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My guest today is Nelson Chu, CEO/Co-Founder of Percent, a global leader in financial infrastructure solutions that brings transparency and efficiency to lenders and credit transactions. Founded in 2018, Percent has powered almost $1 billion in transaction volume and has raised capital from B Capital, Coinbase, 10x Capital, and many more.
In this episode, we discuss:
How Percent aims to transform private credit markets and we explore their strategy to gain market share by expanding through adjacencies.
“We've done a lot of these transactions ourselves. We've done close to a billion dollars-worth of volume in 335 transactions. It goes a long way towards learning what the pain points are, and then solving our own problems. We recognize that if we can solve our own problems, everybody else is definitely having those same problems. And so they’ll be willing to adopt it from there.”
The strength of private credit in the face of a market downturn and why the asset class is very recession-resilient.
“Investors now have the opportunity to get higher yield at comparable risk levels from what it was before. The borrowers themselves can continue to raise capital in this environment, because there's always going to be a price that someone's willing to take. And, at the end of the day, the underwriters who are doing these transactions have never been busier, because of the frequency of deals going on to market. So I love private credit.”
Nelson is a repeat founder and he shares lessons on how to build a culture of accountability and transparency that drives employee retention.
"We've had definitely a lot of challenges… in 2019/2020, we had two weeks of payroll left and had to figure out what we were going to do. And we proposed this to the company internally - we were saying, hey, how do you want to handle this? do we skip payroll for two weeks and pay you back after we close this round? Or how do you want to handle it?"
Steps Percent is taking to bridge DeFi and traditional finance, why New York City is the best city in the world to build a fintech company… and a lot more!
“As a capital markets FinTech company… New York is the best city without a doubt. Every major credit fund, every major finance shop has their home here. And I would say a lot of the VCs who understand capital markets well, are here as well. So it makes no sense for us to build anywhere else than… the greatest city on Earth.”
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Miguel Armaza is Co-Founder & Managing General Partner of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas. He also hosts and writes the Fintech Leaders podcast and newsletter.
Nelson Chu, CEO of Percent – Disrupting a Multi-Trillion-Dollar Market, Building a Culture of Accountability and Transparency, & Why NYC is the Global Fintech Capital