A few years ago, Neal Bloom, Managing Partner of Interlock Capital, organized an online event where CTOs were to meet at a virtual coffee gathering. It was late in the afternoon.

I had known Neal from before he formalized Interlock Capital, as he often attended Orange County tech events to network and build a tech community. We hit it off well, and I followed Neal’s journey both near and far, always admiring the energy he brought to building Southern California’s tech ecosystem.

The Meeting

I joined Neal's virtual coffee event, ready to mingle. That’s when Sam Xia, our future co-founder and CTO of LendAPI, logged in. Sam and I had never met before, and as it turned out, the two of us, along with Neal, were the only ones at the meetup that day.

Sam and I hit it off immediately, discussing our respective companies. As it turned out, Sam lived just minutes away from my office. We met up soon after, along with some of his business partners, and I tried to help Sam with his venture several times.

After about a year, after we both exited from our previous companies, we decided to work together on a new venture: LendAPI.

Sam’s background is rooted in deep tech and enterprise software. He holds several patents, including one for the predecessor technology of fingerprint sensors in many Apple devices. My background, on the other hand, is in banking technology and risk management. Together, we thought we could build something that banks and fintechs could use to quickly launch products, without wasting millions of dollars or years of development, thus seizing market opportunities.

The Birth

I took on some of the product design work while Sam handled the technological implementation. We were fortunate to have a few customers and friends who paid us to be their launch partners, which really helped us grow in the early days.

We worked tirelessly with just a small team, evolving the platform while staying true to our original goal: building a software platform that enabled banks to quickly launch new products.

Feature by feature, we watched the product grow and come together. It finally made sense to us that this could be something that would become a dominant player in this new market we were creating.

The Launch Party

On March 1, 2024, we officially launched LendAPI. We were both excited and anxious, but that stress quickly evaporated when we secured one of the largest banks in the country as a client. They were looking for a solution to generate millions of offers for their clients daily and needed a high-speed platform with caching capabilities to achieve this.

We tested the platform with them, and within a week, it was live. Today, this bank processes hundreds of thousands of applications a day on our platform, and everything runs smoothly.

We quickly grew to $1 million in ARR, onboarding several banks, financial institutions, and retail clients to help them rebuild their in-house financing arms.

The Raise

While I was posting on Reddit, someone reached out to me—an associate from Headline Ventures. At the time, I wasn’t planning to raise capital, as our plan was always to stick to our bootstrapping ideals and grind it out like we had in our previous ventures.

Out of curiosity, I took the call with Headline and presented our product and traction. I have to say, the folks from Headline were phenomenal and professional, and they changed my mind about venture capital, possibly altering LendAPI’s trajectory.

Headline introduced us to Josh Dodson at Assurant, who in turn introduced us to Cohen Circle, and so on. After nearly 300 calls with VCs across fintech, SaaS, and enterprise software, I think we are finally close to raising venture capital money for the first time. Things are getting interesting.

SoCal Connection

In August 2024, Neal Bloom sent Sam and me an invite to another event hosted by Interlock Capital, their “Summer Hang.”

By now, Sam and I had been telling the story of how we met almost daily when speaking to prospective clients and investors. We thought it would be great to attend Neal’s event to give him an update and, most importantly, to show our appreciation for how he brought us together years earlier.

At the event in San Diego, we met a few folks from Plug and Play, especially Alex Tran and Stephen Fay. I pitched to Alex, talked about our acceptance into Techstars, and he immediately started texting and emailing people, introducing us to prospective investors. Alex followed up with me after the event and continues to make introductions even today.

Through Alex, I met Andrew Wegrzyn from SixThirty. Andrew had lunch with another VC, Great North Ventures, while visiting one of his portfolio companies. Rob Weber from Great North reached out, but I’ll save the rest of that story for another time.

A Community That Keeps on Giving

This week, I was invited to Plug and Play’s San Diego event to pitch our company. Instead of my usual presentation, I told the story you just read in front of 100 San Diego founders, builders, and academic leaders.

It was the first time I told this story publicly, and it resonated with so many in the audience that I wanted to share it with you all.

Thanks to Neal, Alex, and SoCal. “Never Doubt SoCal.”