Blair Silverberg, CEO & Founder of Hum Capital — Connecting Great Companies to the Right Capital

Gabriela Ariana Campoverde sits down with Blair Silverberg, Founder and CEO of Hum Capital, a funding platform connecting great companies with the right capital for their growth.

If you follow my episodes, you know that I am constantly on the search for companies promote financial inclusion. While most fintechs are tackling this mission with a consumer lens, Hum is addressing the biases in fundraising which exist for businesses and large enterprises. On Hum’s Intelligent Capital Market, companies are evaluated on fundamentals and performance, not on who they know.

In this episode, you will learn all about:

• The platform that Blair and his team are building:

“From a company’s perspective, like for a CFO or CEO, it’s a lot like using something like Mint.com or Quicken. You come to us and you say, ‘Hey, I want to raise capital,’ and we say ‘Great!’

The fastest way to understand your business is if you connect your QuickBooks, and we can do really interesting cohort analysis, some things like your payment processor data, we can audit your business for free by looking at online banking. These are the three types of data sources. We support about a hundred that are really important to the investors in our network.

We just say, ‘Hey, connect to us. It takes about five minute. You don’t have to make a pitch deck. You don’t have to make a data room. There’s no guessing at what investors want to see. We know exactly what investors like to see. So we prep all of that information for them and show it to you to get your approval.’

Then when you say, ‘I want to kick off the financing process.’ What we do is we make direct introductions to a bunch of the investors in our network. There’s about 250. So you’re meeting investors, powered by the data and the analysis that we give. You’re having conversations, but they’re informed by where your company benchmarks relative to other public and private companies.

It’s a very contextualized clear conversation that is totally different, much more focused and much less time consuming than the old way.”

• How Hum builds an efficient two-sided marketplace:

“We make raising capital very easy. Companies come to us, they connect their systems that they use for financial analysis, like NetSuite, or QuickBooks, or their payment processors to a system that we’ve built called the Intelligent Capital Market.

Then we scan the entire global capital markets — sovereign wealth funds, large institutional family offices, insurance companies, banks, endowments — who invest directly in companies for the very best matches for them. Then we connect both parties. We operate as a fundraising market. And we make the capital raising process, predictable, efficient, not time consuming.

We also give companies the lowest cost, most efficient forms of financing possible because we’re able to optimize what the entire marketplace has to offer.”

• The power of data in removing biases in fundraising:

“If you are a non-coastal entrepreneur, in the middle of the country, your Series A and Series B valuation will be 2x to 10x lower than if you’re a coastal entrepreneur doing the same thing with the same metrics. That is obviously not efficient or fair. We all know the statistics about the low percentage of women and minority founders — it’s much, much, much lower than the percentage of people, i.e., consumers in society from these groups.

That’s obviously not fair, right? Because the entrepreneurial community should basically represent the customers that are going to buy the products. These are just two very obvious, clear and unfortunate statistics in our society that get fixed when you look at the data that drives businesses.”

• The current issues companies face when attempting to access capital

“Capital is lifeblood to that company and as you also know, raising capital takes three to six months of the CEO and often the CFO’s is full time and attention, which means the people running companies in our economy are taking gigantic portions of their time away from running their businesses.”

• Blair’s journey from investor to founder

“There are a bunch of differences, but the similarities are you’re trying to find places where society’s capital should be put to efficient, good use for the good of the world. When you’re an investor, you’re just picking those and then making sure that the capital’s deployed rigorously and being an advisor and sounding board to the operator.

When you’re an operator, you’re just the other side of that coin. You’re building teams and your day-to-day is much more about the people that you put in place and the coaching you do to foster them, to have the context and confidence to be effective, and creating that teamwork that makes a great company Hum. It’s a totally different discipline, but it’s basically for the same purpose.

So I found when I made the transition, I hired a executive coach very early on. I’ve been a heavy user of a personal therapist. I say this very publicly I had to basically to get comfortable with an entrepreneurial journey. I started taking Lexapro. You know, there’s just a lot of sort of mental prep that you need to go through to start a business and have the grit to execute.

There’s a lot of personal change that you need to be able to execute and to conform yourself to the problem that you’re solving. For me, that was a lot of learning how to foster a team and be patient, which is very different from an investor mind, where you’re just making good decisions.

All your job is just to make the decision, press, buy or sell, and that is done. When you’re an operator, you press buy years ago, and you’re fostering the team that’s executing.”

• And much more!

About Blair Silverberg

Blair Silverberg is the Founder and CEO of Hum Capital. Prior to launching Hum, he was an investor at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He is passionate about using data to identify great businesses. He studied Product Design at Stanford University.

About Hum Capital

Launched in 2019, Hum is turning the tables on the traditional fundraising process. The platform strives to make fundraising more efficient, transparent and data-driven. To learn more about Hum, visit humcapital.com.

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