← The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
599: They Rejected Her Idea, She Turned it into a BILLION Dollar Business | Suneera Madhani (Best of Foundr)
00:40:53
Suneera Madhani built Stax from an idea her employer rejected into a $1B fintech unicorn processing over $25B in payments.
Loading summary
Transcript33 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hey, founder fam. I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with Omnisend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e commerce founders. We've been recommending Omnisend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, OMNISEND customers make $68 for every $1 they spend, which is an insanely good return. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code. Founder50. Just head to omnisend.com founder without the e to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Imagine taking your business idea to your employer and then being laughed out of the room and then turning it into a billion dollar fintech. That's exactly what today's guest did. I'm joined by Sunira Madani, co founder of Stacks the, the first subscription based credit card processor that's now processed tens of billions in payments. She's also a three time founder, Fortune 40 under 40 honoree, and the voice behind CEO School where she's built a community of over 300,000 women in business. And in this conversation, you're going to learn how she went from pitching payments out of the trunk of her Volkswagen to raising over $500 million in capital. The scrappy tactics that got her first 5 million in transactions and her first customers within six months. And why saying no to a $17 million buyout was the best decision that changed everything.
- [01:40]
B
Here are the stories. Learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder podcast with Nathan Chan.
- [01:54]
A
All right, so the first question that I ask everyone that comes on is how did you get your job? AKA how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today?
- [02:03]
B
I guess the way that I found my job. When you say find your job, I don't think any CEO says they found their job. I was in the payment card industry, so my background was in credit card processing. I was in the industry. I saw a problem. Long story short, I decided to go find a solution myself. And so I was in the industry when I got started, but I had no idea that I was going to go build a company on my own and then now have a giant fintech that we do today. So I happened to be in the industry that I was in.
- [02:39]
A
Yeah. And can you take us back to the early stages, like, you know, did you have much exposure to entrepreneurship in the beginning?
- [02:49]
B
You know what? I actually did. I have a really interesting story because I come from immigrant, an immigrant family. My parents immigrated here from Karachi, Pakistan. So I'm in the US currently. And my parents immigrated here when they were, you know, in their early teens, met in Chicago, got married. I was born in Chicago and grew up in Dallas. But what makes kind of my story and our family story really interesting is I've come from this line of entrepreneurs out of necessity. So because my parents were immigrants, entrepreneurship was something that it wasn't, it was a necessity. It wasn't something that was sexy or cool as it is today. They just weren't educated. So in order for them to have their American dream, they had to start a, start a business. So I came from a line of small businesses. My parents literally had every small business you can think of. And so my brother and I actually went to 10 different schools in 12 years of our schooling where we moved around so much in this pursuit of my parents American dream. And honestly, their American dream was just to make sure that my brother and I had an education and that we didn't have to become entrepreneurs, that we could have a steady job at a 401k. And then here we are now as entrepreneurs. And so it's funny how that that story kind of unfolded. But yes, I grew up around the most incredible, hardworking entrepreneurs and kind of saw firsthand what it took to build a business, what it took for businesses to fail, the hardship, the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. But all of that credit goes to my parents.
- [04:28]
A
Yeah. Wow, what an amazing story. So you co founded Stacks with your brother. Can, can you talk us about when you had that aha moment for Stacks?
- [04:40]
B
Yes, I started the company in 2014 and honestly, Nathan, I didn't even know that I could go build a million dollar business, let alone a billion dollar business. I came from the payment card industry. I was working, you know, selling terminals which are like credit card processing machines that are the trunk of my Volkswagen Beetle. So I started like ground up. This is in field sales. It doesn't even exist anymore. And I, you know, I serve small businesses and from that I had this, I guess aha moment in 2012 when I was stuck in a, in a snowstorm in Texas. And yes, Texas does have snowstorms. So I was stuck visiting my, my family and I got, you know, I got stuck because of the weather and I was rerouting my then subscription boxes back In Orlando. And I was so obsessed with everything subscription and this was pre subscription economy, now it is today. So I was like rerouting, you know, my dog's bark box and birch box and whatever else because I wanted to be home to make sure I received and opened this amazing package. And that's kind of when that aha moment happened. That light bulb went off and I was like, holy shit, why isn't there a flat subscription and payments? This like has to exist. And that's kind of when I started digging into this subscription side of the credit card industry which didn't exist. And that's kind of where the or like the origin story of now stacks. Then Fat Merchant, which was the original name of the company was started. And we were the first subscription based credit card processor to come to market that had flat fee unlimited credit card processing. Just like all of these amazing softwares like Spotify. Spotify and Netflix. And quickly we were coined as the Netflix of credit card processing. And here we are, you know, almost 25 billion in payments later.
