Episode with Rohit Mittal (Co-Founder & CEO of Stilt)

Hello everybody. Welcome to the Building Public Podcast, and I'm your host, KP. Today I'm thrilled to have a special guest, a fellow Indian immigrant, Rohit Mittal, on the show. Rohit, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, KP. Excited to be here.

Rohit and I connected on Twitter, like many of my guests lately, but the context I wanted to give to the audience is quite serendipitous. One of Rohit's investors mentioned the company, the startup that Rohit's working on under, you know, in one of my tweets. And the context was like, I was sharing as an Indian immigrant who's been here for 10 years in the US, there was a series of problems and unique specific challenges that I went through. And I kind of bucketed all of them and I called them like the immigrant stack of problems. And I think not a lot of them are focusing on them. And there was not a lot of innovation in that space. So one of my comments was like, there could be a series of startups, not just one, focusing on different flavors and angles of The challenges that immigrants face. Of course, I was speaking from my experience of being in the US, but that thread kind of went viral. And then I think one of Rohit's investors mentioned, KP, you got to talk to Stilt, which is what Rohit's working on. And it kind of solves the credit side of problem that you're talking about. So before going into the deeper dive on Stilt, I want to give Rohit an opportunity to introduce Stilt to us. Maybe give a 30, 40-second intro to what Stilt is, Rohit.

For sure. Thanks, KP. And that investor added a lot of value, I guess, with that response. Yeah. So Stilt is a fintech company focused on immigrants, and our mission is to make immigrants successful. In that direction, the first product that we have launched is an unsecured personal loan product for anyone moving to the US or who has been in the US for a little while. And the product is you can get up to $35,000 in unsecured personal loans at very low rates, even if you don't have a credit history or a credit score, or you don't have a cosigner. So we don't ask for any of those things. We underwrite you for who you are, and not just try to look at your credit score. So we have built our proprietary underwriting technology to determine risk of immigrants. And we've been doing it for the past few years, we've been— we went through Y Combinator, we have raised tens of millions of dollars in equity, hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, we have helped tens of thousands of immigrants who have moved to the US from 160 different countries. Wow. To the US, I didn't even know the names of all those countries until they applied for loans with us. So a few years into the journey, we have now a strong team of about 30-ish people working all around the world now. One-third of the team is in the US, and we are continuously growing and launching new products. And you'll get to see and hear about a lot of fun stuff that we'll be launching next year.

I love that. The overarching theme that stands out here is an immigrant building for other immigrants, you know, because you know the pain and, you know, you have this sort of firsthand experience of going through some of these challenges. One keyword that stood out in your description of Stealth was unsecured. And I think it's quite important for my American friends and audience here to understand that as an immigrant, like, you really have no credit history. So you may have been a great candidate in terms of paying all your bills and being consistent with your— being rigorous with your financial, you know, persona in your home country. But even when you move to the US, you really are starting at ground zero, right? Can you double-click into that and explain what you've seen that felt like that was broken that needed to be fixed with Stilt?

Yeah, for sure. So I moved to the US about 10 years ago as an international student at Columbia University for my master's. And first time me moving to the US, when I got here, I was trying to rent an apartment. And for the life of me, I could not do that. Everywhere I went to, every landlord I went, they asked me for, again, like credit score, credit history, and cosigners. And I had none of those things. So I ended up sleeping on a Columbia alum's couch for multiple weeks. It was a very nice couch and that Columbia alum was like fairly generous, but it was still a couch. So, so it took me a little while to find my first roommate or find the first apartment. And throughout this journey, I realized that there's something called credit. That's something that's important in the US. Everyone asks for it. Not— and at that time I wasn't even thinking of credit cards and stuff, which I got to know later. But even for basic stuff like getting an apartment, it's difficult to get so until you have a credit history. And a lot of learnings came later on where I realized like unsecured credit, where basically there is no physical property backing the loan, it's even more difficult to get access to credit. And that includes credit card loans, so on and so forth. So that was the first brush up against the US financial system for me, which manifests in many different ways.

This is a huge problem. Right? Because the— I mean, I don't know if you have the numbers top of mind, like the number of immigrants from all these countries coming in and the financial impact this sort of a problem, you know, causes. As I'm curious, do you have any top-of-line numbers around this?

