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5 episodes with sam hodges
5 episodes with sam hodges
4 episodes with sam hodges
3 episodes with sam hodges
2 episodes with sam hodges
2 episodes with sam hodges
Mother’s Day is, for most, a day of celebration, but for the 30 percent of Americans who have lost their mom, it can be a painful reminder of loss. If you are grieving the loss of your mom, GriefShare has released a new free on-demand webinar, Remembering Mom. This program addresses this unique grief by sharing practical tools, biblical encouragement, and stories for those who’ve experienced the loss of a mother. On this Friday before Mother’s Day, Ken and Deb welcome Sam Hodges, president of Church Initiative, the creators of GriefShare, to talk about a new and free resource for those who are navigating this loss, which Sam says, “creates a void that can’t be fully filled by another person.”Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshow/wdlmSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Losing a mother creates a void that can’t be fully filled by another person. Sam Hodges, President of Church Initiative, the creators of GriefShare, the number one church-based grief support program in the world introduces a new resource. Remembering Mom, is a free resource to provide a lifeline to those navigating this difficult journey, offering them comfort and hope rooted in biblical, Christ-centered principles.” Resources and information is available for you at griefshare.org/mom.Donate to Moody Radio: http://moodyradio.org/donateto/morningshow/wmbwSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Startups face unexpected risks every day — cyberattacks, lawsuits, market shifts —but many entrepreneurs don't think about risk management until it's too late. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Vouch co-founder/CEO Sam Hodges explains why risk management should be top of mind for early-stage founders. We discuss: Why risk management matters for early-stage startups How Vouch validated, built, and launched Corix as a new business unit The biggest mistakes founders make when managing risk Why work-life balance is a myth for startup leaders Key insurtech trends that early-stage founders should watch in 2025 Sam also shares insights on team structuring, branding, and time management—plus the one question he'd ask an insurtech CEO before taking a job. RUNTIME: 44:36 EPISODE BREAKDOWN (2:27) “ Risk management is something that a lot of founders don't think about a lot, but when it matters, it really matters.” (3:26) How Sam connected with co-founder Travis Hedge. (5:53) Why Vouch's first team member was a design lead. (6:35) What sets Corix apart from Vouch's core offerings. (9:05) The process behind starting up a new business unit. (12:42) “ At some point in scale, almost every company is going to organize around products, geographies, or market segments.” (15:05) “ There are three very specific stakeholder groups that we talk to all the time.” (16:26) How the team balanced quantitative metrics against qualitative insights while planning. (18:50) Inside their messaging, branding and rollout strategy for Corix. (21:59) “ The roots of Corix are ‘core' and ‘risk,' and we really do think that's what this is all about.” (25:47) How Sam's day-to-day work is different since launching a new BU. (28:25) A few thoughts about time management and self-care. (30:32) “ I am not a big fan of the term ‘work-life balance.'” (33:22) “ When you make a decision like this, it is going to always feel like it is too early or too late.” (35:48) Insurtech trends early-stage founders should look out for in 2025. (40:14) The biggest risk-management mistakes Sam sees founders making. (43:14) The one question he'd have to ask an insurtech CEO if he were interviewing for a job. LINKS Vouch Sam Hodges, co-founder/CEO Travis Hedge, co-founder/CRO Introducing Corix: An MGA from Vouch, Empowering Brokers with Tailored Insurance Products (PR Newswire) SUBSCRIBE LinkedIn Substack Instagram Thanks for listening! – Walter.
Dive into the mind of Sam Hodges, the co-founder and CEO of Vouch Insurance. With over two decades of experience as an entrepreneur and investor, Sam is now at the helm of a startup that's reshaping the insurance landscape for high-growth companies. Vouch isn't just another insurance company; it's a technology-first platform backed with a whopping $160M in funding. Why? Because Sam saw a broken system and envisioned a solution that's fast, responsive, and genuinely customer-centric. From his early days at Endurance and Funding Circle to championing women in the FinTech industry, Sam's journey offers valuable insights into the startup world. Discover how Vouch is addressing real-world problems with innovative tech solutions, writing policies tailored for startups, and offering a seamless, user-friendly experience in an industry that's historically been anything but. Join us as we unpack Sam's mission to make Vouch the go-to business insurance for the modern era. Subscribe for more insights from industry leaders!
In episode 26 of Venture Everywhere, Angela Prince, former CEO of Climb Credit, founder of Orchard (acquired by Kabbage), and LP of Everywhere Ventures, chats with Sam Hodges, co-founder and CEO of Vouch – a tech-driven commercial insurance business. Vouch's platform offers digital insurance coverage that can be activated swiftly to ensure a seamless experience from the initial sign up process to handling claims. Prior to Vouch, Sam co-founded and built the US business for Funding Circle, a global marketplace for small business loans. With two decades of entrepreneurship and investment under his belt, Sam has effectively positioned the company as a disruptive force in commercial insurance by using technology to meet the distinct needs of startups and high-growth businesses. In this episode, you will hear: ● Vouch's focus on insuring startups and assisting entrepreneurs in managing their crucial risks. ● The need for product evolution and broadening service offerings to cater diverse company sizes and types. ● Vouch's potential in the commercial property and casualty insurance market, with opportunities for innovation and distribution. ● Understanding different stages of businesses and the company culture to thrive. ● Addressing AI-specific risks for companies and ensuring appropriate insurance coverage and risk management.Learn more about Sam Hodges | Vouch Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/samhodges Website: https://www.vouch.us/ Learn more about Angela Prince | Everywhere Ventures and Climb Credit Website: http://everywhere.vc/ and https://climbcredit.com/students Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/angela-galardi-ceresnie
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On this best of "Mornings with Carmen, " Church Initiative's Sam Hodges offers hope for those dealing with the death of a loved one as we head into the holidays through a ministry called Griefshare. Karen Ellis, author of "Wisdom's Call," talks about pursuing wholeness and peace by listening to wisdom's call in the person of Jesus, His Kingdom, and His ways, as opposed to the call of folly from the world. Faith Radio podcasts are made possible by your support. Give now: Click here
Everyone's Wilson's Daryl Crouch helps us look at all those end of year giving mailings and texts, and how to way which ones you should be part of, focusing on ministries that support long-term flourishing and the spread of the Gospel. Church Initiative's Sam Hodges offers hope for those dealing with the death of a loved one as we head into the holidays through a ministry called Griefshare. Faith Radio podcasts are made possible by your support. Give now: Click here
Today on the radio show: 1 - Sports Chat 7 - The Rock 2000 is back! 8 - Crook Book with Westie Lee 10 - Long names 14 - Rock 2000 voting 16 - Sam Hodges is going to Chile! 20 - Ruthless teacher fart 22 - Steve Harvey toilet set up 26 - Must Watch; Flamin' Hot https://bit.ly/3PRKCGu 28 - Southern Grandpa sayings 29 - Kids school adults in quiz 32 - Country cover 33 - Late mail 35 - Last drinks See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Carmen talks about why we sometimes question whether we're blessed or not and what it means to operate with a thanks-living posture. Sam Hodges, president of Church Initiative, shares about coming to know Jesus through times of grief and reaching those in our communities who need to be comforted. Faith Radio podcasts are made possible by your support. Give now: Click here
Has Trump been dumped by Murdoch? In this week's show, host Jake Kanter is joined by Karin Robinson (Edelman) and Alex Hudson (Newsweek) to dissect the US media landscape in the wake of the Midterms.Also in the programme, we discuss the news that Emma Tucker looks set to swap editing the Sunday Times for the Wall Street Journal - and the BBC preparing to export its brand of impartiality to America. Plus we get some special insight on the hot mess that is Twitter with ex-head of PR & Comms, Sam Hodges, sharing his advice for Elon Musk.And in our deep dive, director and producer Fenton Bailey, shares his take on Reality TV and the gossip from his new book Screen Age.NOT ONLY THAT... but media quiz we're playing Social Media Chaos.A Rethink Audio Production, produced by Phoebe Adler-Ryan with support from Matt Hill.Hear more from Fenton Bailey, including his account of discovering Graham Norton, on our Patreon.ScreenAge: How TV Shaped Our Reality, From Tammy Faye to RuPaul's Drag Race by Fenton Bailey is published by Ebury Press at £20 and is available in all good bookstores now; To order visit https://smarturl.it/ScreenAge. For US listeners, the book will be available stateside in early 2023. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Political scientist Mark Caleb Smith peels back the layers of churches openly endorsing political candidates and the discussions that arise from our era of identity politics. Sam Hodges, president of Church Initiative, shares about coming to know Jesus through times of grief and reaching those in our communities who need to be comforted. Click here for today's show notes
Sam Hodges took his first startup all the way to IPO, after raising $370M in funding for it. His latest venture has already raised $160M to help other founders reduce risk. The venture, Funding Circle has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Waterfall Asset Management, DST Global, Rocket Internet, and Union Square Ventures.
