Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson (Part 1)

Brent was a solo founder starting up a Fintech company. Read on how he put one foot before the other to navigate his journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Brent Jackson: I grew up here in California. I lived here pretty much my whole life. I went to Gonzaga University, Washington and studied Finance and Accounting. After four years at Gonzaga, I wanted to come back home. I started working at Deloitte in San Francisco. I worked there for about four years in the corporate tax group. It’s a great place to launch a career.

I left and joined a venture-backed company called Accrualify. They were in the spend management space. I was the first employee there. I got great exposure working with different small to medium-sized businesses. That’s how Torpago was born.

Sramana Mitra: What function were you working in at that startup?

Brent Jackson: I was wearing a lot of hats. My title was Operations Manager, but I was doing everything shy of writing code.

Sramana Mitra: How long did that last?

Brent Jackson: A year and a half.

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Brent Jackson: 2020.

Sramana Mitra: You started Torpago recently?

Brent Jackson: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What was the observation that led you to Torpago?

Brent Jackson: When we were at Accrualify, we were talking to thousands of small businesses. All of them kept saying the same thing. They’re looking for a better corporate card and a robust spend management platform. The thesis was that the small business market was underserved by the current solutions. Our thesis was we could offer a free corporate credit card and complete spend management platform that’s low cost and easy to deploy.

Sramana Mitra: That would put you in competition with American Express?

Brent Jackson: Exactly, that’s one of the main competitors. Traditional cards are direct competitors.

Sramana Mitra: What was missing with AmEx that you decide to focus on?

Brent Jackson: The biggest thing is software. AmEx does a great job of issuing cards. They’ll provide you credit, but there’s no software platform. When your business grows past 10 to 15 employees and you have remote workforces, it can be hard and cumbersome to issue cards to employees. There is no software attached to those systems to manage spend.

At month-end or year-end, there is no integration between your accounting systems. You have to find another tool like Expensify. You have to have someone manually enter information into your accounting system.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning and tell me how you started. Did you quit your job?

Brent Jackson: I quit my job. I was lucky that I was in a similar space. I was able to raise a little bit of seed capital early on from friends and family.

Sramana Mitra: How much was that?

Brent Jackson: $250,000.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Solo Founder to Funded FinTech Startup Scaling Rapidly: Torpago CEO Brent Jackson
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