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Greg Rogers

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2015-04-13

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2015-04-13

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1. “That's right. And so, what Dupay does is you get paid with a prepaid debit card and you have a smartphone app that controls that prepaid debit card and it allows you to do remittances. It allows you to top up your phone. It allows you to do all these different types of financial services. And of course, they can still go to an ATM and pull out cash if they want. But it's just a way, think of it almost as a new form of bank because it's not like they're going to a traditional bank and having their pay deposited there. Instead, they're getting it deposited into this lightweight financial model.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And then the third company also based here in London is called DuPay. And DuPay has an operation in Egypt. I'd kind of alluded to it before. And what they do is they have paid what's called payroll cards and a smartphone app. And people in Egypt, most people who have a job don't have a bank account. And so what they do is they typically get paid by the company in cash. And so if everyone in Egypt is getting paid in cash, it becomes not just costly for society and for the employer, but it's also dangerous for them.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “The second company would be Squirrel. And what Squirrel does is they tie into an employer's payroll in order to provide the employees with better financial management tools. And the idea here is if you can tap into people's pay, you are getting them to think about their finances at the moment in which they typically acquire money. And that is the most critical moment. And the hope here is that through their platform, they can dramatically reduce the need for short-term loans and payday loans.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Well, I never play favorites, right? And so it's very hard for me, very hard for me to answer this question, but I will certainly what I'll do is I'll frame it as I'll give you three companies that are here based here in London. and that are oftentimes in the news. So there's a company that came out of my last cohort called Air, A-I-R-E. And they're creating an alternative scoring methodology for people who don't typically have credit scores. And so the catch-22 of getting a credit score is you oftentimes need to have a credit history. And if you don't have a credit history, you can't get a credit score. So what do you do? And so AIR is trying to tackle that problem again around this notion of financial inclusion so that new people can enter into the credit system.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Well, it depends on what it's trying to accomplish. You know, I think in things like financial inclusion where the disruption is more of this creation of new services that are lightweight and able to bank billions of people who never had it before, it's an incredible value generator. In cases where disruption might lead to many people getting laid off and not being laid off just purely for technology's sake, I think during the period of transition as people are learning new skills, it becomes a very hard, it's hard on society. But ultimately disruption is in its best form creates a lot of value, not just for investors, but for society at large.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I would say don't be afraid to collaborate. There are a lot of fintech entrepreneurs who are, you know, they're staying away from the traditional banks because they feel like they're trying to disrupt them. But my one recommendation would be, you know, big banks are fantastic potential partners. They're great potential distributors. And they're in a time period right now where they're looking for innovation and they're looking to partner with young startups. And so don't be afraid just because you're doing something disruptive doesn't mean you can't partner with one of the large financial incumbents.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I mean, I'll be working with entrepreneurs. So whether it's through tech stars or some other mechanism, I'll be investing and continue to stay close to people who are building great companies.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I'm a founding investor. So Frank came to me, he told me what he was wanting to do way at the beginning. And when he had just a couple of pages of PowerPoint, and I got really excited, but ultimately I have taken on this role with TechStars because I also love to, I love to invest. And it's something that I want to begin to and continue to scale up in my own way. So five years from now, I'll still be angel investing. It's one of the most gratifying things that I think anybody can do.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “In preparation for becoming an entrepreneur. So if you think about TechSars as being at the stage where an entrepreneur has a MVP, they've got a product, they're entering the market, they've got a team. SmartUp is for people who are getting ready to be that entrepreneur. They haven't made the step yet, but they want to begin to build on their knowledge and build on their education to get ready for it. And given the fact that now being an entrepreneur is the coolest thing since sliced bread and everybody wants to do it, I think the timing of the product into the market is perfect.”