Yeah, so about 2 million new immigrants move to the US every year on long-term visas. And the interesting thing there is immigrants actually are contributing 50% of US adult population growth. So immigrants don't move to the US, the US population will grow older. And as fewer couples are having kids, there will be like fewer working people in the next couple of decades. So anyway, so 2 million new immigrants are moving to the US, and none of them have this credit history. And even as they move here, it's not like in 1 month or 2 months, this gets solved. It goes on for years, right? Because to build credit, you need access to credit, right? And then everyone who relies on that credit score wants to see that you have used credit for a long period of time and have paid back To be comfortable in giving you more money. So it's kind of a catch-22 situation. No one gives you credit because you don't have credit, and you can't get credit because you don't have credit. So it's problematic.

It spun my head when I first learned about this as a student in universities. You know, I was like, what is this? Like, I can't believe like this is a thing. It felt like a racket, right? It felt like it's going in circles. I'm like, and the irony here in many cases is some of these immigrants, I mean, I'm not speaking about all of them, but many of the immigrants on longstanding visas are exceptional profiles, peoples from their own home countries, right? Like they're not people who just like, you know, were like on the street or they were just like, they couldn't hack away to get on a plane ticket. They have gone through rigorous visa process. They've gone through rigorous interviews, rigorous, you know, even academically, they're brilliant. And it's so ironic that those are the people who are struggling to find, you know, basic necessities like getting a car loan, auto loan, or getting a, you know, like a rental agreement to sign. So this is fantastic. Now you bring a certain sense of financial awareness to this problem already, and I want to uncover that, which is your background that kind of made you uniquely, I think, qualified to take on a problem like this. So what were you doing before Stiltz? What kind of unique skills that you brought from that era?

Yeah, so I moved to the US for, for my master's in operations research, which is just math and optimization of any any system. And then I was planning to apply that to the financial world, i.e., stock market, or, you know, fixed income assets and structured products to make more money and wanted to be a quote unquote quant at a hedge fund type of work in quantitative finance on Wall Street. And that just didn't materialize. A, maybe I wasn't that good enough. I realized I wasn't that interested in it. And B, like, there are even fewer visas available for work if you want to work in those kinds of positions. So I studied a lot of this stuff. And then instead of working at Wall Street, I ended up working in credit risk. So I work at a credit analytics consulting firm where I learned a lot about how do banks view credit risk. And I was— because I was a consultant, I was consulting banks on their credit risk models, credit card portfolios, so wallet share analysis, so on and so forth. So trying to help banks become better at managing credit card portfolios. And I got to see a lot of different banks— American Express, Citibank, Bank of America, Cap One, so on and so forth. So that's where I also realized that banks' underwriting policies start at a credit risk score. Like the first thing they look at you when they look at you is what's your credit risk score if they are to extend credit to you. So you can have $5 million in your bank account, which is a true story. Someone at American Express had $5 million in his bank account, tried to get American Express credit card and could not get one because he did not— he was an immigrant. He ran his restaurant business, always did everything from his business account. But when he got his personal account, he was like super rich guy but could not get a credit card, could never build credit history. And then American Express, I think, made one-time exception for him and like took months to do so. So that's what I got to learn. And then I had already had financial knowledge. I got to learn a little bit about data science as I was doing credit risk analytics. And then later on, I came, moved to the Bay Area and worked at a company called PopSugar, was a founding member of the growth team. There were 5 of us trying to grow, trying to help grow PopSugar and ShopStyle, which was their shopping website, using quantitative approach. And that time growth teams were very popular. Mm-hmm. So we try to just help women buy more stuff online or like match them with the right stuff. And I was a data scientist there. That's where I learned the technology stack. So I'm not a software engineer by training, but I became a mediocre full-stack engineer because I was just coding day and night and working with engineers front end and back end in my job to hack together growth projects for the company. And after that, I got together with my aforementioned roommate at Columbia and started Stilt. So my background spans a lot of different industries— finance, credit risk, technology, and growth. co-founder is just a machine learning engineer who worked at Microsoft and Amazon. So we got together and started the company.

So there's a— I know there was a specific moment in Still's early journey where I think the MVP or the first version was built over a startup weekend or pitch competition or something. So let's talk about that. So do you— what was this? Was this in the Bay Area or was this in Colombia? Where was this?

This was in the Bay Area and I don't want to presume too much, but I think we probably are the most successful company to come out of a startup weekend. Right. Or maybe the longest surviving. And yeah, it was Startup Weekend in Santa Clara. I think if you search for Startup Santa Clara and our— and us, like, you'll find something there. What was the first version like?

What was it? What was it trying to solve?

