common and so normal just to do meetings over Zoom now, especially meetings that could be done in person. So I love that. Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind as I go through my weeks now of what could be in person. I’m just going to do a Zoom. 

Will Sealy
Call for I really agree. I think it’s harder to get people in front of you now than it used to be, but when you have them, there’s almost a novelty to it where they’re like, wow, this is my first in person meeting in a week. And you’re like, great, okay, cool. But you know that when you’re in front of them, there’s an energy there that you’re able to harness and tap into. And it’s very human to just have that in person connection. And that does not mean that I endorse like, we should all go back to the office. But I do think that when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re constantly trying to defy the odds. The odds are against you in every direction, right. Competitors are taking over market share. How do you keep up? It’s getting harder to recruit people because of XYZ. It’s getting harder to get deals over the finish line of sales. 

Will Sealy
Cycles change, everything is difficult, and the odds are unfortunately, always against you. So how do you break through walls? How do you do that? And you got to find just basic things that work, and it doesn’t work for everyone, but that’s something that has worked for me. 

Brett
Yeah. I love that. 

Brett
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Brett
Now let’s switch gears a little bit and let’s dive deeper into the company. So normally I’d ask about origin story, but I think that’s pretty clear. So let’s just jump right into the business model. So asked in a simple way, how do you guys make money? 

Will Sealy
Yeah, we’re a B to C business, where we partner with employers and financial institutions that can reach hundreds, if not thousands of employers as distribution partners and provide them a valuable benefit for their employees to manage. Everything from planning how to pay for college and navigating college savings to paying off the last student loan as an employee that could be in your we’ve seen people still repaying their loans, unfortunately in their sixty s and seventy s. And we also assist with tuition reimbursement and tuition assistance as employers look to upskill their workforce and educate them for the new challenges of tomorrow. 

Brett
And what’s the model with financial institutions? It makes sense on the employer side, but could you just expand on that model with financial institutions? 

Will Sealy
Yeah, so we work with a number of financial institutions intuit, Fidelity, and a host of others. And I will say with distribution partners, there’s usually very bespoke models that work within their ecosystem. Because when you start doing that, you’re obviously going B to B to C. And so inevitably you have to be very thoughtful about how to acclimate and adapt to the clients preferences or the channel partner’s preferences. But we do all sorts of things such as either still charging the employer through with a revenue share to the channel partner, or in some cases we do allow for an actual employee to opt into our services as a fee for service. So that would be essentially it’s a B to C relationship, but it’s a D to C payment. And so that is another way that we work with some of our partners. 

Brett
And I think you had mentioned twelve years. That’s the number, right? That’s how many years you’ve been in this space. 

Will Sealy
Correct. 

Brett
So take me back twelve years ago. I’m sure you spent some of that time thinking about the future and what the future would hold. Are you happy with how the industry has evolved? Is it not moving nearly fast enough? Or what are your general views on the state of the market? 

Will Sealy
So the student loan market is something that is fundamentally broken. And it’s gotten better, but it’s still very broken. And what I think a lot about is the fact that when you look at the US. Education system, higher education system in particular, relative to other countries, you start to realize pretty quickly that this is a fundamental American problem. And regardless of people’s politics, analogy I do think about is like where you look at the number of gun deaths in the United States relative to gun deaths around the world, and you’re like, oh, that’s a uniquely US. Problem too. When you compare to other countries, it serves as a mirror back to you and your system. And then you can start to ask, why is this so different? And there’s all kinds of theories as to why other countries have less student debt, substantially less student debt. 

Will Sealy
But there’s a few basics that we can highlight. So one is the fact that a lot of other countries don’t have nearly as many colleges as the United States. So this is just a much bigger system, we have a bigger population. But even when you look at countries that have the same population as the United States, you then start to say, we call it a private nonprofit for most schools, and then we obviously have a number of state schools and. Community colleges. But we have a much more privatized education system than most other countries. And what that means is we’re allowing for these universities to set their own tuitions. These tuitions go up and up as these colleges compete in what is like an education arms race to have the best science program, the best basketball team, the best football stadium. And the number of administrators that are at these universities keeps going up and up relative to the size of the student body. 