Topics: Affairs, Pornography, Same-Sex Attraction, Boundaries, Grief, Avoiders Hosts: Steve Arterburn, Dr. Jill Hubbard, Milan Yerkovich Caller Questions: Interview with Sam Hodges, president of Church Initiative, to talk about DivorceCare and GriefShare. What should I do if my husband had an affair 17yrs ago and I just caught him looking at porn? Thank you for the scholarship to Emotional Freedom; it was great! My The post New Life Live: March 9, 2022 appeared first on New Life.
Hosts: Steve Arterburn, Dr. Jill Hubbard, Milan Yerkovich Caller Questions: - Interview with Sam Hodges, president of Church Initiative, to talk about DivorceCare and GriefShare. - What should I do if my husband had an affair 17yrs ago and I just caught him looking at porn? - Thank you for the scholarship to Emotional Freedom; it was great! My sister is in a gay relationship and our family is getting together at my house. How should we do the sleeping arrangements? - I never had anyone to talk to as a child. Now that my daughter took her own life and my mom has dementia, it has been hard. - Do I have an avoidant personality? My first husband was a porn addict and the second one was violent, so I'm happy to be by myself. New relationships have been disappointing. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/451/29
On this episode I speak with Sam Hodges a millionaire with Monat, how she got started, where she is now and advice to anyone looking to join! Follow Sam on instagram @samanthagomeshodges --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
On this week's episode of How to Raise a Round, Josh Weisman sat down with Vouch co-founders Sam Hodges and Travis Hedge to discuss how meeting for coffee became their $45M Series B.Vouch got its start in 2018 and provides startup business insurance for those building the future. The idea generated a lot of investor buzz, and by the summer of 2019, Vouch had been accepted into the Y-Combinator.The co-founders were laying a solid foundation on which to raise their Series B when Sam got an unexpected surprise. A few minutes into a routine conversation with an investor, he was handed a term sheet. Would it be worth it to sign the preempted term sheet and raise their Series B in a few short weeks?After a phone call with Travis, it was decided: Vouch would accept the term sheet, and had just two weeks to raise. Sam and Travis began jetting around the country to reconnect with the investors, and they quickly realized they couldn't raise based on their relationships alone.Travis and Sam tranched their round into two closes: the first for investors with an established relationship to Vouch, and the second for smaller-check investors, which brought them a few new angel investors. Based on the strength of their connections, Travis and Sam raised a $45M Series B, with the Y Combinator's Continuity Fund leading the round.Learn more about Vouch ›
This is a special bonus episode that features Harriet's best bits of season 2. The list of episodes that the clips are taken from Sliding Doors with Sam Hodges and James MacLeod https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sliding-doors-with-sam-hodges-and-james-macleod/id1550599535?i=1000538655304 Document, rather than create and Alex Payne, The Room - building a marketing tech business https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/document-rather-than-create-and-alex-payne-the/id1550599535?i=1000537810843 Oh the Glamorous and Music PR with Brenda Juliet https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/oh-the-glamorous-and-music-pr-with-brenda-juliet/id1550599535?i=1000536357574 Wellbeing at work - more than a yoga class and the revival of internal communications with Dev Mistry https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/wellbeing-at-work-more-than-a-yoga-class-and/id1550599535?i=1000531052164 Getting leadership visibility right and creative leadership with Charles Day https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/getting-leadership-visibility-right-and-creative/id1550599535?i=1000534774447 Asking for Help at Work and Wellness PR Guru Naomi White https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/asking-for-help-at-work-and-wellness-pr-guru-naomi-white/id1550599535?i=1000530367373 @jamesmacleod https://twitter.com/jamesmacleod?lang=en Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jamesmacleodcomms @SamHodges https://twitter.com/SamHodges Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/samhodgescomms Twitter https://twitter.com/alexpaynetv?lang=en Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/arapayne/?originalSubdomain=uk Find Brenda Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenda-juliet-nabanja-a3b9548b/?originalSubdomain=uk Myblaqbook Instagram https://www.instagram.com/MYBLAQBOOK/ My Blaqbook https://www.myblaqbook.com/ Find Dev Twitter https://twitter.com/DeMistryMan Linkedin https://uk.linkedin.com/in/devrmistry Find Charles The Looking Glass https://www.thelookinglass.com/ @charlesday https://twitter.com/charlesday Find Naomi Twitter: @Bambi_Nay https://twitter.com/Bambi_Nay Instagram: @naomiwhitecommunications https://www.instagram.com/naomiwhitecommunications/?hl=en Linkedin: Naomi White https://www.naomiwhitecommunications.com/ Season 2 of Have You Got 5 Minutes? Is hosted by Harriet Small and Rebecca Roberts, produced by Dave Musson, Mustard Yellow Media, and brought to in partnership with Nextdoor. Nextdoor is the neighbourhood app used by 1 in 7 households in the UK. For more information: Twitter: @Nextdoor_UK Website: https://nextdoor.co.uk/ Follow us on Instagram @HYG5MPod Find Rebecca: Twitter: https://twitter.com/rebecca7roberts https://twitter.com/threadandfable Linkedin: Rebecca Roberts Website: https://threadandfable.com/ Podcast: The Hear It podcast Find Harriet: Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarrietSmallies Linkedin: Harriet Small Website: https://www.commsoveracoffee.com/
This extended guest episode was recorded as part of our season 2 finale. In this episode, we are joined by two titans of television and entertainment PR who are generally all-around nice guys. Sam Hodges and James MacLeod started their PR career at the BBC together working on shows such as Strictly Come Dancing. They have gone on to have top comms roles at ITV, BBC, Netflix, Channel 4 and Twitter between them. During our conversation, we talked about what it is really like being at the top, moving a headquarters outside London, making the decision to switch industries from TV to tech, failure, reality TV, Ofcom and the most important question of all, how do shows get picked for Gogglebox. At the time of recording the podcast, James MacLeod had stepped down as Communications Director at Channel 4, and remained as an advisor on the government's new consultation relating to the broadcaster's future ownership and its review of public service broadcasting. James started his career at the BBC as a publicist and then later joined ITV, leaving there as Head of Press, Broadcasting. Sam Hodges is a director at Aaqua. He has been the Head of Communications at the BBC , and Twitter, the Director of Content Comms at Netflix and a partner at the agency Freuds. Studio Lambert https://www.studiolambert.com/shows.html Pregnancy Loss Policy https://www.channel4.com/corporate/pregnancy-loss-policy Menopause Policy https://www.channel4.com/corporate/menopause-policy Future4 https://www.channel4.com/corporate/future4 BBC's Alex Scott ‘proud' of working class accent after peer's elocution jibe This article is more than 2 months old: Lord Digby Jones accuses Alex Scott of spoiling Olympics coverage by dropping her ‘g's https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2021/jul/31/bbc-alex-scott-proud-working-class-accent-digby-jones-elocution @jamesmacleod https://twitter.com/jamesmacleod?lang=en Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jamesmacleodcomms @SamHodges https://twitter.com/SamHodges Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/samhodgescomms Season 2 of Have You Got 5 Minutes? Is hosted by Harriet Small and Rebecca Roberts, produced by Dave Musson, Mustard Yellow Media, and brought to in partnership with Nextdoor. Nextdoor is the neighbourhood app used by 1 in 7 households in the UK. For more information Nextdoor Twitter: @Nextdoor_UK Website: https://nextdoor.co.uk/ Follow us on Instagram @HYG5MPod Find Rebecca: Twitter: https://twitter.com/rebecca7roberts https://twitter.com/threadandfable Linkedin: Rebecca Roberts Website: https://threadandfable.com/ Podcast: The Hear It podcast Find Harriet: Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarrietSmallies Linkedin: Harriet Small Website: https://www.commsoveracoffee.com/
Who really killed Sam Hodges? Is Harry really the only alien walking amongst us? Why won't they give Linda Hamilton more lines? We're figuring that out on today's podcast as “Resident Alien” quickly speeds towards its season one finale on Syfy! This show is living rent free in our heads at the moments, so it's only fair we break down and broadcast some of our wild fan theories to try and answer these pressing questions. Needless to say, spoilers ahead!
