Co-founder & CEO @SlopePay⚡️ (YC S21) | prev: Head of AI Platforms & DS @NautoInc, founder/CEO at Newton (acq), @Stanford 🇧🇷
lawrence@lawrencemurata.com
- Tweets 4,814
- Following 748
- Followers 3,743
- Likes 6,362
Pinned Tweet
At @slopepay, we’re excited to announce our $30M round led by @USV with major participation from @sama - bringing our total equity/debt funding to $187M. Since launching in Aug ‘21, we are over 8 figures in ARR and are a lean team of 18. In the midst of this excitement, I wanted to share color on what it took to get to where we are. A 🧵
65
104
1,690
989,151
⚡We are excited to announce our $65M equity and debt round from @JPMorgan, which brings our total funding to $77M in equity and $175M in debt. The fintech industry is going through a tumultuous time. Companies are going under, and regulators are increasingly applying more pressure on the industry. We think our long-term thinking and emphasis on both “fin” and “tech” has been imperative to execute precisely above the chaos, close major partnerships, and onboard new customers. To be concrete, here are some examples:
26
33
503
213,651
My long-time friend @alicevdeng and I iterated through 100+ ideas before entering B2B payments. Actually, the name “Slope” was just a placeholder incorporation name since we were iterating through so many ideas. It was important for our legal name to mirror a life philosophy that was timeless: it’s not about how much experience you have or “Y-intercept” but how fast you iterate, learn, and grow.
8
10
191
52,133
⚡Excited to announce our $24M Series A co-led by @usv + monashees (🇧🇷) w/ participation from Tiger, @Global_Founders. In 7 months, we went from pre-product to processing millions in transaction volume and raising $32M in total funding to date!
techcrunch.com/2022/04/15/sl…
14
6
130
And even once you find PMF, iteration never stops. “Slope” is a lifelong commitment ;) - @alicevdeng and I have our logo tattooed on our wrists!!! Thank you to everyone who believed in us since the very beginning (shoutout to some of our investors that were with us since our first companies - @ycombinator @paulg @arashf, @bradflora, @mwseibel, @rujulz, @aneelr, @scottfits, @jonbma, @hollyhliu). We are excited to continue our journey of digitizing the $125 trillion B2B economy!
19
1
114
30,372
I think there’s something very special when two 2nd-time founders who failed quickly in their first companies go through the iteration process together. We are clear-eyed on how painful building startups are and what our next decades would look like, learned from all the naive mistakes we made, and have undeterred focus on the most important thing – product-market fit. We really look up to @gemusan, co-founder of @Honey. George iterated for 12 years with immense tenacity until he finally started Honey, which exited to Paypal for over $4 Billion. (Shoutout to fellow AAPI founders 🤙)
3
2
95
40,775
One worry we had was moving on too early from an idea that could eventually be promising. Whenever we pivoted, we wrote a post-mortem essay. When you write things down in full sentences, it really forces you to have crystal-clear thinking.
2
1
76
24,462
We applied and got into @YCombinator with AirDesk - “Airbnb for Office Space.” @bradflora told us our idea sucked 😂but he believed in us (thanks @bradflora, @snowmaker, @SurbhiSarnaSF! 🙂).
4
69
28,742
Operating as a 2-person team, we focused solely on achieving PMF. Hiring, culture, marketing, fundraising, etc. were vanity metrics until we had clear traction with signed contracts, prompting our seed round.
We hired our first two employees in Jan 2022, when we were almost $1M in ARR. We’ve always valued staying lean - we raised our $24M Series A as a 4-person team and our current APE (ARR per employee) rivals public companies.
5
3
67
25,307
1st-time founders often fixate on solutions rather than problems. As 2nd-time founders, we interviewed 100s of wholesalers and pinpointed painful, recurring, and costly issues: cashflow management and manual workflows.
We continued to follow our iteration framework re: product fidelity as we signed more contracts we continued to make our MVP (still zero lines of code) less and less shitty.
3
2
57
28,094
When pivoting we took optimizing for speed to an extreme: we started with the fastest, lowest-fidelity product to gather initial low-confidence customer feedback. We would only move to the next, higher-fidelity version once we got sufficiently positive feedback and then we’d rinse and repeat.
No-code @webflow landing pages were our hack 👌
3
1
44
32,768
Following AirDesk, we delved into various ideas (founder mortgages, stock options, foreclosure simplification, etc.). Our customer research led us to early investors like @ericwu01 and @ryanchanupkeep. When we were exploring what could be our 5th idea, I recalled the challenges of moving B2B payments online with outdated solutions while working in my parents' wholesale toy shop.
