On April 13, 2017, I was lucky enough to be invited by Victor Hwang, then VP of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, to participate in a design session focused on ways to improve access to capital for businesses not on the VC track. There, I met several people who would end up inspiring me and eventually shaping what I would go on to do next at Novel. 

Four years on, I’ve been reflecting on what that day meant to me and how it changed my trajectory. That’s where my interest in revenue-based financing really took off. I often joke about this, but it is true that I walked out of the meeting at one point to sit on a chair outside the conference room and build a model for what an RBF deal might look like, and then sketched out what a portfolio would like. (Also, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that pretty much every single assumption I made on that day was wrong.)

It was there that I met Ross Baird for the first time. I also met John and Lula at Fin Gourmet who shared their experience with revenue based financing from Village Capital and how it helped them grow. Their story inspired me to dig in deeper.

I also met Jonny Price who was leading Kiva in the US at the time (and who will be my next Speaker Series guest...see below). Even Andrew Yang was there. It was one of those times where I wasn’t sure how I ended up in the room, i.e., who thought I was qualified to sit with these humans? I was beyond grateful to be there.

Coming out of that meeting I was super energized about the opportunity to build a different kind of firm focused on providing capital in a different way. I reached out to every entrepreneur and investor I could find to ask them what they thought of the concept. I reached out to RBF investors and other alternative capital providers to try to learn the nonobvious. I had something like 120 meetings with people in 3 months. At the end of those months, Carlos and I had agreed to partner up and we were ready to get started on building Novel. 

But the most exciting development since then is that the community of alternative capital providers has grown significantly. We are not just a few firms anymore. This is a movement. We are at a moment in time where the hunger for new capital products is pulling more and more innovators into the market. Entrepreneurs are looking for new ways to fund their businesses, and this industry is skating to the puck. The number of founders who simply assume that VC is the only path to fund their businesses is dwindling, and we see the hunger for different capital every day. There are so many ways to solve this problem, so many different use cases for different capital. We’ve seen the emergence and growth of CapChase, Pipe, Clearbanc. Whether you love their models or you don’t, they demonstrate a strong pull for new capital products entrepreneurs can use to grow their companies. 

These last four years have been about helping entrepreneurs see a different path. I think the next four years will see rapid growth of our community, our asset class, our impact. 

Keep building.