Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part V & Part VI

Helping individuals pay back their student loans through refinancing as low as 2.13%

Nate Matherson is the CEO and co-founder of LendEDU, an online platform for student debt refinancing. LendEDU allows its users to compare rates between 12 different student loan lenders, including SoFi, LendKey, iHelp, Education Success Loans, College Ave Student Loans, Upstart, and more. Nate started the company with his dormmate, Matt Lenhard, at the University of Delaware in 2014; since then, LendEDU has graduated the Iowa Startup Accelerator and Y Combinator business accelerator programs, and has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Bloomberg, NPR, CBS News, Fox News, TechCrunch, and many others.

EDWIN WARFIELD: How has the company been able to sustain growth?

NATE MATHERSON: LendEDU has never been well-funded. We’ve always been very frugal. For the first two years of our business, Matt and I got paid couple hundred bucks a month. We paid ourselves virtually nothing for the first two years, and that did a lot for us in terms of being able to extend out our life. I’m a firm believer that the longer you can work on your startup, the higher chances of success for that startup—the more time to give yourself to do something right. We’ve always taken that philosophy: keep as low of a burn rate as possible.

Maybe we’re just not good at raising money, or LendEDU’s not an interesting company to invest in. We just never raised any money—we were never really any good at it. So, for the first two years of our business we focused on being profitable and growing profitably. We said that we didn’t want to lose money because we really didn’t have money to lose.

I don’t want to talk about competitors specifically, but I think that methodology is a lot different than what you see other startups doing. In contrast to LendEDU, you have startups that go out there and raise $10 million immediately. They don’t even have a product and they’re building a different type of business. They’re building a business that is high risk/high reward, in my opinion—for themselves, for their employees, for their investors—and they know that, but at LendEDU we’ve tried to raise less money and grow at our own pace while being profitable.

Q. Tell us about going out and convincing lenders to participate.

A. It was a difficult process, because we would go to these lenders, and we knew nothing about the student loan industry. The way we set up the initial conversations with our lenders was through LinkedIn Premium: for three bucks you can email anybody you want. So, we would go and search and find the head of business development at all of these different lending companies, and we would just cold email them and say, “Hey, John we have a lot of leads we can send you. We can send you a lot of business.” That’s how we would set up the initial conversations with our lenders.

But then when we got them on the phone, we would say, “We don’t have any lenders on our marketplace now. We’re building this marketplace and you can be the first one that could join.” None of the lenders wanted to be the first lender to join our marketplace. So, creatively, we had to convince them that what we were doing would be worth their time. It was not easy. We launched with three lenders who were trusting enough to believe in what we were doing.

Connect with Nate on LinkedIn

Sponsored by:

ABOUT NEWMARK GRUBB KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Grubb Knight Frank (NGKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NGKF's 14,100 professionals operate from more than 400 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NGKF's strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NGKF's full-service platform comprises BGC's real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

NGKF is a part of BGC Partners, Inc., a leading global brokerage company servicing the financial and real estate markets. BGC's common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol (NASDAQ: BGCP). BGC also has an outstanding bond issuance of Senior Notes due June 15, 2042, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: BGCA). BGC Partners is led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Howard W. Lutnick. For more information, please visit http://www.bgcpartners.com/.

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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