TWIF: Private credit investing, art collecting, and building a $1B investment platform from the ground up

Today, we go to New York to talk with Nelson Chu, the founder and CEO of Percent.

Percent has created the modern credit marketplace, empowering investors, borrowers, and underwriters with innovative technology to increase the speed and velocity of transactions at a fraction of the cost. The company’s core infrastructure delivers public market efficiencies to the analog private credit market by powering the sourcing, structuring, syndication, surveillance and servicing of private credit transactions from beginning to end. Founded in 2018, Percent’s platform is becoming the market standard for asset-backed and corporate lending, powering over $1 billion in transaction volume in a multi-trillion-dollar private credit industry.

Nelson Chu is a repeat founder who got his start in finance working on the Fixed Income portfolio at Bank of America and then BlackRock. Coming out of banking, Nelson first founded technology consulting business Lumenary, a strategic advisory group focused on bringing innovative and transformative ideas to life. He leveraged his experience at Lumenary to become a formal advisor to a few other well-known names in the fintech ecosystem including Recharge Capital and BlockFi, before founding Percent in 2018 (anticipating the currrent private credit boom).

Percent is a platform for sourcing, structuring, syndicating, monitoring, and servicing private credit transactions. The platform recently passed $1 billion in transaction volume, and can be found at percent.com.

Summary

Nik Milanovic interviews Nelson Chu, founder of Percent, a private credit platform. Nelson shares his journey from starting in tech at Apple in 2007, through his finance roles at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and BlackRock, to founding multiple companies, including Lumenary and My Support. He discusses the inception of Percent in 2018, which has facilitated over $1 billion in transactions. Nelson emphasizes the importance of standardization in private credit, the role of venture capital in scaling his ventures, and his involvement in nonprofits like Yama Yama Malawi and Womankind. He also touches on his passion for art collection.