3
28
26,552
Woke up to this. Wow, thank you @forbes and @forbesunder30 for featuring us this year under Enterprise Technology. Let’s continue to transition the world’s B2B economy online! ⚡
3
32
Slope recently signed a number of big public logos without even a sales team, more to share soon. We are ready to grow our sales function aggressively. ⚡
DM me or email us at founders@slope.so if you are a top AE/BDR wanting join as one of @slopepay's early GTM hires, or if you've worked with a top AE/BDR! Let's grow!!!
6
29
8,211
One thing led to another and we went from our hacky landing page to actual revenue from startups using AirDesk offices - this helped us learn in detail about customer needs and the unit economics which ended up being the main reason we didn’t pursue AirDesk. Thanks @collinmathilde at @FrontHQ for being one of our first office spaces and now an investor :)
1
27
28,099
2021 has been a year of huge change. Earlier this year, I left @NautoInc after 2 yrs to start a company for the 2nd-time.
Now we're announcing our $8M seed led by GFC with participation from @ycombinator & founders of @Dropbox, @DoorDash, @Opendoor, @Plaid
Join our rocketship🚀
Slope takes in first capital with visions of being ‘Stripe for global B2B payments’ tcrn.ch/3CSn3n3 by @christinemhall
4
2
27
"Hire for slope, not Y-intercept. This is actually my number one piece of life advice." @sama
Both @alicevdeng and I come from nontraditional backgrounds, so we started @slopepay to help underdog small businesses grow. Join us in our mission!🚀
DM or email at founders@slope.so
We are hiring our 1st engineer. We're building B2B payments infrastructure to help small business owners grow, starting by building Buy Now, Pay Later for B2B. It's unique timing to join a rocketship! 🚀
DM or email founders@slope.so!
ycombinator.com/companies/sl…
1
1
23
our new office! @slopepay growing fast and hiring!! 🚀
3
22
Disruption in financial services cannot happen without working hand in hand with traditional financial institutions. Our newly announced partnership with J.P. Morgan entails 1) a GTM partnership where JPM refers Slope to enterprise clients, 2) an equity investment, 3) a new debt warehouse facility to enable us to serve enterprise customers at scale, and 4) James Fraser, Global Head of Trade & Working Capital, is joining as Board Observer. We last announced a capital raise Sept. of last year and have remained extremely disciplined on headcount as a 25-person team. As such, there was no need to take in additional capital, but partnering with J.P. Morgan presented a unique strategic opportunity.
1
17
7,956
Founded by undergraduates, @cs4good utilizes technology to make a positive social impact: stanford.io/1NeqbOK
2
2
15
We celebrate iteration, whether the decision is to move on or stick with an idea. We got this wine as a gift from @ruslansv to celebrate when we moved on or stuck with AirDesk.
1
18
17,396
However, we also understand the importance of domain expertise – especially in compliance, capital markets, and risk. Our general counsel, Euna Kim, and CFO, Ashish Jain, have been executives at Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank as well as high-growth fintechs like Robinhood and SoFi. Although folks are from very different backgrounds, the one thing that unites us all is iteration speed!⚡
2
19
4,922
Bringing the $125T B2B economy online is a massive undertaking, but we know we are putting the right building blocks in place for the long-term. We are hitting an exciting inflection point and we are hiring! If you or someone you know are interested in joining us, please DM @alicevdeng or I!
2
14
3,815
It’s when a media outlet announces a projected result. Basically they are saying that based on the counted votes and outstanding ballots, they are fully certain about a projected outcome: apnews.com/article/ap-race-c…
1
1
14
we're excited to tackle this multi-trillion opportunity at @slopepay!! ⚡️ thank you for the mention @mspiro3
My newest post on the B2B payments space. Thread coming later.
thetakeoff.substack.com/p/b2…
1
1
14
check out the @medium post I wrote on @cs4good's journey to change #tech, #stanford and the world medium.com/cs-social-good/wh… #techForGood
3
10
Excited to see @slopepay take over Times Square! Thank you to the @Nasdaq team for helping us celebrate our $30M round. We’ve been consistent with our principles of efficiency, customer-centricity and “slope” even when it goes against the herd — that type of long-term thinking compounds. We’ll see you again later :)
13
1,259
We often lean on the support, network, and expertise from world-class experts from both worlds which brings a broad and unique perspective. We’re grateful to have backing from the world’s largest bank (@jpmorgan) combined with the best in Silicon Valley (@sama , @ycombinator, founders of @openAI, @doordash, @dropbox, @plaid, @unity, @opendoor, @rappi, @deel, and @lattice).