- [06:37]
A
Yeah, it's crazy. You, you've had such an incredible success story. I want to, I want to delve a little deeper though because I know that you actually brought this idea to your then employer.
- [06:48]
B
Correct, Correct. I had no desire. So as I mentioned to you earlier, so I grew up in a, in a household of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. I mean we, you know, my parents had small businesses. I had to work in small businesses every weekend after school. I mean from you know, franchise, you know, fast food restaurants to pizza shops to you know, even a marketing company. Like my parents literally had every single style business you can, you can think of real estate, all of it. And we worked in every single one of these small businesses as a family. So we all had our roles and responsibility. And it wasn't this like child labor kind of work. It was just a family run business. And so because I kind of had that background, I didn't even for one second think that I was going to go start this company. And it wasn't a small business. Right. Where do you go find Mr. Visa? Right. So I'm 25 years old, I'm working for a credit card company. I was like, I think this is going to be amazing. All I wanted to do was to bring this idea to life. And instead of going home on that trip back to Orlando, I ended up routing my ticket to Houston where my headquarters was for by the company that I worked for. And I ended up securing the meeting with a C suite. And I was like, I'M going to pitch this idea. I worked on this presentation for a week. I binge watched, I think, season one and two of Shark Tank. And so if any of the sharks I ever get to meet soon, hopefully, you know, that is, that's a huge part of my story. And I ended up, you know, watching like the first season of Shark Tank and I'm like, okay, this is how I'm going to pitch this, this is how this is going to work. And all I wanted was to see this successful in my own company and hopefully just have a part in that success of whatever that could look like and just like lead this division and change the way that the credit card industry was. I ended up going to Houston and the idea was just laughed out of a room and you know, it wasn't taken seriously. I mean, why would we want to disrupt this industry that was done this way for so long? And oh, we want to create technology and invest in analytics and drive data from transactions. Like, why would we want to do that? We could just charge everybody whatever we want. And so it, it was, it was shut down.
- [09:05]
A
So you had this idea, you just shut down. What happened next?
- [09:09]
B
So I, I was disappointed, right? I was not just disappointed, I was, I was frustrated. I was disappointed. I remember getting back on this flight home and I get home and by coincidence it was family dinner, it was Sunday night and my brother actually happened to be home from San Francisco. He was working for another startup. Everyone's around the dinner table and I'm explaining what had took place and this idea that I have for, you know, to, to revolutionize this industry. I'm like, if somebody's got to do this. And my family looks to me, Nathan, and they're like, why not you? And that was the first time that it even occurred to me, why not me, right? Why not go give this a shot? And my first response was, how am I going to go find Mr. Visa? That was literally, I think, the first thing I said to my family and I was like, I don't know how to start a software company. I've never built technology before. I know marketing. I went to school for finance and marketing and my parents looked at me and they said, I mean, what's the worst that's going to happen, right? Give yourself six months and give it a go. And so that was kind of how the story of my entrepreneurship journey began. I ended up quitting that job, moving into my parents house, investing the very little savings that I had, ended up taking a small round from friends and family and Starting this venture and in six months we had done over 5 million in payments our first year. And so that was kind of the start of this company. And there's a lot that happened in the last 10 years in becoming a unicorn, but that's how I got started.
- [10:58]
A
Yeah. And we will get there. Trust me, we will get there. We have to get into this. But what did the first six months look like? Like, that's, that's pretty impressive to process 5 million of payments. Like what the first version of the platform look like. How much did you raise from friends and family to get an MVP going and even, you know, processing payments? That's kind of scary. Like, this is company's money. Like, you got to get that right. And in six months, that's actually pretty quick. So can you talk us through some of that?
