Venture Everywhere Podcast: Neha Govindraj with Jenny Fielding
Jenny Fielding, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Neha Govindraj, founder and CEO of Bonside, on Episode 14: Catch You on the Bonside
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Neha Govindraj is the founder of Bonside, providing tailor-made financing for brick-and-mortar businesses without dilution, guarantees, collateral, or restrictions on spend. Prior to Bonside, Neha co-founded Glowbar and worked at Bain and Glossier.
This episode is hosted by Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures (previously The Fund). In this interview, Jenny and Neha dive into the founding and thesis behind Bonside. They discuss Bonside’s mission to drive a narrative change in the brick and mortar universe and normalize the multiple ways to finance and scale growth. Hear how a four-hour solo dance performance changed Neha’s perspective forever, and her unique approach to fundraising as a founder. Listen till the end for a neat productivity hack!
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us and be sure to subscribe to Venture Everywhere. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and ideas.everywhere.vc on Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
Read more from Neha Govindraj in Founders Everywhere.
Check out Neha Govindraj on Bloomberg TV.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jenny Fielding
Hi, and welcome to the everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that: founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Jenny Fielding
Welcome to the podcast. Today, we have Neha from Bonside who's going to tell us a little bit more about her vision for - what are we calling them now? Not SMBs?
Neha Govindraj
For multi unit retailers.
Jenny Fielding
I love it - multiunit retailers, I'm not sure I could get that out in one sentence, but awesome. So I'd love to kick off with this, which is, you know, as we think about like, founder archetypes. I always think about, okay, there's the, the founder, the passionate founder, who sees the vision and is just like, gonna get there by any means. And we work with a lot of technical founders, but we also work with like the empath founder, right, and I kind of consider you the ultimate empath founder. In that you were running a business for many years, and you experienced this problem that you're solving with Bonside, firsthand. So take us back to kind of early days of starting the company and some of the insights from Glowbar that inform the new company.
Neha Govindraj
Yes, of course, and thank you again, Jenny for having me on the podcast. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. I think you do such a great job of facilitating conversation. So, excited for this. Going back to early days of Bonside, early days in my career. I started my career at Bain and then went to glowbar and built glowbar and then went to bonside. In all those learnings, I think the biggest thing that kind of jumped out to me was that there was this beautiful ecosystem of venture capital that had been designed for the tech industry. And when you think about traditional financing, the tech industry had all of these things layered on top of it that really catered to them. So they had venture capital, but they also had venture debt. And conversely, when you looked at, you know, the rest of the businesses, which are 99% of businesses, they didn't have that beautiful layer that exist on top of traditional financing. And so instead, they were just directly exposed to all of the nitty gritty of traditional financing anytime they needed capital. And maybe, you know, like a shark loan or two along the way. And when I was sitting in the seat of being a brick and mortar business owner, I found myself really unsatisfied by that.
Neha Govindraj
I looked at my peers that were building tech companies. I thought to myself, Why do you have such amazing options? And I feel like I'm jumping off a cliff of options. Why is there nothing in between that actually serves a business model like mine? And it was that thought that really led me to think about, well, if I were to design an instrument from scratch, if I ignored all of the existing infrastructure in today's world, what would I actually craft for myself? And what I knew was - with a brick and mortar business, you are essentially repeating a playbook. It's really the only business like this that almost operates like a step function, where once you open one location and a second location and a third location, the way you're growing, is by doing that over and over again, at a faster pace with more efficiency. There is no, you know, all of a sudden, we're gonna go and launch cloud services, and all these other things that require learning a new problem from scratch. And so the consistency of that is something that's really underwritable. If you can do that three times, and you have an existing footprint there that's generating top line and generating bottom line, why are we not using those and treating those as individual business units to actually unlock financing in a more efficient manner? And I think a lot of those insights came to me when I was sitting in that business owner seat, right? These were my problems. These were the things that I was thinking about, this is what was keeping me up at night. And I just got so excited by - Hey, I think there's a solution here, when you actually identify the root cause of the problem. And is there an opportunity not just to build a solution for myself, but to actually build it for the broader industry?
