Milind Mehere, YieldStreet Founder/CEO — Transforming Digital Wealth Management
Miguel Armaza is joined by the fascinating Milind Mehere, serial entrepreneur, and Founder/CEO of YieldStreet, a digital wealth management platform that aims to transform the investing landscape by enabling individual investors to invest in alternative asset classes such as Real Estate, Marine Finance, Art Finance, Legal Finance, and Commercial loans.
The company has raised over $180M in equity and debt from top VCs including Edison Partners, Greycroft, and Raine Ventures.
Topics discussed:
- Milind’s successful entrepreneurial journey and the path to Yieldstreet as a second time founder
- Company Culture
- Challenges of building an investing platform and disrupting an industry traditionally reserved for the wealthy
- Leveraging regulatory opportunities for a new asset class
- The incredible impact of COVID on the business
- And a lot more
Full interview → Spotify | Soundcloud | Apple
Mr. Mehere is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded his first startup, Yodle, back in 2006. The company was an online advertising and marketing ecosystem for small businesses that ended up serving over 50 thousand businesses, scaled to 1400 employees and over $220 million in revenue, and was eventually acquired by Web.com for $342M in 2016. But early in his Yodle experience, Milind came up with the idea that would eventually become Yieldstreet.
During the 2008 financial crisis, Milind and his wife found themselves with a severely affected and overexposed portfolio, comprised of mostly public stocks and highly correlated assets. The crisis helped them realize they needed a mix of less volatile and non-correlated income-generating products as part of their investments, but they also ran into the unfortunate reality that access to most of these alternative assets was reserved for the very wealthy.
As the market began shifting and the US government passed significant pieces of regulation (JOBS Act, 506(c), Reg D,) that expanded the universe of qualified investors and relaxed investor rules, Milind saw an opportunity to launch a platform to democratize alternative asset investing and provide access to a category previously reserved only for institutions and the ultra-wealthy. Close to six years after launch, Yieldstreet has now grown to one of the leading marketplaces in alternative asset investing and has facilitated over $1.7 billion in investments for thousands of new investors.
Entrepreneurial Advice
Armed with more than fifteen years as an entrepreneur, Mr. Mehere had some interesting advice for aspiring builders:
- Bring your family along — “Entrepreneurship, you have to understand, is not about yourself, you have to bring your family along. Whether it’s your significant other, your kids, whatever may be the case, because they all become entrepreneurs with you. And it’s so important to get their buy-in, because entrepreneurship is very hard. There are lots of ups and downs and things like that. So make sure that you have that support system.
- You cannot be a part-time entrepreneur — “A lot of people romanticize entrepreneurship, but it’s extremely hard. And while it is very, very rewarding, you cannot be a part time entrepreneur. And so you have to be committed to the idea. But once you are committed, you also need to focus on what your true north is and what are your milestones. So I always focus on revenue, service, and milestones. Because it’s very easy to get carried away with your idea because you love the idea… But does the world love it? That is very important to know.”
- Don’t wait for the perfect product — “You’ve got to have your MVP out in the market ASAP. Don’t wait for that perfect product, because you’re never going to have a perfect model. So get it out in the market. So you can get proof points.”
- The first 10 people are the most important — “The first 10 people are the most important… You have to have domain experts, and the first 10 people are the most important, and you need to prioritize those guys because they are going to bring the next 25. So I think having that team and culture is very, very important.”
Milind Mehere
Milind Mehere is an award-winning entrepreneur with a track record of building large scalable businesses and creating new product categories. He is the founder and CEO of YieldStreet, a digital wealth management platform changing the way financial products are delivered and how wealth is created. Previously, Milind co-founded and scaled Yodlee (an ad-tech platform for SMBs) to $200M+ in revenue and 1,400 employees — the company was acquired by Web.com for $342M in 2016.
About Yieldstreet
YieldStreet is striving to become the world’s largest digital wealth management platform to change the way wealth is created. YieldStreet is accomplishing this by transforming the investing landscape, opening up access to investments for individual investors across a range of asset classes such as Real Estate, Marine Finance, Art Finance, Legal Finance and Commercial loans. Headquartered in New York City with offices in Brazil, Argentina and Greece, the company is backed with $178M in equity and debt funding from firms including Edison Partners, Greycroft and Raine Ventures. Join the movement at www.yieldstreet.com.
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Miguel Armaza is Co-Host of the Wharton Fintech Podcast and Co-Founder of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas.
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