Hosts James Benham & Rob Galbraith are joined by Sam Hodges from Vouch. Rob & Sam discuss digital coverage and Vouch's targeted approach towards Start-Ups The InsureTech Geek Podcast is brought to you by JBKnowledge. Find us on social media! We're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, or follow James on Twitter! Subscribe, rate, and comment. As always - Enjoy the Ride & Geek Out!
Back with more brand new episodes for 2021, Nottingham Playhouse’s Amplify Producer Craig Gilbert chats to artists of national and international renown in our Amplify podcast series. These conversations cover career and process as well as offering a few ideas to explore from home during this time of social distancing. This week Craig is chatting to Sam Hodges, a theatre director, artistic director and producer with over 15 years’ experience across the not-for-profit and commercial sectors. A few years after graduating from Cambridge University, he founded the HighTide Festival Theatre which grew into one of the country’s leading new writing companies. He was Artistic Director for five years, during which time he produced early work by the leading writers and directors of his generation – including writers Nick Payne, Sam Holcroft, Ella Hickson and Beth Steel, and directors Mike Longhurst, Polly Findlay and Natalie Abrahami. Highlights include Stovepipe - which was co-produced with the National Theatre and named one of The Sunday Times ‘Ten Best Theatre Productions of the Decade’ - and Ditch, which opened the Old Vic Tunnels. In 2009, Sam was named in Esquire Magazine’s 60 Brilliant Brits for shaping British theatre. Between 2012 and 2014, he was invited by Stephen Fry and Sally Greene to become the Creative Producer for the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End. More recently, Sam was Artistic Director of Nuffield Southampton Theatres (NST) where he built on his reputation for commissioning new plays and musicals. Highlights include international award-winning tours of Fantastic Mr Fox the Musical and Billionaire Boy the Musical, London transfers for A Number to the Young Vic and SS Mendi to the Royal Opera House, and world premieres of The Shadow Factory by Howard Brenton and an adaptation of the Coen Brothers film The Hudsucker Proxy. After his first season in charge, NST was named Regional Theatre of the Year and Sam has been named in the Stage 100 power list for the last 4 years. As a director, his productions for NST include The Audience (nominated Best Design & Best Actress, UK Theatre Awards), The Shadow Factory (nominated Best Design, UK Theatre Awards), Dedication, and The Glass Menagerie (nominated Best Director, UK Theatre Awards). He has also written two short films, Player (nominated Best Short: Raindance Film Festival, Miami Short Film Festival) and Double Take (commissioned by BAFTA and Big Dance for Channel 4: Dance on Camera Festival 2013 ) which he also directed.
Sam Hodges is the Growth Director at men's health company, Numan. Founded in 2018 Numan has quickly become the go-to place for men looking to treat all manner of health issues such as hair loss, gut and lung health and nutritional deficiencies. The company's honest and modern approach to healthcare, fuelled in part by Sam expertise in Performance & Multichannel Marketing, has seen it become one of the fastest-growing companies in the UK. In this episode James and Sam focus on the topic of growth, predominantly what it means, how to become a growth specialist and how to build out a successful growth team. Make sure to like and subscribe to the Riding Unicorns podcast to never miss an episode. Also don't forget to give Riding Unicorns a follow on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep on top of the latest developments.
12. Sam Hodges, Vouch Insurance --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/andreas-penna/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/andreas-penna/support
Sam Hodges from Vouch on being a leader during a storm, the founders of Sonder & Tell on keeping your brand's tone of voice consistent, and a check-in with Courier's local cafe.
Be sure to listen to our companion episode, HOW STUDENTS ARE ADJUSTING to distance learning. Guess what educators miss most about not being in school during the Coronavirus quarantine? It might surprise you! We, the freshmen podcasters of the Innovation Diploma program, planned, wrote, recorded, and edited, this podcast episode about distance learning from our homes while sheltering in place during the Covid19, or Coronavirus outbreak. We worked from home exclusively using recorded Zoom meetings to communicate. We asked, "What is it like for educators during emergency distance learning during Covid19, and how do they manage their own families while teaching us? It might surprise you to learn what they miss most. Thanks to Bo Adams, Brad Droke, James Tiffin, Chris Andres, Kristen Pisacreta, and Eileen Fennelly for sharing their thoughts with us. The music is written and performed by freshman, Sam Hodges.
Be sure to listen to our Companion Episode: HOW TEACHERS ARE ADJUSTING to distance learning. We, the freshmen podcasters of the Innovation Diploma program, planned, wrote, recorded, and edited, this podcast episode about distance learning from our homes while sheltering in place during the Covid19, or Coronavirus outbreak. We worked from home exclusively using recorded Zoom meetings to communicate. We asked, "What has the class of 2020 sacrificed to beat Covid19? Students tell us how they have adapted to distance learning, but, high school seniors explain what the pain has been like having their final year of high school cut short. While making this episode, something awful happened this week that changed everything about this story for us as we lost one of our own to Covid19. The music is written and performed by freshman, Sam Hodges.
This week's bonus content features a conversation with Rob Conley, Director of Financial Operations for IM, Inc.Rob also serves as head of security for the NAFWB national office building as well as The Donelson Fellowship FWB Church in Nashville, TN. He joins us to discuss the importance of church security and how to implement security policies while maintaining the mission of the church: reaching the lost for Christ.In 2015, the Executive Office produced a video on Church Security Teams, presented by security specialist Sam Hodges. That video, along with the notes and powerpoint presentation, is available for download at https://nafwb.org/churchsecurity/.