   2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “It is giving wisdom. It is giving interviews, much like I'm doing right now, and it's packaging it all together into this simulation platform where people can pretend they're starting up a certain type of company and they can go through the marketing plan, go through the”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yeah, so Smartup is being built in conjunction with Founders Form, which is led by Brent Hoberman. And so Brent. And so Frank and Brent and Johnny Goodwin from Pounder's Forum, they're all kind of pulling this together and Founders Forum is a membership of entrepreneurs. And so some of the most famous entrepreneurs in the world are part of this community called Founders Forum. The concept of smartup is really tapping into this nascent and growing, rapidly growing community of would-be entrepreneurs. So people who are thinking about being the next founders. And what they're trying to do is we're building a platform that takes this notion of mentoring. It's giving it.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Yeah, I mean, I think mentors are most necessary in the early growth of companies. You think about the two things that entrepreneurs have the least of, which is time and money. If talking to a mentor can get you onto the right strategic path faster, if it can help you avoid some of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make, and the thing is that entrepreneurs make a lot of the same thematic mistakes over and over again by simply being a good mentor, you can help that entrepreneur move faster and save time. And the younger the company is, the more susceptible it is to getting derailed. And so I would say it's the mentorship is absolutely critical in those early formation times.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Honest, so mentors who are not going to just smile at you and tell you what you want to hear, but they're people who will be honest with you on what the challenges are and will show you all of the ugly parts of your business in order to help you make them more beautiful.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “I mean, the best mentors are the ones that are intellectually curious. So you can get a sense pretty quickly by talking to somebody whether or not they love to work on puzzles. So are these the people who can sit down with you and just very quickly, and you can see that as you bring your strategic problems with them to them, their eyes light up. They love this idea of sitting in front of a whiteboard and beginning to draw out this puzzle. And most entrepreneurial challenges are puzzles. Typically they're strategic problems. And these are people, these are mentors who just love that challenge and they derive a lot of intrinsic value from working with entrepreneurs on those challenges. And then second, I would say, and perhaps even more important or just as important, is people who are intellectual.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “It's a charitable donation of time. I know this sounds, it's one of the things that boggled my mind the most when I first joined TechStars, which is I just couldn't understand why people would do this. Why would they? Why would they give so freely of their time? But think of it this way. It's a self-selecting thing, meaning the best mentors are the ones that typically they're very successful. They have had very successful careers and they're used, this is a way for them to give back and it's a way for them to help the next generation. So it's not surprising that most of the really great mentors are people with families, right? And so they just have this notion of giving back to the next generation.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “A lot of them are, right? So I have very specifically gone out and tried to get entrepreneurs who have a lot of experience, not just in founding companies, but if possible, in founding financial service companies.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “So this program runs just like any other TechSars program. It's a three month mentorship driven program. We choose 10 companies to work with. We are specifically focused on fintech. What is FinTech? I mean, fintech is anything that touches financial services, including cybersecurity. And what it is, so think of it as two components. One is there's the Tech Stars component. So we're very mentorship driven, meaning in this program we have about 80 mentors that come from different parts aspects of the ecosystem.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, because Traditional banking is expensive. Banks that have branches, physical infrastructure, it's just very expensive to bank people. And in countries like Egypt, where the average salary is 4,000 pounds, it's just not profitable to bank each person on a case-by-case basis. And so in order to bank them, you need to rethink financial services. And you've got to create something that's really light, very inexpensive to run, and it's just very hard for traditional global banks to be able to do that.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “And for companies that are trying to break that, right? They're trying to reinvent financial services to be able to work for segments of the population that banks have ignored for a long time. That is extraordinarily exciting because it's one of those rare moments in at least my career where as an investor you can do two things. You can both change the world and make the world a better place, but also And to be able to give somebody a bank account, to be able to give them loans, to be able to offer them financial services, it's amazing.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Sure. Well, let me just take one step back because one of the things I think what's interesting about The opportunity for fintech today is the same opportunity I saw in ad tech 15 years ago. It's just a blue ocean. Which segues into what gets me excited? Why do I get out of bed in the morning and do this every day? And one of the categories that is just, I think, phenomenal is the notion of financial inclusion. This is the aspect of financial services in which there's a segment of people, whether here in the UK or in fact most of the world, in which there's a group of people that don't have bank accounts. They are excluded from what we would consider to be traditional financial services”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “No. No, because I would say London is certainly becoming a center of fintech. I don't like to use the word Silicon Valley. That's a very unique ecosystem and geography and community. But I would certainly say that London is funny. I hear this all the time. People are like, well, is New York or London the fintech hubs of the world? And I mean Adult. You can argue that any way you want, but I think London is certainly becoming or it's certainly taking a leadership role in fintech disruption.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I mean, it is to watch what has happened the last two years is it's magical. We're now seeing, at least here in London, we're seeing entrepreneurs from all over the world move here to start their fintech companies. And the transformation that's happened is things are no longer focused on peer-to-peer. Things are no longer just focused on remittance or on payments. We're seeing every aspect of financial services disrupted.