How Veem Reached 300,000 SMB Accounts and $120M Raised with Three Revenue Streams (Interview with CEO Marwan Forzley)

Introduction and Veem Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Marwan Forzley. He's the co founder and CEO of Veem, a next generation global payment provider that enables businesses to quickly and securely send and receive payments in local currency. Marwan, you ready to take us to the top?

Marwan Forzley

00:12>> All right, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Nathan Latka

00:14You bet. So did you have a local currency crisis a couple of years ago, and this is what made you get the business going or what?

Marwan Forzley

00:20>> I have a lot of businesses in my family, and it's been quite painful watching SMBs deal with payments all day because they're busy selling what they do best, selling their products, and they're looking for ways to simplify paying and getting paid, and I'm amazed about the number of things they do that are what I call old fashioned processes, so like cutting checks, sending wires, creating paper invoices, and we wanted to rip that whole thing up and

00:55>> provide something simpler to the user so that they can pay and get paid without having to think about it. It kind of becomes natural and secondhand. That's why we created Veem so that we help them do it in domestic markets as well as cross border international. It's one login that gets you to do payments, payables, receivables, domestic and cross border under the same service.

Nathan Latka

01:19Interesting. Help me understand. I'm not quite sure what the right question is here, but you'll guide me. How many small businesses use you guys? Sent at least $1 via Veem last month.

300,000 Accounts and Platform Scale

Marwan Forzley

01:31>> Yeah, we have about 300,000 accounts on the platform. We're in 110 countries. We have 70 plus currencies that we support. We've been doing this since 2014, and customers use us to pay suppliers, pay labor, some customers use us to move money between their own bank accounts, some customers use us to collect payments on invoices, they either create on the system or they have an invoice already created, they send it out and collect payments on it.

Nathan Latka

02:03And so, I guess, what was total, you'd maybe call it GMV through your platform in August?

Marwan Forzley

02:09>> Yeah, we generally don't disclose that data, but this is a scalable platform that is designed to simplify payments for SMBs. We're not talking about we're not PowerPoint in early stage. We're not a big company either. That's a very large company. We're, I would call, mid market accounts in the way that Wall Street describes companies.

Nathan Latka

02:31Yeah. I won't push you hard here, but it would be helpful. Could you give a range you're comfortable with in terms of GMV? Like, you over 1,000,000,000 in GMV last Yeah,

Marwan Forzley

02:39>> we do billions annually.

Nathan Latka

02:41Okay, billion. Have you had a billion dollar month yet?

Marwan Forzley

02:46>> I can't disclose that, but it's really billions a year. That's what we can discuss.

Nathan Latka

02:51Got it. My guess would be you're not billions a month would be impressive, so maybe you're not there yet. But is it on the trajectory? Do you think you can get that within the next twenty four months?

Account Doubling and Growth Rate

Marwan Forzley

02:58>> It's a scalable system. We double the number of accounts pretty much every year. We've been in existence, and every year, the number of accounts on the platform at least doubles.

Nathan Latka

03:09Interesting. Tell me about how you're doing that. If you're 300,000 now, you're 150,000 a year ago, how are you signing SMBs?

Three Customer Acquisition Channels

Marwan Forzley

03:15>> Yeah, so it comes in three different buckets. Some of it comes through our own marketing programs. We acquire customers directly. Some of it comes through partnerships. We're plugged into QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite. We're integrating with bank partners. Most interesting, the bulk of it, over half of it, from customers that already on Veem. Think of it like member get member. The reason why they do that, they like the service, they find it to be delightful, it's a simple

03:46>> experience, so they tell other customers that they have, Hey, I'm going to use Veem to pay you, or I'm going to use Veem to get paid from you. And so that naturally brings other customers to the platform. That actually is the primary way of getting customers on the system, existing customers, bringing other customers.

Nathan Latka

04:05Do you measure that? Do know what your viral coefficient is?

65% Viral Growth from Existing Customers

Marwan Forzley

04:07>> Oh, yeah. We're at every month that passes by, 65% of new accounts come in from customers that are on the platform. That's your 65%

Nathan Latka

04:21of new sign ups come from referral links from current customers.