Will Sealy
And what some people have said is these schools are getting more and more bloated in a high cost structure. And who pays well? The student? The family. And so as you look at other countries, what we see in other countries is that a lot of the taxpayer base is providing for the next generation’s education. And so that’s done through just normal taxes. Every year taxes are higher in other countries relative to the United States. Not always, but in many. And in those systems, those taxes are going to subsidize the education of the next generation of college students. Whereas here in the United States, we’ve actually cut federal taxes, cut state taxes so that even a lot of state schools have seen dramatic increases to their tuition. So all of this is leading to this bloated, cost heavy system. And you kind of have to decide that it’s like, at the end of the day, education is expensive. 

Will Sealy
It’s more expensive in the United States based on all of the investments made. And you have to ask people come from all over the world to study the United States. Yes, that is 100% true. But then you’d have to say, but do they need all of the bells and whistles and all the other administrative costs that are going into colleges being so darn expensive that is also driving up the cost? And do we need all of these administrators to run these education programs beyond just the professors who at the end of the day, are the ones teaching the students? And I would push back on anyone who questions that and say, I don’t think we need all of that. I think that’s part of this privatized system where everyone’s trying to compete for the flashy kind of banner that gets people to apply to their school and stand out in this crowded market of 4000 plus colleges and that system is not working, is showing signs of breaking left and right. 

Will Sealy
And you’re increasingly seeing more and more people say, like, well, maybe you shouldn’t go to college. And I think the talk track on that is changing. I think years ago it was always like, well, college is a great ROI, even if it is expensive, you will earn more back in your lifetime than you will paying for it. And that still is true. But that formula, that ROI analysis, is sadly changing and it’s tightening. And so as I look back to where I was twelve years ago, I would say, unfortunately, we’ve made far fewer gains in the cost of education than I would have hoped, which is the actual root underlying problem of the student loan market. It’s what drives up the debt load that all of these borrowers have. And if we can’t solve that, we’re never going to solve the problem. And so then you start to see things like Biden debt relief, where the President is saying we need to cancel what will amount to something close to around $500 billion of student debt relief. 

Will Sealy
400 $500 billion of student debt relief across tens of millions of borrowers. What is that? That’s like saying, oh, well, the taxpayer still has to pay. We could have subsidized this on the front end like they do in Europe, but now the cost is there. It’s higher in the US. Than other countries, but it has to be paid for. So either we’re going to ask all of these borrowers to pay for it we now see one in five borrowers have defaulted on their student loan, meaning they have simply been unable to repay their loan for at least nine months. Another two in five say they have trouble repaying their student loans and are missing payments. So now we’re talking about three in five individuals in the United States are having trouble covering the cost of their student debt. I mean, if you look at the 45 million student loan borrowers, that’s a lot of people, right? 

Will Sealy
That’s 60% of 45 million. And that’s around 24 million people. That’s a lot of people that are either flat out stopped paying their loans or are missing payments. And so a lot of people then take a step back and say like, well, okay, either the taxpayer covers the cost through mass cancellation. If Biden gets his way and the Supreme Court sides with the administration and lets cancellation proceed, that will be one way to fix the immediate problem. Again, not addressing the underlying tuition issue. But then you also have to take a step back and say, if that doesn’t go through, will borrowers actually be able to repay the loans? And I think there are a lot of progressive advocates and activists that say, like, if you have this many people who have trouble repaying, the problem is going to end up on the taxpayer one way or the other, because at some point the money went out. 

Will Sealy
And if the borrower can’t repay it, then the government essentially has to come up with the difference. And where’s the government finding that money? Taxpayer dollars. So either you have a mass cancellation or you have a bunch of taxpayers over the next few decades bailing it out. The same way that I think people are running around saying, we’re going to run out of Social Security payments in the next decade, and guess who’s going to have to pay for all of the elderly who expect their checks young people today. And so all of these older people are complaining about how they have to bail out student loan borrowers because they feel like, hey, I repaid my student loans or I never had to pay. Maybe they were lucky. They had $5,000 college tuition and they’re like, what is this $50,000 of student debt? I think there’s a lot of intergenerational warfare around these issues because it’s like, who’s paying for who? 

