I write from, time to time, about financing, strategy, impact startup and entreprenurial experiences, financial inclusion and sustainability. While I have professionally been financing impactful projects, my personal focus in sustainability started with financial inclusion, moving onto care and most recently, greentech.
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5 bumps my banking experience found it harder to avoid in my fintech startup – Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I summarized some of the bumps/lessons that, despite being ‘common sense’ still had to be experienced. Sales cycles: As a startup, everyone makes you wait and everything seems to move at a glacial pace. Banks and corporations take time. We all ‘know’ this but yet the world of enterprise…
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5 bumps my banking experience found it harder to avoid in my fintech startup – Part 1
In the previous post, I listed some of the bumps we could have avoided. In this second part, I’ve summarized some of the lessons that, while easy to dismiss as common sense, would need to have been experienced one way or another. Unanticipated, Harder to Avoid Lessons 1. Immunity to Change: This is always the…
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5 bumps my banking experience didn’t avoid in my fintech startup
I’d like to think we did a few things really well in our fintech start-up, Bilbus. And, of course, we made our share of mistakes. In between, there were a lot of things we could have done better. Good timing forgives mistakes. Bad timing highlights them. It’s easier to simplify some of our lessons learned…
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How well do we absorb and strengthen from failure?
The medallions of our failures nestle closely to us through the seasons. Whether slight, or solid, invisible or gleaming, these battle trophies remind us of lessons learned, fruitless journeys and tangential epiphanies. I grew up in a time and place when failure attached itself to you, finding its way into the sense of self, as…
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Closing a chapter
Sometimes we get an opportunity to reset, reorganize and push ahead. Timing, funding, team: all the pitons that slow the start-up climb up the cliff. And sometimes, the climb isn’t the one you set out on and it would be quicker to start again using lessons learned, than to try to pivot from the current…
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Here’s to another interesting year
I say this a lot. Time flies! Here we are and another year whizzed by! 12+ months ago I took our start-up in a different direction, turning off functionality, changing the business model and rearranging the product set. Months were spent diving deep into unravelling the reason for so many curious but unengaged users.…
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The Low-Down on SMB Lending
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released research suggesting that SMB lending had more than one thing affecting it. A supply and demand problem. Policy Analyst Anne Marie Wiersh and Professor Scott Shane summed it up in the following paragraph: “Since the Great Recession, bank lending to small businesses has fallen significantly,…
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When You Should Order Invoice Finance on the Funding Menu–Part 2
In part 1 of this two-part post, I talked about the use of invoice finance as a cost effective way for business to fund its credit sales. While invoice finance tends to have ‘sweet spot’ sectors (manufacturing, services) and hard to do areas (construction, hospitality, consulting), the basic suitability is simple: we’ve seen deals go…