The Startup Journey Podcast

#5 Building the 2nd Most Influential Fintech Brand in the World With Scripbox CEO & Co-Founder Atul Shinghal

A few years ago, Atul saw an inefficiency in the way insurance products were sold in India. 
Calling on his two decades of Fintech experience and expertise, he set out to solve it with his company, Scripbox. 
Atul had to take a lot of time and effort to educate the market that their money would be safe. As people at the time weren’t used to digital banking or transferring money online. 
To achieve this, his core priorities when it came to customer relationships were transparency and honesty.   
And it paid off. He was able to convince customers that their money would be safe with Scripbox – changing the market’s behaviours and ultimately finding success. 
Fast forward to today, and Scripbox has evolved to become India’s leading digital wealth management platform, raising over $34M in the process and is in the top 1% of companies in his market for customer satisfaction.
Moreover, Scripbox has been recognised by LinkedIn as the second most influential financial services brand in the world and has won numerous awards such as Financial Express’ Best Bank Award. 
In this episode, we break down the following:
The process for validating the business idea behind Scripbox
The road to product-market fit 
The lessons Atul learnt from dealing with investors 
Key insights on building an early-stage startup team
Balancing the intense work every entrepreneur faces with their personal life 
Advice on every facet of the entrepreneurial journey
Tune in as Atul shares his journey building Scripbox, as well as the insights that come from a 20-year career in entrepreneurship. 
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#4 How to Network Your Way Into a Unicorn Startup With Varo Bank Co-Founder Roger Van Duinen

Today’s guest, Roger Van Duinen is the co-founder of Varo Money – an “entirely new kind of bank” that uses tech to bring financial inclusion and opportunity to all of its users. 
With 25 years of experience working as a C-level executive in the banking and financial services sector – he brought a lot of industry expertise to the table.
In that time, he built and nurtured an extensive network of like-minded entrepreneurs and business leaders.
In fact, it was that network that led him to co-found Varo Money in the first place. 
It started when a mutual connection put Roger in contact with Colin Walsh. 
Colin was also a veteran in the banking industry but had taken a very different path than Roger. 
They got to talking and realised that, despite their different paths, they saw a lot of the same problems in the industry. 
Before long, Roger and Colin had co-founded Varo Money. Fast forward to today, and Varo has raised over $990M to date – most recently raising $510M in their Series E round, at a $2.5B valuation. 
In this episode, Roger and I dive deep into
The idea behind Varo
The road to product-market fit 
The lessons Roger and his team learnt from dealing with investors 
Key insights on building an early-stage startup team
Balancing the intense work every entrepreneur faces with their personal life (something Roger admits, was a huge challenge for him)
Advice on every facet of the entrepreneurial journey
Tune in as Roger shares entrepreneurial insights from a career spanning nearly three decades. 
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#3 Raising $30M from a Dorm Room With Indico CTO & Co-Founder Slater Victoroff

Back in 2013, Slater and his co-founder had an idea in their dorm room – to revolutionise the data industry by creating a platform that takes raw data and structures it, enabling you to build innovative, mission-critical enterprise workflows.
The idea quickly gained interest as they were accepted into Techstars Boston – and before long, Slater was questioning whether or not he needed to stay in school. 
Indico Data was so successful that he never graduated. He was too busy scaling the backend system to handle several billion monthly API calls and a developer ecosystem of roughly 10k developers (while closing multiple six-figure enterprise contracts simultaneously). 
Fast forward to today, and Indico Data is worth over $30M and is consistently pushing the envelope within its vertical.
In this episode, we break down:
The process for validating the business idea behind Indico
The road to product-market fit 
The lessons Slater learnt from dealing with investors 
Key insights on building an early-stage startup team
Balancing the intense work every entrepreneur faces with their personal life 
Advice on every facet of the entrepreneurial journey
Tune in as Slater delves into the trials and tribulations of launching such a huge startup between just him and his co-founder.
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Let us know what you thought of Slater’s episode.  
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#2 Solving One Problem: Taulia Co-Founder Maex Ament on Building an Industry-Leading Company with Over 1.8M Clients

Today’s guest, Markus (Maex) Ament, is the founder behind Taulia, a  leading provider of working capital solutions with over 1.8 million companies using it across the globe – including Airbus, Nissan & the UK Government. 
And, like most successful companies, it began with a problem. In Taulia’s case, that problem was liquidity: 
“When a company invoices a client, they’re generally going to have to wait anywhere between 30 to 90 days to receive payment. We wanted to solve that problem for companies.” 
While this idea isn’t necessarily new, Maex and his team added a twist. They went to the biggest companies on the planet and used their cash to pay their suppliers early for a “dynamic discount”. 
Tune in as Maex shares his story, and the hurdles he and his founding team faced bringing Taulia to life and scaling it to become an industry leader. 
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#1 From Humble Roots to Raising over $2.5B in funding With Kabbage Co-Founder Kathryn Petralia

Back in 2008, Kathryn Petralia and her founding team had a vision. To use technology to give small businesses the funding tools they need to grow and scale their companies. 
A few months later, Kabbage was born. The platform quickly evolved and grew to not just provide loans to SMEs, but a full suite of cash management solutions for founders and entrepreneurs. 
In this episode, we break down:
The process for validating the business idea behind Kabbage
The road to product-market fit 
The lessons Kathryn learnt from dealing with investors 
Key insights on building an early-stage startup team
Balancing the intense work every entrepreneur faces with their personal life 
Advice on every facet of the entrepreneurial journey
Tune in as Kathryn shares the trials and tribulations of building Kabbage – from its humble roots providing small business loans to eBay users to raising over $2.5B in funding and getting acquired by American Express.
Find Altar on LinkedIn. Subscribe to our Newsletter. Check out our library of entrepreneurial resources.Contact Us to talk about your startup.Let us know what you thought of Kathryn’s episode.  Follow Kathryn on LinkedIn.