Best of Bootstrapping: Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck from Indiana

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  One Click Ventures Co-founders Angie Stocklin and her husband built a portfolio of e-commerce businesses using a very unusual strategy. I had a lot of fun learning about their journey back in 2016, and hope you will as well. One Click Internet Ventures was acquired by

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Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at right now? Todd Schwartz: This year, we’re in the over $400 million range. Sramana Mitra: When did you go public? Todd Schwartz: In 2021 on the NYSE. When I walked up to the stock exchange, it was never about financial gain. It’s so funny to me to see

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $100M from The Netherlands

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.  Pierre and Fred Guelen bootstrapped Planon, a very significant company from The Netherlands, using the bootstrapping using services principle. Read this conversation from 2016 to learn more. Sramana Mitra: We’re going to start at the very beginning of your personal journeys. One of you please start

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Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about going beyond Illinois? How long did you do just Illinois? Todd Schwartz: We scale nationally now. What was interesting to me was there were 17 other states that had small-dollar lending laws that we could use. What’s difficult is that each state has its own rules. We started to scale that

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Catching Up On Readings: Top 10 Strategic Tech Trends 2023

This feature from Gartner identifies the top ten strategic technology trends that organizations should explore in 2023. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about the technology? Did you build all that? Todd Schwartz: I do not believe in going out and blowing a bunch of equity to build this beautiful shiny technology system. In four years, it’s probably not going to be the best system with the rate of change. I used off-the-shelf solutions and

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596th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Julien Pham, Third Culture Capital

Julien Pham is Founder and Managing Director at Third Culture Capital (3CC), a firm focused on investing in the healthcare space.

Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 3)

Todd Schwartz: The technology wasn’t there. I didn’t know anything about lending. I didn’t know any other way to do it except take $100,000 of my own savings and open a one-room office in the north side of Chicago, get a printer, and use Excel to originate loans. I applied for the CILO license. Six

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