5 years to the day
May 15, 2023
Today marks an important milestone in our company’s life. Five years ago to the day, we officially incorporated ourselves in our small office in Tribeca that we shared with a few other companies. Five years later and I could have never imagined we’d be what we are today.
Startups are hard and the odds are stacked against you. 50% of companies fail in the first year, 90% fail after three and 99% shutter their doors after five. To get to where we are today and to be in the position that we are is a testament to all of you and to all of our team members over the years who are forever a part of our story.
And oh what a story it is.
There are enough anecdotes to fill an entire book one day about all of our highs and lows. We started this company with the vision that we could transform alternative investments for the better, providing investors with shorter duration, lower minimum investments… and on the blockchain. Security tokens, minting Ethereum contracts, all of that seems like eons ago. In going down this path, we realized very quickly that it wasn’t blockchain we needed, it was real technology and the market was bigger than we could have ever imagined.
From then on, every challenge we faced actually worked its way towards becoming a part of our grander plan.
Only by launching our initial investment platform and underwriting deals ourselves did we realize we needed order book management, compliance tools, and asset surveillance capabilities. It forced us to challenge our original business plan and recognize that it wasn't a big enough idea - there was no point in building another YieldStreet, we had to dream bigger.
We needed to prove out partnerships ahead of our Seed round and so we tried to partner with Bloomberg to make an app on their App Portal that we realized very quickly we were in no way equipped to support. Still, launching it pushed us to think about standardized data and indices that are now coming into full force in the Markets tabs.
Revenue growth was slower than expected in 2019 so we took on an incredibly complicated and difficult deal in [ ] and somehow managed to close it one week before the world shut down with COVID when no one would ever want to invest in a restaurant franchise business. Yet it was that deal that helped turn our institutional business into a key revenue generator for us that helped prove out our capabilities and build out our reputation in the industry that we're still leveraging to this day with prospective underwriters.
We had to at some point demonstrate why we were a software company ahead of the Series A, so we launched a very basic Borrower portal in 2020 just so we could start laying the foundation to charge monthly SaaS fees. This model now underpins every software suite we sell today.
When the venture equity market turned in 2022, we used our platform to raise venture debt for ourselves to extend our runway just in the nick of time. This became a proving ground for our entry into the asset class that is now paying dividends and it managed to even bring Nomura into the fold as a partner and customer.
Throughout the Series B fundraising process, we had to prove underwriters actually wanted our product and so we pushed to try and find a way to close one deal, any deal, just to show the business was viable. [ ] reached out with an idea and we latched onto it to push the deal through. This deal became the de facto case study for early Series B investors and helped us in the sales process with the first batch of new underwriters to get to where we are today.
These are just a fraction of the challenges, mistakes, and learnings that we've experienced over these past few years. More than anything else, these stories prove that it's engrained in our DNA to fight, to claw, and to persevere. Nothing comes easy but we are nothing if not creative, innovative, and incredible executers. To succeed takes a little bit of luck, a willingness to capitalize on opportunities that emerge, and a metric ton of hard work. Looking back, it has been the absolute privilege of a lifetime to have spent these past five years building this company with all of you. This is our company, not my company, and I know for certain that with this team, our best years are ahead of us not behind us. I couldn’t be more proud and excited to be on this journey with all of you. Here’s to the next five years 🥂
