This is a blog dedicated to building in public, where founders can see what goes on behind the scenes at a venture-backed startup. Weekly internal team emails (on a delay) are juxtaposed against interviews and articles published in real-time.
Yet another first for the industry
May 16, 2022
We continue to make good progress on [ ] and we will soon be able to offer the first ever credit protection product for private credit markets. To start, we're going to be layering it into just our blended notes and not a note for any individual borrower as we want to ensure that in the event of a default, we don't damage their long term prospects for success. We're tracking well towards launching the first blended note with credit protection coverage on June 1st. There's been a few key developments in recent weeks that are making all of this possible.
Four
May 9, 2022
This week is a very special one as we come together to celebrate four years of our company's life. It's been four years of trying to reinvent private credit markets from the ground up. Four years of learning, testing, building, shipping, and doing it all over again. And most important of all, four years of bringing together a world class team that I would argue rivals the best of any company out there.
Learning by doing
May 2, 2022
Our webinar last week highlighted the first of a few underwriters who are gearing up to join the platform when we officially launch the Underwriter portal to the public in a few weeks time. This is a watershed moment for our company, one where our ability to live up to the hype and realize our vision of becoming an infrastructure provider is realized for the very first time. We're incredibly fortunate to have the likes of underwriters like [ ] and several others in our pipeline who have the skillset, the network, and the desire to seek out innovation in an industry that's as archaic as they come.
Making up for two quarters in one month
April 25, 2022
Coming off of a quarter where we only had [ ] new borrower join the platform and just [ ] onboard in the past two quarters, we made it a priority in April to push new borrowers forward. As a result of that, in April alone we've already launched [ ], are slated to launch another before the end of the week, and are in the final stages of discussions for another that is navigating some final legal hurdles as a result of having a co-underwriter.
Moving in the right direction
April 18, 2022
As we cross the middle of the month, we are tracking well on the objectives we laid out in the all-hands. One of the big focuses this month was on getting Underwriter out the door and ready for prime time in May for third party underwriters to use for the very first time. Credit to the Product and Engineering teams for going heads down and reprioritizing what needs to get done to help hit this target, especially given how many dependencies were tied to getting this out the door.
It's time to get tactical
April 11, 2022
One of the core values of our company is to be transparent with all of you around not just positive and developmental feedback for you individually but also how we are doing as a company. More than just doing an all-hands, my job and the management team's job is to hold ourselves accountable how we are tracking towards our objectives for the year and for you to know how we're progressing. To that end, we are re-tooling our weekly standups to be extremely tactical, focused on the major objectives for the year (e.g. revenue targets) and critical objectives for the month that unlock our other objectives for the rest of the year.
Rising to the occasion
April 4, 2022
Coming out of our all-hands on Friday, our objectives for the next month leading into the rest of the year are more clear than ever. I encourage all of you to look at these 2022 Strategic Initiatives in detail, either in PDF form or on Monday. Above all else, what's important to highlight is just how important each and every one of you are in bringing these objectives to life.
Our next 9 months
March 28, 2022
As we wrap up Q1, our objectives for the rest of the year are becoming all the more clear. Many of these initiatives are ones that span across teams and everyone will have to work together to execute these to perfection. A high level overview is below and I will be outlining them in much more detail in our all-hands on Friday this week.
Our path to $[ ]M+
March 21, 2022
We are being measured against our revenue for this year and our ability to hit the targets we’ve set for ourselves across our recurring revenue and our transaction revenue. On our path to $[ ]M+ in revenue, around half of that will come from our broker dealer’s transaction revenue, where we will be delivering on our promise of seeing our borrowers through their entire capital markets life, all the way through to when they hit the institutional markets.
Levers for growth
March 14, 2022
As we grow out from our identity as a Series A company, there is an ideological shift from just finding product market fit to understanding how to develop and adjust the growth levers of our business to reach scale.
Team, vision, product.... and revenue
March 7, 2022
As you heard in the all-hands on Friday, we've had tremendously positive feedback from VCs about our team, our vision, and everything we've built so far. The only pushback we've gotten has been around revenues, even though we've been limited by what we can do as the only underwriter on the platform to date. The past few years have spent experimenting, finding product market fit, and validating our vision with underwriters, investors, and borrowers alike, getting us to where we are today and building a fantastic foundation for our vision. The next few years have to be about how we turn that vision into a reality.
Data rules our world
February 28, 2022
We've had a lot of questions in the past around what the IP we acquired is and how it actually fits into our broader vision. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of our engineering team, we were able to do our first demo of the platform with a VC who also has a credit fund and they came away incredibly impressed. The technology has the ability to essentially provide real-time surveillance on underlying small business borrowers, breaking down their receivables, payables, inventory, machinery, etc., graphed out over time with the ability to flag any anomalies along the way.
Ready for our next asset class
February 22, 2022
We always know how to move quickly around here, that's for sure! For something that was just an idea a few weeks back to a full fledged launch of a brand new product offering last week, the pace at which we ship is remarkable to see. As we had outlined in the last all-hands, our next asset class after fintech lender finance is going to be venture loans. Instead of providing financing to lenders who then use it to expand their loan portfolios, we are now financing individual venture-backed companies who can use our capital to grow and scale their business to reach their next round of financing.
An overview of our company from end to end
February 14, 2022
It's been a full court press on the Series B front these past two weeks as I've taken 25 first round meetings with various different VCs at all sizes and scales. The consistent theme has been how impressed they are at the breadth of what we've built. Supporting 5 technology platforms simultaneously (borrowers, underwriters, investors, admin, surveillance) is no small feat and we've been able to continue to ship and deliver on product enhancements across all of them on a consistent basis.
All green lights for Anzen
February 7, 2022
I'm excited to share that Anzen is officially a go. Our binding letter of intent (LOI) has been signed and the board has signed off on our strategic partnership. To top it all off, Anzen also closed on their initial pre-seed round and are using our LOI to close on their seed round, which is looking like it will wrap up in the next week or so as well.