1
11
6,224
Nothing compares to meeting your earliest customers in person!! 🇲🇽
Amazing to visit our first customer, Meru.com, in Mexico City! Huge thank you to @merumex, for giving us the opportunity to partner and help them to scale at an incredible pace - they are growing at an insane rate each month! 🚀 #bnpl #b2b #wholesale
13
Really excited to announce that Newton Technologies is joining Nauto! newtondrive.co/announce/
2
1
9
We're thrilled to announce our $125 million debt round led by @SVB_Financial with participation from @trincapinvest.
This new funding round will help us scale our vision to empower businesses to digitize and grow. ⚡️
We're thrilled to announce our $125 million debt round led by @SVB_Financial with participation from @trincapinvest. We're excited to scale our mission of empowering businesses to digitize and grow.
News coverage: americanbanker.com/payments/…
12
In terms of hiring, we’ve come to appreciate the value of deep tech, non-traditional backgrounds. Our earliest hires were from autonomous driving, given my background. While self-driving and payments are obviously different, a surprising number of lessons carry over. 1) Due to cut-throat competition and the life-or-death nature of the task, self-driving teaches you to build tight data loops to drive fast iteration, a value we bring to our underwriting engine at Slope. 2) In a self-driving car, you are continuously predicting, sensing, and reacting to changes in risk – which can escalate in milliseconds. Similarly, at Slope we chose to build our stack on real-time data (open banking) and to prioritize continuous monitoring & reassessment. These design choices were second nature to us – but an anomaly in finance.
1
8
5,558
We are partnering with @DesignerInc_ to bring Buy Now, Pay Later to furniture wholesale! Excited to see us grow fast together ⚡️
Excited to launch and be a Buy Now, Pay Later partner to @DesignerInc_, a fast-growing B2B furniture platform. If you are an interior designer or business looking to purchase custom and stock trade products, check them out!
1
11
Hej! We're excited to announce our partnership with @IKEA to make B2B furniture purchasing seamless! Let's go team🪑⚡️
We're thrilled to announce our partnership with @IKEA to enhance financial solutions and power Invoice to Pay for business customers! We are live on IKEA.com and will be in all stores across the United States on October 1st.
Official press release: ikea.com/us/en/newsroom/corp…
11
1,054
We're so stoked to announce the launch of Pay Now which we believe is a game-changer for B2B payments. We're excited about taking a step closer to our mission of bringing the world’s B2B economy online.
We launched on Product Hunt: producthunt.com/posts/slope-…. Please upvote/comment!
11
1,323
The @slopepay family is growing! Come join us on this 🚀
We're hiring engineers, EA, customer success, CFO/head of capital markets, general counsel! ⚡️
Had an amazing 1st Slope Holiday Party! 🎄 Happy holidays from the Slope family to yours! 🎉
2021 has been a year of insane growth (37x volume growth since our $8M seed), so we're hiring non-technical and technical roles: ycombinator.com/companies/sl… 🚀
Reach to founders@slope.so ⚡
2
9
Massive bet by Square. BNPL is the future and we're barely scratching the surface on the B2B side. Huge opportunity we’re tackling at Slope. ⚡️🚀
squareup.com/us/en/press/squ…
1
9
wrote a guide on how to innovate based on my conversations/classes w/ Elon Musk, Jony Ive, Paul Allen and Zuckerberg bit.ly/1ud2o1z
1
1
6
Congrats to the Faire team for the huge growth! Faire is likely one of the fastest-growing YC companies ever 📈 At @slopepay, we aim to empower every B2B marketplace to grow as fast through net terms / BNPL
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
8
we won 2nd place and "Smart Things" prizes at the hackathon for building our own Jarvis! :D #robotics #hacking #hackathon #hack #iot
1
6
celebrating the recent milestones reached by the incredible @cs4good team! 🎂 #firstBirthday #socialGood #techForGood
1
6
Having come from the self-driving car industry to fintech, this is how we view data at Slope: iteration speed is a moat. Even more as models become more commoditized.