Life has challenges and can’t be faced alone, but with the help of faithful and loyal friends, we can make it through. We all need a Batman. They were right there beside me. Where I went, they went. I couldn’t shake them off, and neither would I want to. They saw both my very private moments of despair and the times of victorious success. He was my batman and carried my bat well. Before Batman wore a mask Long before Batman made his appearance as comic book caped crusader, some men had a role in military life as being a batman for a senior officer. They were essentially a servant to an officer in the army. The term is derived from the obsolete word ‘bat’ meaning ‘packsaddle.’ The batman was in charge of the officers ‘bat-horse,’ which would carry the officers kit during a campaign. A batman’s duties often included acting as a “runner” to convey orders from the officer to subordinates maintaining the officer’s uniform and personal equipment as a valet driving the officer’s vehicle, sometimes under combat conditions acting as the officer’s bodyguard in combat digging the officer’s foxhole in combat, giving the officer time to direct his unit other miscellaneous tasks the officer did not have time or inclination to do Batman (military) Sam Hodges Not a name we probably know, but Sam Hodges was batman to J.R.R. Tolkien at the Battle of the Somme in World War I. This place of hellish death and evil was the context out of which Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, I believe, honors his batman by naming one of the principal characters in the story after him. In the epic story, a small furry footed hobbit called Frodo is on a mission to rid the world of a powerful ring. Alongside him walks an equally little man named Samwise Gangee, a batman to his friend. So typical was the loyal response of a batman to his officer is that of Sam to Frodo. “Come, Mr. Frodo!’ he cried. ‘I can’t carry it [the ring] for you, but I can carry you.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King Jonathan, Ruth, and Mary When we look into the biblical hero stories of men and women like you and me, we find batmen. David had Jonathan. He also had his mighty men who would go way beyond the call of duty to serve their leader. Naomi had a daughter in law Ruth, who declared her loyalty. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. Ruth 1:16-18 Jesus had Mary Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. John 12:1-8 The Batman sees There is something special about the truest of batmen and batwomen. They see something beyond the immediate struggle. When the one they are serving loses heart, they come alongside and fill up the encouragement tank. They know that their role is subservient to some higher calling. That there is a mission, and their part to play is backstage. In real life I’ve been batman to many. I haven’t dug any actual foxholes, but I have provided places for people to come and find shelter from the storms and battles of life. It takes the vision of seeing in someone else the battles and challenges they are facing. That takes deep listening. Then a coming alongside and pouring encouragement into the soul. For a man, it might well be noticing the remembered movements he is making in his world. He is on a quest, and he stumbles, he falls, you pick him up and tell to keep going. For a woman, it might well be noticing the beauty that is contained within her. There is an invite there to know something of that divine beauty. She gets hurt, used, and wants to hide, but you confirm the beauty and help her to reveal it once more. Have we lost batman? In the foolishness of self individualism, where its all about ‘me’ and less about ‘we’ perhaps we have lost the awareness of batmen and batwomen. The faithful Samwise Gamgee, the loyalty of Ruth, and the self-sacrifice of Mary. Theodore Roosevelt wrote this It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; ‘The Man in the Arena.’ For every ‘man in the arena,’ there has to be a batman or batwoman in his corner. Someone who will wipe away the dust and sweat and blood. Someone who will give him water and a warm, encouraging pat on the back. It’s time to acknowledge and endorse the role of Batman and Batwoman and rid Gotham city of despair. Quotes to consider Real encouragement occurs when words are spoken from a heart of love to another’s recognized fear. Larry Crabb Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.Just walk beside me and be my friend. Albert Camus When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. Henri J.M. Nouwen Encouragement has its root in the Latin word cor, which literally means “heart”. So does the word courage. To have courage means to have heart. To encourage – to provide with or give courage – literally means to give others heart. Jim Kouzes, Barry Posner Questions to answer What are the qualities of a good batman? What other examples can you think of people in the background who have been batmen? How do we encourage those who seem to be like batmen? Further reading Barry Pearman
Life has challenges and can’t be faced alone, but with the help of faithful and loyal friends, we can make it through. We all need a Batman. They were right there beside me. Where I went, they went. I couldn’t shake them off, and neither would I want to. They saw both my very private moments of despair and the times of victorious success. He was my batman and carried my bat well. Before Batman wore a mask Long before Batman made his appearance as comic book caped crusader, some men had a role in military life as being a batman for a senior officer. They were essentially a servant to an officer in the army. The term is derived from the obsolete word ‘bat’ meaning ‘packsaddle.’ The batman was in charge of the officers ‘bat-horse,’ which would carry the officers kit during a campaign. A batman’s duties often included acting as a “runner” to convey orders from the officer to subordinates maintaining the officer’s uniform and personal equipment as a valet driving the officer’s vehicle, sometimes under combat conditions acting as the officer’s bodyguard in combat digging the officer’s foxhole in combat, giving the officer time to direct his unit other miscellaneous tasks the officer did not have time or inclination to do Batman (military) Sam Hodges Not a name we probably know, but Sam Hodges was batman to J.R.R. Tolkien at the Battle of the Somme in World War I. This place of hellish death and evil was the context out of which Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, I believe, honors his batman by naming one of the principal characters in the story after him. In the epic story, a small furry footed hobbit called Frodo is on a mission to rid the world of a powerful ring. Alongside him walks an equally little man named Samwise Gangee, a batman to his friend. So typical was the loyal response of a batman to his officer is that of Sam to Frodo. “Come, Mr. Frodo!’ he cried. ‘I can’t carry it [the ring] for you, but I can carry you.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King Jonathan, Ruth, and Mary When we look into the biblical hero stories of men and women like you and me, we find batmen. David had Jonathan. He also had his mighty men who would go way beyond the call of duty to serve their leader. Naomi had a daughter in law Ruth, who declared her loyalty. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. Ruth 1:16-18 Jesus had Mary Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. John 12:1-8 The Batman sees There is something special about the truest of batmen and batwomen. They see something beyond the immediate struggle. When the one they are serving loses heart, they come alongside and fill up the encouragement tank. They know that their role is subservient to some higher calling. That there is a mission, and their part to play is backstage. In real life I’ve been batman to many. I haven’t dug any actual foxholes, but I have provided places for people to come and find shelter from the storms and battles of life. It takes the vision of seeing in someone else the battles and challenges they are facing. That takes deep listening. Then a coming alongside and pouring encouragement into the soul. For a man, it might well be noticing the remembered movements he is making in his world. He is on a quest, and he stumbles, he falls, you pick him up and tell to keep going. For a woman, it might well be noticing the beauty that is contained within her. There is an invite there to know something of that divine beauty. She gets hurt, used, and wants to hide, but you confirm the beauty and help her to reveal it once more. Have we lost batman? In the foolishness of self individualism, where its all about ‘me’ and less about ‘we’ perhaps we have lost the awareness of batmen and batwomen. The faithful Samwise Gamgee, the loyalty of Ruth, and the self-sacrifice of Mary. Theodore Roosevelt wrote this It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; ‘The Man in the Arena.’ For every ‘man in the arena,’ there has to be a batman or batwoman in his corner. Someone who will wipe away the dust and sweat and blood. Someone who will give him water and a warm, encouraging pat on the back. It’s time to acknowledge and endorse the role of Batman and Batwoman and rid Gotham city of despair. Quotes to consider Real encouragement occurs when words are spoken from a heart of love to another’s recognized fear. Larry Crabb Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.Just walk beside me and be my friend. Albert Camus When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. Henri J.M. Nouwen Encouragement has its root in the Latin word cor, which literally means “heart”. So does the word courage. To have courage means to have heart. To encourage – to provide with or give courage – literally means to give others heart. Jim Kouzes, Barry Posner Questions to answer What are the qualities of a good batman? What other examples can you think of people in the background who have been batmen? How do we encourage those who seem to be like batmen? Further reading Barry Pearman
In this episode, we are joined by Sam Hodges and Travis Hedge who are the Co-Founders of Vouch Insurance. We learn about their recent experience at Y Combinator and get the details on their big Series A funding round. If you are a startup looking to do big things you should consider Vouch Insurance as a partner for when things go wrong and you need some coverage to get you through.
