Michele Romanow: Co-Founder of Clearco

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. It’s Kara Goldin. And we are here with Michele Romanow, who was the co founder of clear cow, and I am so excited to have Michele on the show. I met Michele. I don’t know if you remember this. Michele, but I met you years ago at the lobby conference. And since we’ve been Yeah, which is? Yeah, exactly. had amazing, amazing conversation that night. And I’ve seen each other since and just an amazing entrepreneur and incredible executive for sure. So Michele is the co founder of clear co she up until recently was running the company as well. It is the world’s largest e commerce investor. The platform is called Clear cocoa. And we’re about to hear a lot more about it. Who wouldn’t believe that Michele, who started six companies before her 35th birthday, and was a dragon and still is the dragon on the Canadian show Dragon’s Den. She has achieved amazing, amazing things. And like I said at in CO founding clear cocoa, they’ve invested over 5 billion to over 10,000 entrepreneurs and 13 countries. It’s such an incredible business for sure one of the top FinTech startups, I should also mention too, so really, really an honor to have you on the show, just to tell us a lot more about your journey and about you. So welcome.

Michele Romanow 2:17
Oh, it’s great. It’s great to be here. I mean, the the story is great at the end of the journey to get there as always very messy. Here to the artists with the tail.

Kara Goldin 2:26
So true. So you worked in a few different industries. And I was doing some research for this interview and heard you say, do you think the best entrepreneurs would say, like, why did they start their companies? What was what was kind of the the key thing?

Michele Romanow 2:46
So I think, you know, really entrepreneurs in some ways, when they’re not from an industry have an enormous competitive advantage, because when you’re from an industry, you have this game line, and this like industry knowledge where you’re like, we’ve always done it this way, versus doing it differently. And so I’ll give you an example of a of a friend of mine and a company invested in a company called Share tax. She, Catherine was like, Look, I’m gonna figure out how to make indestructible pantyhose. And everyone in the hosiery industry was like, that’s impossible. Like, I mean, pantyhose rep. She’s like, well, I know that there’s like hundreds of 1000s of people that have worked in the grocery industry, but I believe that I can do this better. So she got a Kevlar bulletproof fiber, she started to weave it, she broke 36 Sewing Machines. And today, her product is truly a pretty indestructible form of pantyhose, but she had to figure it out from the ground up, because when you’re there, it’s too easy. And so I think it was like really the same with with my story. You know, I had started companies in a lot of different industries, I had been an ecommerce founder founded an early AI app that we sold to Groupon. And let me just set the scene. I’m 28 years old, and I joined the cast of Dragon’s Den, which is the Canadian version of Shark Tank. And I’m like, I don’t belong to be here. I youngest person here. I’m the poorest person here, but like, I’ll take this chair, and I’ll like figure out how to do this. And so one of the things most people don’t know about the show is that we see something like 200 pitches a year, we see them back to back like 10 pitches a day. And so every pitch is like starting to sound the same. I got a great ecommerce product, I want to sell it. I need $100,000 I’m willing to sell 10% of my business. And what was fascinating is when you ask those founders what they needed the $100,000 for, they always said the same two things care. They said I need money for adspend and I need money for inventory. And as a wait a second. Why are founders giving a 10% of their business for for an expense that’s that’s really really could be measured very differently. So I was like, You know what, I’m going to just kill, instead of, I’m going to give you the 100 Grand you’re looking for, instead of taking 10% of your business that I would own forever, I just want to 10% of your revenue until you pay me back my capital plus 10%. So I’ll give me 100 grand, give me $110,000 back, I don’t own a piece of your company. And they’re like, oh, this sounds a lot like a loan. And I was like, ah, a loan would have a personal guarantee. So I would take your house, if you didn’t pay me back. And I would take your business if you didn’t pay me back that is way more punitive than what I’m offering. And so the founder on the show is like, Okay, well, what’s the catch? And I was like, Look, I just need to see your Facebook ad data, I need to be connected to your online platforms to see how your your business and how your ads are converting. Because then I can basically figure out if this is a good business to underwrite. So the founder that day is like 100%, I’ll take that business. Everyone in finance, like, I mean, we created effectively a new category in, in specialty finance the same way you created a category of beverages that truly had never existed before. And the number of people who are like, there’s water, and then there’s juice, no one thought that people wanted a flavor. It’s the same thing. People were like, there’s debt. And there’s equity, no one thought there was ever room for revenue share agreement that was based on data coming out of your business. And so when you have done that, the number of naysayers is just exhausting, because you have nothing to call the category, you have things that don’t make sense about the category. And you just need to keep listening to your customer feedback and seeing if that’s good. And ultimately, then you look back in 10 years, and you’re like, Oh, of course that deserves to exist. I mean, we have a competitor in 45 countries around the world, there is now billions of dollars being deployed on the thing that we built out of Canada, you know, a couple of years ago, which is pretty cool. But it’s a very, very difficult journey to get there.

