Collis and Cyan Ta’eed are the founders of Envato, an online creative marketplace. They founded Envato together after having ran a freelance design agency together out of Australia. Collis studied math and science while Cyan earned her degree in design. Sramana: Let’s start at the beginning of your personal stories. What leads up to Envato?
Sramana: In your industry there must be issues around the APIs of various payment infrastructures and data systems. Some are easier to tie into now; for example, you can tie into PayPal via an API and run your algorithms on that data. Is that becoming the standard? Marc Gorlin: It is tremendously helpful to have
Sramana: What has been the financing structure of your business? Where does the capital come from, and how did you put the pieces together to create this business? Marc Gorlin: It has been different at different times. In many ways it was harder to raise our first $25,000 than it was to raise our last
Sramana: How many customers do you have, and what is the nature of their use of Kabbage? Marc Gorlin: We have north of 65,000 customers. Not all of them are active at one time. We put out north of 30,000 advances. That is one of the things that is unique about our platform. You have
Sramana: What is the formula for calculating how much money people can get against their recievables? Marc Gorlin: That is part of our secret sauce. However, it takes into account various data sources and different sources have different values. Nobody, unlike any other financial institution, gets turned down solely based on their credit score. We
Sramana: What did you do after VerticalOne? Marc Gorlin: I went back to the recruiting firm I had, and I also helped a bunch of startups in the interim. I also looked at deals in Atlanta for some investors as well. It was a good time to focus on family and real estate and do
Sramana: When you had those initial conversations, what was the consensus on identifying a company-building opportunity? Marc Gorlin: The concept was to take a worldwide known brand, PGP, and turn it into a product that corporations could buy to protect their digitally sensitive information. It was not something that you would normally see done because
Marc Gorlin is the co-founder of Kabbage and a serial entrepreneur. In 1996 he was a co-founder of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and oversaw the financing and eventual sell of PGP to Network Associates in 1997. After PGP Marc co-founded VerticalOne, a content personalization service that was sold to S1 Corporation. Marc is also a