Usually I post about events that I’m speaking at in the future. Or events that I have spoken at. Today it’s kind of both, since I had the pleasure of recording two sessions for CB Insight’s upcoming Future of Fintech event today.
The first was with Michele Romanow, a serial entrepreneur, a star on the Canadian shark tank (Dragon’s Den), and the co-founder of Clearbanc, which is doing some insanely disruptive work in the startup financing space. I think it’s fair to say that Clearbanc is disrupting both venture capitalists and traditional banks, and it’s doing such different things that when I asked Michelle for a word defining what the company does, she kind of struggled.
In any case, we had a great chat, and it will be live in about a week. (The second chat was with executives from TransferWise and Bitrise on fintech, agile, and more)
The questions I asked Michelle:
- Clearbanc is an extremely unusual investor. Michele … how do you make your investment decisions?
- What do you take in exchange for your cash?
- You’re the “biggest e-commerce investor in the world? Good timing, no?
- Now you’re fronting cash for inventory. $1 billion … tell us about that …
- You’ve also got a focus on diversity … how does AI play into that?
- How would you describe yourself … bank? VC? Something new?
- You have a new funding service for software-as-a-service companies … tell me more?
- What trends are you seeing in the B2B SaaS space?
- How does that play into what you see are the top trends in fintech right now?
- What are your fintech predictions for 2021?
- What’s next for Clearbanc?
If Michelle’s name sounds familiar, one reason might be because I’ve talked to her before. She’s super-smart, and this new chat is well worth checking out at CB Insights’ future of fintech event.