William Leonard
Hey, everyone! My name is William Leonard, your host for today, and this is the Virginia StartUp podcast. I’m really excited to be joined by Boomer Muth, who is the CEO and co-founder of Koalafi. Boomer, welcome to the Virginia StartUp Podcast!
Boomer Muth
Yeah, thank you for having me, William.
William Leonard
Yeah, Boomer. I want to just jump right in and get into the Boomer story. And you know your arc of choosing Virginia, thinking about the journey and trajectory of your career as a new graduate, and how you started on your founder journey. So I’ll kick it over to you to just dive right into that.
Boomer Muth
Okay, yeah, well, William, I’d say my journey as an entrepreneur started when I was about 14. Me and a couple of buddies decided we wanted to start a band, but none of us knew how to play instruments. So, we decided what instruments we were going to play and essentially learned them together. And I think, not dissimilar from entrepreneurship, this is really what we all do when we take that leap. We say we believe we can do something that we’ve never done before, and getting to see what a group of us could do together. You know, we learned our instruments together, and we were playing our first show a year later. At our first show, we actually got thumbs down—people were booing. It was pretty bad, but we still kept deciding to push through that, which I think is kind of the definition of grit: believing in yourself enough that the outward perception doesn’t change your drive. And eventually, we actually started getting people to like us, and people would come to our shows and see us. And, you know, just like entrepreneurship, we had to learn how to sell our product. We had to constantly refine the product based on the feedback we were getting from the crowd.
We were doing well enough that the reason I chose Virginia Tech to go to was for a couple of reasons. One, everybody in the band agreed, and, you know, we had in our minds that we were going to be rock stars, so everyone agreed we could go to Virginia Tech together and keep our journey together. Then, my dad told me that he would pay for college (I was fortunate) if I went into engineering, but if I wasn’t in engineering, he wouldn’t pay for college, and Virginia Tech had an engineering school. I was able to achieve both things at the same time.
A few years into college, we were doing pretty well as a band. We were touring quite a bit, getting some attention, and it was distracting from school. So, as a band, we agreed to take a year off. We got our parents to agree, but they said we could take a year off to focus on the band. All of our parents said, “You could do this, but you have to pay your bills.” So, hey, that was my first experience in business. We had to market ourselves, and we had to make sure that fraternities and bars were paying us. We just toured up and down the East Coast playing shows, and it was just a great experience. In hindsight, I realized I learned a lot about entrepreneurship from that. Well, we didn’t really take off; we didn’t become rock stars. So, I went back to school and finished school.
After school, I went to Capital One, and Capital One has a great culture. I think they were doing things that were completely reinventing what could be done in the credit card space. If you don’t know Capital One’s story, it’s kind of important for the Central Virginia area, and we’ll get to Startup Virginia later. Capital One’s a big sponsor of Startup Virginia, which really helps entrepreneurs now. Capital One essentially looked at the credit card space and applied first principles thinking to say, instead of hiring a bunch of finance majors to use off-the-shelf credit scores, they would hire engineers and statisticians to get as much data as possible to build the most intelligent models to underwrite consumers differently than others. Capital One came off a local bank called Signet Bank and is now, I think, one of the four largest banks in the country. And it really is because they looked at the problem differently. So, there was a lot of entrepreneurial thinking at Capital One.
Now, four years into my journey at Capital One, this is around 2006, I realized I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn’t know any entrepreneurs. So, I went to the people I was surrounded with—my coworkers—and said, “I want to start a company, and I have this idea for a senior home care company, where caregivers go into seniors’ homes and help them with everyday things that you and I might take for granted.” My coworker said, “Sounds like a great idea, but sounds really risky. You have a great thing going here—you’ve got a team that reports to you.” I was 26 or 27 at the time, making good money, and they said, “Man, that sounds really risky.” I listened to them, and I decided to start my business while I was at Capital One. I started a senior healthcare business called Home Helpers.
What happened over the following six years, I did two things in a mediocre way. My career at Capital One plateaued because I was distracted with my business, and I ended up selling my company six years later for half of the money that I put into it. By the way, I never paid myself anything over those six years, so financially, it would be defined as a failure, but a wonderful learning experience, right? You’re either winning or learning. I wasn’t winning for those six years, but I was doing a lot of learning. That was my first foray into entrepreneurship.
After that, William, I’ll say this: I learned that you have to be focused. If I had gone all in on Home Helpers, it probably would’ve had a much higher likelihood of success. But I’ll tell you, the most important lesson I learned was from our clients, who were seniors towards the end of their lives. You know, the big lesson I learned about entrepreneurship is, if you want to do something, talk to people who have actually done it. I didn’t know any entrepreneurs, so I talked to my coworkers. I was absolutely talking to the wrong people, right? “Show me your five closest friends, and I’ll tell you who you are.” I wasn’t surrounded by entrepreneurs, so I wasn’t going to become an entrepreneur. I think that hits on a lot of things we’ll talk about later on. Another big lesson I learned in life was talking to seniors who were at the end of their lives. I started realizing a theme in my conversations with them. Nobody I ever talked to regretted something they tried and failed at. The only regrets I ever heard were things they had never ever tried. This was almost like an unlock for me. I had a client who said, “I retired a little early, at 55, and it was a little tougher financially, but I always dreamed of writing a book. I wrote it and only 40 people read it, but there it is.” He pointed over to his bookshelf and said, “But, there it is,” but he has a huge smile on his face. He might have defined that before he started as a failure, but at the end of his life, he said, “That was what I always dreamed of doing, and I did it.” And so, I had this revelation that everything society feeds us is BS, right? They say, “Don’t do that, it’s risky, it’s scary.” The real risk in life is not taking risks, because that’s what we’ll regret at the end of the day. William, I’m doing a lot of talking. Is this some of the stuff you wanted to hear?