Marwan Forzley

04:24>> Interesting. It's not the traditional refer a friend model where you don't know if you've been referred or not. This is in the transaction. I send money to you, you'll like it. You say, I'm going to use Veem to get somebody else to pay you, or I'm going to use Veem to send money to somebody else. So it's in the transaction flow.

Nathan Latka

04:45Yep. So one party might not use Veem yet, but they get an invoice from me and they go, What's this Veem thing? Maybe I should sign up. And you get 65% of your growth comes from that.

Marwan Forzley

04:53>> And what's amazing about that model is basically, in return for a delightful experience that you give to the customers, customers become party to their growth. They themselves introduce the concept to other customers that they have, that they have relations with.

Nathan Latka

05:09This makes a ton of sense. I want to try and put a face. I don't want just get lost in the 300,000 number. Want try and put a face to this SMB. Can you name? Is there anyone you can cite?

Marwan Forzley

05:18>> We have so many of them. We have a lot of startups, e tailers, e commerce.

Nathan Latka

05:23Can you name one though, a

Marwan Forzley

05:25>> specific I'm trying to

Nathan Latka

05:29There's so many to pick from.

Marwan Forzley

05:30>> There's so many to pick from. I I

Nathan Latka

05:33Pick a startup, a startup, an SMB startup. So,

05:39yeah, he's searching through his HubSpot, his CRM right now. Yeah, I

Marwan Forzley

05:42>> was just about to say, I have so many of them. This is one of the things about SMBs, unlike enterprise clients where you have big accounts that you know them by heart, This is such a wide swath of businesses that use us. Not only businesses, businesses, accountants, partners, so it's just a large number of customers that

Nathan Latka

06:02use Well, me paint a picture and you tell me what's accurate. I'm a new startup. I need help invoicing. I'm gonna use Veem. We're in a couple of different countries. I'm gonna use Veem to do that. I might put like, what, 10,000 through the platform each month, something like that, my first couple of invoices?

Marwan Forzley

06:15>> Yeah. I mean, that's a typical profile.

Nathan Latka

06:18That's a

Marwan Forzley

06:19>> good way of describing it. Actually, customers start either paying suppliers and they start with a couple of suppliers a month, then they like the system, they start expanding on it and adding more suppliers to that platform. And some customers start the other way around. They start on the invoicing flow, exactly what you said. You have a couple of customers you want to collect on your invoice, and so you send them the invoice or the request and

Revenue Streams: FX, Credit Card, Capital

Marwan Forzley

06:45>> you collect payments on Veem. That's a typical profile.

Nathan Latka

06:48So let's stick to this exact story. Again, I'm a new startup. I did $10,000 through your system this month in September. How do you guys make money on the $10,000 I use your system to collect?

Marwan Forzley

06:57>> Yeah, we make money on foreign exchange. We make money if the payer paid with their credit card. We make money when we deposit funds real time to your debit card, and we make money on capital programs. A bunch of customers really like the idea of accessing capital lines from Veem. I have a bill, need to pay it, but I'm kind of short on cash. So what I do is I request the payment to be delayed. Essentially,

07:23>> think of it like a pay later type program.

Nathan Latka

07:27The NPL, right? The

Marwan Forzley

07:28>> NPL, that's exactly similar to that for businesses. So these aren't the types of revenue we make. What's interesting is there's no subscription fee, there's no setup fee, and there's no transaction fees on ACH, cheques, or debit cards. They're all corporate. We make money on what we call advanced features, which is credit cards, foreign exchange, and capital program.

Narrowing the Model to Three Streams

Nathan Latka

07:49Let me repeat these back to you quickly, and just to make sure I got them. You

07:55said foreign exchange credit card fees, deposit funds real time to the debt debit cards, and then capital programs. But really, I can eliminate the deposit funds to real time to debt cards. Do really think foreign exchange credit card fees and capital programs?

Marwan Forzley

08:08>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

08:09That's I see. Okay. And of those three, is there like clearly a leader in terms of what your core business model is? Or is it like 33%, 33% revenue split?