In this episode, we are joined by Sam Hodges and Travis Hedge who are the Co-Founders of Vouch Insurance. We learn about their recent experience at Y Combinator and get the details on their big Series A funding round. If you are a startup looking to do big things you should consider Vouch Insurance as a partner for when things go wrong and you need some coverage to get you through.
Sam Hodges, co-founder and chairman of Funding Circle who recently stepped down as US head of the fintech company shares his lessons on how to build a successful startup. 0:48 - what was it like for Sam to be a teenager 3:50 - when he knew he wanted to build something 6:30 - steps to start his own company 9:05 - learning from others 10:04 - lessons “should do” and “shouldn’t do” in the business 14:15 - how to validate your idea 17:56 - people who made a significant impact 20:46 - advice how to meet and learn from experienced leaders 22:56 - influencing books 26:49 - outlook on failures 31:46 - cooking up a new project
Today we’re expanding beyond our usual Barefoot Innovation focus on consumer financial innovation, to explore the parallel issues arising for small businesses. We’ve touched on this before, but are so fortunate, today, to have a guest who deeply understands the whole range of these issues. She is Karen Mills, former head of the Small Business Administration and now senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, where she has just released a comprehensive paper on fintech and small business. We recorded today’s show in her office on the business school campus, which is just across the Charles River from my fellowship’s home base in the Harvard Kennedy School. She and I first met in Washington a few years back, when she issued a research paper on the state of small business lending. That was in conjunction with the group that issued the Small Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights (which we covered in our episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance. In 2016, much to my delight, Karen and her co-author Brayden McCarthy put out an update on her paper, and this time it’s mostly about fintech. Technology is changing small business lending in the same ways it’s transforming consumer finance, but with different twists. On the positive side, innovators are using technology to do better for SME’s -- small and medium-sized enterprises -- by adopting low-cost online platforms, becoming much smarter about getting and using data, speeding up service, and creating a vastly better user experience than was possible in the past. The data issue is crucial. Thanks to new technology (including Square), small businesses increasingly can give lenders solid, up to date information on their financial positions and cash flows. Innovative lenders can analyze this, determine with precision what the borrower can afford, and often can create a flexible repayment schedule that works with the rhythm of the business, including seasonal ones. These innovators are filling an enormous gap -- which Karen clearly demonstrates -- because banks just cannot profitably make the smaller loans that so many businesses need. There are downsides, though. One is that whereas local banks interact with their business customers face to face, these new relationships are online. For lenders, this creates higher risk of fraud. And for borrowers, there is rising danger that these entrepreneurs will be harmed by confusing terms and, sometimes, by downright predatory practices online. And here’s a little-known fact: small business borrowers have almost no regulatory protections, at least at the federal level. There is no federal regulator for small business lending, as there is for consumers, and even if there were, there are very few regulations that apply. Generally speaking, there are no requirements for standard disclosures to small business borrowers, and no rules against unfair and deceptive practices, beyond those that cover commerce in general. This is significant, because today’s small businesses are more similar to consumers than ever before. The “1099” or “gig” economy has led to more and more people starting small businesses as their main work, or to supplement tight household budgets, or to tide them over after losing a job. It’s a mistake to assume that, simply because they’re business people, they are therefore financially sophisticated. Listeners to Barefoot Innovation have probably figured out by now that I’m not a fan of the current regulatory apparatus for protecting financial consumers (even though I myself have been involved in developing some of it). Broadly speaking, disclosures are failing, and regulations are choking desirable innovation. The last thing I think we should do is to transplant our whole system of consumer protection laws into the fresh, green field of small business lending, and have it put down roots there -- like crabgrass. I think we should be deeply rethinking our consumer laws. In the process, though, we should also be thinking about whether and how to create protections and tools for small businesses to use, too. Karen does recommend extending some consumer-type protections to these firms, including APR’s (we had a good exchange on the pros and cons of that). She also has tremendous insights into the structure and nature of the market, and on what to do about what she calls the “spaghetti soup” of regulatory agencies and rules, which now make it so hard to move toward a smarter system. She focuses, too, on the critical need for clearer, updated regulatory guidance for banks that want to work with fintechs on small business lending. A wide spectrum of new models are emerging, partly because these two industries need each other -- they complement each other. Both sides will suffer, and so will business borrowers, if banks can’t navigate the third-party risk rules of their prudential regulators. (As I often say, the regulators have the hardest job in all this.) More information on Karen: Karen Gordon Mills served as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 2009 until August 2013. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School and at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School focusing on U.S. competitiveness, entrepreneurship and innovation. As SBA Administrator and a Cabinet member, Mills served on the President’s National Economic Council and was a key member of the White House economic team. At the SBA, she led a team of more than 3,000 employees and managed a loan guarantee portfolio of over $100 billion. Mills is credited with turning around the agency during the financial crisis and with streamlining loan programs, shortening turnaround times, and reducing paperwork. In addition, Mills helped small businesses create regional economic clusters, gain access to early stage capital, hire skilled workers, boost exports, and tap into government and commercial supply chains. Prior to the SBA, Mills held leadership positions in the private sector, including as a partner in several private equity firms, and served on the boards of Scotts Miracle-Gro and Arrow Electronics. Most recently, she was president of MMP Group, which invested in businesses in consumer products, food, textiles, and industrial components. In 2007, Maine Governor John Baldacci appointed Mills to chair Maine’s Council on Competitiveness and the Economy, where she focused on regional development initiatives, including a regional economic cluster with Maine’s boatbuilding industry. Mills earned an AB in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. Additionally, she is a past vice chair of the Harvard Overseers, and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Harvard Corporation. And listen, too, to our episode from last year with Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, a leading example of platform lending to small businesses. More for our listeners We have some amazing shows coming up, including one with Chase’s Colleen Briggs, several focused on global trends, at least one with a CEO of a community bank, and one that I will call a barn-burner with the former CEO of PayPal and Inuit, Bill Harris. Don’t miss them! Remember to write a review of Barefoot Innovation on ITunes, and please sign up at www.,jsbarefoot.com to get email notices when new podcasts come out, as well as my newsletter and blog posts. Go there too to send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going. And remember to join my facebook fan page and follow me on twitter. Support the Podcast Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!
Guest host Sam Maule speaks with American Banker reporter Lalita Clozel, Sam Hodges, managing director of Funding Circle, and Normand Lepine, senior practice lead at NTT DATA about U.S. regulators’ approach to fintech companies and trends in smart home devices. Sam then interviews Brian Roemmele, founder of PayFinders.com, about the growth of virtual assistants and the security and compliance issues of far-field versions like Amazon Alexa, and Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, about digital marketing.