So our initial, initial idea was to build new type of risk model that we can sell to others, so they can lend to immigrants, particularly international students, and then sort of grow from there. And that was the idea we went to Startup Weekend with. And at Startup Weekend, we obviously did not create the full model, but we created like the bare bones version of it. And it was a website and some risk models. And coincidentally, or thankfully, we also did customer research as a part of the process, which actually resulted in a bunch of customers later on. But that was the initial version. And after the Startup Weekend, so we built it, we actually won Startup Weekend that time. And that gave us a little more confidence. But later on, when customers were reaching out to us, the ones who we had surveyed during Startup Weekend, that's when we actually felt like there is something here and we worked on it more. But the initial, just the first website that went live was during

the weekend. It's actually quite funny. Not a lot of those Startup Weekend pitches, founders or people who attend those actually take customer discovery that seriously because they're like trying to hustle in that 24 to 48 hour window and they're like, they just don't have the time. But in the classic words of Paul Graham, like, you know, build something people want is the essence of any great product. So I'm actually not surprised that you— a lot of your success came from really talking to customers and learning about, you know, what they want. Like, I'm curious, what were some, like, surprising things that you learned from that exercise? Like, what were some things that they taught you that you didn't even know?

I mean, at Startup Weekend A, I had never built a product for outside of work before. I just— the basic thing of working within a 4-person team, from what I remember, like, we were 4 people and actually building something. that, that could be used by others. Like I had never built like a whole website by myself, even though my co-founder is the CTO. At the time, I was the one who's the full-stack engineer. So I was— I basically built the site. So that was the first time that I put something out in public and got reactions of people to that. And we also did, did a presentation, built a presentation again, like not something that we had done before, but overall we got to see just a tiny sliver of what it is like to build something. And that was somewhat intoxicating and— Energizing. Exciting. For us. Yeah. So energizing for us. And we— yeah, that's, that's what also kept us going. So Startup Weekend was just a sliver of what, what the actual startup thing is. And we got to talk to investors. We had never done that before. So got to, got to learn how to just how to explain your ideas in a few words, how to figure out what people care about and asking the right questions from customers or others. So yeah, so it was like a whole bunch of things, but just a sliver of all of those, which was very helpful.

So one of the common misconceptions people have, especially investors, is they think the TAM, if you're building for the immigrant stack, the TAM is too small. Typically, that's what I've seen. How did you— did this ever come up in your conversations? How did you overcome it?

By execution. You can't— if the market is growing, if there's like momentum in the market, then you can't convince investors otherwise that there is no momentum. And if there is no momentum in the market, then you can't convince investors otherwise. Basically, it's It's like, it's so much driven by what's happening outside that they have very few of them have their own. That's what we realized in the early days.

And for you, what were those market wins that you thought were helping you?

We actually just started executing. So the story went on after Startup Weekend. We, we were one of those teams too that didn't work on the idea after the Startup Weekend for a little while. But when the website that I had put up, I was taking it down, I saw like a whole bunch of entries in our database, which Basically meant people came to the site and signed up and gave us their information. And that kind of prompted me to look a little bit deeper into—

Wait, so this is interesting. You almost went to shut it down and then you saw like some database entries and you're like, okay, people are paying attention. They're like going through the friction of inputting data. Right?

Yeah. And we had like a whole bunch of questions. Like it wasn't like, just give us your name and email. We asked like 10 to 20 different questions. And it was high, very high friction because we were stupider. So we, we didn't know what it means to Create a low friction product. Right. So, but the thing is like, and I was, I got charged for Heroku's database or something on my credit card. I'm like, I don't want to pay for this. And I, that's when I went to shut it down and that's when I saw the database entries. But

how cool is that? Like, that's just a tidbit in your story right now. You're, you're, you know, like you were a 30 people team. Now you're crushing it, massive company. And looking back at that, you almost just wanted to shut it down because Heroku was charging you, but that's awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. It was like, I don't know. So it almost didn't happen. Almost didn't happen. Multiple times almost didn't happen. Even later on, like, as I mentioned, we were trying to sell credit risk models. We, I was like, and so we were trying to sell credit risk models. And this is, this part is like specific to immigrants, which is like, I was on H-1B visa, which meant I couldn't work full-time for my startup. And I've been in your shoes.

Oh, such a pain in the ass.

Right. Like, so, so, so yeah. So we were trying to sell the risk model, but no one was buying it, which meant we made it feel like nobody wants it. Consumers wanted, but no business wants it because like we didn't have the money to give. And then I was told my now co-founder, like at that time it was just a side project. So I was like, maybe we should just, you know, not move forward with it because people are asking for money and we don't have, you know, we don't have the money to give because others are not buying.