Jenny Fielding
We call that the ultimate empath. So I love it. So as you were thinking of this idea, like you've already gone through building a startup, what gave you not the inspiration because we got the inspiration, but the you know, running companies is really hard. Like, I sold my company, and then ended up running another one, I felt pretty exhausted by the second one. So what gave you kind of that like mojo to be like, Okay, I have it in me to do this again?
Neha Govindraj
Yeah, you know, I think at the time, I think it's just the phase of life that I'm in right now, I don't know that I consciously decided, I have this in me. I just had it in me. I'm in this phase of my life right now where I have so much energy to give, and I was so aware of that. I don't have kids, I don't have a mortgage, I don't have any real responsibilities. And we are all living in this world. We are all shaping this world. We are all shaping the future of this world. And so if I want to drive a meaningful portion of that, then right now is my best time to go and run at that. That is what motivates me every day is you know, I look at all these people around us and I'm so in awe of what they're accomplishing and what they're building and what they're doing. And I'm like, Well, how am I any different? Why can't I be one of them? And I have right now all the reasons to go be one of them. And so I think it's just that sort of phase of life that I'm in right now where it's, it's, I have that energy in me to go do it. And so why not?
Jenny Fielding
I love that. So tell us a little bit more about bonside the zoomed out big mission of the company and kind of where you want to take it.
Neha Govindraj
Yeah. So today, we are really focused on financing brick and mortar businesses. And if I think about really what the vision is behind that. What we want to do is, you know, I think the question that folks ask when someone says Oh I'm building a startup, one of the first few questions, it's Oh, are you venture backed? Or did you raise venture capital? I want to change that question. I want that question to be, how did you capitalize your business? And if that's the question we're asking, then we've normalized that there are multiple ways to finance or scale growth. And I think we're starting to see that right. Like, I think most people now - there's a lot of headlines around oh so and so bootstrapped from $0 to a billion, and it's starting to become a little bit more of a thing. But it's almost a headline when someone does it, versus it being normalized as hey, this is how we're all going to do it.
Neha Govindraj
And so our mission at bonside is to really drive that narrative and to drive that change in the brick and mortar universe, where it's almost like, oh, did you did you use bonside to scale? That's how we think about our vision here. And so part of that is, I think the way that we think about it is - it's an intersection of financing, but also data. Because we're ingesting a ton of data, brick and mortars have never had more data that are that behind their business than they do today. And community, right? We're involving these investors that have a passion for these businesses and want to improve their locality and be a part of their stories. And so really, our long term vision is rooted in expanding on our financing arm, but also our data intelligence and our community. And so that's where we see the future going.
Jenny Fielding
Amazing. And how does educating the market come into this vision? I imagine, as you said, like, we're starting to shift our psyche from venture backable really as the only option or like getting a loan, which is not an option for many small businesses. So how are you thinking about getting the word out there - any like interesting ways that you've kind of thought of the last year of running the business?
Neha Govindraj
Yeah, Jenny, all we do is educate. All of our marketing is educating. And it's so fun, right? I think we really think about educating as an opportunity to storytell. And I love storytelling. And so it's every piece of marketing from bonside is meant to shift the way that you think about things. And so I'll give you a few examples. One is our content engine notes.bonside.com, where we write 60-second reads. And it's just very intuitive and very, you know, seventh grader English, to help folks understand the simplicity and the beauty of brick and mortar and why it's something worth watching.
Neha Govindraj
Another example is when we bring deals to our private network for investing, the way that we present those deals to the marketplace, we're very thoughtful about the language that we use to describe the deal and to describe the financing. And so it's little levers, the little things like that, where it's like, every single thing that is external facing at our business is something that we have spent time thinking about exactly what words we use, and make sure we did not miss the opportunity to educate our end consumer. So there's all sorts of things we're doing. We're going to be launching a couple of events later this year. And I'm really excited for those because I think we're gonna bring interesting conversations to life in a really fun way that people won't expect. And so I can't wait to do that.