Welcome to our first conversation with an innovator in small business lending – my guest is Sam Hodges, Co-founder and U.S. Managing Director of Funding Circle. Funding Circle was founded in 2012 and is the world’s leading marketplace lender that’s exclusively focused on small businesses. It has made more than $2.5 billion in loans to 20,000 businesses in the U.S., Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK (where it is based). It customers borrow directly from a wide range of investors, including more than 50,000 people, the UK Government, and divers entities like local councils, a university and various financial organizations. Funding Circle was created because the founders were small business owners themselves and learned how hard it is to access finance, even for a successful business. Even when a loan was approved, they found the process difficult, or the terms unattractive. Sometimes they even felt misled. After opening their 96th loan rejection letter, they decided this was a systemic failure – that the traditional bank loan system was broken – and they set out to build a new solution. The financial crisis created fertile ground for them, as so many business suddenly had trouble accessing capital (the number of small businesses has dropped every year for the past 8-10 years). And their timing fit with the emergence of marketplace lending as a new model. As Funding Circle’s Co–Founder and U.S. Managing Director, Sam oversees the company’s overall strategic direction and its day–to–day operation in the U.S. He was previously Vice President of Business Development at SecondMarket, the leading marketplace for alternative investments, where he was responsible for corporate and business development and the company’s geographic expansion efforts. Sam was also part of the investment team at Pequot Capital, an $8 billion global fund manager, covering investments in financial technology and information services. He started his career as a strategy consultant at Katzenbach Partners, advising financial services and technology companies. He currently serves on the boards of two private companies. He received his MBA and MS from Stanford University and graduated magna cum laude from Brown University. Sam points to three key Funding Circle innovations: One is delivering a superior borrower experience. They can on-board and evaluate customers sometimes in minutes, or a few days, for situations where a bank might need 30 man-hours to reach a decision. Second, they’ve re-architected how they do credit evaluation. Sam says it’s not a silver bullet, but they’ve have created their own rigorous data-driven approach to understanding risk, and they’re using new data, in new ways, to serve more borrowers. And third, he argues that the marketplace model can be more scalable and profitable than the traditional bank approach, enabling them to grow a global business. In our conversation, Sam expresses his continued confidence in the marketplace model. He discusses Funding Circle’s risk analytics (he says they hire world class risk officers from world-class institutions). He explains the role of alternative data in driving more sound and inclusive lending. I was especially interested in how Sam contrasts the U.S. regulatory model with the U.K.’s efforts, especially on P2P lending. He thinks the fragmented American structure makes innovation here difficult. He also has suggestions for regulatory innovation, including sandboxes and a graduated scale of coverage that would allow small innovators to get up and running more easily. He emphasizes the need for interagency coordination and consistency. He says transparency needs to undergird the whole industry, and that requires smart, sound regulation that everyone understands. (To listen to our previous episode about the “Regulatory Sandbox” with Nitish Pandey of BMO, click here.) Sam welcomes smart customer protection regulation – he discusses his involvement in creating the Small Business Borrower’s Bill of Rights we discussed in an earlier episode with Brian Graham of BancAlliance. See also this Harvard research paper by former Small Business Administration head Karen Mills on small business lending. I hear increasing discussion about more regulation of small business lending. It’s partly because the online lenders are transforming the market, and partly because the “1099 economy” is producing more little businesses that arguably are functionally-equivalent to consumer borrowers. The sector is covered by some of the federal laws on consumer protection, but not by most of them. My own view is that regulation will probably need to come, but that we should NOT transplant the existing consumer protection rules into it without first updating them for the digital age. Speaking as someone who helped develop some of these rules, I will say they have a mixed record, at best, of protecting consumers. And complying with them costs a fortune. If we’re going to bring new regulation into the small business sector, let’s use the chance to take a fresh look, and apply some RegTech thinking. Other notes: Newsletter: I also want to share an announcement -- this month we’re launching a newsletter. It will be pithy and punchy and useful, highlighting the most interesting things that have happened, the most exciting things coming up. It will be a way to share some of the fascinating things I’ve been getting involved with. One example is that, this summer, I joined the Netherlands’ Queen Maxima (who leads the UN’s work on global financial inclusion) on her trip to Silicon Valley. Another is that I just returned from a week in Fiji at the global policy forum of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which represents the financial regulators of more than 90 countries in the developing world. I’m also working on ideas for promoting regulatory sandboxes in the United States. And in November, I’ll be speaking in Singapore at Asia’s first RegTech conference. And I’m doing a lot of work on RegTech. In fact, in Fiji I heard a new term – “SuperTech.” It’s a branch of RegTech that means technology-driven solutions for bank supervision. The newsletter will share some of the intriguing things that are going on, outside our poccasts. Don’t forget: Remember to send in your “buck a show” to keep the podcasts coming Support the Podcast Remember to rate us on ITunes. Coming guests: And look for some amazing guests coming up. We have none other than the leaders of Varo, Ripple, LendUp, and Loot (from London)! We have two amazing, mold-breaking innovators from the developing world – eCurrency and OneDollarCellPhone, as well as the head of AFI, the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. And back in the US, we’ll have the community bank perspective on innovation. But first, next up, we have Harvard professor and behavioral economics expert, Brigitte Madrian. So, enjoy my conversation with Funding Circle’s Sam Hodges … and come back soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!
Today's show explores financial innovation through the eyes of one of America's most respected consumer advocates. My guest is Lauren Saunders, Associate Director of the National Consumer Law Center. The NCLC has been active in consumer financial protection for over 40 years. Lauren manages its Washington, DC office and directs its federal legislative and regulatory work on issues like prepaid cards, electronic payments, small dollar loans, credit cards, bank accounts, and consumer protection regulation overall. She also contributes to NCLC legal treatises, including Consumer Banking and Payments Law, Consumer Credit Regulation, and Fair Credit Reporting. Previously she directed the Federal Rights Project of the National Senior Citizens Law Center; was Deputy Director of Litigation at Bet Tzedek Legal Services; and was an associate at Hall & Phillips. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was an Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She holds a Masters' in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, from Stanford University. In our conversation, Lauren talks thoughtfully about what worries her about consumer finance today and how she thinks we should address emerging problems. We had a wide-ranging discussion, including about what would happen if traditional payday lending was no longer an option (she'd like a "Goldilocks" approach on loan length). She also discusses her concerns about both easy credit and fast credit; partnering between banks and marketplace lenders; using alternative data in underwriting; and the future of overdraft products as we move toward increasingly fast - and even real-time - payments. For a look into the innovators who were mentioned in the show (and who have been featured as previous guests), check out their websites: Digit, Even, and Simple. Also note Lauren's mention of the American Express-backed movie, Spent. Also .... Time is running out to vote for my SXSW panel! Remember to vote for my panel for SXSW 2017. It's Regulation Innovation - how to modernize regulation to optimize financial innovation. My fantastic panelists are CFSI's CEO Jennifer Tescher, the White House's Adrienne Harris, and Simple CEO Josh Reich. To vote, just go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67829 (there's a quick signup to be sure the votes are real). And please plan to come to SXSW! Remember to like us! Also remember to like Barefoot Innovation on ITunes; follow me on Twitter @JoAnnBarefoot; and contribute your "buck a show" to keep our podcasts coming. Going global: I recorded the introduction to this episode from the airport en route to London (I figure if Tim Ferriss can do this - and he inspired me to try pod-casting - I can give it a try). I'm heading to the UK for meetings on progress so far with the regulatory sandbox that was launched this year by the Financial Conduct Authority, to distill some lessons for the United States with our much more fragmented regulatory structure. Two days after I return from London, I'm heading to Fiji for the annual global conference of AFI - the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, which is made up of the financial regulators of the Global South. In November, I'll be speaking at the FinTech forum of the Singapore Monetary Authority - in the portion that will be Asia's first-ever RegTech conference in Asia. And I recently had to turn down invitations to speak in Tokyo and in Shanghai, and to participate in a UN gathering in Tanzania. All of which is to say, financial innovation is global, and so are the global challenges of how to regulate it, and so is Barefoot Innovation. We have listeners throughout the world, and I'll be recording fascinating podcasts on these travels. Watch for widened horizons this fall. Upcoming: Meanwhile, come back next time for my special guest, Sam Hodges of Funding Circle. Support Barefoot Innovation! Don't forget to send in your buck-a-show to support Barefoot Innovation Support the Podcast Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!
