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Lawrence Lin Murata
4,812 posts
- ⚡We are excited to announce our $65M equity and debt round from @jpmorgan, which brings our total funding to $77M in equity and $175M in debt. The fintech industry is going through a tumultuous time. Companies are going under, and regulators are increasingly applying more
- Replying to @LawLM @slopepay and 3 othersMy long-time friend @alicevdeng and I iterated through 100+ ideas before entering B2B payments. Actually, the name “Slope” was just a placeholder incorporation name since we were iterating through so many ideas. It was important for our legal name to mirror a life philosophy that
- ⚡Excited to announce our $24M Series A co-led by @usv + monashees (🇧🇷) w/ participation from Tiger, @Global_Founders. In 7 months, we went from pre-product to processing millions in transaction volume and raising $32M in total funding to date! techcrunch.com/2022/04/15/slo…
- Replying to @LawLM and @ruslansvAnd even once you find PMF, iteration never stops. “Slope” is a lifelong commitment ;) - @alicevdeng and I have our logo tattooed on our wrists!!! Thank you to everyone who believed in us since the very beginning (shoutout to some of our investors that were with us since our
- Replying to @LawLM @slopepay and 3 othersI think there’s something very special when two 2nd-time founders who failed quickly in their first companies go through the iteration process together. We are clear-eyed on how painful building startups are and what our next decades would look like, learned from all the naive
- Replying to @LawLMOne worry we had was moving on too early from an idea that could eventually be promising. Whenever we pivoted, we wrote a post-mortem essay. When you write things down in full sentences, it really forces you to have crystal-clear thinking.
- Replying to @LawLM @slopepay and 3 othersWe applied and got into @YCombinator with AirDesk - “Airbnb for Office Space.” @bradflora told us our idea sucked 😂but he believed in us (thanks @bradflora, @snowmaker, @SurbhiSarnaSF! 🙂).
- Replying to @LawLMOperating as a 2-person team, we focused solely on achieving PMF. Hiring, culture, marketing, fundraising, etc. were vanity metrics until we had clear traction with signed contracts, prompting our seed round. We hired our first two employees in Jan 2022, when we were almost $1M
- Replying to @LawLM1st-time founders often fixate on solutions rather than problems. As 2nd-time founders, we interviewed 100s of wholesalers and pinpointed painful, recurring, and costly issues: cashflow management and manual workflows. We continued to follow our iteration framework re: product
- Replying to @LawLM @slopepay and 7 othersWhen pivoting we took optimizing for speed to an extreme: we started with the fastest, lowest-fidelity product to gather initial low-confidence customer feedback. We would only move to the next, higher-fidelity version once we got sufficiently positive feedback and then we’d
- Skin in the game, literally
this is what happens when your CEO has the company’s logo tattooed on them - Replying to @LawLMFollowing AirDesk, we delved into various ideas (founder mortgages, stock options, foreclosure simplification, etc.). Our customer research led us to early investors like @ericwu01 and @ryanchanupkeep. When we were exploring what could be our 5th idea, I recalled the challenges
- Woke up to this. Wow, thank you @forbes and @forbesunder30 for featuring us this year under Enterprise Technology. Let’s continue to transition the world’s B2B economy online! ⚡