- [11:27]
B
Yeah. So I would say the first thing that I did, which I encourage a lot of founders to do, is to, you know, leverage and white label solutions that are already there to get an MVP off the ground. And I didn't know at the time that it was called an MVP that I was, you know, doing like, I didn't know like the terms white label. Like, I didn't, I didn't know startup lingo or, you know, founder lingo, but I happened to do some of the things in a, in a way that I, that I, that I, I think I did it not I think I did it in the right way. And one of the first things that I did was if I had six months, I, I did raise. It was very little. It was like sub 50,000 dol of startup capital that I had taken from my now husband. So, and my brother. So my brother ended up investing his, his savings as well. And it was, it was about a $50,000 check. And it was because honestly, immediately that we put the money in the account in order for us to Register with Visa, MasterCard and go through some of the compliances. Like, that was half of the money like immediately gone. So I had no startup capital. And so it's actually, by not having capital, it actually forced me to think, how am I going to do this differently in comparison to the industry? So the way that, and this is not that long ago, so 2000, 2014. So 2013 is when this idea came to place. In 2014 is when I got the company registered and like kind of our first clients going. But in 2014, it's not that long ago in payment, that's about a decade ago. However, most of the industry at that time was going to market by the FI channels and the banking channels. You got your, your processing through your, you know, through Chase or through bank of America or through like your physical locations of banks. And I had just, I mean, you know, I love digital marketing and that was my background in school. I did finance and I did marketing and I uh, and I was also one of the agents that was like the feet on the street. I could not afford to hire people and so how could I make my dollars go further where I built a website and then I started doing blogs and SEO and I invested you know, the first $500 in Google and PPC and I, you know, the phone rang and what was really cool about that model is that you could have share of space so quickly online when there wasn't, there weren't processing companies, there weren't fintechs. Fintech didn't even like the, the word Fintech didn't even exist. They weren't, they didn't have a space in the digital space yet. So we were able to get such quick share of space digitally and be a lot larger than having like, we didn't have branches, we didn't have, you know, partnerships with, with the, with institutions or feet on the street or lots of employees that can go, you know, sit sell our solutions. And so we took, it was almost because of the scrappiness that we were able to, you know, become be one of the first players to come to market to really own the digital space in acquisition and customer acquisition online for payments. So that's kind of how we were able to make our dollars go further. And we would invest a dollar and we would get $10 back. Like we would, you know, our phones would be ringing for customers with this model. And another thing that I did was to go white label as I had mentioned earlier. So I didn't have a technology background, I didn't know where to go build the software. But I, but I knew enough of what we needed. So we partnered with, with, with one of the banking institutions to use one of their, their white label solutions to go bring this to market, to at least go test out the hypothesis that people would want to have a subscription style model versus a percentage style model. So I would say the first about 250 customers that year came through that until we knew okay, we need to go invest further and we had enough proof of concept to then go raise capital to go build out software.
- [15:30]
A
Yeah. Wow. Crazy. That's a great story because I think oftentimes founders when they raise money, they want to build Customers, you know, they've got a short development timeline, they don't have proof of concept. I really respect the creativity and, and that lesson around this idea. When you don't have that much money, you've, you've got to be forced to be creative. Like, you know, even for us with founder and our online education platform, you know, we just use WordPress and we just do a few different plugins. Right. And we, you know, you have a substantial platform with a lot of users and it's, it can work.
- [16:12]
B
Absolutely. I think it's so I agree with you. I think it's especially in the early stages, I've seen so many companies not get started or not, you know, not be able to actually iterate with their customers. And so I think that was the biggest benefit in not owning this, like not investing so many dollars in building up the platform. We were able to build our platform with our customers and honestly the platform as it is today would not have happened if we hadn't gone to that route. Because what we learned very quickly when we went online is that we were also attracting a different style of customer. Our customers weren't the restaurants or retailers or what you think of for, you know, customers. People really recognize square as like a processor in America, but they were, there were technology solutions like Square and Stripe that were emerging in the marketplace but there wasn't anybody that was able to do what we saw. The need was for specific verticals. So we were attracting customers in the healthcare space, we were attracting customers in the professional services space and the services industries that needed both card present solutions. So they had in person payments and online payments. So our next thesis was formed that there needed to be an omnichannel platform, that there needed to be one hub in payments and that it wasn't just about the transparency and billing, it was also about that customers were going to pay in a multitude of ways and that businesses needed to accept payments through all of the different channels that were going to become omnichannel. And so we took a bet on that thesis and build our technology to be a payments hub. Right? So whether a customer needed E commerce, whether they needed to integrate into QuickBooks or they needed an online shopping cart, an in person terminal or a mobile, we then knew that we could, we didn't have to have the solutions at that time. We were just integrating with the world leading software to build into a singular hub.
