20VC: Raising $150m, Meeting Yuri Milner & Revolutionising Mobile Finance with Sasha Orloff @ LendUp

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2016

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sasha Orloff is the CEO and Co-founder of LendUp, a fintech startup offering online and mobile personal loans and credit cards in the United States. Prior to launching LendUp Sasha was on the other side of the table as a VC with Citi Group’s corporate venture capital arm. On the topic of VC funding, LendUp raised an incredible $150m in Jan 2016 from likes of SV Angel, Yuri Milner our friends at Susa and Google Ventures just to name a few.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How did Sasha come to found LendUp following a stint in VC with Citi Group?

2.) What Sasha learnt from VC about running a successful startup and how he applied them to his founding of LendUp?

3.) Was it difficult leaving the security of a VC job to found a startup? Would you have done the same had you had children at the time?

4.) What trends in FinTech is Sasha most excited for? Why does Sasha think banks are in so much trouble? Is there the potential to co-operate rather than replace banks?

5.) How was the fundraising process for Sasha? What was his preferred round and how did they differ from stag to stage?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:

Sasha’s Fave Book: Banker To The Poor

Sasha’s Fave Blog: Sam Altman

As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sasha on Twitter here!

If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!

The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You are listening to the 20-minute VC, and as it's Friday, we are featuring a world-beating founder
0:04.9	for our Founders Friday episode. So joining me today, I'm thrilled to welcome Sasha Oloff.
0:10.2	Sasha is the CEO and co-founder of LendUp, a fintech startup offering online and mobile
0:15.6	personal loans and credit cards in the United States. Prior to launching Lendup,
0:20.5	Sasha was on the other side of the
0:21.8	table as a VC with Citigroup's corporate venture capital art. And on the topic of VC,
0:26.8	Lendup raised an incredible $150 million in January 2016, according to the trustee P.E. Hub,
0:33.4	from the likes of S.V. Angel, Yuri Milner, our friends at Seuss Ventures with Chad Biers,
0:39.0	who I've got to thank for making the intro today, and then Google Ventures, just to name a few.
0:43.6	But before we meet Sasha today, did you know the world's most expensive bed is worth $6.3 million?
0:50.0	However, do you think you would sleep better in that than a Lisa mattress?
0:53.4	Well, no, you wouldn't, as all the added costs comes from the accessories, whereas with
0:58.0	Lisa, they put the mattress first and the customer price considerations first.
1:02.0	With no retail stores, they can pass on those cost savings to you and I, the consumer, which is
1:07.0	reflected in their reasonable and transparent pricing mechanism.
1:10.0	Even better, all Lisa mattresses are made in the UK and the US and can be shipped for free
1:15.1	to the US, UK and Canada.
1:17.4	They even have a 100-night trial, so there really is no risk in you finding your perfect mattress.
1:23.0	So head over to Lisa.com forward slash VC and enter the promo code VC75 at checkout to get a whopping
1:29.8	$75 off. That's L-E-E-E-S-A.com. Likewise, if you haven't signed up for the Mattermark
1:36.3	Daily, what have you been doing? It really is a go-to place for startup and VC articles created
1:41.7	by my good friend Nick Frost or at Thinker on Twitter.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Twenty Minute VC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Twenty Minute VC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.