Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Now, was this interview a buyout firm? Were they, were you doing kind of growth majority buyouts there?
A No, Centerview was an M&A boutique investment bank. So it competed with Goldman Sachs and UBS and others. Uh, but all they did was M&A. They didn't have a financing arm. They didn't have a capital markets arm to it at that time. So when I moved back, the goal was to actually go out and buy a business. But when I spoke to all these, uh, small business owners, they would say things like, yeah, I'm interested in you telling me how much my, my business might be worth if you want to acquire it, but take into account that my customers are taking longer and longer to pay me. A bank won't lend to me because it was after the crisis, and I might be asset light, or too small, or just don't fit their credit profile, and I've got this gap, but I've got a stack of purchase orders that I, if only I had the capital I would be able to fill, and I've got a stack of invoices that are just taking longer and longer to pay. So I took a bit of a detour, and I had never heard the term factoring, I'm embarrassed to say today. Um, you know, having an undergraduate degree in finance, having been working on Wall Street, having an MBA in finance, I had never heard the term factoring. But what I realized was that when you sell to high quality customers, you're creating an asset and you should be able to use that asset and no other asset as a way of being able to get the capital that you need.
AI assessment note: “No, Centerview was an M&A boutique investment bank.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q is to try and back into a true APR, right? So if I'm going to pay you, you're going to advance 9900 on a 10,000 dollar contract. So it's a hundred dollars. That's what it cost me to save that two months, right? Multiply obviously at a year. That's 600 dollars on 10 K. You can back into essentially a six percent effective APR. Am I doing that math correctly?
A Yeah, that, that math is correct. The other thing that I would, uh, I would say that is, is different is what's interesting is there are a lot of players in the capital space, and a lot of them, uh, you've just, you've just mentioned. They all actually do really different things, uh, and it is our job and, you know, the industry's job to actually demonstrate to small business owners in which case you would want to use one versus, versus another. The interesting thing about fun through is, uh, relative to say a loan, uh, which was what the other ones that you were talking about are all, uh, are all loans, uh, is that when you take a loan, you get the money up front and you spend the money and that's great, but now the money's gone and you hopefully have used it to generate revenue or, you know, more cash. Uh, but at some point you've got to find a way to repay the loan.
AI assessment note: “Yeah, that, that math is correct.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q So, I mean, what the hell were you doing for between two dozen nine, 20 14? That's five years.
A So between 2009 and 2014. So the first thing I did is I spent several months trying to figure out how to buy a business. Then I realized that, wait a minute, this thing called factoring, the best way for me to learn about factoring, uh, because to me it was, it sounded like the best way for you to fund yourself, you know, off of the credit worthiness of who you sell to, not off of who you are, get unlimited access to capital simply by doing what you do best, which is sell. Sounded great. But the next question I asked was, why doesn't everybody do this? Why doesn't everybody know about it? So, you know, I'm a curious guy and I figured the best way to figure it out is to just jump right in.
AI assessment note: “first thing I did is I spent several months trying to figure out how”
Partly produced feed
D 2 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 3.40
Q You know, time sites, well, the reason I'm positioning it that way in the context of this interview is because I want to now pull this forward, right? So what did you grow your loan tape to in 2014? How many kind of total advances did you do GMV wise?
A Well, so that, so 20 14 is when we launched fund through. So prior to that, uh, it was not fund through. It was just, you know, on my own book. When we launched fund through, uh, the, the very first advance that we made Was a 300,000 dollar advance to a guy who was selling, uh, to Walmart and had never sold anything before. Uh, so he, he invented this tool. It was a really cool, uh, tool. He won best in show at his conference and Walmart gave him an opening order and we said, okay, you know, we're going to take a risk because it's Walmart. We're going to, we're going to fund it. The only thing I can promise you is we're going to charge you too much money. It's going to be really cumbersome. Um, but I promise that you'll have founder level attention and you will solve creative. And he's like, okay, he was an early adopter. He's like, okay, let's go for it. I think we charged him the equivalent of like 36% to annualize. We didn't really know. And, you know, we were trying to figure out what it is. Uh, and we advanced.
AI assessment note: “the very first advance that we made Was a 300,000 dollar advance”