Marwan Forzley

08:17>> Well, historically, foreign exchange is the leader because historically we come from cross border payments market. And over time we know there's quite a lot of activity in domestic markets, so we started adding other ways to monetize domestic. So that's a newer revenue stream, parts and capital, but today there's more skew towards foreign exchange. In the future, it'll balance out.

Nathan Latka

08:40I see. Okay. So I mean, is it fair to say that right now more than 70% of your revenue is foreign exchange, but the other two ones are growing very quick because they're brand new?

Marwan Forzley

08:47>> It's not as high, but yeah, the growth rate on domestic is, you know, definitely high. You know, it's like high growth markets.

Nathan Latka

08:55Give us a prediction. I mean, a year and a half, two years from now of these three lines, which one do you

Marwan Forzley

08:59>> think is Yeah, going to the they'll divvy up like maybe a third, a third, a third. These are all different ways to monetize customers, and these are all big trends in the market. Credit card and B2B and card issuance and deposits, these are all hot markets in the B2B space. Capital and, like you said, the NPL, that's a hot market as well. But foreign exchange is the most painful thing to do, and that's a known pain

09:26>> that everybody goes through. That's a reliable, very good revenue stream that we're going to have for a long time.

Nathan Latka

09:33So again, I'm that startup with 10,000, I need to send it through foreign exchange, like, how much might you make on a 10,000 that I'm processing through that channel?

Marwan Forzley

09:43>> It ranges from on the low end about quarter percent, on the high end about 2%. It varies depending on the payment method you choose, on the currency terms, on the countries. There's a difference between sending payments to Europe versus sending payments to Vietnam. That's just the cost structure is very different, so there's a range of outcomes. But it is very competitive. It ends up being half the price compared to what you usually pay when you use

10:07>> a bank product.

Nathan Latka

10:08What about on credit card rates and depositing funds to your debit card real time? How much can you make there?

Marwan Forzley

10:11>> We charge 1% on payments to a debit card. That's real time payments. Instantly, the money is deposited in your bank account that's linked to your debit card. On paying with a card, we charge 2.9%.

Capital Program and Buy Now Pay Later for SMBs

Nathan Latka

10:25Interesting. Okay. See, when I hear those, you're basically capped at 2 to 2.9% on those first two revenue streams. The capital program, that was very interesting because the buy now pay later stuff, if your cycle time on this is very tight, you'll be able to recycle capital very quickly, and you're charging like a two or 3%, don't know what it is, but you're charging some percentage, but the APR is through the roof. You can print money doing this.

Marwan Forzley

10:46>> Yeah. On the APR, that is also a range. It's not necessarily a fixed amount. It depends on the quality of the customer, where you're located, how long you've been on Veem. So there's a range of outcomes. But in general, what we try to do is make sure the experience is delightful, it's simple. We're not going to milk it on the revenue side. We just want to make sure that there's multiple products we can monetize, and that's

11:10>> the key thing.

Nathan Latka

11:11So Marwan, if I, again, same use case, I'm going start up 10 ks through your platform, but let's say that that 10,000 is a bill that I'm paying to a vendor. I've bought it and I want to pay it later. I want to keep that 10 ks. How much am I going to pay you? Like, how long can I push that payment off using Veem, and what am I going to pay you at the end? Like,

11:27what's your cost?

Marwan Forzley

11:29>> You can push up to six months. And generally, you pay anywhere from about a percent to 2% a month on that schedule.

Nathan Latka

11:39Okay. So 12% to 24% effective interest rate. Pretty fair. Pretty fair. Are you doing this off your balance sheet? Do you have debt on a balance sheet?

Marwan Forzley

11:48>> We work with bank partners and partners that have invested in Veem, and we work with them on these programs.

Nathan Latka

11:58Interesting. So why haven't you raised? I mean, again, you want to own this in house if you can. Why not go raise 4% or 5% cost of capital from a bank and do this off your own balance sheet?