Potentially nitpicky but competitive advantage in AI goes not so much to those with data but those with a data engine: iterated data aquisition, re-training, evaluation, deployment, telemetry. And whoever can spin it fastest. Slide from Tesla to ~illustrate but concept is general
8
Excited to launch SloptGPT, the first payments risk model powered by GPT-4! ⚡️
We are excited to launch SlopeGPT and publish our blog post on it. SlopeGPT is the first payments risk model powered by GPT-4. Read more on: medium.com/slope-stories/slo…
2
8
1,244
Go team @slopepay ⚡️
How to increase your multiple in the next round:
1. Strong unit economics
2. Scalable and proven GTM
3. Matching cofounder tattoos of the company logo ⚡️
1
7
Excited to discuss the future of BNPL!!⚡️
After a summer haitus Future of Fintech is back with a session on BNPL with:
@dcstalder - Mattix GP and on the Afterpay board.
@LawLM - Slope.so founder
…more TBA
And your hosts @immad and @pitdesi
Join us, Tue, Sep 7 at 11am pt clubhouse.com/event/MwkwpryQ
2
6
incredible post by @pejmannozad about his journey in the Valley. immense respect for him! medium.com/@pejmannozad/tech… @PejmanMar #tech #SV
5
panel with @pmarca, Bob Iger (CEO Disney), @karaswisher. Bob said that Star Wars 8 shootings are starting #VFSummit
5
I am using "my college" instead of the college's name itself because outsiders might think we sound pretentious if we mention its name
1
5
building stuff on Saturday #hacking #hackathon #nest #google #IoT #InternetOfThings #hack 💡 instagram.com/p/3CvCnBybNM/
1
5
at our CS+Social Good event, the professor who was the first one to give d.school class came. His office was next to Sergey and Larry Page's
5
Excited to partner with Konnectbox’s B2B marketplace to offer BNPL and help small business grow 📈
Until slope came around, small wholesalers saw credit as a scary thing only meant for large wholesalers, now I can safely say, Slope has unbundled a lever only available to large companies and democratised credit for small companies. @LawLM @alicevdeng
6
redesigned my website and implemented some new features lawrencemurata.com/ suggestions and feedback are really, really appreciated! (:
4
Hey @rickyyean, the article about @Crowdbooster just got published! (: hope you like it stanforddaily.com/2014/10/29…
1
2
4
"We believe that good design can support understanding and help nurture a community." by @tokatherineliu on @cs4good medium.com/cs-social-good/de…
1
3
a homeless person saved us by fixing our car. He's a Vietnam veteran & was a mechanic for yrs #SF
3
4
Thank you @BankMercury for hosting!! Exciting to discuss the future of BNPL
5
Extremely honored and humbled to receive this award from #MIT! Feliz de representar o Brasil! 🎉🇧🇷 #TR35
El #Visionario brasileño, Lawrence Murata, nos presenta su prometedora aplicación que analiza la forma de conducir de los usuarios para lograr evitar accidentes de tráfico 🚗. Lee su artículo aquí: bit.ly/2Fd8Ist
1
2
4
this is great! this is very useful. had to use efax.com recently for that purpose and the UX was terrible
4
.@davidryalpug and I am also a huge fan of @Samasource's work of connecting people to work opportunities
1
1
3
article on how our initiatives are connected to a larger mission of changing people's mindset around tech medium.com/cs-social-good/wh… #tech4good
3
4
@LahJaka @adamkovic @sorola @SirLarr wait that's actually so true. they even called it "smart cover" lol (it says 2012 in the pic btw)
3
seriously, it feels like i got my acceptance letter yesterday. we're just starting college and acceptances are being released
3
"We are at the beginning of a 20 year shift" -- @Scobleizer after trying META's new AR headset (it will be released in 2 weeks at Ted)
1
3
vamos 🇧🇷🧡
Two years ago, there were only a couple Brazilian-led startups in a @ycombinator batch. Last batch there were 14. @giowolftadini and I had a fun conversation about this exciting moment for Brazilian startups
5
so much work. that's what happens when you're taking 20 units and founding 2 startups (one of them is a personal/social project)
3
bringing 3D to web3!! love seeing what my freshman roomie and his team are doing @sminocha_ 🛸
1
1
5
just made a new Apple Watch face :D @cs4good version! #techForGood #procrastination #apple #appleWatch #design
3
pretty cool & simple idea. thanks for sharing @tokatherineliu !
Earn money for your favorite nonprofits by answering survey questions in your free time through @microheroapp: apple.co/1MBtEUR
3
Thanks, Apple, for the amazing summer! I learned a lot and now I also understand much better how the… instagram.com/p/7RNaCMybFn/
3