Sahill Poddar is the Co-founder and CEO of Parafin, helping marketplaces, vertical SaaS, and point of sale providers offer financial services their merchants.

Sahill started his career getting a PhD discovering the Higgs boson particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. We talk about how physics is just real world machine learning, and all the lessons he learned on the growth teams at Facebook and Robinhood.

We also talk about getting Parafin off the ground, which four years later is nearing in on a $100m GAAP revenue run rate. He shares how they avoided Silicon Valley’s graveyard of SMB lenders by leveraging other platforms, landing DoorDash as their first customer before building the product, and advice for technical founders learning enterprise sales.

A thank you to Hans Tung at Notable Capital, Nick Shalek at Ribbit, and Mahdi Raza at Pathlight for their help brainstorming topics for the conversation.

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Timestamps:

(4:06) Lending to SMBs inside marketplaces and platforms

(9:39) Why SMB lending is so hard

(12:50) Three ways AI is changing Fintech

(16:47) Silicon Valley’s graveyard of SMB lenders

(22:44) Getting a PhD in Particle Physics

(26:15) How CERN's Large Hadron Collider works

(31:49) Discovering new dimensions

(34:10) Building billion user data sets at Facebook

(39:53) Working with other physicists at Robinhood

(50:29) Growth lessons from FB + Robinhood

(1:00:57) Starting Parafin, embedded, horizontal SMB lending

(1:06:09) Why credit is the biggest problem for SMBs

(1:10:53) Raising a Seed from Ribbit pre-product

(1:13:25) Landing DoorDash as the first customer

(1:16:51) Mastering B2B sales as a technical founder

(1:22:58) Lessons from Vlad at Robinhood

Referenced

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PhD to $100M Revenue: Rebuilding SMB Lending with AI | Sahill Poddar, Co-founder and CEO of Parafin

The Peel with Turner Novak