Click here for Part I, Part III, Part IV, 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: Your startup success story is not a typical one. How did you end up in Hoboken after graduating Y Combinator, and how did your company change in the process?

NATE MATHERSON: You hear a lot in the news, in the media and on tech sites, about these overnight success startups. For us, it was not an overnight success by any means. After we got out of the Iowa Startup Accelerator, we had an 8-month period of no growth, but then we figured out that we were really good at creating content. That’s when things started to go right in our business. Like I said, our investors decided that they would reinvest in our company. They believed in us enough that they would invest in what looked like a very failing startup, but quickly things started to go right in our business.

We hired our smartest friends from college. All of our roommates started working for us. We ended up growing from August to October in a real way. We actually had money coming into our bank account for the first time, and that’s when we decided to apply to Y Combinator.

One thing led to another. We ended up getting into Y Combinator. At this time, we really weren’t sure where our business was at, because we were starting to grow but it still felt very fragile. But, we were going to move to California. When you get into Y Combinator, they require you to move out to the Bay Area and live in Mountain View. We had, at this point, four employees working for us—four of our college roommates who were also students at the University of Delaware working for us part-time—and when we got into Y Combinator, we asked them: “Do you want to come move out with us and live in a house with us in Mountain View?

We thought one of our four employees might say yes, but surprisingly, they all said yes. We moved out to Mountain View with a team of six. When the program started we had rented a three-bedroom house in Mountain View where we would work and live for the next four months at Y Combinator.

We worked every single day for four months, which was really hard. We worked seven days a week, and by the end of it, we were all tired. Our entire team gave it our all to grow, grow, grow. They set a goal for you to grow by about 9 percent per week in terms of revenue while you’re at Y Combinator. They set your goals for you. And we did it. Over that four-month period we were able to grow our revenue by about 9 percent each week. By the end of that experience, our entire team was exhausted. So we gave all of our employees about three weeks off.

Matt and I continued to work back and forth between the East Coast and California, trying to raise money post-YC and our employees just relaxed, which they deserved, and right around at the end of April or early May we set up shop in my college apartment in Newark, Delaware, where we would work for the next two months before we went to Hoboken.

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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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