Jenny Fielding
So when we first met, the thing that I'd heard from other people were: I don't care what she's building, I would back her. And I heard that from multiple people. So when I met you around investing, actually didn't know what you were doing. I mean, maybe someone sent me the deck, but it was more like you need to meet this woman like she's a force. That phrase came up quite a bit. So I'd love any insights on this kind of passion that you have, this force that people seem to identify, where do you think that comes from? Is that you know, something that you were encouraged by a moment, a person growing up? or that drive, any insights there?
Neha Govindraj
First of all, that's so sweet. And I appreciate -
Jenny Fielding
and multiple people said it to me.
Neha Govindraj
That's too nice. I attribute a lot to family and my parents and my upbringing. I think one of the things that was really defining in my childhood, and if you ask my parents about this, they talk about it. If there's something that I am compelled by, or if there's like a vision that I see, and I really see it, I won't stop until I get there. And I get laser focused on it and excited by it and inspired by it, and I want to, I can't sleep and think about anything else other than it. My first example of that was in high school, I did classical Indian dancing growing up. And I would go every Saturday for my class, I can do classical Indian dance class. And I remember I was always the worst one at the dance class. I never practiced or I never had it in me. I was never - I never wanted to be there. And even my dance teacher was like, Come on, just like show up, just like do practice once. And then once you kind do enough classes and you gain enough skill. You had this like little like mini graduation performance where it's a four hour solo dance performance. And my teacher was like, Okay, you're ready for it. And I was like, what?
Jenny Fielding
It's like, four hours by yourself?
Neha Govindraj
Oh, yeah, it's, it's a whole thing.
Jenny Fielding
Wow.
Neha Govindraj
So we decided I was going to do it. And at the beginning of the summer, all of a sudden, I was just like, I want to nail this. Like, I want this to be the best performance that I could ever possibly give. And I created an entire bootcamp around - I was just like so intense about it. And I remember both my mom and my dance teacher, were just like, what? You didn't even care about this, like, I had to force you to show up to class. And I think ever since that moment, I sort of knew, Okay, if I really wanted to do something, I'm gonna get it done. With bonside, I'm not stopping until we accomplish our mission ,like this is everything I want to be doing right now.
Jenny Fielding
Well, it's also a good segue into the round that you recently announced, because this is definitely not the easiest time to be raising capital for your own business. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about how that was raising money. Any challenges around that? And you know, generally any market trends around fundraising?
Neha Govindraj
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think fundraising, it was very different raising my seed round than a pre seed round. One, it was two very different macro environments. And then two, it's really different when you're raising off of an idea where it's so solely about the person versus when you're raising now, it's a little bit of a proof of concept where it's a little bit more mixed. And I think in navigating the fundraising process, I think I really felt the switch when I stopped thinking about it as the fundraising process. And I just said, Okay, I'm gonna just gonna forget. I don't do well, when I try and play the game and join the hype circle, like, I think back to when interviewing for jobs, people had all these like interviewing circles and things like that. And I didn't join any of it. Because I was like, it's actually a distraction from my creativity, I just want to do what naturally feels right. And same thing with fundraising, I was like reading all of the fundraising things and all and I was just like, this is a distraction, I just need to go with intuitively what feels right.
Neha Govindraj
And when I started operating that way, I felt a lot more momentum. And that really came from just saying to myself, forget everything I know about fundraising, I am building a business, I would like to add capital. And I would like to bring on an external person to provide me with capital, so that I can go chase this a little bit further. I have some immediate hires I want to make. I have some immediate investments that I want to make. And so I need capital to do that. And I feel good about bringing someone on and I want to give them a bit of ownership in exchange for that, right? When you actually break it down to the fundamentals of what you are doing, it makes it way easier to set up a conversation and actually just talk to someone like they're human. And have a two way expectation where it's like, Hey, Jenny, I'm telling you that about my business, let's see if you're the right person to come in and be my financial partner on this business. And that sort of conversation is just a lot more natural versus okay, I've gotten my pitch deck and I like, you know, I'm accept my intro call, and I'm gonna tell them like, hey, other people are talking like I got to know in the next three days. It was just way more natural. And as a result, I love our cap table, I really feel like it's so representative of the business that we're building. And every person on there is just a great human being and really passionate about what we're doing in some way, shape, or form. So yeah.
