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Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 3)

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 test out the technology with $1 million. I had provided them a budget. I had thought this all through in advance.

Sramana Mitra: You were thinking of launching this network on somebody else’s brand, and white-labeling this for other people’s brand?

Jason Hogg: No, I wanted to create a brand. I was thinking big. At that time, this concept of white-labeling was not as prolific as it is now.

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to create a brand and they were willing to finance you to create a brand? >>>

Buying Control Back from VCs: Jason Robbins, CEO of ePromos (Part 1)

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 your journey. Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jason Robbins: I was born in Brooklyn and did most of my studies at Syracuse in the New York area. I worked at Manhattan. I went to Columbia for my MBA. I’ve been around the country and the world a lot but most of my stuff has been in the New York area. Most recently, I picked up and moved from New York to Florida. I have been living in Florida with my entire family since August. >>>

Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 2)

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 opportunities and a lot of brilliant and creative entrepreneurs who did not have hard skills and operating experience.

It was, for me, fortuitous because I did not have the entrepreneurial experience but was able to bring the other side of the equation to bear. I was introduced to Argentum Group, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase Capital Partners, and First Analysis. The four had co-invested in a series of investments. So began my entrepreneurial journey stepping into a couple of portfolio companies that needed turning around.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do turnaround work? >>>

Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 7)

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 first financing round was led by First Round Capital, which is a seed-stage venture capital firm that has offices both on the East Coast and the West Coast. That was a $2 million financing round. We started in 2009 and raised about $3 million. Then in 2012, we started to accelerate the customer growth of the business and we raised >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 7)

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. Instead of just saying A/B testing, I would say data-driven would characterize it better. When you interview a candidate, for example, you’re not A/B testing, but you can apply the same data-driven mentality. Another very overlapping area that is very core to my philosophy on how I do things is the philosophy of continuous improvement. I absolutely believe in this up to this day and it is applicable to individuals, teams, and companies. It doesn’t matter so much on where you start. What matters more is the velocity at which you improve and move forward. That, I believe, is super critical, especially for startups. Velocity is the name of the game. >>>

Innovating in Fintech: Jason Hogg, CEO of Lending.com (Part 1)

FinTech is hot these days. Jason has particular expertise in the segment, and he discusses his multiple ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your personal story. Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jason Hogg: I’m from New York originally and grew up just outside the city. My dad was actually the CEO of MasterCard, which was located in the city at that time. Before that, he had been with American Express and ran their international business. I ended up spending my early youth in England as well. I was born in the States, moved over to England for a few years, and then came back.

Sramana Mitra: After high school, what did you do in terms of further education? >>>

Building a Capital Marketplace for Mid-Market Businesses: Axial CEO Peter Lehrman (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you acquire members for your community? What is the marketing strategy? How do people find out about you?

Peter Lehrman: We have a couple of different strategies for the different markets that we’re pursuing. We pursue sources of capital and the investment banking and business brokerage community. Beginning in 2014, we began to market directly to entrepreneurs and CEOs in each of these industries.

Sramana Mitra: When you say you’re marketing directly to them, what kind of customer acquisition strategies are you using?

Peter Lehrman: I was just laying out the three different categories because our strategies are different in each of those categories. In the investor category, one of the most effective acquisition techniques is events-based marketing. We both attend a lot of industry events and we also >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to a bit more of a chronological story. I understand the philosophy of how you built the company. It’s very interesting what you can do today in terms of really doing these kinds of testing on all marketing exercises at a very dramatic level. Today’s world allows you to do things that it didn’t allow earlier on. It’s really extremely effective if you have the mental bent to be able to do it in a rigorous scientific mathematically-oriented way. Talk about some of the strategic things that you did in the course of 2007. What were the inflection points? I get it that you were growing at 100%. What were some of the strategic moves?

Andrew Filev: A lot of it comes down to the product. Over the years, we had completely rewritten the product. We didn’t put the business on hold for a year. It was more of a gradual rewrite. I think, right now, every single piece of code that we have has probably been rewritten. Over the years, we’ve always interacted very closely with customers and got their feedback both at mass and individual levels. We wanted to understand how they run their businesses, what challenges they’re seeing, and how we can be helpful for them to resolve those challenges. Doing that continuously over the years, we’ve learned a ton. That got reflected to the product a lot. >>>