Today we’d like to introduce you to Kathryn Petralia.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
You might call me a serial entrepreneur. I had my first internet startup in the mid-90s despite the fact I was in graduate school studying literature trying to become a professor.
Once I was exposed to the internet and the opportunity to create more commerce and business, I found that to be a much more compelling career choice. It was a natural fit for me. I had a computer before I was ten years old, so I’ve always been comfortable with technology even though I don’t write any code and I never have, but I understand the practical application of it.
Kabbage is my seventh company, and it wasn’t a difficult decision when my co-founder and friend, Rob Frohwein, called me up and told me about the idea of Kabbage as a financial services data and technology platform to provide automated funding to small businesses in minutes. It seemed really obvious to become a part of it due to it being a great convergence of all the different things I had done in the past.
Nearly ten years later, I’m very proud of Kabbage as we now have nearly 500 employees and helped more than 155,000 small business customers access over $5 billion in flexible working capital. It’s rewarding work that has a significant impact on the economy and its growth.
Has it been a smooth road?
I want someone to tell me about their smooth road because I’m not sure it exists. Nothing is ever what you expect it to be.
We thought we were going to need $2 million and 50 employees to get this business to where it is today. It’s taken a dramatically different turn than we expected.
Most of the bumps we’ve faced have been around people, performance and scaling. It’s also about being prepared for the next phase of the business and finding the right people to help us accomplish those milestones. In a big company that does the same thing all the time, it can be easier to hide mediocrity, but it’s impossible to do that in a growing company.
The goal is to hire really amazing talented people who want great opportunities. Some of the bumps we’ve experienced along the way are funny in hindsight. When we had just started, and there were fewer than ten employees, our website went down because the cleaning lady who came in the morning to vacuum the office plugged her vacuum cleaner into the cube where the server was and blew the outlet.
Another example is one day we came into work to discover the internet wasn’t working. When we called our internet provider, it came to light that the bill had simply not been paid.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Kabbage is a fully-automated online lending platform for small businesses. To date, we have helped more than 150,000 small businesses access over $5 billion in flexible working capital. We approve businesses by analyzing the live business data of the company, often giving a response within minutes.
What I’m most surprised by and most proud of is the unintended and unexpected benefit resulting in the economic growth that we have fostered. For every billion dollars of capital provided to businesses, 22,000 jobs are created so we’ve enabled the creation of over 110,000 jobs.
Not to mention the fact that for every dollar that goes into the small business community, it generates nearly $4 in economic activity which means our $5 billion would have created roughly $20 billion in economic activity throughout the U.S.
We thought we were going to build a really cool user experience for e-commerce companies to get access to working capital, but it really has been a lot more than that.
How do you, personally, define success? What’s your criteria, the markers you’re looking out for, etc?
At the end of the day, if you haven’t returned capital to your investors, then you haven’t fully succeeded. However, this should not be achieved at the cost of the customer experience nor employee satisfaction. You have to check those boxes, among others, however, ultimately a business has to create a meaningful return to the people who took a chance on it to achieve true success.
Pricing:
- Kabbage offers small business access to flexible and ongoing lines of credit, which go as high as $250,000.
Contact Info:
- Address: 925B Peachtree St. NE Atlanta, GA 30309
- Website: https://www.kabbage.com/
- Phone: 888-986-8263
- Email: support@kabbage.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kabbageinc/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KabbageInc
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/kabbageinc
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kabbage-inc/
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