When you say people are asking for money, people are asking for loans, correct?

Yes. People are asking for loans. Sorry. And my response was, let's just like not do it. Let's try to figure out something else. And he, his response was, what if we give our own money? And I was like, I don't have any money to give. And he was like, okay, okay. He said, I like, I'll put the first dollar in and let's see what happens kind of thing. So we actually started by lending our own savings.

Wow. It was almost like a P2P lending platform first then.

Yeah. There was only one P, which was my co-founder on one side. And—

So it was basically Priyank banking at the time.

Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was. Yeah. We, you should have renamed it Priyank banking at the time. So Priyank Singh is my co-founder. Right. I didn't mention his name before. Yeah. And yeah, so we basically went through his savings because he was like, okay, we continued to lend. And then I was like, okay, because now we have a few customers, we have more customers coming. And I was like, okay, I'll—

So all of this was pre-YC, correct?

All of this was pre-YC.

So what I'm curious about, so for a while then you went bootstrapped then?

Yeah. So we, because like we are in the business of money or like giving money. So I built the site. Heroku was charging my credit card, but not, not a big amount. And we, yeah, we just started lending money. We got some law firm to give us some promissory notes, which, which are legal documents that we can get users to sign. We asked users to upload everything. We were looking through all the data manually because we hadn't built any behind-the-scenes systems. And yeah, so pre-YC, we were lending. Our YC application video is actually online. I put it on YouTube. I'll plug that in the show notes. Yeah. In that video, we were very excitedly saying that we have done $25,000 in loans because all of that money was coming from our bank accounts, primarily still Priyan's bank account. But yeah, that's, that's how we got started. And then I gave my savings or like—

So the people, but he was clearly showing you that there was a huge appetite from the consumer side that they were wanting these loans. Right. So that's good data points for you.

Yeah. And we, one thing we learned, at least I'm, I think I've always been a fan of is like constraining the problem so much that the solution is fairly straightforward. So at the time we were just lending to international students who are about to graduate or have graduated and needed money for relocation. So it was just a $5,000 loan only for relocation, primarily for Columbia University Indian international graduate students.

As niche as it can get.

Yeah. Maybe we should have like also limited it to anyone from Delhi kind of thing, because I can go back to their home if they don't pay. But yeah, that's, that's how we started. And that's That's how we did our initial lending. And from there on, we, with that idea, that pitch, we applied to YC, we got into YC, and then we did a whole bunch of other things.

So as part of that inflection point, well, getting into YC is a huge moment, right, for any startup, and especially yours, given that you bootstrapped for a while. And I think you were hitting your ceiling, how much we can draw out of Priyank's savings, right? So how was that journey like for you as both of you presenting to YC and just going through the first round of interviews? If I'm not wrong, it's a 10-minute interview, right? It's just a quick one. Yeah, it's a 10-minute interview.

Man, I almost didn't go to the interview.

Walk me through— walk us through the process. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll just add like a quick, quick additional note here. So we didn't only go through Priyank's savings. We then went through my savings. We went through— at the time, my girlfriend, we asked money from her. We asked money from other friends. Priyank asked money from a lot of his friends. Some of them now don't respond to him. You know, so, so we, we actually, instead of $25,000, which was at the application time, when we went to YC, we got up to $125,000 approximately. So we We just borrowed all that money on our personal goodwill from all these other folks. If we didn't get repayments back, like we would be on the hook for paying that money back. But anyways, so that we get, we get into YC or like we, we applied to YC and I've written again, like a whole blog post as to our journey of getting into YC. And I was like, we're just giving money. Like, you know, no one, YC is not going to take us, but I still submitted the application and wanted to give a shout out to a couple of YC founders at the time who helped me edit my application 3 hours before submission on a random Slack channel that I joined for some reason, which I don't know why. And they said, we are offering help for the last— for 3 hours to review and edit your application before applying to YC. So I asked them for help. They picked 3 applications. I was one of those 3 applications and only one got in, which was us. Wow. Right. So—

What are the odds?

Yeah. Oh, cool.

I also love that. I also love that about the YC culture. There's a lot of spirit of service paying it forward, even from alumni, even before people getting in. But I understand, right? You can understand if someone's helping once you got in, but even like before you got in, there's this great sense of spirit of service.

