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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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oppfi
Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at right now? Todd Schwartz: This year, we’re in the over $400 million range. Sramana Mitra: When did you go public? Todd Schwartz: In 2021 on the NYSE. When I walked up to the stock exchange, it was never about financial gain. It’s so funny to me to see
Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: What about going beyond Illinois? How long did you do just Illinois? Todd Schwartz: We scale nationally now. What was interesting to me was there were 17 other states that had small-dollar lending laws that we could use. What’s difficult is that each state has its own rules. We started to scale that
Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What about the technology? Did you build all that? Todd Schwartz: I do not believe in going out and blowing a bunch of equity to build this beautiful shiny technology system. In four years, it’s probably not going to be the best system with the rate of change. I used off-the-shelf solutions and
Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 3)
Todd Schwartz: The technology wasn’t there. I didn’t know anything about lending. I didn’t know any other way to do it except take $100,000 of my own savings and open a one-room office in the north side of Chicago, get a printer, and use Excel to originate loans. I applied for the CILO license. Six
Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: How did you steer your career from that point on? Todd Schwartz: I went through the crisis of 2008. That’s when I learned a lion’s share of what I know today. I learned about investing. I learned about allocating capital. I learned what not to do. I learned it not from having success.
Building a Public FinTech Company From Scratch: OppFi CEO Todd Schwartz (Part 1)
Todd has built a public FinTech business with $7M of family money and another $8M of debt. OppFi went public in 2021. Impressive, capital-efficient, fundamentals-oriented journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background? Todd Schwartz:
