Episode 346: Scott Weller - CTO & Co-Founder, EnFi

Episode 346 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Scott Weller, CTO & Co-Founder at EnFi. The formula for a thriving tech ecosystem ideally looks something like this: * Entrepreneurial-minded person works for startups and learns a ton. Perhaps they even witness success at scale to an exit. * Said person takes lessons learned and builds their own company to an exit. * Said person then starts to mentor and invest back into the ecosystem to fund the next generation of companies. * Said person eventually finds an idea that they can’t get out of their head and launches another company. This is the case for Scott, as he was involved in tech from an early age and connected with a talented group of entrepreneurs who were building the first generation of online gaming where he witnessed a couple of exits. He then co-founded and was the CTO of SessionM which led to a successful exit to Mastercard. He was angel investing and advising companies when he and another successful entrepreneur, Josh Summers, saw a problem which was a perfect opportunity to disrupt an industry using AI. Josh has the same startup founder pedigree as he was part of the WHERE team that was acquired by PayPal and then went on to found Clypd which was acquired by Xandr. The two have come together to build a company called EnFi which recently announced $7.5M in seed funding led by Unusual Ventures with participation from Boston Seed, Argon Ventures and Impellent Ventures. EnFi is accelerating complex credit analysis and risk monitoring with AI Assistants for bank and private lending origination, underwriting, and portfolio management teams. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A discussion about the AI landscape in the Boston tech scene. * Scott's background story and his early involvement with one of the very first Internet Service Providers called Intelecom Data Systems as a teenager. * Working at an early stage web gaming startup called Gamesville which was acquired by Lycos. * GameLogic and the early innovation of working with regulated games and the level of innovation in terms of patent creation which was acquired by Scientific Games. * Being early to market with an online video product for SMBs called SnapYap that he started with others. * The founding story of SessionM with Mark Hermann & Lars Albright and how the company evolved through the years, plus its acquisition by Mastercard and how things materialized post-acquisition. * SessionM’s involvement in building the very successful mobile app for Starbucks and its bonus & loyalty campaigns. * The background story and all the details about EnFi and how they are disrupting the market. * Common startup mistakes that he sees entrepreneurs make over and over again. * And so much more.