Marwan Forzley

12:07>> You know, there's different ways of doing it. Generally, we like to stick to the things we do well and outsource to partners that have their expertise, so there are partners that we have that are in the balance sheet business, and they're very good at scaling that. My business is more payments related, more customer experience, and so I'd like to stick to the things I know and then hand it off to partners that this is their sweet

12:34>> spot. That way, raise complementary offerings and we are able to scale that program without having ups to figuring out to raise capital all the time.

Nathan Latka

12:44Yeah. Do you think you can do, like, $50,000,000 in loans this year?

Marwan Forzley

12:49>> This is a new program that we had that we just launched, like, like, a month ago. Oh, wow. I'm not sure where we're at. It's like a brand new program. I'd tell you, though, capital, access to capital is something that SMBs won't like. There's demand for it. A reason why GetL is a hot thing these days because there's a general demand in the market for these types of products.

Nathan Latka

13:14Yeah. I mean, had Jim on the co founder of Square on the show, and we got going into his POS business and his credit business and how the POS system allows their buy now, pay later stuff, and one of their fastest growing arms. This is a very, very, very hot space.

Marwan Forzley

13:26>> What's interesting is if you look at Square, it's a really good, interesting case. Square Payments is the engine that was created first. Square Capital landed second. Square Capital now is a big thing, And actually, the whole concept of embedding capital to payments is a hot topic because if you look at where capital has scaled in the past, it's situations where it is embedded into something else. Payments is a natural. Yeah. You see the same trend with

13:49>> PayPal, PayPal and PayPal Credit. See the same thing with Intuit. So like there's cases in the market where embedding capital into something else have done really well.

Nathan Latka

13:58Oh, embedded finance is the future. I mean, that's why you launched the product and you're testing it. We'll see what happens. I want to move on to more of your backstory and the team here. Before we do that, though, so we just learned about all your revenue streams, your different products, how you're helping these SMBs. So what will you make on average per month from these guys? It sounds like it's probably like ten or twenty bucks,

14:14right?

ARPU: $20 Per Month Per Customer

Marwan Forzley

14:15>> Yeah, it's SMBs. You're making yeah, like $20 a month a good

14:22>> way to characterize it.

Company History and Licensing Journey

Nathan Latka

14:24Yeah. Okay, give me more of your backstory here. So you launched it in 2014. Mean, how did you get the first 100 customers?

Marwan Forzley

14:29>> Oh, no. I started the company in late twenty fourteen. You know, we regulated company, meaning we're licensed in every single state in The US, and we also have licenses in other parts of the world, so it took us like two, three years just like legal compliance licensing. And in The US you can't just move money, you got to have all the licenses in place before you do it. So the actual selling of getting customers in did

14:55>> not really begin until later, like 2017 timeframe before you can really start adding customers and bringing customers at scale. The initial set of customers, I call it like friends and family, it's like whoever we know between all of us that have access to customers, we call them up, it's like, Hey, we built this thing, you want to try it, Can you give it a shot and give us feedback? So that's the initial group that came in

15:20>> that used the product.

Nathan Latka

15:21Makes a Once lot of we have the first batch of customers in, we got their feedback, and so were very good at building quickly to whatever their customer feedback is. We then started hiring sales and marketing teams to then get the next batch of customers, and that's where you start going from the first 100 to the first thousand to the first 10,000. That becomes like sales and marketing efforts.

15:47So sorry, what year was that that you got your first customer?

Marwan Forzley

15:51>> Oh, like we were doing I mean, we got the first customer in like 2016, and then they trickle in because you're not really commercially available. You're kind of doing it in states you have access to where you have licensing, and you've got to get customers. It's sort of a parallel path. As you get more licenses in different states, you add customers, it so takes a while to get the engine going because of the licensing schemes you

16:16>> have to have in place.

Nathan Latka

16:17And Marwan, do you remember the first year you did $1,000,000 in revenue?

Marwan Forzley

16:22>> That was like '20 I don't actually remember. Maybe 2017?

Nathan Latka

16:28That's a big moment. That's a big year.

Marwan Forzley

16:30>> Yeah.