Yeah. I mean, I've helped many founders myself. I think I've talked to like 100+ founders now. Ever since I've edited, like after we graduated YC, maybe even the last couple of years since we have like grown a little bigger and I've started writing blog posts and helped many companies get in, like I've edited their applications. I do mock interviews, like do a whole bunch of things. And if you search for it, many YC group of YC founders are like, we'll just do 3-hour mock interviews for folks and you can just like book a time slot and they'll just do 10-minute interviews, like real YC mock interviews.

Right.

But yeah, so the main thing of getting into YC, the key, key part here is the— we got— so I thought we wouldn't get in. We submit the application and then we Like the— and I was like, I'm not going to get in, or we are not going to get in. And this was around October, November. And I was— I booked a ticket for home for Diwali. It was November 6th. YC comes back that we'd like to invite you for interview November 9th. And now I'm like, 10-minute interview. I looked at the flight change prices, like $1,000 and like $6,000 an hour for interview. We are anyways not going to get in. Maybe I shouldn't go. And like did a whole bunch of like calculations there and then eventually decided. It to give it a shot, booked the flight for the night of November 9th, went for interview in, in the, in the afternoon. And YC, as we all know, does 10-minute interviews, but they asked us to stay back because they wanted to interview us again. Wow. The same day. And because my flight was at like 8:30 or 9, they were like, we'll interview after all the other ones are done. And so now I'm pacing like 5:30, 6, like supposed to be at 5. And so they interviewed us at around 6 and they are like 5:30 or 6 and they said, we are going to give you a call if you get in and we are going to email you if you don't get in. And we call by 7 and we email by 9, something like that. And now it's 7 PM.

Hilarious. You're probably like checking in at the airport and everything.

Yeah. So I was actually doing that and it was like 7 PM and we gave my co-founder's phone number, Priyan's phone number instead of mine in case like I wasn't available because of security or something. And yeah, at 7:00, 7:15, 7:30, I'm not still getting my boarding pass. I'm like, they'll call and, or they may call. And at 7:45, I got my boarding pass. 30 seconds later, I see Priyank calling me and I'm like, we got it. Even before I picked up the call, because I knew he's calling because we got it. Texted or forwarded the email.

What a cool moment. So did you end up going to India that time?

Yes, I did. Yes, I did.

And then I was like— It's a happy visit, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It was the best flight ever. And I landed on the night of Diwali. So

sweet.

It was actually Diwali for me.

Now, if you, as you reflect on, let's say the 3-month experience at YC, what were one or two like moments where you went like, wow, you know, I learned something really, really amazing. Like what were two, like, I think one of my questions to you earlier was around value prop that YC brings and it's different for everybody, right? It's everybody has their own sort of story of like these two things I learned from YC. What would those two things for you?

I mean, almost everything I know about startups is because of YC. I listened to their podcasts a lot, even before we got into YC as just like someone who's— who was interested in that kind of stuff. And then going to YC, just learned a ton of stuff every day from founders, but mainly some learnings that I've— that I actively use is keeping things simple. I never try to complicate things too much and trying to get to the heart of the problem or the solution with like one key insight is extremely important, like more important than we think. And that's one. Second is YC, I mean, popularized it and it's pretty common, like do things that don't scale, and which essentially means like talk to your customers. And we did a lot of that. Like we have built Stilt really in a do things that don't scale kind of way. Many people just say like, when are you going to like do things that scale? Right. So I think I've taken that to heart fairly strong. Like we just Like figure out what's the key important thing that we need to do. How do we execute on it in the smallest possible way and then continuously talk to our customers as we are moving along? And I think that was just like, I knew that in theory, but I basically learned implementation, continuous implementation, and keeping that mentality at all times during YC. And there are like many, many other lessons that I learned at the time, but these are the couple.

Obviously, I think, you know, what's also interesting from what you're sharing is the despite both of you being technical enough to build whatever you want, you know, there's this focus on trying to like solve the problem first in whatever scrappy way and then try to build a fancy product, you know. And that's so much— that's music to my ears because I run the No-Code Fellowship at On Deck. And a lot of the times, you know, our builders, our founders are always like sometimes paranoid about, am I choosing the right stack? Am I choosing the right—

Right.