- [18:15]
A
So when you were scaling, can you talk us through the challenges that you faced over this past 10 year period? And you know, the increasing Demands of the business. How, How'd you keep up?
- [18:29]
B
Wine? I don't know. No sleep? I don't, I don't even know how we're still standing today as like we're 10 years into this business and I think now people are, you know, learning about the company and know who we are and, and it's like, people forget like the, it's like 10 years to get to where we are today. And it was a lot of true blood, sweat and tears and a million moments that I could tell you that I didn't know I could go build a million dollar business, let alone a billion dollar business. And a lot of it was grit and hustle and hard work and resiliency and just being able to fight through all of the no's and all of the rejection and just making it one day at a time. So I would say that, you know, the last 10 years, if I were to sum it up just, it was, it was hard work like that is how I would sum up the last 10 years of building this business. But I wouldn't trade it for anything else, you know, in the world. I mean, it has been, it's, it's been the, the journey has been just if as hard as it's been, it's also been the most rewarding thing that I've also been able to do. And it continues to surprise me. It's like this never ending, like growth that comes from reaching this next milestone. And it's not about the chase, because in the initial, in the initial days when I started the company, it was about the chase, right? It was like, what's the milestone and this next milestone. And I think as you start to grow a company, you know, there's like the team milestones, there's the revenue milestones, there's the funding milestones, there's all these milestones. And everybody tells you what is success, right? So success is defined by what, you know, success to be. And so initially that is how kind of my first like initial part of the journey, if I were looked, were to look back of what I, what I was chasing. And now I would say there was like a shift in the last three years in, after you start achieving some of these milestones, it actually stops becoming about those milestones. It's really about, it's the, it's, you realize that it's really about the journey. And it sounds as, as cliche as it does. I mean, people still ask why I'm still, I'm still here, right? We've had, you know, I've gone through multiple different rounds of private equity, been able to have a lot of success for myself, for my team, for our investors and everything else. And it's like, I just love the journey that I'm on. And every day I get to show up for something different for a job that was harder than the one I had yesterday. And who gets an opportunity to build something at this level and then continue to go? And so I'm still, I think, like, that's the, that's the. It's the journey that I'm. I'm here for. And I, I've realized that it's not about the milestone anymore. Like, especially after this last, like, unicorn announcement. I mean, what next? Right? People are like, what's next? And I'm like, there's nothing next to Chase. Like, I, I don't think it's about what's next. It's about, you know, what's possible. Like, what, what's. It's not about what's next. It's about. It's about how do I take this platform and show other women, honestly, that they too, can do it too.
- [21:52]
A
And you also had a buyout offer for 17 and a half million in 2017. What made you decline that?
