Ben Borodach raising $80M for an AI-driven tax platform, indicating a significant fundraising round beyond early stages.
Ben Borodach raising $80M for an AI-driven tax platform, indicating a significant fundraising round beyond early stages. It also touches on building the company and the founder’s journey.
Um, I think that that constantly finding ways to maximize your efficiency and get more punch for the time you spend is really important. I think you have to take a wider view than just like how many [music] hours are you in the office and be realistic that that's not always going to be the thing that's most productive for you in business. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have a another guest you know another guest that um again you know quite an inspiring conversation that we have in front of us. We're going to be talking about the whole good stuff of the building, the scaling, the financing, you know, when things go well, when things go not so well, you know. Uh, so we're going to be talking I always say that you either succeed or you learn. So there's going to be quite a few lessons from uh, you know, the previous venture that he did, but right
now his current venture is a rocket ship. So again, you know, we're going to learn about the founding story, you know, becoming co-founders with his co-founder, raising 80 million bucks. I mean, you name it. So, brace yourself for quite the conversation. So, without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Ben Borodak. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much for having me, Alejandro. >> So, originally born in the Bronx, but raised in New Jersey. Give us a walk through Memory Lane. How was life growing up for you? >> Um, I don't remember too much of that. It was it was more known as Riverdale, uh, I guess, which is technically in the in the Bronx, and my parents moved to North Jersey, uh, when I was fairly young. I'm the oldest of four siblings, so it was pretty crazy uh time. Um had two siblings two years both sequentially after me. So it was already always a
pretty rambunctious time growing up. >> That's amazing. And how did you get into like the whole thing of computers problem solving? I mean, was that something that you developed while growing up or or where did that spark from? >> I was raised by two lawyers, so I always thought that I was probably going to be a lawyer because that's what I think other lawyers sort of instill upon you. And you know at some point in my time at NYU I met this professor named Larry Lenahan who was a venture capitalist at First Mark Capital uh which was I think at the time sort of one of the still probably one of the preeminent firms specifically headquartered out of New York. And uh he taught a class in the business school called Ready Fire Aim. And it was all about build build first and ask questions later. And so I took that class and won an astounding $12,500 uh as an investment, which was
his salary, I guess, from from the NYU business school, and sort of parallel tracked my first company uh while attending university. So that's >> mean I I I remember Larry from back in the day. I mean, the guy was always like super well-dressed from head to toes. He was saying that was something that I remember from Larry. That's for sure. >> I don't think I've ever met a venture capitalist that dresses as well as Larry that. [laughter] >> That's amazing. So, so obviously you know like during this time is when you got started as you were alluding to uh the first company. So that was called publish. So give us give us some you know uh highlights on on perhaps what were the you know sequences of events there for you to get going with the company you know how it all happened with first mark also backing you guys and what you were doing and then also you know what happened
you know with with with the with the outcome of the company. >> Yeah. So we were very young. We were sophomores at NYU uh and Ruckers where my co-founder was at the time and we had this idea. We had been doing marketing and website consulting for small businesses. So we started to learn about building websites and sort of what businesses need to drive leads and this was sort of back in 2010 2011 when CRM were really blowing up HubSpot, Salesforce, Marquetto and others. And we realized there was sort of a disconnect between the CRM and the content that was on the website. And so the idea behind the company was to basically dynamically render content mostly within the B2B realm. So think webinars, ebooks, podcasts, uh other other white papers and and more dynamically serve up the content uh you know to the to the customer base. I think we would have been super successful had we stuck
with it. So we raised about a quarter million dollars which back then was actually a seed round. uh the New York Angels wanted to put more money into the company and we were kind of running this out of our college dorm rooms while telling our parents that we were sort of uh getting our degree which we all eventually did uh get and I think it was just a classic story of making way too many first-time mistakes. We didn't really understand how to go from an MVP to a production scale product. We didn't fully understand uh even what the enterprise contracting process would look like. So, we finally got a buyer. Um, I think it may have been someone on the marketing team at Trinet or one of the other POSs that was interested in this. Um, and then they were like, "Okay, send me a contract." And we were sort of just not even exactly sure how to proceed. And so I think what it really inspired me,
um, you know, with and ultimately what we decided to do is just not take on more capital. So we ran it kind of on out of the dorm room for another year and eventually realized probably we didn't have what it took at that point. And so I think it gave me a couple of really important lessons. One is how hard it was uh to build a successful startup company and it actually took me about 10 years until I was willing to try it again because I had to go learn everything I found out that I didn't know. Um and the second thing is how much I loved building and scaling technology. Uh and so from there I went to Deote Consulting which was probably not the classical thing that a tech entrepreneur would do but it gave me unbelievable access uh to the largest financial uh uh uh executives in the world that the largest insurance companies and payments companies and and sort of the problems that they
were facing on the one hand uh and also sort of the the the challenges that they had in operationalizing those and so it really gave me a masterclass in how business is run at the highest level within financial services and I became the go-to person at Deote uh for for answering uh challenging innovation questions um you know across insurance, wealth management and banking. And so it allowed me to get sort of an unparalleled access um and and also develop a real expertise uh within financial services. >> But you know it that's not easy you know for you to come to that conclusion that that you need to learn um certain things because you don't know what you don't know. So anyone in your position as they say you know once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur you would have just like been like okay you know I fell on this one you know that that was painful but you know I'll get back
and do it again but in this case you know you were very strategic you were like you know what I may do it again but before I need to learn things that I don't know so what do you think gave you access to really understand that your path you know needed to pause as an entrepreneur for a bit until you were ready to do it And >> yeah, it's it's it's a great question that was kind of on the back of everybody thought they were going to be Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. I think first of all a recognition that I loved complex problems and probably my calling was more enterprise problems. I think if I was more interested in consumer or or sort of direct to consumer apps, it would have probably changed what I had done. I probably would have gone to maybe another startup and been a product manager or something like that. Um, but I think, you know, being a being an
entrepreneur is the is the ultimate exercise in in humility. I think, yes, it's true. We sometimes put these people on uh pedestals, especially when they're extremely successful or in moments where they have extreme success. But I think on the way to that success, you have to remember that there was tons and tons of failure. And the only way that they were able to get to that point was by digesting that, reflecting, pivoting, and moving forward. Yes, we all have to move forward, but if you don't recognize that you failed, there's no way that you'll learn to succeed the second time. And so, I think, you know, I just diagnosed it. I'm a systems thinker and I said, look, I don't understand how enterprise sales processes work. I don't understand enterprise requirements. Um, I don't necessarily even understand how to build relationships with enterprise buyers. And so, I needed to go to a
place uh that would…