And almost ultimately the answer is, doesn't matter. Like, right, it doesn't matter. Like, you can always change it 6 months down the line, or you can always— you may not even end up going down that rabbit hole of whatever feature you want because people may want something else. So it's always people first, problem, you know, second, then stack third, in my— has been my lesson. So it's fantastic to see that even as people who— both of you who are able to code do the same. So fast forward to Demo Day, and I just want— I know you have had a series of inflection points since the Demo Day. Do you want to address maybe 2 or Very important inflection points in your story. So if you were onboarding a new employee at Stilt today, what would you say were like these 3 inflection points you must know apart from the Heroku story, which I think should be part of your onboarding document because it almost didn't happen. But

yeah, we actually have some of these moments in our onboarding document. Like that video is a part of onboarding. Like a couple of blog posts I've written about the history of Stilt or our journey are a part of onboarding. It's not a part of onboarding, but I think I think it's critical to understand, and I'm talking from an immigrant point of view, like getting our— getting the right type of visas so that we can work on the company was a key, key point. And this was like, it's— I can't emphasize enough what— how big of a risk it was for us. So we were both on H-1Bs, we had to quit our jobs, we were in YC, we had a certain amount of time to find, like, get different visas or leave the country, right? And we got those visas, which is O-1 visas.

Right.

Yeah, at the time and it's 2016. So like the O-1 visas were not as well known. As prevalent. Yeah. So we— yeah. So getting those was extremely critical because if we hadn't gotten those visas, it would have meant that we need to leave the US soon after. And so that was, that was really, really crucial. And then us, like we had never raised money as we had never— I mean, yes, YC money, but we had never like talked to investors and done any of that. So getting the first money in from a non-YC investor was also a Super, super crucial or super important. And that gave us confidence that we can actually go and like do this a few times over and raise more money. Like, what, these guys just gave us $100K? Like, you know, like that was the kind of reaction we had. So anyone raising their first money, if they had never been in this kind of situation, like, uh, it's always exciting. And then later on, finding some of the, the right team members for the company is what made the company, who people who we can trust 100%. Like there was one, the first person who we hired was Priyank's friend from 15 years, and we were able to convince him to come work with us so we could, and that was fairly critical in the company journey. So it's all about like finding the customers, finding the money, and then finding the people for us. And all of this, all of those things happen in succession. Right. Maybe a main inflection point that happened in Stealth's journey was actually me meeting Priyank, him being my roommate, which is also a crazy story. But more or less, like, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here. They wouldn't be here. Right. Yeah, right. Like, so I'll add one interesting tidbit. We were 4 or 5 roommates at the time when we were in that apartment at Columbia. 3 of us, Priyank, myself, and one more person, we are founders and we all have raised multiple rounds of funding. And the third person is actually in India. There's a company called Dunzo. Oh, he's the CTO of that Right. He was our roommate.

Wow.

For about a year. So

this was some kind of a mini incubator there.

You know, like hopefully like all of these companies are big and there's, there's a building in San Francisco where like all these early YC startups were like Justin.tv and others. And that apartment can be the other version of it. Yeah.

No, this is, so this is awesome. So I think stretching through that timeline, What do you think is next in your roadmap now from a product perspective, but also generally from your offerings that are just beyond this extension of a product? I know you mentioned that you're a fintech company and one of the first products was this unsecured loan, but what do you see as other offerings that may be complementary to what you have right now?

Yeah. So one of the things we realized this year especially is that we need to double down on our strengths of credit products. Like that's what we know the best. That's where we have the most expertise and that's where we can add the most value to immigrants' lives. So one of the things we'll, we'll share more about in the coming months is Build is, is a, is an infrastructure version of our product using which any consumer fintech or non-fintech company can launch credit products for their consumers, including immigrant ones.

Interesting.

So it's not just us trying to get to as many immigrants as possible. We are enabling others to also serve this underserved market.

So the other brands could basically use your platform slash offering, like kind of like how Macy's has, or Target has their own versions of credit cards. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah. So it's not a credit card, but, uh, it's just a credit product, like a line of credit or personal loan of sorts. And there are all these other companies, like many immigrant-focused neobanks, right, who are offering debit accounts, but nobody offers a credit product, right? Like, we can enable them to offer a credit product. And we have built all of the technology in-house because nothing existed when we, when we launched, or hardly anything existed at the time. So we, we have— we brought everything in-house. We, we are one of the only companies that have our own licenses to lend, which means you don't have to go to a bank sponsor to get approvals. And I tweeted about this, and I and I firmly believe in it, the amount of time and the cost it takes to launch a fintech company is still incredibly high.

Right.

There are various versions of it, solutions people are trying, and a bunch of solutions now exist in the debit side space, like BaaS, banking as a service providers, but no real solutions exist in the credit space.

Wow.