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “And I walked away from that meeting thinking about it. And I did a lot of reading at that point. I started looking into what was going on in the fintech space. Of course, the first wave of what I would consider to be the famous London FinTech startups had already begun. There's the transfer wises were already out there. The funding circles. I started to read up on them and I started to look at what was going on in the entire space on a global basis. And I realized that if you look at any industry, whether it's advertising or education or robotics or health, we've already begun to see a tremendous transformation of those industries. But when you look at financial services and the sheer size of it, in fact it has seen very little innovation at least that was the case two years ago”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “And he said, Well, you know, you'll pick it up. But first and foremost, Tech Stars looks for entrepreneurs for their MDs. He said, you know, you can find industry experts all you want, but what's actually really hard to find are people who have gone through the VC races, been rejected multiple times, have built up the engineering team, have negotiated the sale of their own company. And you just said that brings so much more credibility to when you're trying to advise entrepreneurs than any industry expert. And he said industry expertise. And he said also, what's great is you're going to have all these mentors and all these mentors will have been 20 years in financial services. And they're going to bring a lot of that industry expertise. And he said, So why don't you think about it?”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “So it must have been maybe like a week I landed and within about a week I was introduced to John Bradford who runs TechSars London which is our general program here and John and I sat for a coffee for those of you who are listening. You probably all know John. He's incredibly well connected in this ecosystem. And John looks at me and he says, you know, Greg, you look like a man with some time on his hands. And I said, well, yeah, I guess so. I just got here. So, you know, I figured I would look around and see what's going on. And, you know, he said, well, we're looking to start this fintech program with Barb as a partner. Would you be potentially interested in that? And I looked at him and I said, but John, you know I'm an ad tech guy. This doesn't make any sense.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “And you go through that little back of the envelope calculation, and sometimes you sit there and you look at each other, you go, you know what? I think we'll take this offer. And we did. And I wound up staying with AOL for a couple of years. I ran premium advertising for them, using our technology as the underpinning to serving really premium ads for the company. And during that time, I wound up meeting a British woman who became my wife. And after spending 11 years in New York, we both decided that it was time to move away. And we were deciding between either Boston, where I'm from or London where she's from. And I just thought London would be more interesting.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Well, no, it's a little bit different because Pictela was, you know, by the time we sold, we were still very early, right? It took us a year to build the platform, and then we were just starting to get into the market and begin selling it when they all came and approached us. And so not all the stars were in alignment yet, right? We didn't have tens of million dollars in revenue yet. We didn't have a big company. And so it was a little bit easier to say, you know, you look at the cap table when somebody comes to you and you say, okay, well, we're going to have to do another raise. And if we do another raise, we're going to dilute by this much roughly. And if we do dilute by this much roughly, how much do we then have to sell the company later on to make the same amount of money?”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “That's right. So that was also, believe it or not, about two years. So that was also a quick sell. That was one of those things where we weren't in the market to sell. It's just that AOL had new leadership. So Tim Armstrong had come over from Google. He had been head of sales for Google. And he was brought into AOL to turn around. What was once one of the great internet companies of our time. And he had a vision of wanting to create new types of ad units, ones that could command a premium price. But he didn't have the technology to be able to serve really rich ads. And so, you know, his team was out searching for the right technology. They came upon us through a mutual friend. And it was one of those things where they made an offer that was very hard to refuse.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “We did, we raised venture capital, we hired an engineering team. Well, actually, let me step back. Actually, at the very, very beginning, because we didn't have a big team, we used a small development shop to help us get to market quicker. But eventually what winds up happening is you eventually want to bring things in-house. You want to be able to control development a little bit better. And at that point, we started hiring up a full engineering team.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Can we now build a platform that can serve really incredible ads and ads that do a lot that contain a tremendous amount of high definition video and information such that people don't need to click on them? Nobody clicks on ads. And so we started that. We grew that coincidentally also into an entirely different management team also sold that to AWL.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And it was actually quite pressing on his part because, of course, it was just before the crash of 2007 when the real estate market plummeted. Of course. And, I mean, if he hadn't decided to sell then, we would probably still be clanking away trying to take the company public. And so at the same time, it's funny I shouldn't poo-poo it very much because it also launched my entrepreneurial career. So soon after that sale, I spent a little time at AOL, but then I decided that I wanted to create my own destiny, and I launched a company with a dear friend of mine, and the company was called Pictela. And Pictela was a next generation rich media ad server. So this was the idea here was, well, now that we know how to target people effectively using services like Takoda.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Well, you know, I mean, that's how I felt at the time, right? And that was why I was upset at the meeting. Because I looked at him and I said, I can't believe it. I thought we were going to take this public. And he's like, you know, Greg, there's a big difference between a sale that's close to $300 million and taking something public”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I was there. It happened so fast. I was there for two years during the time of the rapid growth. And around 2007, the CEO decided that he wanted to sell the company. He got a very good offer from AWL Time Warner for around $275 million. Now the irony there is actually when he called me into his office and he goes, Greg, we've decided to sell the company. He had a big smile on his face. That was the worst, that was one of the worst news of my career. And people oftentimes look at me and they shake their head and they're like, how could an exit or a liquidity event be bad news? And it wasn't except for the fact that Dakota was doing so well. We had hit this perfect alignment of product market fit, culture, and amazing technology group, an amazing sales group. To see all these stars align in one organization, it's rare.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Sure. Well, I started off as an entrepreneur, so I spent 11 years in New York City. And I really caught the entrepreneurial bug very early on. My first entree into it was in the world of advertising technology. I was one of the early employees in a company called Takota, which did what's called behavioral targeting. And that's just a really fancy word for when an ad follows you around the web. I'm sure you've seen this before. It's a way of segmenting people and targeting people with advertising based upon their interests and behaviors. And that company grew like gangbusters. It was just a phenomenal experience to be part of something that went logarithmic in its growth.”

    2015-04-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source