Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is the revenue trajectory that you can share? How many subscribers do you have? What is the situation now?

Eytan Bensoussan: We don’t share specifics on that. What COVID did for us was, it actually put jet fuel in the engine and nobody told us. We thought it was the end of everything. Small businesses in America were looking for some sort of a banking offering that could be run from their basement. It turned a lot of eyes on folks like us and others in our space who are designed for branchless banking. The company grew dramatically.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: NorthOne CEO Eytan Bensoussan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very crucial point where you raise your first institutional round of financing. It doesn’t have to be an institutional round, but it has to be a seed round. How much was the seed round?

Eytan Bensoussan: It was $1.7 million.

Sramana Mitra: The investors are from New York??

584th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Bhaskar Ghosh, 8VC

Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC, discusses his firm’s investment thesis, and we have an interesting discussion about the definition of a “good” entrepreneur.

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August 11 – 585th 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 585th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, August 11, 2022, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 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!

Roundtable Recap: July 28 – What is a “Good” Entrepreneur?

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC, discussing his firm’s investment thesis. We had an interesting discussion about the definition of a “good” entrepreneur.

UpTerra

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Roland Van der Meer from San Francisco, California, pitch UpTerra, a fascinating AgTech company that is already at $3M in revenue.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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584th Roundtable Recording with Bhaskar Ghosh, 8VC

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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.

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.