Kara Goldin 6:58
That’s wild. So you touched on this, but can you describe, just flush it out for people? So basically, you’re giving people money to it? Can you just describe it a little bit further? Yeah,

Michele Romanow 7:13
of course. So what happens is, if you’re an entrepreneur looking for capital, anywhere from you know, 10,000, all the way up to $10 million. You connect us to your online data sources to your wherever you’re buying ads, Facebook, Instagram, you connect us to your payment processor, and you’re where you’re creating money in your bank account, we can tell you within 24 hours, how much capital we can give you and the terms of that capital, and then you pay us back as you make your revenue until you’ve paid us back or capital plus your fee. And then we’re done. We don’t own a piece of your company. We don’t have a personal guarantee on the business. And we have scaled with businesses, as they’ve gone from, you know, 10s and 1000s. of dollars in sales to millions of dollars in sales. That’s amazing.

Kara Goldin 7:57
And when you guys were first starting, you were the first I mean, you disrupted a category. Were there others that copycats after you had started this model?

Michele Romanow 8:07
Oh, course. And I think that in some ways, like, that’s a good and an okay thing, right? If you’re the only person in a category, you first of all, haven’t created a category. Totally. But like, ultimately, what I care about more at the end of the day is that I believe there should be more founders, I believe founders are the world’s greatest problem solvers. And they build the world that we want to live in. And you can work for governments, and you can work for big businesses, and they can have impact, but they move very slowly. If you really want to change how something is done, you should be a founder. And so the number one thing that holds people back from becoming a founder and scaling their business is access to capital, it is not education, it is not knowing how to do it. And so if if I can make it my life’s mission and work for it to be easier for founders to get access to capital, I think I’ve made you know, a small little dent in the ability to do so and care. The coolest part is you can see it in our numbers. I mean, I never expected this, I was like, Let’s build a system that’s based on numbers versus pitches. Because when you pet you have so much bias on how good your pitches how polish you are, how where you went to school, if you know the VC from undergrad, we were like what just plug us into your digital data. That’s also the way we can deploy a lot of capital, because we can do this algorithmically. And I didn’t expect this. But when you look back at our data, half, half of our portfolio is women. This compares to 2% of venture capital while women that’s insane. It’s 25 times a third of our founders did not go to post secondary education. And a quarter of offenders are minorities. So it’s just It’s extraordinary to see that when you actually just use data and you don’t look at who a person is or where they went to school. You get So much more diversity in these incredible businesses that that are being built. So you’re

Kara Goldin 10:06
based out of Canada, but you’re obviously not just in Canada, you’re now in 13 countries. Is that right? Yes, we’ve

Michele Romanow 10:14
deployed capital in 13 countries, we’re active. We’re most active in the US now, we scaled back a lot of our European operations when things started to change in the economy. But yeah, it’s, it’s like an incredible tool for founders to be building their business,

Kara Goldin 10:27
have you I bet you are able to see so much data, not just on somebody’s individual business, but in terms of trends and entrepreneurship overall. Do you see any major similarities or differences that sort of surprised you?

