Welcome back to the TWIF podcast!

Today, we go to New York to talk with Nelson Chu, the founder and CEO of Percent.

Percent has created the modern credit marketplace, empowering investors, borrowers, and underwriters with innovative technology to increase the speed and velocity of transactions at a fraction of the cost. The company’s core infrastructure delivers public market efficiencies to the analog private credit market by powering the sourcing, structuring, syndication, surveillance and servicing of private credit transactions from beginning to end. Founded in 2018, Percent’s platform is becoming the market standard for asset-backed and corporate lending, powering over $1 billion in transaction volume in a multi-trillion-dollar private credit industry.

Nelson Chu is a repeat founder who got his start in finance working on the Fixed Income portfolio at Bank of America and then BlackRock. Coming out of banking, Nelson first founded technology consulting business Lumenary, a strategic advisory group focused on bringing innovative and transformative ideas to life. He leveraged his experience at Lumenary to become a formal advisor to a few other well-known names in the fintech ecosystem including Recharge Capital and BlockFi, before founding Percent in 2018 (anticipating the currrent private credit boom).

Percent is a platform for sourcing, structuring, syndicating, monitoring, and servicing private credit transactions. The platform recently passed $1 billion in transaction volume, and can be found at percent.com.

🎧 Nelson Chu, Founder & CEO of Percent: Private credit investing, art collecting, and building a $1B investment platform from the ground up by This Week in Fintech’s Podcast

Today, we go to New York to talk with Nelson Chu, the founder and CEO of Percent. Percent has created the modern credit marketplace, empowering investors, borrowers, and underwriters with innovative technology to increase the speed and velocity of transactions at a fraction of the cost. The company’s core infrastructure delivers public market efficiencies to the analog private credit market by powering the sourcing, structuring, syndication, surveillance and servicing of private credit transactions from beginning to end. Founded in 2018, Percent’s platform is becoming the market standard for asset-backed and corporate lending, powering over $1 billion in transaction volume in a multi-trillion-dollar private credit industry. Nelson Chu is a repeat founder who got his start in finance working on the Fixed Income portfolio at Bank of America and then BlackRock. Coming out of banking, Nelson first founded technology consulting business Luminary, a strategic advisory group focused on bringing innovative and transformative ideas to life. He leveraged his experience at Luminary to become a formal advisor to a few other well-known names in the fintech ecosystem including Recharge Capital and BlockFi, before founding Percent in 2018 (anticipating the currrent private credit boom). Percent is a platform for sourcing, structuring, syndicating, monitoring, and servicing private credit transactions. The platform recently passed $1 billion in transaction volume, and can be found at percent.com.

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🎧 Nelson Chu, Founder & CEO of Percent: Private credit investing, art collecting, and building a $1B investment platform from the ground up

Podcast Episode · This Week in Fintech’s Podcast · 11/04/2024 · 53m

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🎧 Nelson Chu, Founder & CEO of Percent: Private credit investing, art collecting, and building a $1B investment platform from the ground up

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Summary

Nik Milanovic interviews Nelson Chu, founder of Percent, a private credit platform. Nelson shares his journey from starting in tech at Apple in 2007, through his finance roles at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and BlackRock, to founding multiple companies, including Lumenary and My Support. He discusses the inception of Percent in 2018, which has facilitated over $1 billion in transactions. Nelson emphasizes the importance of standardization in private credit, the role of venture capital in scaling his ventures, and his involvement in nonprofits like Yama Yama Malawi and Womankind. He also touches on his passion for art collection.

Transcript

Nik Milanovic  00:05

Well, thank you everyone for coming back to This Week in FinTech. This is Nik Milanovic, and I am here with Nelson, the founder of percent, which you can find at percent.com pretty excited for this episode. Full disclosure, I'm a tiny, tiny, tiny investor in percent as of two years ago, but I've known Nelson over those two years and gotten more and more excited about the company as I've seen more and more updates coming through. And so Nelson, thanks for joining me today. Thanks so much for having me. It's gonna be fun. I'm excited that we got the hour, because there's a lot that I want to dive into here. You know, our audience is 130,000 FinTech people, and so they want to hear about the FinTech side. But I would also love to hear a little bit more about you and your personal journey, not just starting percent, but kind of how you came to percent too. In your career, I've also heard a couple interesting things about how you spend your time outside of percent. It sounds like you definitely don't get bored, and have some interesting hobbies as well. And so I want to learn about that. But just starting off, I am very curious. You've been in tech officially for about 11 years, but I noticed that you were a max specialist back in the day with Apple in 2007 so really, I feel like you can say that your tech journey started almost 20 years ago. I'm curious. You know, when you were working for Apple, was that was there a light bulb moment where you decided, hey, actually, you know, Tech is a really interesting space to spend time in.

Nelson Chu  00:30

I think my tech journey actually started 30 years ago, and I'm roughly like 35, 36 right? So we can go into that for sure, but on the Apple side, I will say it was a really interesting time to be at Apple, because it was pre iPhone, and so actually it was just pretty much the Mac and the iPod. And the iPod was pretty popular, but it wasn't nearly as popular as the iPhone. And buying a Mac, it was just kind of weird. In 2006 2007 I mean, it really wasn't that popular. You had to really sell it. And I think back in the day, Apple did a really great job of teaching their sales associates what to do, how to align yourself with the clients and customers and what they're looking for, and it was just actually one of my first real sales experiences. And I credit a lot of the things they taught even back then to how I sell today, actually.