Will Sealy
Young people now have to pay for old people. Old people have to bail out young people for very different problems. Both of them are real. The costs are too high. And I think I feel now, twelve years later, kind of bummed that we haven’t made a lot of progress. If biden’s cancellation goes through, which I’m rooting for, I do hope it goes through. I know there are a lot of people who stand against it. I do think borrowers need the help. And it will do a lot of good to flush the system of what is predominantly people with under $10,000 of student debt, who’ve just struggled to pay off that last bit, who are struggling financially, and then everyone else who has the $300,000 MBA that’s making 400k or 200k, whatever in a good job, a high paying job, they will be okay. They will still get through that, and they will pay that off. 

Will Sealy
And I know it’s not just MBAs that are in the camp of people who won’t have debt forgiven. The JDS, the MDS, there’s a whole slew of higher income earners in that camp, but they will generally be okay. I do think though, we need to look after everyone else, but just to rest this long explanation and put it to bed. I will say we need to fix the cost of tuition, and we need to find a better way to put guardrails in place so colleges can’t just keep raising tuition year over year and that we do a better job of subsidizing state education programs where those budgets have been cut ever since the 2008 financial crisis and they haven’t come back. And so even state schools are now looking as expensive as some private schools, and that’s a problem too. So until we fix this, it’s just going to get worse. 

Brett
And how do we fix this problem? Because let’s just say that the student debt forgiveness passes, and then aren’t we just going to be back to square one after that? How do you actually address these problems? Or is that outside of the scope of what you’re thinking about day to day? 

Will Sealy
Oh, no, I’m thinking about all of it. But Brett, it’s a great question. Look, I don’t have all the answers, but what I can say is, yes, you are exactly right. Say cancellation does go through, and unfortunately, given the state of the Supreme Court, it’s looking likely it actually won’t go through. It’s not a guarantee either way, but it does look like the 63 conservative split on the court will rule against the administration on this one, but we’ll find out in a few months. But either way, either debt is canceled and it’s replenished, the 1.7 trillion will naturally replenish in about five to seven years, maybe ten, depending on the rate of tuition and college attendance. But it will grow quite quickly back, at which point, I don’t think the American taxpayer is excited about a rolling debt jubilee every five to ten years. And it creates all kinds of perverse incentives in the system where if you’re a freshman in college and you just think that, well, maybe I’ll get lucky and just like my older brother, my debt will be canceled, so I’m going to borrow extra and spend all that money on video games or whatever. 

Will Sealy
I don’t think there’s too many people like that. But it creates perverse incentives if people think that the loans they’re taking out for school are not actually going to need to be repaid. And so I don’t think this is a good system. I do think that we need to increase taxes and fund higher education on the front end so that people aren’t racking up $100,000 of student debt. I do think we need more awareness about which degrees are going to help people repay the loan. There’s a lack of financial literacy in this country. Somehow you could graduate top of your class from Harvard University and never be once taught what an interest rate is and what a loan is. No one’s stopping you. You can go all the way, and that’s insane. I think we need financial literacy courses as early as elementary school, but definitely high school before you go to college, before you start thinking about student loans. 

Will Sealy
And I think that colleges need to be held accountable. I think there needs to be a lot more accountability as to the cost of tuition. They need to have skin in the game. I think the government’s tried to enforce, like, cohort default rates, meaning three years after graduation, how many students after they’ve graduated have defaulted on their loans, and there are consequences to losing Title Four funding if you’re not meeting strict requirements. I think we need to really, actually increase and double down on regulations like that and make them more expansive and more aggressive, because it’s not done enough to slow down the risks of colleges leaving people with a ton of debt and unfortunately, really bad educations that aren’t necessarily letting them reach an earning potential that allows them to repay their loans. So, again, sort of, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, elizabeth Warren’s vision for the CFPB, kind of the three legged stool like supervision, enforcement and education those are three lenses in which to approach the college cost problem. 