Jenny Fielding
That's awesome. When you are raising either your preseed or your seed, did you get any skepticism around helping brick and mortar? Right? So I think there's definitely a sentiment of okay, well, you know, the High Street is dying, or, you know, whatever some of these things are. And so was that a challenge at all, or not so much?
Neha Govindraj
You know, Jenny, what's interesting is, I feel like that conversation was really big a few years ago, where retail is dead. And I think coming out of a pandemic, almost actually eliminated that conversation, because we all realized that, if retail is dead, so is our culture, and community and any sense of life, right? Because retail was dead for a period of time. And we all felt it. And none of us ever want to live in our homes or just over technology ever again. And so I honestly didn't face that statement as much, or that controversy as much, as much as I faced SMB financing is hard. And that was something that I heard time and time again. And more than disagree with that, or more than feel like it was feedback on the business. I disagreed with the the generalization of that statement - of SMB financing, to finance 99% of the businesses in this country is hard. Do you realize how big of a statement that is? And do you really think that every single business in that 99%, you don't think there's actually a way to even carve it down to 3% and make that financing easy? That was the question that I really pushed when I heard that feedback? And I would say Okay, talk to me about why you feel that way. What have you seen that supports that? And support all 99% of business? Are you actually just talking about 10% of businesses or 20% of businesses? So I would say that was more the feedback point.
Jenny Fielding
Back to your superpower of educating people, helping them understand where their own biases come from. I love it. Can you talk a little bit about some of the companies that you serve? I mean, you don't have to tell us the names but more kind of the challenges that they have or kind of what the demographic is? Love to just kind of get that out there.
Neha Govindraj
Yes, 100%. I love the businesses we serve, because they are the businesses that I frequent. They are multi unit services based businesses. They are the emerging brands and concepts that are so brilliant at providing a service, that falls into for us - generally three categories. The first is food and beverage, the second is health and wellness. And then the third is kind of traditional services or clinic based care. So think like auto services, or a clinic or a daycare. So those three categories are really where we're laser focused. The beauty of these businesses is, many of them were started in the last five years. And they have seen rapid growth and expansion because of customer loyalty and a desire to start to feel like you belong to the businesses that you frequent. And they place roots in communities where people own homes and send their kids to school. And so people are really looking to build that community within their brick and mortars and maybe not consciously, right? Not like, oh, every Tuesday, I go to the coffee store, and I have my like game night there, maybe you do. But just Oh, every morning, or at least three mornings a week, I go to this coffee shop and I get coffee, that is your community. That's part of your interactions. And so those are the businesses that we really serve.
Neha Govindraj
And what's interesting about that is, you know, a lot of these businesses when they get started, we don't necessarily finance their first location. We come in after their second or their third. They get their first location off the ground, by leveraging family and friends capital, or maybe their existing capital, or they've got a scrappy way to be able to build out a location, or maybe they've taken on like an SBA loan of sorts. As they start to think about continued growth. Sure, you can go the route of bringing in venture capital, and we can have a longer discussion about that. But let's say you say, Okay, I'm not going to take on venture capital for my location expansion, bank financing isn't necessarily catering directly to this, these business owners, right, because bank financing is built off of - you need operating history, and you need to actually personally be wealthy so that you can guarantee this loan. And if you think about that, it's like, Well, why is that? And you know, I often say this, the requirements for banking or for bank loans haven't been iterated on in like a century. And so it's if you think about back in the day, who started businesses, it was the already wealthy and so they could personally guarantee their loans. And that's why I think with this state of how bank, bank financing is done, it's very needed for a modern player to cater to these modern brands. And that's where we play.