Michele Romanow 10:45
Oh, between different countries? Yeah, I mean, there was a lot. I mean, there’s very few things that rivals the American consumer, and how powerful they are at attaching to a trend and how good the conversions are. I mean, there’s been a lot of changes in the e Commerce Industry in the last couple of years, right? It started when inventory got way more difficult, secure. So now having inventory was absolutely key, there was a ton of changes that happened when Facebook changed their algorithm that had been continuing on right, like the days of really low cost, cost per acquisition are probably over. And people need to be thinking about how to be building your basket size, how to be selling higher ticket items. And there was just a, there was a difference in debt levels, the and risk levels, American businesses were taking on versus other countries. So Canada, for example, everyone pays back their money, I think it is one of the most compliant places that that we deploy capital, but it’s also harder to deploy capital, because people are you no more scared of taking risk in their business and betting on their business early on. So you do see those differences when you deploy capital globally.

Kara Goldin 11:55
So interesting. What about the recovery overall, since you know, the the meltdown, and maybe, you know, that had kind of a ripple across the world, basically, I mean, what have you guys seen as far as your business? And how has that affected that?

Michele Romanow 12:13
Yeah, I think people are now in the wait and see period of this. You know, there was I think last year was pretty tough. But we’ve seen, you know, consumer spending hold up, while still continuing to be buying things. And so look, I think, my my personal opinion is, there’s probably still another shoe to drop, I don’t think we can get away with just printing trillions of dollars, and not have it really affect the system. And we just have not seen that recession yet. And so I’m always a little bit, I’m always a little bit cautious. But that’s also because I took a lot of risks in my life becoming an entrepreneur, so I, I’m constantly in the back of my brain being like, okay, and I actually think that’s a good way for an entrepreneur to operate, right? Part of what it feels like to be an entrepreneur is there’s always someone chasing you. And you’re always like, self motivating yourself to be like, let me think of this recipe. Think of what to do here and how to and how to fix it.

Kara Goldin 13:07
That’s, I love that analogy. I mean, it’s so so so true. So beyond actually giving capital, you also offer tools and insights, can you share a little bit more about that?

Michele Romanow 13:20
Yeah. So one of our one of our big things when we rebranded from clearbank, to clear coat was that we wanted to be more than just capital, we were like, how do we have our team and have our tools help you with your business. And so that was a suite of all sorts of things. If you need help selling your business, we could broker you with the people because we had tons of investors and private equity events coming to us being like, look, we’re interested in buying these businesses. So that was one of the things that we launched, we have a team that, you know, when you take capital from us, you talk to someone and they see hundreds of businesses and what’s working between, you know, ad spends, and conversions, and all sorts of things where we can connect you with other founders that may have had the same problems that you’ve had. And so I always want to think that we’re doing the best of what an investor can do. But in the best model where we are not on your board, we cannot fire you. We cannot. We cannot take control of your business. But certainly we can be helpful when we’ve seen problems that are happening in your business and other places. I mean, I think, truly, we had one of our companies that were in trouble and I like personally renegotiated their shipping rates for them and save them like 30% which ended up being like $3 million. And so they were like this completely changed our business economics and you can’t do that for everyone. But you know, where it makes a difference. It’s it’s huge.

Kara Goldin 14:42
It’s huge. Do you have a story one of your favorite stories where you feel like wow, that felt really awesome to be able to help company a founder or be able to, you know, really do something that they wouldn’t have been able to do. I feel like you’ve probably done that for so many Um, but are there any that are really kind of jumping out at you or as as being one of your favorites?