So I think we'll be one of the first ones to build this and popularize this. We already have a bunch of clients currently integrating And the market pull is telling us that the next wave of enabling companies to build fintech products is on the credit side. The debit side has been done because that's where consumers need the most help.

Gotcha.

Especially the underserved ones.

Right. Now let's talk about DeFi. How do you see DeFi impacting your industry/company?

I hope DeFi gets more popular, you know, is able to, is able to serve more customers. It still has a fairly long way to go. explored using DeFi still to help immigrants and somehow enable, somehow open access to capital for all immigrants possible. The more immigrants we can serve, the better. And as of now, there are still a few barriers, like mostly on-ramping to the crypto world where DeFi is applicable. Right. We explored ideas around bridging on crypto world, like, so bridging folks who have crypto and this unsecured credit, people who don't have any crypto. Right. We had like a few ideas there. We were just not in a position to implement them, but I'm very confident that someone will. Right. It's definitely a green space

now. I mean, as someone who's now dabbling in crypto a little bit, not too much, but enough to cause anxiety for my wife, I have a lot of curiosity around this because I'm like, why can't there be, you know, loans, crypto loans? I'm sure there are, right? But not to the extent at which you can simply get an online loan that's just old traditional fi, right? Trad fi, whatever that is. But why can't— what I'm curious about is why can't there be a Stilt that would just simply look at my credit score, if that's a thing? I don't know how you would do underwriting, but it's up to you, right? But issue me ETH. I don't know if this is happening. I'm just curious, right? This is something that comes to mind as I think about that. The other thing that comes to mind, Rohit, is you and I both know that there's so many qualified students, international students who are just 2 steps before coming to the US, right? Like basically the Rohit from 2012 who was going to be going to Columbia, maybe got an admission there, but struggling to get the banking loan because of India's banking system. Could that person access still, you know, one of your portfolio products and get a loan from some other way? I don't know if this is already happening. I'm just curious.

Yeah, it's not happening. And I apologize for apologizing for like another quick story, which is that And the reason we worked on Stealth as one of the ideas, because of the idea that I wrote in my idea book. So, I have this idea book where whenever I feel like something can be an idea, I write there. So, back in 2011, 2012, when I moved here, like a little bit after that, I wrote an idea in my idea book that we should create a nonprofit where students who have moved here, got graduated, and are now earning money should pool money together to bring other international students to the US who are— Right. really capable, but don't have the money. Because I have multiple friends who are not willing to take loans or who are not willing to take the risk. And some are unable to take the risk because of their family's financial situation. And it's like, we need to bring these people to the US because they are really smart and really good. And like, when they're here, they graduate and they make money, they will have to put something in the pool and the pool constantly— Right. Yeah, it's a flywheel and the pool continuously grows larger. And I think some version of that can exist with crypto's help. Someone, if someone spends like a month or so researching and dabbling into this, I'm sure they they'll be able to come up with like a protocol design where people are incentivized or people are paid a return based on how much they are helping bring in other— Right.

And this could be calibrated, obviously, to high risk, high reward. So the larger risk you're willing to take, of course, the higher reward you should be willing to receive. And I think, I mean, there's a, like recently I actually heard about Kiva a long time ago, kiva.org, when I was at Vanderbilt, but only recently I've become more intentional about literally just like blindly looking at some of the stuff and like putting money into Kiva. And I'm really enjoying it because it gives me a lot of satisfaction given where I am now in my life. And I'm sure you feel the same way, right? That like $300 is nothing to me, right? Like $400 is nothing to me, but it could mean that someone is getting their entire month's stock of crochet equipment or some kind of a sewing machine in Nigeria or in South India, whatever. And it It gives me so much joy because at that point I'm not even thinking about ROI. I'm not even thinking if they pay me back or not. Right. But Kiva has an average of 98% payback. So I know that at some point there is a version of that money coming back. But again, I don't care. You know what I mean? And I wonder, there's so many people like me around the world, including you, and I'm sure many of your coworkers or your team members who feel the same way because we've benefited from somebody believing in us and they were willing to pay pay back. And right, that there's like, to your point, there's a crypto version of this, where I think this would just remove all these barriers that are unnecessarily, you know, have been around for whatever reason for decades. And so anyway, just something that comes to mind on the topic of, you know, your mission.

I'll share a quick number with you. We actually did some research internally for our customers. And this was done back in 2019. Because of our loans, people were able to accomplish certain things that they would not have been And they added $200 million in their lifetime earnings.

Wow.

