PhD to $100M Revenue: Rebuilding SMB Lending with AI | Sahill Poddar, Co-founder and CEO of Parafin

Sahill Poddar is the Co-founder and CEO of Parafin, helping marketplaces, vertical SaaS, and point of sale providers offer financial services their merchants.

Sahill and his team have quietly built Parafin to nearly a $100m GAAP revenue run rate in only four years, and they've done it in an industry that's become a Silicon Valley graveyard: SMB lending.

Sahill talks about how they partnered with other marketplaces, vertical SaaS, and point of sale providers to offer financial services to SMBs at scale, landing DoorDash as their first customer before building the product, and advice for technical teams learning enterprise sales.

Sahill's a fascinating founder, as he started his career getting a PhD discovering the Higgs boson particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. We talk about physics, he explains how the Large Hadron Collider works, why physics is just real world machine learning, and all the lessons he learned on the growth teams at Facebook and Robinhood (including the way Robinhood acquired most of its userbase!)

A thank you to Hans Tung at Notable Capital, Nick Shalek at Ribbit, and Mahdi Raza at Pathlight for their help brainstorming topics for the conversation.

Thanks to Ramp for supporting this episode. It's the corporate card and expense management platform used by over 40,000 companies, like Shopify, CBRE and Stripe. Time is money. Save both with Ramp. Get your $250 here.

Timestamps:

(4:06) Lending to SMBs inside marketplaces and platforms

(9:39) Why SMB lending is so hard

(12:50) Three ways AI is changing Fintech

(16:47) Silicon Valley’s graveyard of SMB lenders

(22:44) Getting a PhD in Particle Physics

(26:15) How CERN's Large Hadron Collider works

(31:49) Discovering new dimensions

(34:10) Building billion user data sets at Facebook

(39:53) Working with other physicists at Robinhood

(50:29) Growth lessons from FB + Robinhood

(1:00:57) Starting Parafin, embedded, horizontal SMB lending

(1:06:09) Why credit is the biggest problem for SMBs

(1:10:53) Raising a Seed from Ribbit pre-product

(1:13:25) Landing DoorDash as the first customer

(1:16:51) Mastering B2B sales as a technical founder

(1:22:58) Lessons from Vlad at Robinhood

Referenced

• Parafin:

• Careers at Parafin
• Episode with Charley & Mahdi
• Julius
• CERN
• Large Hadron Collider

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