Michele Romanow 15:06
What a great question. I mean, I feel like I have so many. I have so many special founders, like I remember getting on the phone with,

you know, an ex military veteran, and he had built an incredible business. That was that was selling apparel had a big brand on it. And he’s like, You don’t understand, Michele, like no one believes in us, no one believes in us, we come back, there’s no bank that’s willing to look at us, like everyone just left us. And like you, first of all, didn’t even didn’t even care in the best possible way you were like, if your data has great, or if your business has great metrics, like we want to fund you. And so I remember getting on this very emotional call where he’s crying and his daughter’s, and I was like, I just have no idea of the impact. You can generate for some of this, I have one founder, who is in Europe, that effectively made you know, the stock actually one of these sneaker marketplaces in Europe, and, you know, he started this out of his garage. And I mean, the business kind of did 2 million and 20 million, the close to 100 million your house. And he’s like, I met him for the first time. And he came and he hugged me, and he’s like, Michele, I own 100% of this business, and I have four kids, and I’m gonna get pass it on him because of your money. And it just never, I never appreciate that. And it was just it was life changing for him and his family. Well,

Kara Goldin 16:40
that’s super powerful. And knowing that you’re actually helping people and you said the word impact to me that’s, that’s such a massive thing. I I feel like, that’s what keeps you going, right? Even during those really hard times. As an entrepreneur, I always tell people that if they love a brand, right to them, yeah. Right? If they love a service right to them, because there’s people who are really trying to make it all work behind that really, you know, need to hear that from you. And I run into people all the time who have said to me, like Ken has changed my life and has gotten me healthier has kept me healthier. I love it. What, you know, other people who were just like, oh, you know, I never drink water before. And then I started drinking it. And so, definitely, you know, I know how powerful it can be. So let’s talk about Dragon being a dragon on Dragon’s Den. So 28 years old, you get this job, you’re, you’re still a dragon, what have you learned from that show? It must be really exciting, being able to listen to all these pitches, right, you probably see trends you see, you know, people who just aren’t ready, right now to be able to I mean, you see it, like, you know, the spectrum, right? What’s what’s sort of the the most surprising aspect of being, you know, in your position on that show?

Michele Romanow 18:14
I think it’s always like the ingenuity of things that people dream up and believe. There’s, there’s just no shortage of, of great ideas. And there’s so many ways to build a business. That’s the other thing is like we we somehow think there’s like a playbook or a how to guide, there’s actually a million ways to make something successful. And the show is really, really good at showing all of those examples. So there’s probably a couple of questions that people always have about, you know, Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank. So the first is that we have no idea of what the pitches are before they come on. We don’t get notes. We don’t get to study anything. And so when you’re literally like picking something up, and you’re like, What is this like it, we’re truly being like, what is this? We’re learning in real time with the founder hearing the pitch for the first time. The second question that people ask is like, you know, how many of the deals close all the deals and the offers we’re making are serious, they’re all our money. And then they go into a diligence process after that, and some of them don’t close after that. Some of them the founders don’t want the capital. Some of them we find, you know, that they exaggerated a little bit in the picture. It’s not quite the business, we thought. But I mean, I now have, like, dozens of companies in my portfolio. So a lot of these deals, you know, did close, and I’ve done so much work on and then it’s just extraordinary, the businesses that people can build. So I’ll give you one example. There was there was two founders that walked on the show, but five years ago, it was an ex cop and an ex military officer that had gone to Afghanistan. One had been of hurt on the job. And they had bought three RVs themselves, and they were trying to rent them out. And they’re like, well, there’s nowhere to there’s no air b&b. for RVs. And so they built the platform themselves to be able to rent out the three, Airbnb three RVs that they have. And, you know, the question is, well, why does an Airbnb do this? Well, it’s actually more complicated to rent a vehicle with insurance that moves, you can appreciate how this is a whole different category. In Canada alone, there were 2 million RVs that were used on average for two weeks here. So this is a massive asset class that no one is using. And you know, especially for folks that own our V’s they’re in the demographic, we’re probably making another 1020 grand a summer is very significant from renting something that they own. And I mean, the number in the US would be 10 times that. So they started this business, I literally went to go to Boots and Hearts Music Festival, which is like an RV Country Music Festival and knocked on doors to our viewers and be like, hey, you know, you can rent your RV, when you’re not using it. And, you know, today, the second largest player in North America, this is like a massive, you know, billion dollar company now. And it started off Dragon’s Den, which is really, really cool.

