September 18, 2023

Another week, another milestone achievement. On Friday afternoon, we officially closed our credit facility with [ ], something that's been months in the making. We're taking a three-pronged approach to hitting our AUM target and there's nothing like a nice $[ ]M boost to help us get there faster. While it won't be immediate and there's a few rules we have to follow, the groundwork is there to start deploying their capital as early as next month. 

Here’s the journey I went on as a founder and what I learned at each stage. Most founder advice tells you to delegate fast and focus on your strengths. After six years of building Percent, a private credit marketplace, from $80,000 in credit card debt to a Series B, I believe the opposite: The founders who win are the ones who do wear every hat as they go through their journey.

In this episode, I sit down with Bryan Pham, our Head of Institutional Sales, to talk about the launch of our Separately Managed Accounts and why we built them. Bryan came from the other side of the table—JP Morgan, family offices—and he’s lived the exact frustrations we’re now solving. We dig into why institutional money moves differently than retail, the phone calls that made us realize Blended Notes weren’t enough, and how we’re making SMAs accessible at $100K instead of the typical $500K+.

September 11, 2023

Companies are constantly maturing and evolving and often times things reach a point where the processes, policies, and practices that got them there need to be revamped to help them reach their next stage. Sometimes this stems from growth in the team's size, other times it's the result of fundamental changes in the business. Still, the theme above all else is a willingness and desire to adapt and change.

September 5, 2023

As we get closer to the day when we have the multi-market software suite ready to launch, we've been putting in the work to ensure we find the right anchor client to go to market with first to help us get our legs underneath us. An anchor client like this should ideally meet certain criteria:

We built a durable marketplace. Now the industry needs infrastructure, and that starts with me returning to square one. It won’t be forever, but six to twelve months of trench time will compound for years.

In 2018, my company had a marketplace with investors lined up, no borrowers and 60 days to close a deal or lose our equity funding. That scramble taught me the toughest truth about marketplaces: Getting both sides to believe in something that doesn’t exist yet matters more than the launch itself.

If you're building a marketplace from scratch, here's what you’ll likely face before launch, and what you need to know to make the market believe in your product.

August 28, 2023

As we head into Labor Day weekend and the last weekend of summer, I wanted to express how proud I am of each and every one of you for what we've accomplished not just this year but this summer alone. It's been an incredible few months and the pace at which we're getting things done (deals, releases, fixes, clients onboarded, investors acquired, and more) is at a level of which the company has never seen before.

August 21, 2023

We're not one to waste time, that's for sure. Fresh off our broker dealer approval, we managed to launch and close a new offering that simply wasn't possible before. Limited partnership (LP) interests in funds are the first of many new asset classes we can expand into, allowing our investors to become institutional investors in the truest sense of the word.

I sit down with Marc Andrew, who's become a leading voice in private markets by putting the right people in the right room together. We cover the slow decline of public listings, why firms can’t run on Excel anymore, and how AI, cloud, and interoperable data are opening real build zones. It’s a deep dive into the unsexy but essential plumbing for the future of finance.

August 14, 2023

Finally, two years after we first kicked off the discussion around becoming a broker dealer, we officially have our application approved. To say this was a journey is an understatement - the amount of times we had to explain what we do, outline how our business operates, answer the same questions again and again, and then re-explain all over to another group who needed the same explanation but worded differently, was an exercise in persistence like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

August 7, 2023

Heading into our board meeting last week, there was cause for concern. AUM has been stagnant, we missed on our revenue targets as a result of the broker dealer delays, and software revenue still needs time to be realized. And yet the sentiment all throughout the meeting was one of optimism and momentum. There's an undertone of growth and opportunity that this company has not felt in years.

Private credit funds often use “volatility laundering” to make returns look smoother than they are. In this episode, I talk about why Percent decided to do things differently, what radical transparency looks like in practice, and how sharing the full story with investors has helped us build lasting trust and a stronger business.

July 31, 2023

Another quarter is in the books heading into our Q2 board meeting this week and we have a lot to be proud of despite the headwinds facing the business, from delays in broker dealer approval to challenges with getting more institutional capital on board. Despite all this, we managed to top revenue forecasts after backing out the broker dealer servicing fees. The acceleration from here, though, becomes all the more challenging.

July 24, 2023

Before this year, we had focused most of our efforts on acquiring accredited investors as we had a strategy that had proven itself effective through digital ad campaigns and other means to get them on board. As we had seen in the past though, in times of market volatility, accredited investors become more fearful and they tend to invest less or pull out altogether.