Jenny Fielding
Awesome. What would you say is one idea that experts in your field say that you disagree with?
Neha Govindraj
SMB financing is hard?
Jenny Fielding
Okay, so we're, so we're back to that.
Neha Govindraj
That's what I would disagree with, I think, yeah, the statement is SMB financing is hard. And I really think it's not even disagree with, it's way too big of a generalization. I think the term SMB is something I disagree with. It's like describing 99% of our population with one word, you don't you just don't do that. Right. And so, yeah.
Jenny Fielding
That makes sense. If you had to distill all of your great attributes down into one superpower, the thing that you do better than other folks? For me, it's really being able to stitch together kind of things that seem disparate into, you know, something that is coherent, or make connections that don't necessarily seem obvious for the future. So kind of curious what your entrepreneurial superpower is?
Neha Govindraj
You know, that's such a hard question, because entrepreneurs have so many superpowers that I think it's such a bold thing to say.
Jenny Fielding
Many hats, but what's one of the things that you know?
Neha Govindraj
Sorry, what I meant by that was not that I have so many superpowers. I meant was, there are people - there are so many entrepreneurs that are so good at so many things that I would never be so bold to say this is my superpower. Like, I think there's probably 10,000 other people like me that have that superpower? If I went like so down to my core, I think it's going back to my high school dance days, I love performing. In another life would have loved to be a performer of some sorts. And so I think I leverage that as my superpower in business. Because I don't think there's as many people who love performing in business and to me being a performer means connecting with people's emotions, understanding when they're lighting up, leaning into that, being able to really connect with someone at a deep level and break things down that seem complex into things that are a bit more simple, and getting joy out of all of that. And it's that performer that I think - I love a big meeting. I love a big presentation. So yeah.
Jenny Fielding
That's very cool. All right, we're gonna wrap it up with our typical speed round. So I think you are a consumer of lots of content. Is there a book or podcast or something that you're enjoying right now?
Neha Govindraj
I would say a book that I'm enjoying right now that I just read - I pick up and read is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I actually feel like recently it's been all over Instagram. That's like coffee table books, but it's not just a coffee table book, pick it up and read it. I'm like halfway through it. I read a chapter like every other day or so. It's just a nice way to pull you out of your world and reshape how you think creatively.
Jenny Fielding
I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
Neha Govindraj
I feel like I would want to do Australia. That I just want to be in nature and be in all types of nature. And I feel like Australia is such a great place to do that.
Jenny Fielding
Beautiful place. Favorite productivity hack. I'm very excited to hear about this from you. Because I feel like you're a very responsive person. And when you want something like when we were talking about I think PR and stuff, you just went at it full force. And so I was like, wow, this is - she definitely has some skills here on organizing her time.
Neha Govindraj
Thanks. Okay, I will give something that's very, very hacky. My phone screen is really clean. There's nothing really on there. And I basically only put the stuff on there that is like highest priority that I want to deal with at that point in time. And so when PR was a big priority, it was like there was a homescreen thing related to it. So it's probably like a Google Doc with PR stuff. And so my home screen is like my visual reminder of what's most important to me, and sorry by homescreen that I mean, like when you unlock your iPhone,
Jenny Fielding
that's awesome. I like that. Just have it front and center without all the other distractions. Okay, well, Where should our listeners find you?
Neha Govindraj
You can find me on Twitter at Neha Gov. You can also find me BTS on Bonside Instagram, which is Bonside Inc, and Bonside Twitter, which is also Bonside Inc.
Jenny Fielding
All right, we're just so thrilled to have you and congrats on all the success. Thank you.
Neha Govindraj
Thank you, Jenny.
Scott Hartley
Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn about everywhere, we’re a first check preseed fund that does exactly that. We invest everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc on LinkedIn and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Neha in Founders Everywhere.
Check out Neha on Bloomberg TV.