Kara Goldin 21:11
I love that. No, that’s such a great story. So knowing what you know, today about launching a company growing a company, what are some of the most important characteristics that you see and successful founders. I think there’s two parts to that successful founders, and maybe successful founders who stay on as CEOs.

Michele Romanow 21:36
I mean, I think this whole game is just in many ways, but like pain, tolerance, and resilience. Like this job is so painful, like, you know, the Elan Musk about this is chewing glass, like there are so many dates for her like, everything is going wrong. Right my life as a founder always as two times a week, you have a disaster that you cannot anticipate that you have to deal with that is urgent and immediate. So it makes your ability to plan a lot harder one to two times a week, you know, that’s 100 times a year, you’re gonna stop, things just blow up. So you have to be good with changing your mind, you have to be good with responding quickly. You have to just have a chip on your shoulder where it doesn’t matter how hard you were hit yesterday, and how many black eyes you have. You’re gonna get up in the ring that next day and be like, I’m back. Ready? Yeah, let’s do this. Yeah, I’m not losing my own sense of confidence, I’m not ability, losing my own ability to pick up the phone and make things happen. Like, somebody’s going to just get really angry, I’m like, I’m going to call 20 People, I’m gonna solve this problem right now myself, I’m just gonna show my team that I can do it. And that is incredibly powerful. The next thing that matters is, is related to that it’s really never thinking you’re above any task or anything. I mean, I’ve invested in dozens of founders, everyone goes through this phase where they go from, you know, being the jack of all trades, when they’re one person or five person team, to being like, we got to scale and grow and becoming a 20 person team. And then they want an assistant, and they don’t want to go on sales calls anymore. And they want you to have software engineers, and they want to trust people. And you need to do some of this. But if you take your hand out of the business, people run in all the wrong directions. And so you have to be constantly back, you know, one in every 21 in every 50 sales calls, you just pop your head in, and you’re like, let me just like, see what you guys are saying here. You know, product, you’ve got to pick up and taste and try your own product. You know, I describe especially when you build technical software products, like people have to be able to use them when they’re seven glasses of wine in like, no one is going to give you the attention in the world to be like, Oh, let me figure out what that button means. And like why did were you trying to do that, like you just need to be caught, like stumbling through the flow of trying to do things and, and people complicate things all the time. And so you need to have a real ability to have no ego because as soon as you think you are too good for a task in a startup, your business starts to slip away from you. And I’ve watched this happen dozens and dozens and dozens of times. And that doesn’t mean you forever stay and you never scale and you never trust people. It’s not what I’m saying. You have to change your cadence, but you cannot let go of everything. And then I think probably the last trait is you need to have some natural optimism. And you need to constantly be seeing what the new world is creating, and how you continue to innovate and disrupt your own product. Because even if you’ve created a category someone is going to create a category after you and something better than you and in some ways when you’re the category creator and I’ve done both so the first 10 years of my career, I was always a fast follower. We followed the group honestly As we followed, you know, a couple of different business models, and were able to create success in doing that. And when you’re the category creator, I mean, it feels great, except you’re making a lot of mistakes, like you’re writing a lot of copy that no one is making sense of like, as it unflavored water is it unsweetened water as it like, didn’t have lime water, like, there’s a lot, I mean, you can probably tell me about the amount of iterations it took to just make people understand your product, it’s really simple. 10 years in when you’re like, Okay, now we’re going to just make flavored water, you’re just gonna take everything that’s work that someone else has created. And so you kind of have to manage both of those two things.