Because of that. Wow. So if our loan wasn't there, they would have had to either go back to their home country or may not have been able to finish some coursework they were doing, or may not have gotten their degrees or their visas or something like that, which meant that they would have lost out on the job opportunity that they had at the time or a future job opportunity. And then with average salaries and stuff, we we, we saw we added $200 million of income, lifetime income to them. And this is in 2019. And we have grown 10x since then. So I mean, we haven't done the research again, but like the impact is material. And these are not like big loans. These are like a few thousand, right? Even in the US.

I think just the power of capital, you know, as you've seen it now, and I've recently had a taste of like the power of capital after joining On Deck. And now, you know, I'm a, I'm a small angel investor, and I'm just realizing how many family offices in the US and how many LPs in the US have so much capital looking for good ideas, good people to go to. Right. So money wants to go to a good use. It just naturally travels towards that side. And for a long time, I really couldn't believe that. Like, to your point about the $100K check, right? I think getting the $100K check is probably way harder mentally or emotionally than $10 million on a great idea, because once you get through the first hurdle of your own mental hurdle thinking like, oh my God, this is a— it's not a statement of your worth or ideas with the statement of this is a good excuse, a good use for your money to go and do the right thing. So I think with that said, like the small microloans, you know, $5Ks to $10Ks, and the people who are waiting on those loans blow my mind because they're so— it's kind of like the Lambda School story too. Like it's just believing and betting on the right person can be unbelievable upside for the person and to the economy and to the company. You know, so yeah, definitely close to my heart as a topic. Anyway, so as parting thoughts, what about Web3 and crypto excites you the most? I think you touched on it a little bit, but generally, as someone who's in this, who's in the financial industry, what about it excites you the most in the next 10 years?

Oh man, I am not as deep into crypto as many others. And I was talking to someone and I think I said like crypto is the most overhyped and the most underhyped technology. I

agree with both. I think that's

true. And I think it's going to manifest itself in so many different ways that we can't imagine as of today. Just the sheer amount of unlocking of value it would do if more people got on it is unfathomable. Like we couldn't have predicted what would internet do in the 2000s. Right. We couldn't have predicted what would, you know, computers do in the '80s or '90s. And I think as of now, we can't predict what the crypto world will do in the 2030s and '40s. And maybe it will be, it's a start of breaking down national and international barriers. Boundaries and barriers. Economic opportunities. Yeah. So anyone's like truly global and everything is truly global from the offset kind of thing. Yes, there are NFTs and there will be all these other types of applications, but like the fundamental fabric of society, structural changes are going to, what's going to change the future. And I think there is a probability, however small it may be, that that's actually possible. And that's the most exciting part about crypto from whatever I've seen.

I mean, I couldn't agree more. As a fellow tech optimist, I try to lean towards what's possible than, oh my God, we could be wrong. But anyway, so that was a great note to end this on. How can people find you on the internet and how can people find Stilt?

Yeah, so feel free to go to stilt.com, which is stilt.com. If you are an immigrant or you know immigrants who are having difficulty accessing credit. We give money or give loans to people even on day 1 of their arrival. You land at the airport, you go back home. By the time you're home, you can actually have a loan approved for yourself. So we, we are really built for making immigrants successful and continue to follow us and watch out for all the new and exciting things that we'll be doing in 2022. You'll hear quite a bit of those from us.

Awesome. And you are— what's your Twitter or what's your email if want to share, whatever you want to share.

Yeah. My Twitter is Rohit.mittal, which is R-O-H-I-T dot M-I-T-T-A-L. My email is rohit@stilt.com. If we are always hiring, we're especially hiring a lot of people right now. This is the most momentum we have seen in the company. We have like 20, 30 positions open. If you qualify or even not qualify for any positions listed, feel free to email me your resume and a few lines about yourself. And I'll make sure I get back to you and maybe we find our next great hire.

Awesome. We— that's a great plug, actually. We have a lot of people who are breaking into tech in my audience. And I think, you know, hiring is the hardest or the most significant thing you could do as a founder after investing. I mean, after fundraising. So that was great. Awesome. This is great. Thank you so much, Rohit, for joining me. And it was such a fun ride to hear about some of the inflection points, some of the untold tidbits, you know, from your story. And I I think we're incredibly aligned on the larger mission that Stilt and you have, which is making immigrants successful. As a fellow immigrant, I couldn't be happier someone's working day and night on this. So grateful to have you here, and we'll keep in touch.

Yeah. Thank you for having me, and thank you for giving me a chance to share our story.

Excellent. Awesome.