16:33>> I actually tell my friends when they start businesses that the most important things in life when you're building a business is first customer, first 100, first 1,000, first 10,000. If you think of them like multiples of 10, these are amazing moments. On the revenue side, first million, first 10, and it goes like that. It's a good way of measuring the milestones. It's like you have kids, you know, they go through through stages. Same thing with startups.

Nathan Latka

16:58Yeah. No. I I totally understand. When did you guys pass the $10,000,000 run rate?

Marwan Forzley

17:02>> Yeah. I can't disclose.

Nathan Latka

17:04Oh, you can't go past it. You can just say just a million in 2017. That's as much as you can give me.

Marwan Forzley

17:10>> I Let's put it this way. It's scalable product with a scalable platform. And, you know, what I can say is we pretty much doubled the number of accounts on the platform like every year.

Nathan Latka

17:21Mhmm. No, that's great. And people can do the math if you've doubled every year since 2017, obviously. You can't double forever, but that's a nice growth rate. Talk to me. You have chosen not to bootstrap. You raised some capital. How much total have you raised today?

Total Funding: $120M Raised

Marwan Forzley

17:34>> About $120,000,000 so far.

Nathan Latka

17:36And why do you need to raise all that capital to build this? Obviously, you're getting very diluted as you do that.

Marwan Forzley

17:40>> Yeah, I mean, this is a very heavy infrastructure play. You've got to have licenses. You've got to have fairly heavy duty technology that you need to build to automate payment processing in multiple countries. You've to plug into accounting systems all around the world. You've to have fraud and risk and security, so there's a big build here, and that build is not cheap to do, And so it requires infrastructure to and when you have infrastructure, you're building

18:05>> out, you got to have capital you raised to do that.

Nathan Latka

18:08When was the last run of capital?

Marwan Forzley

18:11>> We did that last year, August last year.

Nathan Latka

18:15What was that? Your Series C?

Marwan Forzley

18:17>> Series C.

Nathan Latka

18:18Yeah, interesting. Okay, so 31,000,000 raised there, Series C. Once you're on the venture track, I mean, you're basically making a funding announcement every 12. Do you want to tell us anything?

Repay Strategic Investment Announced

Marwan Forzley

18:29>> That's a really good question, that a good segue. We announced actually today a relationship with Repay, we Repay is a public company, and we're teaming up with them to do cross border payments for them, and we're working with them on issuing cards, and they decided to invest money in the company. So strategics kind of come in all the time, and part of that, there's investments. So that's one that happened today since this

18:56>> is Nice, there we go, some breaking news, that's good stuff.

Nathan Latka

18:58Now, when, you know, when you're raising a Series C, most founders, you're selling between, call it, like sort of 5 to 10%, maybe sometimes 15% of the business. Were you sort of in that range?

Marwan Forzley

19:08>> It's classical venture cycle in terms of dilution.

Nathan Latka

19:12Yeah. And so why, you know, you made the very public decision to get in bed with Goldman Sachs, right, which decreases your ability to drive competition if you ever want to bring other capital partners to the table because Goldman's a big elephant in the room. Why was that the right decision?

Marwan Forzley

19:25>> Well, Goldman led my Series B, a strategic round. They actually led it. So they've been a partner with us for a long period of time, and we work with them. Essentially, the investment is strategic to them. So that's the context of the relationship we have with them. It's not specific to lending.

Nathan Latka

19:46You feed them any data?

Marwan Forzley

19:47>> What's that?

Nathan Latka

19:48Do you feed them any data? I imagine they were drooling over the data set you sit on.

Marwan Forzley

19:53>> We work with them on a variety of projects, actually, so it's not just to be clear, the relationship with them is multifaceted. It's not necessarily related to lending.

Nathan Latka

20:07Interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is a big question that anyone doing embedded finance that's partnering with a larger bank is going have to go through as a founder. Almost every bank will ask for like an API feed, something behind the scenes that gives them really unique access to data, and you have to decide where you want to draw the line.

