Founder Notes with Nelson Chu and Prath Reddy

We almost got caught up in the First Brands mess years ago, but declined because it didn’t pass muster. Now it’s a $2.3B black hole. This week, Nelson and Prath unpack what went wrong, why redemptions are spiking, and the absurdity of private credit ETFs. Also: our secondary market is getting real traction, Brex just sold for $5B, and the administration wants a 10% credit card cap that could do more harm than good.

Prath’s favorite saying becomes the theme of the episode. In the first full week of 2026, Percent signed a new software client, activated white-label platforms, saw organic secondary market traction, and onboarded two new hires already closing deals. Nelson and Prath break down what’s actually clicking, where private credit is headed, and why contrarian bets are starting to pay off.

In this episode, I sit down with Bryan Pham, our Head of Institutional Sales, to talk about the launch of our Separately Managed Accounts and why we built them. Bryan came from the other side of the table—JP Morgan, family offices—and he’s lived the exact frustrations we’re now solving. We dig into why institutional money moves differently than retail, the phone calls that made us realize Blended Notes weren’t enough, and how we’re making SMAs accessible at $100K instead of the typical $500K+. If you’re trying to understand how to scale upmarket in fintech, this is worth a listen.

We built a durable marketplace. Now the industry needs infrastructure, and that starts with me returning to square one. It won’t be forever, but six to twelve months of trench time will compound for years.

I sit down with Marc Andrew, who's become a leading voice in private markets by putting the right people in the right room together. We cover the slow decline of public listings, why firms can’t run on Excel anymore, and how AI, cloud, and interoperable data are opening real build zones. It’s a deep dive into the unsexy but essential plumbing for the future of finance.

Private credit funds often use “volatility laundering” to make returns look smoother than they are. In this episode, I talk about why Percent decided to do things differently, what radical transparency looks like in practice, and how sharing the full story with investors has helped us build lasting trust and a stronger business.

What happens when a capital markets pro pivots to product? In this episode, Kiley Lubeck and I discuss her journey from manually confirming allocations on a broken CMS to building tech that processes billions. We cover the brutal art of roadmap prioritization, why fintech PMs think like compliance officers, and how our biggest product wins came from solving our own worst pain points.

I break down the absurdity of today’s private credit markets: no liquidity, no standards, no real price discovery. But I also talk about what comes next—and how real infrastructure could double the market and unlock access for 199,000 underserved companies.

In this episode, I sit down with Paola Rios, our VP of Investor Relations & Syndication and employee #7, who's been with us since the early days when syndication was just "scramble." We dive into the art of matchmaking between borrowers who want cheap money and investors who want high returns, the plot twists that make her wish for a punching bag, and why herd mentality drives more investment decisions than you'd think. If you’ve ever invested in a deal on Percent, Paola probably had something to do with it.

In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on Percent’s chaotic origin story—from having investors lined up with zero borrowers to closing our first deal for a few hundred thousand dollars we now laugh about. I share the unglamorous truth about playing the two-sided confidence game every marketplace founder knows, why we chose to be exponentially better rather than revolutionary, and the critical lessons about flexibility that saved our company. This is the real story of how we built Percent, scramble and all.