Drip Capital went from zero to $1 billion in transactions: Fintech meets global trade finance

Drip Capital started as two people with an idea in 2015. Today, they have over 138 employees, raised more than $45M, and will do over $1 billion in trade volume since inception this year. They have over 2,000 importers and exporters on the platform and have built an enduring fintech startup. They're on track to be as impactful as the World Bank in terms of helping businesses worldwide get access to credit. They had to search the space to find one that could grow quickly with high LTV and low CAC. It was really impressive to see as an investor, and I'm so glad we could sit down with cofounder Neil Kothari today. 00:00 Intro 00:38 Meet Neil Kothari 02:50 Starting the founder journey 03:56 First iteration: Lending in the US 05:52 Pivot to global trade finance, finding product market fit 07:18 More data = better lending (key insight) 09:37 Why does net 30 exist when interest rates are zero? 11:48 Incumbent banks aren't doing their job, which lets Drip create a new cross-border trade model 13:46 Why is lending hard? 14:35 What they learned in India 18:00 Do unscalable things, then scale them 21:10 Beware advice 23:31 How to invest, or work at Drip Hi, I’m Garry Tan, venture capitalist and cofounder at Initialized Capital. We were earliest investors in billion dollar startups like Coinbase and Instacart, and I’m a Forbes Midas List Top 100 venture capitalist in the world. We want these videos to be about helping people build world-class teams and startups that touch a billion people. Our startups have gone on to create more than $40 billion in market value so far, and Initialized has over $770M in assets under management. I’m doing my own one man YouTube channel with no staff or crew — we're going for raw and unfiltered, not perfect. Please like this video and subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos like this!