Sramana Mitra: What does that mean? Are we talking about a regular credit card issued that’s your card? Jason Hogg: It was a Revolution card. We had our own brand and our own network. When you walk into a CVS and you see a MasterCard, Visa, and AmEx sticker in the window, you would also
Jason Robbins: Frankly, I didn’t like my job. It was very clerical. I wanted to do more higher-end things that required me to think. More than one time, I was told, “You’re paid to do and not think.” I really wanted to improve my job and improve the organization. When they’re making $20 million a
Sramana Mitra: What year did you do the $10 million first round financing? Jason Hogg: It was a year later. We did the $10 million financing in May of 2006. I had this idea in my head when I made that connection that I told you about all the way back in 2001. It was
Sramana Mitra: At that point, what did you tell them? What were you going to deliver for them? Jason Hogg: I was going to build them the first non-proprietary credit card network in America that would simultaneously have peer-to-peer transfer capability which only PayPal had at that time. I could build a proof of concept to
Jason raised both angel round and a VC round early on, but eventually, the company turned out to be a good, solid, profitable business, but not the kind of rocket VCs like to fund. Read how he negotiated with them to gain control of the venture. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of
Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to now? Jason Hogg: We’re now in 2002. The timing was actually interesting because when I was graduating from Cornell, the first dot-com bomb had gone off. There were a series of venture capital and private equity shops that had made co-investments in a number of
Sramana Mitra: Was that $1 million in the beginning the only capital infusion or have you had other capital infusions? Peter Lehrman: Since then, we’ve raised another $20 million. Sramana Mitra: Walk me through the chronology of those rounds of financing. Peter Lehrman: The subsequent $20 million has been raised across three financing rounds. The
Sramana Mitra: Based on our conversation so far, I picked up two key philosophies on how you build your company. One is this extensive A/B testing to optimize your customer acquisition. The second is evolving the product continuously through customer input and iteration. Andrew Filev: It’s true but I would phrase it a little differently.