Sramana Mitra: Let’s come to where you are now. Help me understand your business better. What’s happening on the platform? Who’s doing what? How are you getting paid? What do you need in terms of infrastructure to make your model work? Sergio Furio: Today, BankFacil is a secure lending platform. We are a digital lender.
Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to? Martin Manniche: 2005. Then the first new thing for me was that I was no more working for myself. I was joining a big company. I worked for Cisco Consumers Group where I eventually became the CTO. That was an interesting journey – coming in as a Senior Director
Sergio Furio: We actually ended up doing exactly what we were seeing at that point, but there were too many question marks. We raised money from a couple of seed funds – one from Brazil and another from the Czech Republic. That was 25% of the round. Another 50% was from a set of 8
Martin Manniche: In a very short period of time, I figured out that I really liked understanding the technology and the software. I picked it off fairly quickly. When I was out delivering these products, every time I would sell them something. I started, together with my brother, a component distribution company for distributing memory,
Sramana Mitra: While you were experimenting with lead generation and doing it on a shoestring experimentation mode, what kind of revenue level did you reach with that? Was that something that you used to bootstrap the new idea? Sergio Furio: The reason why we were doing lead generation at that point was that it was
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 339th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, February 9, 2017, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
Martin is a serial entrepreneur with nine startups under his belt. This story traces his journey from Copenhagen to California with a focus on his latest venture Greenwave that has already scaled to over $50 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were