Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How were you financing a 15-people operation?

Eytan Bensoussan: A lot of it is personal. We had a very early investor who helped us out. Then it was about making the very tiny amount of money that we had last as if it was 10x the amount. This was about being scrappy, extremely thoughtful, and purposeful. Over time, there wasn’t enough. I had to start taking out of my savings and retirement and putting them into the company. Otherwise, you wouldn’t even have the opportunity to launch.

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In these kinds of conversations, I always ask for open problems that new entrepreneurs can solve. One of the problems that come to my mind is, I live a public life. The problem is all these fraudsters are able to access my entire LinkedIn following. I have all these LinkedIn followers who, to some degree, trust me.

I’m just using myself as a proxy. There are lots of people out there on other platforms. If the fraudsters use these brands and start phishing, that’s a very dangerous scenario. We are not doing anything to protect our followers because there’s no solution available. Even if I wanted to, I have no way of protecting my followers from this kind of phishing.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped First to $5M, Raised $10M Later

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

In 2019, French entrepreneur and Toucan Co-founder CEO Charles Miglietti told me the story of how he bootstrapped first to $5 million and then closed a $10 million round.

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?

Charles Miglietti: I’m from France. I grew up in Normandy. I did engineering. I’m married with three kids. 

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Which of these channels is producing? Is Google search producing the best?

Eytan Bensoussan: They’re changing almost every month. The growth team is not dogmatic about where we go. We have very specific constraints. We look for where people come in that have the attributes of the highest likelihood to use the product. Then the cost guardrails. That will shift meaningfully as the pricing on these channels puts them out of our budget or keeps them within. A lot of channels where you can put visual collateral help a lot.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you resolve that dichotomy?

Bill Bruno: One, you or someone pretending to be you is logging in. Let’s use an example that just happened with one of our customers. They had a situation where there was a large scam attempt where several users were receiving messages that were pretending to be the bank.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Freightwise to $33M

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

Freightwise was No. 2 on the Inc. 5000 for 2018. Amazing bootstrapping story from my conversation in 2019 with Freightwise CTO Richard Hoehn.

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?

Richard Hoehn: I grew up in Switzerland. I did an apprenticeship as a machinist – the tool and die maker. After three years, I decided I wanted to go back to school and learn more about computers and technology.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As a small business signing up for NorthOne, you sign the small business up for QuickBooks as well.

Eytan Bensoussan: We work with a lot of accounting suites. QuickBooks is one. A large number of our customers use them, so it’s top of mind. In many ways, what we’re trying to do is to be humble in the face of the existing operations of the business. You have an accounting suite. We’re not going to tell you to change that. We’ll take whatever is working and connect them all. After connecting to the bank platform, then the functionality comes alive.