Today we have our first-ever episode on Insure-tech. Happily, it also turned out to be one of the most fun, funny and thought-provoking shows we've ever done. I'm pretty sure it's the first one where we've talked about the internet of things, and CRISPR gene research, transportation as a service, and drones. My fascinating guest is Caribou Honig, founding partner of QED Investors. QED is a venture fund cofounded by Caribou, Frank Rotman, and Nigel Morris, who first came together in the early days of Capital One. They have helped launch some great fintech companies - for instance LendUp and DriveFactor. Caribou's investments span an array of marketing, payments, and insurance technology companies, particularly where B2C customer acquisition drives the business success. He developed a passion for data-driven marketing when he led key marketing initiatives at Capital One, including responsibility for a $50 mm marketing budget, managing a 200-person underwriting operation, and cracking the code on digital credit card originations. Recent investments led by Caribou include, Remitly, TheMuse, and KNIP. He also serves on the Advisory Council for the CFSI Financial Solutions Lab. As you'll hear in our conversation, moreover, he's a Renaissance man. He holds a bachelor's degree in Physics and Philosophy from Harvard University, an MBA from the Darden School of Business, and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He and his wife have two children and, what he describes as two occasionally annoying dogs. Over the years He's taken time off to be Mr. Mom and to listen to the universe, as he puts it. And of course, he has an interesting name, which he'll explain in our discussion. I reached out to Caribou because I knew he was working in Insure-Tech, which has been on a slower track than other kinds of fintech but is starting to gain real traction. Caribou is Chairman of the InsureTech Connect, a new conference that's scheduled for October 5-6 in Las Vegas. I found our conversation incredibly interesting, especially in how insurance is being transformed by types of technology that have nothing to do with finance -- because its product is usually about managing risks in the physical world ranging from health to roofing materials to self-driving cars. As it turned out, about half of our talk is on insurance, and half is on his broader thoughts oninnovation, and also on regulation. He really sparked my own thinking on some of the tough regulatory issues, like how to resolve the conflicts between alternative data and fair lending disparate impact, and the pros and cons of state-based regulation, and his advice to regulators. Plus I'm stilling thinking about "parametric insurance" - skipping the adjudication process and agreeing in advance to let outside parameters - big data - determine the appropriate claim. New ideas, everywhere! Finally, for all you innovators in the audience, note that Caribou shares an open invitation to bring him interesting ideas. I know you'll enjoy hearing him. Vote for my SXSW Panel! Also, remember to vote to help get my Regulation Innovation panel selected for SXSW 2017 - it's at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/67829. My panelists will be Simple's Josh Reich, Adrienne Harris of the White House, and CFSI's CEO, Jennifer Tescher. We need your vote - voting is only open to September 2. And please plan to come to SX in Austin. Support Barefoot Innovation! Don't forget to send in your buck-a-show to support Barefoot Innovation -- and leave a review on ITunes. Support the Podcast Upcoming Shows Finally, come back next time. We have fantastic guests coming up, including Lauren Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center, Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, Colin Walsh of Varo, and Harvard professor Brigitte Madrian. See you soon! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!
Barefoot Innovation has been in hiatus in recent weeks because my father passed away. I was in San Francisco and got a call saying he was suddenly ill and might not live through the day. I rushed for a redeye and flew all night home to Boston, where my son Matt met me and we drove to Harford in the wee hours. My brother and sister had rushed to our Dad too, and he had held on. In fact he began to do better, regaling us with stories in the ICU, bringing his sharp engineering mind to analyzing his medical situation, and enjoying us singing to him (we’re a singing family). We had hopes he would recover, but a few days later, he worsened and ultimately did not pull through. He was 95 years old. His name was Glidden Sweet Doman. And he was a remarkable innovator. He’s being widely remembered as the last of the great helicopter pioneers, and he was also an important inventor in wind energy. Those two industries share the same technology – the wickedly complex science of rotor dynamics. This very special episode of Barefoot Innovation is a conversation I recorded with him last Thanksgiving but had not yet posted. I got the idea of doing this podcast after watching a video of a talk he’d recently given at the New England Air Museum, which has two of his Doman Helicopters on permanent display. Listening to his lecture, I kept noticing parallels with the themes we discuss on Barefoot Innovation. It occurred to me that it would be fun to do a show inviting insights from someone who, nearly a century ago, began innovating in a field that’s very different from finance, but that was being similarly transformed by new, fast-changing technology. Glid Doman was born in the village of Elbridge, New York, in 1921. His father, Albert Doman, brought electricity to that part of the state in 1890 (you can still see historic sites related to it), and was an inventor of the electric starter and electric windshield wiper. My Dad’s uncle, Lewis Doman, invented the player piano. His half-brother Carl Doman pioneered both aircraft and automobile engines and became a senior executive at Ford. His half-sister Ruth Chamberlain was the first woman architect in the region. My family is loaded with the genes for invention and entrepreneurship. For my Dad as a boy, the most exciting field of invention was aviation. Airplanes were barnstorming farm fields. Airlines did not yet exist. And my Dad, who avidly read Popular Mechanics, built an airplane in his back yard (you’ll hear in the podcast whether he ever made it fly). Aviation was the new technology then, the way digitization and mobile phones and blockchains are the tech frontiers today -- or genetics or robotics or 3D printing. Aviation was full of novel engineering challenges that were not yet understood. Flight was also inspiring bold predictions about how our lives were going to change, some of which were hilariously wrong – a good lesson for people like me who like to try to forecast tech impacts. For instance, in clearing out our parents’ attic in recent days, my siblings and I found a magazine cover story advising on women’s fashion for the coming trend of traveling by helicopter. This little podcast touches only a tiny fragment of what made my Dad fascinating, and has nothing on his great life partner, our late mother, Joan Hamilton Doman. They met because she was the only woman in the 50-person University of Michigan flying club in World War II – and she was its top pilot. They had an amazing six decades or so, built around family and his work. He knew all the aviation greats from Igor Sikorsky to Charles Lindberg. He was featured on aviation magazine covers and traveled throughout the world. He was enlisted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab to help design a “space sail” to rendezvous with Haley’s Comet (ultimately not deployed). He’s been honored by his alma mater, the University of Michigan aeronautical engineering school. And when his helicopter company didn’t reach scale, he pivoted to wind energy and invented a superior rotor design for wind turbines, using the same insights he’d developed working with helicopters. He led the design of two colossal experimental turbines funded by the Departments of Energy and Interior and installed in Wyoming. When he “retired” at age 65, he and my mother moved to Rome where he led international engineering teams in designing huge turbines in Europe. And then, in his 80’s, he started a new wind energy venture of his own. Right up to his death, he continued to be engaged with an affiliated firm, Seawind Technology, which is actively working to deploy his “Gamma” rotor designs on offshore wind turbines in Europe and other parts of the world. Decades before computers could model the movements of rotor blades, my Dad used a combination of intuition, math, physics and relentless measurement to understand, correctly, the movement of spinning blades. For both helicopters and wind turbines, my Dad created massively simplified rotor designs and drastically reduced the stress on the blades as they rotate. This captures huge efficiency gains and virtually eliminates blade failure, the bane of most rotor systems. As he explains in our talk, one key to this was to realize that the commonly-used three-bladed rotor design is inherently unstable. Wind turbines, he argued, should have two blades and helicopters – because they have to fly forward – need four. Our conversation elicited a lot of my Dad’s thoughts about how to work with young, little-understood technology, as both an engineer and entrepreneur. While we didn’t cover all the ground I’d hoped to, you’ll hear him imparting Lean Startup-type wisdom. As a young engineer, for instance, he used a jackknife to cut open the balsa wood of a Sikorsky rotor blade to install measurement gauges on it and figure out what it was doing. He bought a postwar helicopter body for a