Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Hotelplanner.com to $20M with Intelligent Financial Engineering

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

Tim Hentschel, CEO of Hotelplanner.com, built an excellent company with quite unorthodox financial engineering decisions that have played out very well for him. Read on to learn about some out-of-the-box thinking.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Tim Hentschel: I was from the West Coast originally, from as far as Hawaii where my family owns some hotels and also a large tour operation company. I left Hawaii when I was 13 to move to Carmel, California where I went to high school. Then, I moved east to New York where I attended Cornell University for hospitality management.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Infima Founder and Chief Scientist Kay Giesecke (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You built this model at Stanford and then you spun out a company on top of that model. What is going on with bringing this to market like commercializing this? What is the business model? What is the go-to-market strategy? Is it selling to banks?

Kay Giesecke: If you take that mortgage slice, you can divide it into different customer segments. If you want to start at the lifecycle of the mortgage, it always is the bank. What happens then is that the banks collect bundles of mortgages, take them over to a government agency, and they turn these bundle of mortgages into securities that are then bought up by investors and banks. That’s the full lifecycle.

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Infima Founder and Chief Scientist Kay Giesecke (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the nuggets that you’ve learned?

Kay Giesecke: We learned that the behavioral patterns are very complex. Let’s just focus on homeowners. There are the lenders. They look at applications for mortgage loans. They need to decide if this person is creditworthy enough for a home mortgage that’s backed by a specific home that they’d like to purchase. They have to assess the chance that this person is going to be able to repay the mortgage on time over the term of the mortgage.

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Thursday, Jan. 19 – 598th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 598th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, January 19, 2023, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Infima Founder and Chief Scientist Kay Giesecke (Part 1)

Kay is a Stanford professor. He has applied Deep Learning models to various use cases within the Mortgage and Mortgage-backed Securities space to build Decision Support tools for Traders and Portfolio Managers. The general principle applies to other forms of credit as well, besides Mortgage.

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

Catching Up On Readings: Chip Wars

This feature from The Wall Street Journal covers in detail how chips have become the new oil and how the two superpowers are racing for dominance in the industry and artificial intelligence. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Thursday, January 19 – 598th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 598th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, January 19, 2023, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

You can learn more here and REGISTER TO PITCH OR ATTEND HERE. Register and you will receive the recording by email, even if you are unable to attend. Please share with any entrepreneurs in your circle who may be interested. All are welcome!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sergey Jakimov, Co-Founder and Partner at LongeVC (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is the opportunity for gene editing before a baby is born. Then there is the opportunity for gene editing later in life.

Sergey Jakimov: There is a huge ethical component. If you leave that aside, what makes total sense is identifying potential life-threatening diseases or disabilities with DNA-driven factors for unborn babies and introducing these changes early on so that the new person gets to live a normal life. That’s totally fine by me.