Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 1)

In the past year, 330 out of 1200 Unicorns have lost status. You read a lot about Unicorns that raise lots of VC money and then fail to scale. Cynthia Chen tells a very different story. She has raised about $43M and built a highly profitable $100M+ ARR company called Kikoff. Read on to learn how.

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Building a $100M+ FinTech Venture from Michigan: Ryan Rosett, Founder and Co-CEO of Credibly (Part 1)

Ryan has bootstrapped a FinTech small business lending business from Michigan, raised Private Equity funding to scale, and then bought the PE stake back through a Management Buy-out. Excellent case study!

Sramana Mitra: All right, Ryan, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 1)

Felix has done nine ventures and sold several of them. He is currently building a venture-funded,
AI-enabled FinTech venture. Really intelligent, scrappy maneuvering in various alleys of online entrepreneurship.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

In this case study, Cognaize Founder Vahe Andonians talks a lot about bootstrapping – bootstrapping to exit, bootstrapping with services, so on. You will also learn a nifty way of building domain knowledge on top of horizontal AI expertise. This is a valuable and extremely interesting way of building AI companies for entrepreneurs to consider.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Vahe Andonians: I was born in Iran. When I was a couple of weeks old, we moved to the United States. Then my parents moved to Austria. I grew up in Austria. I studied there. I studied high-frequency technology. I did my first job there. From there, we went to Germany. I’ve lived in Germany now for 12 years.

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Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 1)

In this case study, you will hear Vahe talk a lot about bootstrapping – bootstrapping to exit, bootstrapping with services, so on. You will also learn a nifty way of building domain knowledge on top of horizontal AI expertise. This is a valuable and extremely interesting way of building AI companies for entrepreneurs to consider.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a FinTech Startup by Piggybacking with Services

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Quavo Co-founder David Chmielewski transitioned from a developer to an entrepreneur by leveraging his solid domain knowledge in a particular area of FinTech: dispute resolution for credit card transactions. He and his co-founders effectively used bootstrapping using services and piggybacked on the Pega Systems platform. Read on to learn more about his journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

David Chmielewski: I was born in Michigan in a small tourism-driven town. They have good schools but generally not a tremendous amount of job opportunities if you wanted to do something in technology. I was one of the lucky people who always knew what I wanted to do. I was exposed to computers pretty early.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Diversyfund CEO Craig Cecilio (Part 1)

The Jobs Act has introduced the notion of democratization in investing. The issue is not as simple as it sounds. There are lots of gaps in doing this safely.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Evgen Verzun, CEO of Kaizen Finance (Part 1)

Ukrainian serial entrepreneur Evgen Verzun discusses the cesspool of Cyber Security problems within the Crypto space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Thought Leader in Financial Technology: DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba (Part 1)

Equity Crowdfunding is evolving. This conversation highlights some of the trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to DealMaker.

Rebecca Kacaba: I was a capital market attorney for over a decade before founding DealMaker. The idea for DealMaker was born out of the problems my clients were having in trying to raise capital. It was too expensive and it was taking too long. I wanted to solve these problems for them.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sankaet Pathak, CEO of Synapse (Part 1)

Sankaet is building interesting infrastructure products for FinTech. Lots of insights, also, on open opportunities within the field for new entrepreneurs to latch onto.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Synapse.

Sankaet Pathak: I’m the Founder and CEO of Synapse. If you haven’t heard of Synapse, we are what’s considered a Banking-as-a-Service provider based in San Francisco.