Hello and welcome to the Exit presented by Flippa, the world's largest marketplace to buy and sell online businesses and startups.

The Exit is the 30-minute podcast featuring awesome entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it.

The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold business of all different sizes, you learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of Exits.

It's a world occupied by a small few but accessible to many.

Down this episode, I sit down with Daniel Bessimer.

He's an awesome entrepreneur and fintech guru.

We talked to everything about PayPal and all of his experience with Zash and just his incredible Exit story.

This is a really hitting home story for me because having sold my company in the past to one of the founders of PayPal hearing from Daniel and his story about being there as a commercial director and head of mobile at Visa and starting Zash was really an incredible story arc to it.

He's currently doing as the CEO of Great Week and it's a fantastic conversation about everything that is fintech and finance and payments.

Without further ado, let's sit down and have an awesome finance conversation here about Daniel Bessimer's Exit here on the Exit.

Alright everybody, today I am joined by Daniel Bessimer. He is the CEO of Great Week. How's it going Daniel?

Perfect, happy to be here.

Yeah, excited to dig into the Exit but before we get into it, as usual, I want to start with your background. What got you into business and entrepreneurship?

Yeah, look, my career started in New York. I got into the big financial institutions, Citibank, PayPal, Visa.

I did that for 10 years and then I noticed that I was constantly pushed to more entrepreneurial environments within those larger institutions.

So seven years ago I jumped off kind of the comfortness of being employed and started my own companies within the same space but much more smaller of course.

So I founded three companies to date. One of them I scaled to several thousand merchants. It was a POS and payments company, similar to Square.

My business was called Zash. So did that. They didn't have a lot of experience. So I jumped off from PayPal, saw that there was a niche that wasn't fulfilled and then I scaled to Exit just about 2019.

So just before the pandemic broke out, it was extremely excited about that Exit but I can go into how it didn't turn out as good as I thought and what I would have done if I knew what I could have done better.

Yeah, okay. Well, let's start with what Zash was slash is and I'd love to understand some of the things you were tracking to really identify success that led to the Exit.

Sure. Look, when you go out and build things, of course all the nice schools, they will tell you that you need a business plan, you need a PNL, you need a bunch of pitches.

I think what you need to have and I did that is to talk to a lot of customers. Obviously talk to a lot of customers to validate to the pain point that you're going to try to solve.

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