Will Sealy
Supervising colleges to make sure that they’re not jacking up tuition and that students have better outcomes enforcing it. So it’s actually being a cop on the beat and monitoring it, but also the literacy, the education is going to be key for the consumer going through the process. 

Brett
And are you hopeful that the cost of tuition is really going to go down? Like, if you have kids now, let’s just say in 18 years when they start going to school, do you think tuition is going to be much more affordable for them? 

Will Sealy
Realistically, inflation adjusted, I hope it’s, at least within reason. I do worry about the $500,000 undergraduate tuition bill that we’re not that far away from. Again, when you look at an inflation adjusted, it’s a little bit different. But I do think that it’s not slowing down and not nearly at the rate we need it to. But again, I think you’ve heard President Biden talk about college affordability and free community college, and it did not get through Congress. That’s a problem. And I do think that it’s, sadly just a start. Like, free community college is a good step, but community college degrees relative to other college degrees, state schools, two and four year public schools, they’re much more affordable. So it’s just dipping our toes in the water to make a free college future. And inevitably, we just need to think bigger. 

Brett
Now, last question. Since I know we’re up on time here, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s next for Summer, and what do you have planned and what do you think the company is going to look like three to five years from today? 

Will Sealy
Yeah, Brett, it’s a great question. One of the things I’m just really passionate about is consumer finance more broadly and really helping people navigate all types of tough financial decisions. One of the things that makes Summer so exciting to employers that provide us to their employees is that we employ smart tech and couple it with smart people. And what we found is that is a perfect antidote is best antidote as we can find in order to solve all the different types of generations within the workplace. And so you have young people who are like, I don’t even pick up the phone when my mom calls. I only text. And you’re like, great. Okay. How do we work with someone like that all the way through to someone who’s like, I do not do finances through an app. Absolutely not. I have to talk to someone. 

Will Sealy
And so we solve both of those problems, and we have built systems to be able to do that really well for the employers that we serve and the employee base that we represent, or that we serve as well. So as I look to the future, we have incredible technology. We’ve built almost a TurboTax like product to navigate borrowers through over 120 federal and state loan assistance programs, saving them an average of $30,000 a year. And these are incredibly complex financial forms that the government puts out. Some are 1718 pages long. And you have to make a lot of complex decisions along the way. It takes into account your AGI, your marital status. It takes into account of state of residency, number of dependents. It’s like filing your taxes. And these programs can really help people, but in many ways, they’re incredibly difficult to navigate. And that’s what we’ve hacked, that’s what we’ve solved. 

Will Sealy
And so we’ve now added college savings planning so that people can navigate college costs on the front end. We’ve added tuition assistance so that people can enroll in educational systems while they’re working to take a course in statistics or a course in marketing that would allow them to be even more impactful in their job. And as I look to the future, I think there’s all kinds of financial literacy and consumer financial problems that are adjacent to this that are equally as difficult but would be as impactful to solve as well. And so when I look to the future, I’m excited about building out our offering along those lines, helping our clients as they tell us what they care about, for example, emergency savings accounts and how few Americans can afford $1,000 unexpected hit to their finances. It’s about 66% could not afford it. Being able to also support those employees through emergency savings planning in addition to maximizing their savings from their student loans and maybe even redirecting the student loan savings into an emergency savings account or into other family planning type products and services that can help them plan for a better future. 

Will Sealy
All of that excites me about the future for Summer. Amazing. 

Brett
I love it. All right, well, we’re going to have to wrap here. You definitely left us wanting more, and I’d love to keep you on and keep asking you more and more questions, but we’ll have to save that for round two before we wrap up here. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go? 

Will Sealy
Yeah. meetsummer.com awesome. 

Brett
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story, educate myself and the audience, and really demonstrate that there are entrepreneurs out there that are truly mission driven and building technology that solves major problems. So thank you so much, really appreciate it and wish you best of luck in executing on this vision. 

Will Sealy
Thanks so much. 

Brett
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