Martin Schrimpff, Zinobe: Supporting Underserved SMEs with Fintech, Ep 115

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style= "font-size: 24pt;">Martin Schrimpff, Zinobe: Supporting Underserved SMEs with Fintech, Ep 115</span><br /> <br /> Almost 20 years ago, after finishing his engineering degree at the University of Edinburgh, Martin Schrimpff jumped at the opportunity to move back to his native Colombia to set up his first software development company with a friend. That company, Sirius, would kick off Martin’s entrepreneurial journey and lead him to found Payu, a payments business with clients like</span> <span style= "font-weight: 400;"> Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb, and Google.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Becoming an entrepreneur was always at the back of Martin’s mind from a young age, whether it was selling chocolate or setting up small casinos at school, he knew he wanted to have his own business. Over the years, Martin has become an expert in the online payments industry and has founded several successful tech companies including Sirius, Payu, Zinobe, and most recently Centeo.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this episode, I sat down with Martin to talk about his multicultural background, his experience financing his second company, and eventually founding the leading fintech in Colombia for consumer and SMB lending, Zinobe. We also discuss his latest endeavor, Centeo, a startup in Mexico that specializes in vendor finance, and his passion for helping other entrepreneurs get started on their journey.</span></p> <h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Starting a multimillion-dollar company</span></h3> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Martin explains the main differences between building a company that provides a service versus one that provides a product. There are many reasons why a business can fail when developing a product, one of them being the time-consuming nature of the process. It can take many years before you find the right product-market