Marwan Forzley

20:22>> Know, part of the makeup of the business we have is rich data, and so we make sure that we use the data to automate lending decisions, to automate payment experiences, to make sure that you don't have to go through hoops to get what you want. And as part of that makeup, we work with partners that kind of have the same mentality to servicing customers.

Nathan Latka

20:42Yep. Do you guys think you can break $20,000,000 this year in revenue, or is that going have to wait until next year?

Marwan Forzley

20:48>> I just have to reiterate, we're not in a position, unfortunately, to disclose anything on the financials.

Nathan Latka

20:56If I take numbers you've already given me, 300,000 customers times we asked earlier, you said, yeah, $20 a month on each of them sounds about right. I mean, we can sort of back in. You're not this high, but that would put you at $6,000,000 a month in revenue.

Marwan Forzley

21:09>> I think you probably have a calculator somewhere ready to go. You're very good with numbers, so people can do the math. Can't disclose.

Nathan Latka

21:17Well, no, but those are just numbers you gave. Mean, said 300,000 customers and you said you make 20 per customer. I mean, obviously there's something there that's not adding up because that math doesn't work.

Marwan Forzley

21:28>> There are all kinds of customers on the platform. Some are active in the month, some are not.

Nathan Latka

21:33I see.

Marwan Forzley

21:34>> It's not exactly straight math like that, but you know, you could, I mean, it's not, I just repeat, it's not a platform that is small in size.

Nathan Latka

21:43Yep. Yep. Tell me more as we wrap up.

Marwan Forzley

21:45>> Customers around the world.

Team of 160 and Engineering Focus

Nathan Latka

21:47Yeah. Tell me more as we wrap up a little bit about your team. So how many folks total these days?

Marwan Forzley

21:52>> We're 160 almost folks in the company.

Nathan Latka

21:58Heavy and how many engineers?

Marwan Forzley

22:00>> I can't disclose that. But like, I mean, it's a technology product build, so a good chunk of that is engineering and product, and that's like the way tech is built out. It's heavy on engineering.

Nathan Latka

22:11Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, this is what some people say we're heavy on engineering. They have two engineers, and I go, you're full of So, I mean, are you talking like more than 50% of your team is engineers, sixty, seventy engineers?

Marwan Forzley

22:20>> I mean, it's a good chunk of it. It's not two people, let's put it this way.

Nathan Latka

22:26Do you use in terms of growing your base, obviously, like an outbound model, high touch model doesn't seem like it would work because this is more like a high volume, low ARPU approach. Do you have any inside salespeople that have a quota?

Marwan Forzley

22:39>> We do, and they're mainly the type of customers we acquire are inbound. So the traditional model you were mentioning is more outbound oriented. That's better for enterprise customers. For this market, the type of customers coming in are more inbound oriented.

Churn and Active vs Inactive Customers

Nathan Latka

22:59And as we wrap up before the famous five here, how does a founder like you think about churn? Where you're not it's not a SaaS fee where they stop paying. It's more like a tracking how much GMV per month. If they go up, it's expansion. If they do none, then it's churn. Like, how do you think about that?

Marwan Forzley

23:13>> Yeah, it's a different concept because this is transactional business models, it's not like a subscription, so I don't actually have churn and that I cancelled my service this month. What we have is active and inactive customers, and the active and inactive ratios are a function of your invoice cycles. So for example, some customers are on a weekly invoice cycles, they pay every week, some are on a monthly, some are quarterly, some are occasional, so that the

23:43>> system adapts to the invoicing cycles that happen between customers and their payees.

Nathan Latka

23:50Yep. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. Interesting. Okay, cool. Anything else about the business that you think we should chat about that I haven't asked about?

Marwan Forzley

23:57>> I think the market B2B is a really hot market and it's going to be hot for a long period of time. And that's because this is an industry that has not seen innovation for such a long time that all these manual processes need to be completely reimagined. And there's an opportunity to do that with a very different experience than when you get to that. And that's why we created Veem.