- [22:02]
B
My gut. It was the. So something about. Something about me that I feel like is one of my. Now I realize it's one of my biggest strengths. I used to think of it as one of my weaknesses. I'm very empathetic. You know, I'm a mother. I'm a woman. I feel like I lean on my. My three minds is what I call it. So I've got my, you know, like my, my analytical mind. I've got my heart and I've got my gut. And you kind of need I make. I need all three to make the decisions. And when one's not feeling right, I have to tell. To trust that. And it took me a long time to. To trust myself in that decision making. In 2017, you're referencing a time where we had just raised our Series A funding. So we had our seed funding. We had gotten a pre seed and then our seed round. I think our, our value there was. I think it was $7 million. And we had, you know, we were heavily discounted. I mean, we were out of Orlando. There's no venture. There was no venture capital in, in Orlando. I mean, less than 1% of minorities raise capital. Less than 3% of women ever raise capital. And so. And this is. We're, you know, this is 2000. No, I said 2017. Yeah, 2000. 2000. 2015. I would say a year and a half after. And we ended up doing our seed round. And then quickly thereafter, you know, we got some traction, and a strategic payments company reached out and said, hey, you guys are have this great technology. We'd love to talk about an acquisition opportunity. And so, of course, like any other, I get so excited. It's like the first time, like, I'm like, oh, my God, like, somebody wants us. Like, this is so exciting. I feel so validated, right? You feel so good. And I get a term sheet. I'll never forget the day that I got the term sheet because it was also St. Patrick's Day. And then we went out that day. Like, our office is like, in the heart of downtown. And we, like, celebrated as a team. It was like this whole thing. We have an actual term sheet in our hands that says $17 million. And I'm doing all the back of the napkin math, and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm about to be a millionaire if I accept this offer. So you go through all of these things, like, it's a very exciting time for a founder. The first time you ever received anything tangible in paper. And I get excited. And we had just finished off of this. Like, we had just brought non investors. We have our, like, only one or two board meetings that we had had. And so the next morning, I, you know, make sure I let our investors know. We call a board meeting, they're like, oh, we should pursue this opportunity with a strategic. And we go down the path. And long story short, my gut was not clicking. The people on the other side, they just. It just wasn't the right fit. Value wise, culture wise. And I was like, I have to roll. It wasn't this like, you know, and then also, you don't know what you don't know, right? It's not. It's not actually $17 million in cash also for the company. You have equity, you have stock, you know, the investors get paid. And you, as a founder, honestly, you're always the last person to get paid. Like, that is. That is like the first thing that I feel like I want to teach every entrepreneur is I did not know enough in the early stages on. On, you know, I didn't have a lot of resources on how to negotiate term sheets and all of that. The long story short, it didn't feel right. And we go through diligence and every step of our diligence process, like, red flags, red flags. And our board kept pushing us to Keep going through this process and until the kind of like the last, you know, last phases of diligence, they. They retraded the offer at 12 and a half million. And they're. The reasons why they retraded it were, you know, it was almost like they knew they had us. And. And it was because I was negotiating against myself. It was probably one of the biggest lessons that I learned in capital raising was that you don't ever. If you're negotiating with one party, you're negotiating with yourself. And so you want to have multiple parties at the table, which has been one of the biggest lessons that I've learned in my life. So they. They give us. They give us a retraded term sheet. And I'm like, there's no way I'm going to fucking accept this. And so I decline the offer, and I say, thanks, but no thanks, and we're out. And so I call the board meeting the next morning, and I tell the board that I have declined the offer. And they all. We all meet in our office in Orlando. This is pre. Pre pandemic. And it was a shit show of a board meeting. They thought we were, you know, Sal and I were immature and that we should not have, like, you know, we should have consulted and that 12 million could have been a fair offer or we could have countered back. And I'm like, you guys just invested in this business, right? What has changed in the last six weeks that you're ready to take this minimal offer, like, just incrementally more than what you've invested in? And so we started this relationship extremely rocky with our board, but we declined the offer that we had on the table, and we continued to power through. And there was a point in the company where we had absolutely no money left in the bank and needed to go out for our next fundraise and ended up getting that next fundraise term sheet for 50 million there shortly right after. And then the following rounds, I'm like, skipping, like, the. The year after or the two years after. Ended up doing a private equity deal and they ended up buying out. Are the first initial investors that wanted us to sell for the 12 million. We exited those investors at 18 times their capital.
- [27:54]
A
Yeah. What a great story. Thank you for sharing. So you talk about lessons around fundraising. I'd love to tap into that a little more, talk us through, like, some of the levers that. That you've used and, you know, lessons and experiences you could share with our. Our audience.
- [28:11]
B
Yeah, I would say, like, the biggest lesson is to have the right advisory team around you, right? And so I think you don't know what you don't know. And I think as a first time founder, I mean I always say I didn't go to CEO school, so I didn't know, you know, until everything I've learned has had to have like it has been through experience. It's not from a, you know, it's not from a school I went to and it's not from, you know, a best friend's experience. It has, it's gone through the experience of our own company growth and experience that we've had to go through. And so I will say that the levers that have really helped me is one, having the right advisory team around you and getting the right mentors in place early on and even some of these things, like it sounds so basic and so cliche, but really having mentors that have actually been there in your journey. And I had a mentor that was so instrumental in our success. His name is Asif Ramji. He sold his company, payments company for, you know, $550 million to a strategic. And he was also in a similar industry. We had met and he had, you know, really taken Sal and I kind of under his wings as his mentees. And anytime that I needed any resources, I had a, a true mentor that I can call on. And he had been there in the path right before we had. So I think it's important to have a good advisory team around you, but also an advisory team that's in your, ideally in your industry and that some. And someone who hasn't been so far removed from the business. So, you know, I was part of like a venture accelerator. I met great advisors and investors, but they, they had built companies decades ago. Right. So building a company today and having mentors and advisors who are in the trenches of what's happening and it's important for you to surround yourself with advisors and mentors that ideally, you know, are active or that have not been too far in their journeys as well. So that was so super helpful because I could rely on, on these, on this, like this group of mentors that I had who had just gone through this journey. So that was extremely, extremely, extremely helpful. And then two, I would say is it's that intuition, like your intuition is like the most powerful tool that you have and use it and don't discount it and listen to it and if it doesn't feel right, it's okay. Right? It's okay. And that it will be there later and to stay heads down and honestly, lesson number three is focus on execution, right? So don't see the shiny object. I think even when I look back at my, you know, the, that self, when I got that offer, it was like this really shiny, you know, piece of paper. But it's a distraction, right? I was distracted from the business going, you know, going down this path of, you know, this acquisition opportunity when I should have been focused on building the business I had in front of me. And so as long as you prioritize execution, always, right, you are able to build a successful business. And if you're able to build a successful business, the exit will happen, the outcome will happen, right? The success will happen as long as you focus on execution. Because there is no such thing as a billion dollar idea. It's only a billion dollar execution. And so execution needs to be at the top of your list every single day. And, and focus, right? So if you're focused on the right things and not being distracted and focus on your revenue, focus on building a good business, then those opportunities will continue to come and they truly have. Right. And I'm sure that goes for every single founder that you've probably interviewed of what has defined their success is its consistency, it's showing up. It's just keep, just keep going and fighting through it.
- [32:02]
A
And I have to ask you around the details and the experiences from your latest funding round. What details can you share? And, and how. Yeah, how did that, what that looked.
- [32:14]
B
Like this last one. Okay, so I get better every time you do it, right? So it gets, I feel like one of the things that in entrepreneurship and work for anything, right, that you learn, like, it gets harder, right? The journey, like when people are like, what are the. What is like the biggest thing that you look back and you're like, you wish somebody had told you it's not easy. It's fucking hard. And it only gets harder. Like, I thought it was going to get easier when like, oh, I'm going to get my. You're solo. And then you're like, when I get like my first employee, it's going to get easier. When I get my 10th employee, it's going to get easier. When I get my thousandth customer or my, you know, when I hit, you know, a million in ARR or like whatever milestone you feel, you're like, oh, it's going to get easier. It doesn't get easier. You just get better. Right? That's what happens. You just get better through that experience. And so kind of looking back at this last funding round, you know, I Think it's about relationships. So the, you know, this last funding round, it was our current investors that ended up coming back into for more investment. And I think that that goes not only to show of the strength in our business, but of the relationships that, that are. So they're important and that you continue to show like you don't need to have a lot of net new and over the last. I know founders that all they do is focus their time on fundraising and I've been really lucky that we've not had to like my job is an execution of the business and when I'm ready to fundraise, I've already have built the relationships through that journey. Like I'm, we're, I'm always building relationships and honestly, Nathan, I get scared for what's happening post pandemic and people's ability to like or people's like not wanting to meet in person and not wanting to foster relationships. It's really tough to do this in a virtual environment. I was lucky to have like been fundraising in the pre pandemic environment and building these relationships with investors that we ended up doing in our series C round that I was building relationships earlier on when we were in our seed round. So and so it didn't just happen that we had this like knight in shining armor investor that came out and we had just met every single investor that has been part of our board and that has been part of our journey. It was a long relationship that we built. I mean it's like, it's, it's like, it's like marriage. But you got a date before you just jump in and get married. And so I think that's something that founders, you know, I think most of them are naturally good at. Right? I mean, we're storytellers, we're visionaries where, you know, we're great with people. And I think that's a huge part of fundraising is showing, you know, you have to have a great business, right. You've got to have that. That's like foundation of it. That's Clean sheets is what we call it. You got to have that. But you've got to be able to articulate your, your, that story of the business and where it's headed through the financial data and through those relationship and fostering those relationships.
- [35:18]
A
Awesome. And you guys previously were named Fat Merchant. That's a really cool name. So can you tell us about the rebrand, why that happened? Yeah, talk us through that.
- [35:32]
B
So when I started the company, it was Fat Merchant and it was meant it was such a cool name. It was hilarious. It was so fun. And there's been a maturation of us, our products, our. Our company. And Fat Merchant lived its life. And I think it's so hard for founders especially to let go of their baby, right? So I have three babies. My first baby was Fat Merchant, and then I have two daughters. And, you know, it's really. It was a big evolution of where we were in 2014-2020 is when we rebranded the company. But as our technology evolves, our. Our branding, our messaging, our customer journey wasn't reflected in our name and our messaging because we were just merchant facing as Fat Merchant. And Fat Merchant stood for fast, affordable transaction technology. But we had this amazing platform for integrated payments and for, you know, financial institutions for. For SaaS companies. And so we needed a, you know, we were the payment stack and that's where our future was. So where we started and the pivots that evolved in a company, we also had to pay attention to where we were headed, where the puck was going. And so that's something that I feel like I have no ego in, luckily. And it's changed. Like I, you know, as humans, we're so multidimensional, and I embrace my own multidimensional personality. Like, I'm always changing. You're always changing. Like, you know, there's things that keep us core to who we are, and that doesn't change. Right? Which was the values of our company, our core product and offering what we serve to our customers. But there has been an evolution in the company, and it was time to reflect that evolution and where we were headed. And so in 2020, we decided to rip the band aid and to. To come to market and change our name. And. And we, you know, and be the payment stock for small business, large business and software companies, which is more reflective of who we are today and where we're headed. And so we did a extremely large rebrand. It was probably the. One of the hardest decisions I've ever made as CEO and probably one of the best decisions that I've also made as CEO.
- [37:50]
A
Hmm. So you. You really. Why was it the hardest? Because just the name, right? A name name can be anything that you make of it.
- [38:00]
B
That is easy to say that the name. But when the name already has credibility, right. When the name already has SEO value. Like, as I mentioned, we're a digital company. We acquire customers digitally. There's share of space that we own. So to have to completely start over from scratch, right? To transition everything. And it's not necessarily starting from scratch, but there's a big migration that take place, takes place. Right. And people either hate it or love it. And if you think about companies, like, literally at the same time, I believe Facebook also went from like we did ours and then Facebook went from Facebook to meta. Right. I mean, and, and companies have to evolve and where that. Where their future is headed. And so it was nice to also, like, see other large companies kind of head in that direction. It like, helps me feel a little bit more validated. But it was definitely super scary and very hard to say. People may we have to let go of our past. So I think that is a evolutionist is scary. And so just being vulnerable, you know, here to say that change is scary, but change is also. It's risky, but it's, it's, it's important and it's part of who we are and it's part of how companies need to operate as well.
- [39:08]
A
Amazing. Well, look, Sunira, this was an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for your time. The last question is, where's the best place people can find out more about yourself and your work?
- [39:18]
B
Absolutely. You can just find me on any social platform at Suniramidani. That's S U N E E R A Madani M A D H A N I And then from there you'll be able to find stacks and everything else. The podcast every with everything will link. I'm always in my DMs on Instagram, so feel free if you've heard me today on the show. I love, love, love connecting and knowing where people are, are finding, you know, you know, little bits of or any questions that you have or however I can be of assistance. I'm here and I love, love, love talking to entrepreneurs.
- [39:53]
A
Awesome. Well, look, thank you so much. This was an absolute pleasure. It was great to connect. Thank you for staying up late and if you're ever in Melbourne, feel free to reach out. Would love to connect further.
- [40:06]
B
I'm going to take you up on that on my next Australian adventure.
- [40:09]
A
Hey, founder fam. Thank you so much for tuning in today and if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. Think this podcast is 100% free. We work so hard to go out and find the most successful entrepreneurs and founders in the world. Your feedback helps us grow, improve, and even bring on more incredible guests and insights. So if you have a second, please take a moment, leave us a review. It really makes a difference. Thanks again for listening and I'll catch you on the next show.