On Deck attended the 2011 Small Business Influencer Awards last night in New York City. The ceremony honored companies, organizations and people who have made an impact on the small business community. At the ceremony, we were inspired by the supportive dialogue about how small businesses are the backbone of the US economy and a major catalyst for job creation. On Deck applauds all the attendees and winners and looks forward to continuing to serve small business nationwide.
We are excited to announce yet another new milestone for On Deck - as a result of the continued optimization of the On Deck technology, we have increased the loan size and term available through our platform by 50%. Main Street business owners can now access up to $150,000 at terms of up to 18 months through the On Deck system.
This represents a significant opportunity for business owners nationwide, and speaks to the success the On Deck platform has had in using technology to efficiently identify healthy Main Street businesses.
We look forward to continuing to use technology to make capital accessible to business owners nationwide.
You can read our press release for this announcement here.
This is the eighth and final post in an ongoing CEO Insights series leading up to On Deck's $100 Million Milestone. Read the other posts here.Of the 3,500+ customer loan transactions completed by the On Deck system, each one has represented a job created or a job protected, equipment and inventory ordered, a new sign or awning replaced, or a new product offered to customers – the actual vertebrate of the “backbone” of the US economy that the media, politicians, and pundits talk about so often. But more than that, the new employees hired and new equipment purchased also represent a step forward in pursuing the American Dream for the tireless entrepreneurs who own these Main Street businesses.
But it’s not just their dreams of independence or the chance to spend their day pursuing a passion rather than a paycheck that makes On Deck's system important. For anyone who cares about the US economy, these sub 25 employee Main Street Businesses represent as many as 40% of the jobs in the United States - it is important to both grow this base and protect it. Further, it is from Main Street that some of our greatest stars rise, like a coffee shop in Seattle that becomes Starbucks, a 5 and Dime in Bentonville becomes WalMart, and a Bar-B-Que place in San Bernardino becomes McDonalds.
Having crossed $100M, the On Deck platform is now the foundation of a critical ½ trillion dollar industry and the On Deck team is on the first floor executing on that opportunity. It has been an extraordinary journey in technology entrepreneurship and now our sights turn to putting On Deck in the middle between capital sources and Main Street to solve a major problem for Main Street and the United States economy.
We’ll keep you posted.
Mitch
Founder & CEO
This is the seventh post in an ongoing CEO Insights series leading up to On Deck's $100 Million Milestone. Read the other posts here. In 2007, the On Deck platform funded our first loan - to a Limousine company in New York, NY. Since that time the On Deck system has been providing uninterrupted service to Main Street customers.
As a result, Main Street Businesses from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon with business owners like Elaine Ously-Nevarez of Elaine's Florist & Gift Baskets in Houston, Texas and Jim Reardon of Hudson Yards Café on 10th Avenue in New York, can quickly and cost effectively receive capital to grow and operate their businesses.
Mitch
Founder & CEO
This is the sixth post in an ongoing CEO Insights series leading up to On Deck's $100 Million Milestone. Read the other posts here. As Noah and his team dug into the technology challenges, Howard and I shifted focus on the “supply” side of the On Deck platform – all of the money that would need to flow through the system to reach Main Street businesses. It is the nature of every entrepreneurial venture to have a critical point of naïveté - the pivotal challenge that if you really knew how hard it was going to be to overcome, you would have never dared to go forth in the first place.
For the next two years, On Deck would battle through creating a capital supply by getting capital sources committed to an audience of borrowers they had never wanted to fund, through an untested technology platform at one of the worst times in financial market history. We began by using Venture Capital money which was painful for the entrepreneurs and understandably despised by Venture Capitalists; soon we had partial debt in 2008, then mostly debt in 2009, and then, finally, the platform was fueled by all debt in 2010.
The process was an education in capital markets that none of us ever needed, but we successfully crossed the liquidity chasm that prevents many fintech innovators from creating a market. Now that we have the committed capacity to fund over $200M per year through the On Deck platform, we can look ahead in 2011, a year in which we plan to make the transition from private to commercial bank sources of capital.
Mitch
Founder & CEO
This is the fifth post in an ongoing CEO Insights series leading up to On Deck's $100 Million Milestone. Read the other posts here.Our first task was to build the technology platform. Our plan called for being in market by the middle of 2007 and in order to do so, we knew we needed to build a seamless platform that performed the functions of several multi-billion dollar companies.
We had to create a version of Equifax/Experian data collection capabilities that would not collect consumer bill payment information, but instead collect financial performance data of Main Street businesses. We had to create an analytics platform like Fair Isaac's but instead of measuring a consumer’s past credit performance, we would measure the health of a Main Street Business. We would then have to create a processing platform like First Data or Fiserve, but one that would help the Main Street business manage cash through daily micro payments, rather than monthly mail in payments.
We had only had 9 months to do it...
