Welcome to another edition of the electrifying growth podcast. I'm your host, Chris Sugden managing partner of Edison partners today. I'm thrilled to welcome Flint lane. To this episode.

Chris: Flint is the founder and CEO pill trust a B2B or to cash payments software company, which Flint will tell you a little bit more about in a moment which he's led for over 20 years. Under his guidance build trust has gone public maintain a 98% customer satisfaction rate, which again, we'll ask more about that and the name of the best places to work in New Jersey for 10 years running by numerous awards that built trust, including entrepreneur of the year.

He currently serves on the boards of sharks, arrow, prepaid technologies and Edison portfolio company, and the boys and girls clubs of Colorado. Flint. Thanks a lot for joining us today, Chris, always great to do these things with you. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Well, here we go. Um, and, uh, this is sort of a, whether he'll admit it or not, um, because we've actually been competitors, colleagues, CEOs on boards together, and even co-investors for almost 25 years, but most.

I consider a Flint, a friend, and a mentor, a really valuable manager or that. So I do appreciate you doing this. I know you're really busy. Um, so the title of today's podcast, which you actually at one point share with me, my $100 million MBA, um, a bit of a spin off on your first go round at the startup thing.

And I thought the best way to kick this off since in the intro, we didn't cover it also that you're not creative at naming companies either, but, um, I'm gonna kick it over to you to say, take us back to when. Five plus years, there's not the age ourselves. Um, and, uh, and tell us how it all started. Yeah. So I was destined from an early age to be a computer guy.

Flint: Uh, I thought a computer programmer. I took my first computer class in seventh grade, and some people could do sports. Some people could do music, some people could do languages and I could do computers. So I knew I was going to be doing computers. Um, what related to computers as I wasn't as sure about. Um, but, uh, had.

Um, computer programming, jobs, software development, and jobs early in my career and the companies I was at kept getting acquired. And ultimately I decided I was going to take some things into my own hands and started a company that was sort of near and dear to my heart around online bill pay. Um, I had always paid all of my bills online through Quicken or online banking or something like that, but the bills would pile up at my mailbox.

And every Sunday I would go in and key them in. And I thought there had to be a better way. So in 1998, I co-founded a company called Patros, uh, not build trust, not related to build trust other than the lack of creativity in the name, um, to allow consumers. Receive and pay all of their bills online. And it was a really fabulous idea, but a really terrible business model.

Um, we would redirect consumers, paper bills to a processing center where we would scan them, OCR them and put them up on our website. So you would get an email that said. Your gas bills and your Amex bills and your Verizon bill is in, and you can just click it and pay it. No bills would ever show up at your mailbox.

Funny enough, the service still exists. Um, but we were probably 20 years ahead of our time on that, but it was 19 98, 19 99, and anybody could raise the money and we were certainly anybody. Um, so we raised probably a hundred million dollars in about 18 months time and spent about a hundred million dollars in 18 months time.

And we were on billboards and radio ads and we had some really cool marketing spend going on. Um, and ultimately grew the service about a hundred thousand consumers nationwide, but. We made a ton of mistakes and that's why I jokingly call it my hundred million dollar MBA. Cause I have a computer science degree and I learned a lot in that, um, pay, trust, uh, experience.

Chris: So I heard, you know, almost Superbowl ads or cerebral ads billboards. It kind of sounds a little bit like today. My gray hair, your no hair, your hair cut. I should say, take us back here. We are, you know, it's, couldn't be more relevant, right? 20, 22. The wheels may be coming off or maybe not coming off. Just depends how old you are.

Some of us have seen this movie before, but it certainly sounds familiar. Doesn't it? Um, maybe we could just go back a little bit to. You know, not just the mistakes we made, but even how you applied some of those mistakes to your trust early days, that's kind of the bridge I'm thinking of here is, is there was one mantra used.

In fact, we were raising money and we were talking about, I'm not raising money before X is one of the things you said to me. So just kind of talk a little. The ups and downs of the market, but also kind of that mantra of when you were ready to take outside money versus when you did it Patriots, if you would.

Flint: Yeah. I think a lot of people think about raising money as this. You either do it or you don't, and that is just wildly incorrect. Um, who you raise money from is the far more interesting question. And the biggest mistake I made was not raising a hundred million dollars. It was who we raised it from and who we allow it on the board.

Um, And this was on me. Like it was my mistake. I'm not blaming others for this. You know, people are who they are going to be. Um, but when you raise money, it is so vitally important who you're going to erase it from. And it was clear to me that I didn't know how to do that. And that was probably the, one of the biggest mistakes I made at pay trust.

So when I started build trust in sort of in 2001, focused on the other side of billing, which is the people who send in the bills and get paid, I knew that I was not ready for venture capital at that stage of my life. 'cause, I didn't know how to do it. And in fact, I kind of thought I swore off venture capital, but what I said, what I really in hindsight was doing was I wanted to build a real business before I raised a penny of outside capital.

So that that capital could go to growing something that I actually worked, as opposed to just funding a sort of wild ass time. Well, that's sort of sounds familiar because the last few years, lots of wild ass ideas got funded, but go back to that mentor mentee or what, I didn't know. What would you have done different or what did you do differently when you had to build trust to sort of, was it just because of experience, but now instead of someone else getting a hundred million MBA, what would you do before you raise money?

You know, you're a startup CEO with that choice, if you will. Yeah. So day one to build trust. Uh, well maybe not day one, but within 30 days of starting building. Uh, we had a three-person advisory board that I treated like a real board of directors, people. I really respected that I could ask questions too.

Um, you know, you gotta be willing to be vulnerable as a CEO and say, I don't know. And if you have all the answers, then you're proving that you don't have all the answers because you're not willing to admit it. Um, we raised $100 million in the first two years at Patros. We raised $4 million in the first 11 years at Billtrust.