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mushufasaHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I spent time looking into this a couple years ago as a startup founder with this problem

I spent time looking into this a couple years ago as a startup founder with this problem. We are in the finance space so I saw how bad the treasury options were with our bank, given their fee cut versus plain T-bonds at the time. I looked into which brokerages allowed us to setup self-directed accounts (many banks don't offer that for businesses at all). I found the "correct" approach. But then there would be more paperwork and back and forth to set up that new account, then manage transferring money around when we needed it, logging into a different system. On a ski trip a friend in finance told me "you're being dumb, if your bank offers you a treasury plan with a one click button, even if it's not perfect, click that button now!" So I did. Then, the benefit of saving 1-2% extra versus spending my time trying to actually running the business and doing things with our money in the real world, has meant I have never looked back. 1-2% on millions of dollars is significant but it's not nearly as impactful as finding Product-Market-Fit in your actual business. …

Original discussionLaunch HN: Palus Finance (YC W26): Better yields on idle cash for startups, SMBs92 source comments · at import
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SA
sam_palusHN

Hi HN! We’re Sam and Michael from Palus Finance ( https://palus.finance ). We’re building a treasury management platform for startups and SMBs to earn higher yields with a high-yield bond portfolio. We were funded by YC for a consumer-focused product for higher-yield savings. But when we joined YC and got our funding, we realized we needed the product for our own startup’s cash reserves, and other startups in the batch started telling us they wanted this too. We realized that traditional startup treasury products do much the same thing: open a brokerage account, sweep your cash into a money market fund (MMF), and charge a management fee. No strategy involved. (There is actually one widely-advertised treasury product that differentiates on yield, but instead of an MMF it uses a mutual fund where your principal is at considerable risk – it had a 9% loss in 2022 that took years to recover.)…

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SA
sam_palusHN

That's fair. But to your point, the problem we see is that banks' treasury products take advantage of founders who (rightfully) don't want to think about their treasury yields. That's why we designed Palus to be as simple as possible to use. If you check out our demo video, you'll see it's super straightforward. Setup takes <5 min and then you don't have to think about it anymore. We're also building out automatic sweep functionality, so then you REALLY won't have to think about it. Given the significant increase in returns on a large treasury, we think it's worth the small amount of effort.

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DI
digitallogicHN

> 1-2% on millions of dollars is significant but it's not nearly as impactful as finding Product-Market-Fit in your actual business. You've got really significant, broader lesson here for startups at this stage.

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