Kara Goldin 25:44
I think that’s great, great, great wisdom. So you’re on a number of boards and have built your own board as well, always a bit of a mystery for a founders, right, who are trying to put together a board, any lessons and wisdom that you can share and building out boards.

Michele Romanow 26:07
Building your board is exceptionally important. And you want to be looking for a board members that understand founders and that are generally founder friendly. And there’s lots of different versions of this, I would maybe use two litmus tests that I think are important, I think, you even when you’re fundraising should deliver a bad piece of news to an investor at some point. And you should see how they react. And to me, there’s only one form of reaction, their reaction has to be to calm me down, not to rile me up. One of the things as a founder is, it’s already the worst that can possibly be in your mind, you’ve already put your life on the line your family on the line, your savings on the line you are when you’re a founder, you’re just all in. And so when something goes wrong in the business, I’ve already imagined that 8000 ways that this can get worse. And so I’ll give you an example, one of our one of one of my investors, we had a website outage on a big launch day, which is terrible. Because when you launch a bunch of media, you want people to be able to come to your website and sign up for your product. And so if your website goes down, that’s really bad. And I was like, Look, we had this outage, this is very bad. And she goes, You know, it’s happened to another company of mine, except that they went public that day. And so immediately, she just calmed me down, she just said, Look, this, this happens that way bigger scale. And away, we have a problem. And so you want people that have the context where they’ve been doing this for, you know, 20 or 30 years. And so they’re, they’re just, they’re not, you should never be calling with the biggest problem that they’ve heard in their career, and they can give you a lot of context on how to solve it. So that’d be one thing that I’d really test. The other thing that I do before you add something to your board, is I would do some blind calls to other founders that have had that person on their board. I think this is probably the most important thing. So you know, you’re taking money from XYZ VC fund, you look at XYZ partner, you see what other boards they’ve been on, you message those founders on LinkedIn and be like, hey, thinking of taking money from XYZ wanted to know what partner this partner was like. And I’d say 90% of founders will take a random cold LinkedIn message, because this is so important. Almost everyone will tell you, like, look, they were wonderful to deal with, or they were terrible to deal with. And, you know, reputation really matters. And it’s going to make a huge difference to your own mental health on how your investors are going to be. Because companies unfortunately just don’t always go up. Every single company, and even the most successful companies that we absolutely revere as the apples Nikes they have gone through real periods where things were very dark for a very long period of time. And if you do not have people you want to be in the boat with if you do not want to people, if you are not with people you want to weather the storm with, it becomes almost impossible.

Kara Goldin 29:04
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. So best advice you’ve ever received.

Michele Romanow 29:11
Start now that you’re never ready. I think there’s this huge bias for like, need the right time need the right business plan. And they’re all these narratives that are perpetuated from people that are not founders, like, I think companies are the worst at this, like I need two years for to go from an analyst to an associate, I need three years to become a vice president is like, No, you don’t. You need to be like ready to do that. And so when you’re a founder, you got to learn as fast as you can. And you know, you can learn something in three months, or you can learn something in three years. And so I get so many people that come up and they’re like, I’ve been thinking of starting this business, and I’ve been thinking about it for five years, and I’m like, Well, what have you been doing? You got to go so anyway, that’s that I think is the best thing. You’re never ready. You got to look at the side of that swimming pool. Knowing that water is really called, and you gotta jump in. And as soon as you jump in, you will figure out how to tread water. But it’s those that jump in those that are constantly willing to able to get wet. That make it.

Kara Goldin 30:11
Michele Roman, our co founder of clear, co so thankful, grateful that you came on today and share it all your wisdom. Thank you again.

Michele Romanow 30:21
Well, it’s great to be here with another founder, who’s that who is an amazing category creator as well. So thank you.

Kara Goldin 30:27
Thank you. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would, please give us a review. And feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen. Or pick up a copy of my book on daunted which I share my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week, and 2023 and goodbye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening