YouSaid · the spoken record

Sasha Orloff

lines on the record
21
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2016-06-17
most recent
2016-06-17
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1
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  1. “I think when people start saying, remember what Amex did for that wealthy traveler, they gave them travelers checks so they didn't have to travel with cash around the world. They built offices in every American and European and Asian city. They had dedicated travel agents for their”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Career highlights, and well, this was not going to be a fast answer. Every step, I mean, meeting Yuri Milner and having him sort of say, this is it, let's go, and getting, I think getting accepted to YC. How about that? Getting accepted to YC was the first moment that I was like, whoa, this actually could be something. But we've had double digit, month-on-month customer growth for four years now. So it's also kind of nice to see that feedback that we're getting from customers is they love our product and they're telling their friends. And we have a double digit viral component to our business, which is it's still mind-blowing, but it's the most validating thing to think about.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Very, very strict hiring, focus on OKRs, objective, and key results so everybody in the company knows what we're trying to accomplish and why we're trying to accomplish. A lot of time to think, team building activities, fun, happy hours, offsite events, so that people build the collaboration with the team and have time to think about what it is we're doing and can we do it better.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You're building something for the long term as opposed to building something to get it acquired really quickly, focus on fundamentals because boom, bust, boom, bust, fundamentals always matter at some point.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Tempting and speed can be very important. So we had to focus a lot on speed, a lot on reminders, a lot on a very simple, transparent experience to make it work for the majority of people. And as I'm saying this, I realize that I'm sounding douchey for saying that. But it's just a reality. Like I've had a lot of fortune, and that is something where I've been very fortunate in my life. But that's not the case for a lot of people. But I thought I could really help solve that. And I thought technology could really help solve that problem.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Give you a perfect example. For me, let's take a couple years step back to when I was a VC and I was making pretty good money and working relatively minimal hours. My income vastly exceeded my expenses. So on my credit card, it really didn't matter. I was never going to hit my credit line, never really concerned with meeting my expenses. I also have a very sort of low cost lifestyle. When you're looking at people that are making lower incomes and are working and have low lines of access to credit, things like budgeting and savings are really important. Building your credit score is really important. Building tools and features that keep very busy people that are working long hours don't have a lot of savings are really important. So a lot of alerts and reminders embedded into the experience so that when people are managing the money and a couple days really matter between when a paycheck hits and when an expense hits is really important. And credit cards can be very”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “There's a lot of opportunities. Our point of view here at Lendup is that we have a competitive advantage in being able to build products that really work well for the other half of the market that banks are unable to serve today. And customers like it. They're safe. They're transparent. They're fast. And they help them focus on building their credit score. And so we believe that we can enable banks to be even more successful as their communities change. They should add products to their arsenal of offerings to their consumers. And we can help with product development and we can help partner with them to be able to make banks more relevant in the future for the changing sort of changing nature of consumers' demands. So we're a firm believer that banks are the future and we can help them.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So we spend a lot of time thinking about this, and while there's probably a lot of hypotheses, I'm going to talk specifically about the underbanked world here in the United States. So at a high level from a bank, banks in the United States, and I think all over the world outsource their software. And that just gives them a couple disadvantages. One, they can't just change code by like me going over to our development team and asking them to create this feature. It makes it really slow and it makes most bank products look almost identical and their competitive advantage then became their geographic location of where they built their branches. Okay, so that leads to trends number two, which is customers don't really want to go into branches.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, it's both sides. It's harder because you have no traction, but it's easier because you have no traction, you get to sell the vision of what you're trying to accomplish. We had a pretty big and aggressive vision, and a lot of things were happening along around the same time when trends and technology and regulation and mobile phones here in the United States. A huge vision that we thought everybody in the United States deserved the ability to build their credit directly from their mobile phone with a few swipes of their thumb. And that was and still is pretty revolutionary here. The United States is a very divided market between the banked, which is, and the unbanked, and then the sort of payday title pawn markets. And there isn't this bridge between the worlds. That's a big and growing market given the shrinking middle class in the United States.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “There's advantages. We've been pretty fortunate, so I'll tell you the story a little bit about how we approached raising, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. In our case, it's worked really well. My favorite, though, was the very early stage, getting to meet so many angel investors that were just incredibly accomplished in their own careers, whether as entrepreneurs or executives or as just career VCs. It was fun because it expands your network and it gives you a perspective on your business from a lot of different viewpoints. So that might have been my favorite. The pressure was also a little bit lower because it was just me and my stepbrother and a friend and we weren't taking any salary and it was just early on everything was optimistic.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And online marketing for eTrade and Citigroup and American Express. So we really wanted to sort of round out our angel investors at a really early stage with people that brought perspectives that were going to help us succeed. And then as we grew, things that were really important were impact investors like bronze investment in KPOR who really focus on the customer and public policy and social justice and then traditional VCs like Kleiner and Andreessen who invested in thinking about just traditional VC and how to build a company. So we were fortunate enough to be able to attract some incredible angel investors and VCs out of Y Combinator, but we really thought about what were the skill sets around the table, not just the money, but the people who we would want to call.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So at the very early stage, what I looked for was what were the skill sets that we were going to want to have around the table or a phone call or email away as we grew this business. And so at the early stages, we had a lot of really good partners around. So from an angel perspective, people like Ben Boyer from Tanaya Capital, who had worked in online financial services and leadGen, and Eloque Benote, who had worked for fraud management, he led fraud at PayPal and then at Walmart and started in Kiru. And people like Matt Oko, who was really focused on machine learning, and then obviously Google Ventures who have a lot of resources from Google on machine learning and structure, and then people like branding like Jackie Stern, who led acquisitions and branding.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, so that's another incredible opportunity provided by YC, which is they take care of a lot of the other things. They give you all your incorporation paperwork, employment agreements, convertible note and fundraising, and they keep you laser focused for three months. And then at the end, it culminates in demo day where they bring together hundreds of investors and hundreds of companies like a big dating pool. So we had a little bit of fortune to be able to focus because we had confidence that we were going to be building something pretty special and in the hundreds of VCs, hopefully a few of them would be interested in funding us. And that's what happened. Afterwards, and you're able to take that money and then start building a team, one of my core responsibilities is raising and finding not just money, but the right and the most value added money possible.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The biggest takeaway as an entity for sort of the broader market, I think, is write code and talk to users. It's so easy to get distracted with fundraising and superfluous things that don't drive your business that YC is really good at helping you focus. And every week we come together and everybody says, right, show me what you did. incredible focus on doing the thing that is the most important to building your business at the early stage for a software company, writing code and talking to users so you know what you're doing. It's somewhat counterintuitive. I mean, it sounds, it makes sense, but not a lot of people do it.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I see now why so many entrepreneurs are so young because your cost of living is fine. You can live off top ramen. Every day, three times a week. It's not ideal. You can sleep on sofas and floors”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think it's all about execution. And there's a bunch of good ideas. And there's a bunch of people that you can see come out of the woodwork after an idea becomes successful and said, oh, that was my idea. There's a bunch of really good ideas, but it's the team that executes on it and makes that idea a reality important. And that's why you see so many VCs not just think about the conditions of the market and the industry, but the founding team and the founders. And I think that's a incredibly critical part. And I didn't quite understand it. I don't think I valued it as much until I saw my peers. Not stay quite as laser focused. And it's something we really, really hammer here, like ruthless prioritization and laser focus and execution. I think that's my answer.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “All right, well, you've given up your job. You got to make it work. And I don't like failure, so I'm just going to do what it takes to make this successful. So yeah, it was challenging mentally, and I think it was even more overwhelming that very first day. Every once in a while, when you're, as a VC and you're looking at ideas, one of the most exciting parts is learning about an industry, building conviction, and the more research you do and the more companies you talk to and the more experts you talk to. Sometimes your conviction just builds more and more and more. And there's an idea, and then you need to find a team sort of over the course of the 18 months at City Ventures, I was building more and more conviction about this idea that between mobile and regulatory and software changes, that banks were not going to be able to adapt to the changing consumer behavior and changing consumer preferences. And I had so much conviction about this idea, and I just couldn't find”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I think it's hard to deny that having a pretty cushy job where you're paid pretty well to listen to exciting, inspiring people come pit you on ideas and you're managing hundreds of millions of dollars in our case. It's a pretty easy job. That's a tough one to leave. It was scary, I have to say, as much as you build conviction on an idea that very first day is probably the scattest I've ever been in my life. Okay, how am I going to pay rent? What am I going to do? Am I ever going to get paid again? Then the second day you realize.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Now, I have to speak sort of within the realm of Silicon Valley because that's where we are. But I think, and I see now as a CEO of a fast-growing company, that I like entrepreneurs, even if they failed, because you learn so much through the failing process, even more so than I think just being a contributor towards the success or just another company. And so here it's more valuable learning experience because you're focused on whatever the most important thing is to build a company and you've had to realize that through failure. So here at least it's a sign of pride.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Never quite found this idea. And so just decided that seeing that we were funding this, sort of four things happened. One, I was passionate for this idea. I just built more and more conviction that there was safe credit building opportunities available for everybody over mobile phone. It was a big market, hundreds of billions of dollars. I saw that we were funding great entrepreneurs and I realized that I think anybody can be an entrepreneur if they want to. And in Silicon Valley, actually, even failing as an entrepreneur is a side of pride. And there were a bunch of major swings happening in the United States. So decided to step in the ring and give it a go.”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So I was fortunate enough after spending about 15 years in financial services to have my wife move me from New York back to California because she just wanted to be here and got a job at City Ventures. I was at Citigroup before and we were the first sort of bank corporate VC in Silicon Valley. And one of the parts of venture capital I think there's sort of two types of venture capitalists. There's one that just has all their deal flow and they get to pick and choose their deals. And there's others that have to be more hypothesis driven. What I was thinking about was what are the things that I care about? And I just wanted to learn a lot more and ended up trying to chase this idea of a company that could help the other half of the world or the other half of the United States build their credit score and get access to credit was looking for this idea for 18 months while at city ventures and while we made a bunch of other great investments”

    2016-06-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source