The War Room

Matthew Goldman is the CEO of Vertical Finance. His previous company, Wallaby Financial, was acquired by Bankrate in 2014. Just months before that, negotiating the purchase and way beyond the point of no return, Matthew got a phone call... and then everything screeched to a halt.

18 months into building their product, with almost 200K users in their waiting list, the team at Simple, the OG neobank, was a month out from finally launching. Everyone wrote them off, but they were ready. Then, they got an unexpected phone call... 

You may know Matt Harris (no, not that one, the other one) and Bloom Credit, the fast-growing credit infrastructure company he co-founded. Bloom is on a tear with its latest product iteration, but things were not always so rosy and fast-moving. In this episode Matt talks about the moment he realized he needed a drastic change and how someone doing exactly what he asked them not to do let to a priceless epiphany.

Truebill is a fast-growing consumer finance startup that just announced a major round of financing. A few years ago, though, it was on the brink of going out of business with a month of runway left. Then co-founder and then-CEO Yahya Mokhtarzada agreed to do the one thing he'd been resisting all along.

A brief introduction to The War Room - a new experiment