Mitch
Founder & CEO
This is the fourth post in an ongoing CEO Insights series leading up to On Deck's $100 Million Milestone. Read the other posts here.Soon enough we had assembled a
star team. Noah Breslow (our brilliant Chief Product Officer) who I met at
Luke’s Bar & Grill one afternoon and then proceeded to assail with 14 different points of common contact until he submitted. Jorge Sun, a rising star in credit analytics, who we recruited away from JP Morgan Chase, and Howard Katzenberg, a young, very entrepreneurial finance guy who had been at Amex Open and at a venture backed finance startup prior to joining On Deck.
We would later be joined by Blaine Atkinson, who brought military precision and servicing experience to our operations. And finally, Brad Kime who joined as the Company's President bringing public company executive management to our now scaling business.
Now we were making progress...
Mitch
Founder & CEO
The past year has been an exciting one at On Deck - in March we reached $50 million delivered to Main Street businesses, and less than 9 months later we crossed the
$100 million milestone. This was a tremendous achievement and speaks to our original vision of using technology to connect Main Street with capital.
Our latest achievement represents another exciting milestone for us as
SAP Ventures has led a
$15M series C round of financing for On Deck.
We are truly excited to work with this distinguished group of financial investors who have previously invested in technology and software firms including LinkedIn, MySQL, Webex and Red Hat Software.
We will use this investment to expand our technology, and bolster our ability to connect millions of Main Street businesses with capital.
Stay tuned as we march towards our next milestone!
Mitch
Founder & CEO
This is the third post in an ongoing series leading up to On Deck's $100 Million Milestone. Read the other posts here.
It helps to believe in your cause. I prepared one slide, met with Josh Kopelman, superstar entrepreneur turned superstar venture capitalist and founder of First Round Capital (his partner, Howard Morgan had been an investor in my prior company). After a 35 minute meeting with Josh there was no doubt that he believed in On Deck’s mission to help Main Street, and I had my first commitment for a Series A round of capital.
Matt Harris from Village Ventures, a brilliant early stage fintech investor (a rare focus for early stage) took over the lead. Matt's firm Village Ventures was joined by Matt Gorin co-founder of Contour Venture Partners who I bumped into at a Harvard Business School reunion (my wife's, I never made it that far). Before the round was over, David Weiden of renowned Khosla Ventures also joined finalizing an impressive syndicate that brought a combination of experience, depth of capital and great networks. It goes to show that when you believe in what you are doing and share that idea with smart, savvy people, good things can happen… fast.
We were on our way.
Mitch
Founder & CEO
This is the second post in an ongoing series leading up to the $100 Million Milestone. Read the first post here.
On Deck started at a kitchen table on 82nd and East End Avenue in New York, NY.
I had become obsessed with why at a time when “liquidity was everywhere,” the pizza shops, pharmacies, auto repair shops, and local retailers of all types that I had worked with since I started my first Main Street focused “fintech” company when I was a junior at Dartmouth in 1993, were continually being declined by banks for loans.
I was in New York City surrounded by brilliant finance people and the epicenter of the world’s capital market. Through relentless (and I'm sure at times overbearing) questioning, I had come to learn that the reason these Main Street Businesses could not access capital was because no one in the financial system (commercial banks, private equity, hedge funds, and government resources) had an efficient, low cost way to evaluate these small Main Street Businesses.
By the summer of 2006, I had concluded that the Main Street market was too large to ignore but each Main Street Business was too small to serve - it was a long tail problem. I didn’t know a thing about credit or capital markets but this wasn’t a credit or capital problem, it was a technology problem and one that could be solved.
I knew launching a business that would be so complex was no easy task and I hesitated until one night I shared with my wife my long list of observations about the pain suffered by Main Street business owners, the specific requirements of banks, the technology barriers we would need to overcome and the capital access challenges that could potentially be insurmountable. My wife tolerated as much as she could before saying I had to start this business and, thinking about a business whose goal was to always be ready to support Main Street Businesses, "you have to call it
On Deck".
Mitch
Founder & CEO
Last Thursday, the On Deck technology platform issued an instruction to the bank networks to transfer a $50,000 loan to an auto repair shop in upstate New York.
For the business owner, this loan means that he can purchase a new piece of equipment and begin an expansion of his quickly growing business. For On Deck, it means that the technology platform we built to connect Main St. to Capital has now funded $100,000,000.
This is a tremendous accomplishment for the team of 60 employees at On Deck Capital who each in their own way has made critical contributions to achieving this milestone. We also of course owe thanks to many of you who have supported, nurtured and followed On Deck from its beginning.
For those of you who are new to the On Deck story, this month, to celebrate our $100,000,000 milestone we will catch you up on a quick history of how a small group of entrepreneurs solved a problem which has stumped Washington, eluded the entire US financial system, and delivered $100,000,000 to Main Street Businesses.
We'll keep you posted,
Mitch
Founder & CEO
More:Read the $100 Million Milestone Press ReleaseOn Deck Customer Success Stories
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