Nathan Latka

24:19Yeah, let's take off your Founder hat for a second and just put your angel investor, you're analyzing the market. Just fintech right now is just hot, frothy, hot, totally irrational. What do you think companies that are like Veem, right? What revenue do you think they have to hit to where they could probably go get a billion dollar valuation today? I'm assuming a very irrational answer here, but I'm curious of your thoughts.

Marwan Forzley

24:42>> It depends on what segment you're inside fintech. There's a whole bunch of segments.

Nathan Latka

24:47Let's do SMB fintech, embedded finance, SMB products. I mean, of like what you've built.

Marwan Forzley

24:52>> Yeah, generally it's multiple revenue and growth, it's the combination of the two. If you have revenue but slow growth, you get lower sort of multiple. If you have revenue and high growth, you get higher multiples. So to get to that billion range, you got to do like, call it, it depends on the growth rates, but somewhere 20x, 30x multiples these days. Some companies are 50x multiples of revenue, but if you can hit the growth path really

25:17>> hard, then you command multiples that are fairly attractive these days. How long this is going to stay, that's hard to tell. That's just macro dynamics around the public markets and the valuations we're seeing in the private markets are kind of in sync with public or getting there. But I'd say this, fintech is hot now. It's going to be hot for a while, and the reason why it's going to be hot for a while because this is

25:42>> a market that has not seen change for decades. Just been baking for a while, and now it's a hot thing and a sexy thing, but that's because there hasn't been a whole lot going on in the past thirty years, forty years.

Nathan Latka

25:56Marwan, would this be an accurate statement? You sort of feel like companies that are maybe in your space, fintech, SMB focus, they probably need to be around like $30,000,000 to $40,000,000 in revenue growing 70 to 100% year over year to crack that billion dollar sort of valuation mark?

Marwan Forzley

26:12>> That's that's a good sort of a way to think of the market these days.

Nathan Latka

26:17Yeah. So are you gonna be raising at a billion dollar valuation next year?

Marwan Forzley

26:23>> We'll see. You'll you'll find an announcement.

Nathan Latka

26:27Alright, guys. Marwan, good stuff. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book?

Marwan Forzley

26:32>> I have The Innovator's Dilemma.

Nathan Latka

26:35Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Marwan Forzley

26:39>> I love what Jeff Bezos did with Amazon.

Nathan Latka

26:42Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Veem?

Marwan Forzley

26:46>> AWS. It's been really good.

Nathan Latka

26:49Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get for each night?

Marwan Forzley

26:53>> Six hours.

Nathan Latka

26:54Okay. And situation, married, single kids?

Marwan Forzley

26:56>> I'm married.

Nathan Latka

26:57Any kiddos?

Marwan Forzley

26:58>> And I have two kids.

Nathan Latka

27:00Nice. How old are you?

Marwan Forzley

27:02>> I am 49.

Nathan Latka

27:0449 years young. Take us home your last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. Something, say again. Something you wish you knew back when you were 20 years old.

Marwan Forzley

27:13>> Something I wish I knew about when I was 20 years old.

Nathan Latka

27:16Like when you were 20, just something you wish you knew.

Marwan Forzley

27:21>> I wish I knew how to code more efficiently because I would would would write a whole bunch of stuff that I think is really cool. Let's just, like, do it and and see what happens in the market. Find talent in that direction is super interesting.

Nathan Latka

27:40Guys, Marwan was frustrated in 2014. He launched Veem, took him three years to break a million bucks in revenue, but he did it in 2017, has basically been doubling ever since. He's now got over 300,000 SMBs that use his platform using three specific tools. He's got foreign exchange, they make 0.25 to 2% there. They've got credit card feeds and deposit funds real time to your debit card, 1% to 2.9% there. Capital programs, which he's pretty excited

28:04about. Obviously, there's an APR there, but it's all focused on helping SMBs access capital, move money faster so they can focus on doing what they love, which is building their business. He's doing this with a team of 160 people, about $100,000,000 raised as he looks to continue to scale. Marwan, thanks for taking us to the top.

Marwan Forzley

28:18>> Thank you, Nathan. Have a good day.

Nathan Latka

28:21One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

28:46Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

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29:30for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got

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