dollar. He got hold of a Chevrolet clutch to use in his helicopter engine. His team invented do-it-yourself wind tunnels. It’s an MVP approach – a minimum viable product – in which they methodically identified, isolated, and intensively tested issues and reaped what today we call “rapid learning” and “fail-fast” lessons. As they figured out answers, they quickly pivoted, trying to succeed in an industry where, unlike today’s fintech, entrepreneurs needed huge amounts of capital. (In our recording, he talks about how easily his enterprise raised money, but that pattern did not hold over the decades.) Our conversation only touches on a few of these lessons (and nothing about the wind business), but shining through it is his defining trait, the one that made him most successful, which was unbounded and insatiable curiosity. Mainly, this episode shares his secret to being an innovator – and to having a wonderful career. His advice: find organizations that have a lot of interesting problems, and go there and figure out how to solve them. For those intrigued with the technology history of the twentieth century, I’m attaching early chapters of a biography that my brother, Steve Doman – also an aeronautical engineer -- is writing about our father’s journey. Here, also, is an overview and short video on Doman Helicopters created by my sister, Terry Gibbon (she too is an entrepreneur, with her own video company). And here is a short video of one of the wind turbines. To prepare this episode, I re-listened to the recording just a few weeks after his passing. One thing I notice is that, as we had this conversation after our Thanksgiving dinner last fall, my Dad’s comments kept making me laugh. Whenever he said goodbye to people, he always added the advice, “keep smiling.” Words to live by. Let me share two updates about me and the show. First, I’ve become involved in a very significant project aimed at helping prepare our U.S. financial regulatory framework for the challenges raised by innovation. I’m going to stay in my Harvard fellowship for a second year, still writing my book on innovation and regulation, but will also be devoting much of my time to this initiative, which I’ll tell you more about as it develops. One result of the new project is that I’ve decided to suspend the Regulation Innovation video series we launched earlier this year. I expect to reactivate it when I have time to create the videos. Meanwhile, they are still available, still for free, at www.RegulationInnovation.com. Please do check them out. As I said when we started the series, I think the articles that accompany these videos might be the most important writing I’ve ever done. Second, we will soon be back from the Barefoot Innovation hiatus, and what a line up we have! We’ll have CFPB Director Richard Cordray; Digital Asset Holdings’ Blythe Masters; National Consumer Law Center’s Lauren Saunders; the prize-winning founders of Bee, Vinay Patel and Max Gasner; Harvard professor and behavioral economics scholar Brigitte Madrian; Funding Circle’s U.S. CEO Sam Hodges; QED Investors co-founder and venture capital wise man Caribou Honig, and the chief compliance officers of both Citi and Wells Fargo, Kathryn Reimann and Yvette Hollingsworth Clark, together. And those are the ones we’ve already recorded! We have many more exciting people in the scheduling queue. This is why we ask you to send in “a buck a show” – the show has turned into a major enterprise, just because we have so many fascinating people to talk with. We’ll try to speed up production as best we can, I’ll look forward to your continued feedback. Meanwhile, keep smiling. Jo Ann Click below to donate your "buck a show" to keep Barefoot Innovation going and growing. 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Funding Circle's Sam Hodges discusses the growth of small business and related regulation at LendIt USA 2016
Online lending is enjoying its moment. New platforms are launching monthly and raising hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and equity in a race to redefine how we borrow and from whom. And it’s not just a US phenomenon -- Starting 5 years ago, Funding Circle was an early player in this marketplace lending space and has emerged as a leader servicing SMBs. The firm is originating $100 million in SMB loans every month and since inception has lent $1.7 billion to 12,000 businesses. The company was quick to expand internationally -- with strong footholds in Western Europe and the US. The company is exclusively focused on providing finance to small business owners worldwide. Institutional lenders are looking to deploy capital across markets and Funding Circle is enjoying scale advantages from this exposure. Sam Hodges, the co-founder of Funding Circle USA, joins us on the Tradestreaming Podcast to discuss the challenges he and his company successfully navigated in growing the business globally and how he’s planning to continue growing out into the next year. *****This week’s episode of the Tradestreaming Podcast was sponsored by Collective2 — automated trading for humans. Choose one of the thousands of automated trading strategies at Collective2, and trade it in your brokerage account. To learn more, go to www.collective2.com/tradestreaming and as a Tradestreaming listener, you will get $55 off the first strategy you publish to Collective2.
Special Presentation by Sam Hodges, Co-Founder & U.S. Managing Director of Funding Circle, at LendIt USA 2015.
Long Term Small Business Lending panel at LendIt USA 2015 with Sam Hodges, Co-Founder & U.S. Managing Director of Funding Circle; Rohit Arora, CEO & Co-Founder of Biz2Credit; Sam Graziano, Co-Founder & CEO of Fundation; Sid Jajodia, Vice President, Small Business of Lending Club; Ethan Senturia, Co-Founder & CEO of Dealstruck; and moderator Christopher A. Johnson, Managing Director of Prospect Street.
Join Accredited Investor Markets Radio's Christopher Cahill and Funding Circle's Sam Hodges in Episode 39. They discuss how peer-to-peer lending companies have addressed a gap in credit availability to small businesses, while presenting accredited and institutional investors with opportunities to select risk levels as well as types of portfolio diversification in taking slices of loans to small businesses. The irony is that -- in light of P2P's growth -- banks are proposing to partner with P2P lenders, thus taking tentative steps back into the very lending space they vacated. You can find out more about Sam Hodges and Funding Circle here. Or you can find them here: Twitter: @FundingCircleUS; @HodgesSam LinkedIn: Funding Circle; Sam Hodges Facebook About Sam Hodges As Co-Founder and U.S. Managing Director, Sam is responsible for overseeing the overall strategic direction and day-to-day operation of Funding Circle in the U.S. Under his leadership, the U.S. business has grown exponentially since its foundation in 2012 and has emerged as the world’s largest online marketplace exclusively focused on small business loans. He co-founded the company after seeing how hard it was to get a loan for a small business, a successful gym franchise, he helped build. Before co-founding Funding Circle, Sam served as Vice President of Business Development at SecondMarket, the leading marketplace for alternative investments. There, Sam was responsible for corporate and business development and the company's geographic expansion efforts. Sam was also part of the investment team at Pequot Capital, an $8 billion global fund manager, where he covered investments in financial technology and information services. He started his career as a strategy consultant at Katzenbach Partners, where he advised financial services and technology companies. Sam currently serves on the boards of two private companies. He received his MBA and MS from Stanford University and graduated, magna cum laude, from Brown University.
Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRenton Connect with me on LinkedIn Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes
When it comes to small business lending Funding Circle is the largest online marketplace, at least when it comes to traditional term loans. They are the largest small business lending platform in the UK and the first multi-national online lending platform, operating in both the UK and the US. Our guest for episode 38 is […] The post Podcast 38: Sam Hodges of Funding Circle appeared first on Lend Academy.
When it comes to small business lending Funding Circle is the largest online marketplace, at least when it comes to traditional term loans. They are the largest small business lending platform in the UK and the first multi-national online lending platform, operating in both the UK and the US. Our guest for episode 38 is […] The post Podcast 38: Sam Hodges of Funding Circle appeared first on Lend Academy.
Alex Tonelli is the Founder and Managing Director of Funding Circle USA. He started Endurance Lending Network with Sam Hodges back in 2012, which I profiled here last summer, and this company merged with Funding Circle UK in October last year. This discussion is all about small business lending. In the online space, small business […] The post Podcast 12: Alex Tonelli of Funding Circle on Small Business Lending appeared first on Lend Academy.
Alex Tonelli is the Founder and Managing Director of Funding Circle USA. He started Endurance Lending Network with Sam Hodges back in 2012, which I profiled here last summer, and this company merged with Funding Circle UK in October last year. This discussion is all about small business lending. In the online space, small business […] The post Podcast 12: Alex Tonelli of Funding Circle on Small Business Lending appeared first on Lend Academy.
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