William Leonard
Boomer, that is so interesting, and that’s one of the things that I was told before I went to college: take risks while you’re young. And the biggest regret that a lot of people had when they did get through their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s was reflecting on the risks they didn’t take early on when they had the ability, energy, and bandwidth to do so. And so, what an interesting story, Boomer. Going from high school to starting a band, to Virginia Tech, dropping out, going back to school, and then going to Capital One. Curious to just hear, you know, thinking about the arc of that story in your early career, was there a moment, a defining moment, where you said, my experiences from being in the band, going to school, dropping out of school for a semester, and then going to start a home health care company, and now thinking about finance and fintech, and how you can unlock access to credit for people with subprime, non-prime credit—what was the moment for you where you said, I have to go out and start Koalafi? There’s no—I can’t wait any longer. I have to start right now.
Boomer Muth
Yeah, that’s a great question, William, and it sounds like you had some great mentors in your life to tell you to take those risks. I think that’s really wise advice, and I would say it’s not just when you’re young. I think it should never stop. Now, on that, I don’t think I got introspective until pretty recently, so I don’t think I actually was thinking much about my journey and how I got there. But something happened shortly after I sold Home Helpers: Capital One laid me off. And to tell you the truth, William, they should have. My heart wasn’t into it. I wasn’t providing the value to them that I should have been providing, and they laid me off. And it was just a phenomenal gift because so much of us as humans, we just do today exactly what we did yesterday, and we’re going to keep doing that same thing every day unless some outside force pushes us to change. And that outside force was this wake-up call from Capital One that said, “Hey, you need to take a real hard look at what you’re doing with your life,” and that’s how I interpret it.
Now, luckily, it was the second time I had been laid off, so I was able to interpret it that way. The first time I got laid off, six years earlier, I really took the first job I could find. And hey, sometimes you have to make those mistakes to learn. This time, I said, “I am not going to jump to the first job I can get. I’m going to take this gift to be introspective and say, ‘Who do I want to be? What do I want to do?'” And I got introduced to my two co-founders, Rob and Scott. In meeting with Rob and Scott, they had the idea for Koalafi. They had the idea for the business. They said, “Listen, we realized that in the point-of-sale finance space, when customers go into retailers and they can’t get approved for traditional financing, they don’t have an ideal experience. Most of the players in the space aren’t intelligent around machine learning underwriting the consumer in an intelligent way to help reach and access more consumers, and that means retailers are missing out on sales, and customers are missing out on purchasing the product they need in their life.”
And in addition to that, we talked together and said, “And also, in the point-of-sale finance space, particularly non-prime, most of the players just aren’t super transparent with the customer. And most dissatisfaction in our lives, in your life, William, and my life, is because our expectation is misaligned with what happened.” And so we said, “If we can enter this space and be super transparent with the consumer and also underwrite in a really intelligent way, we can offer a differentiated product.”
Now, I think part of my entrepreneurial journey and some of the stuff I shared with you leading up to this is where we actually started agreeing on what our partnership would look like. Initially, they wanted to offer me stock options and a reasonable salary to actually start the company for them because they had a consulting firm called 2nd Order Solutions that was doing really well. And they said, “We want you to start the company for us.” I’m going to condense months of conversations into one conversation: It got to a point where I asked each of them, “Well, how much money are you putting into the business?” They told me, and it happened to be about exactly what I could pull together in cash if I borrowed money from my 401(k) and other places I had access to. And so I essentially said, “Well, if I can put the same amount you guys are putting in, can I be an equal partner?” They said, “Sure, we didn’t know you had that kind of money.” I said, “I’ll pull it together.”
So, I really went all in because I knew from lessons I had learned before that my odds of regretting that were really, really low. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Well, my most powerful asset, I said, is me—it’s my experiences. I can go work for someone else, right? And so, going all in on Koalafi was one of the best choices I ever made because, as soon as I did that, I got really, really uncomfortable, and I was forced to learn a lot of things that, had I gone down just a traditional path, I wouldn’t have been forced to learn.
William Leonard
Yeah, and Boomer, you and I were talking about a couple of weeks back about just finding a wedge, and it sounds like the wedge for you all was a differentiated customer experience. So, you join these guys as an equal partner. And I’m curious to hear, just when you’re coming from a more technical engineering background, one of the challenges that a lot of founders face early on—angel, pre-seed, seed, even into Series A—is growing through founder-led sales. Curious to just hear your thought process and how you overcame that learning curve of coming from this technical background to now learning enterprise founder-led sales.
Boomer Muth
Yes, that was an interesting journey, William, because, you know, back in high school, I was a Math geek. I was thinking in numbers, thinking in very quantitative terms, and obviously going into engineering as well. I had a belief going into starting the company that, almost like the “if you build it, they will come” mentality. We would build the best product, and that would mean we would win. My first few sales, because in the beginning of the company, I was doing every role. I was just driving up and down Broad Street, which is kind of a main street in Richmond, stopping at furniture retailers. And I’d walk in and say, “Hey, we have the best machine learning algorithms. We’re going to help you make sales.”
And they would just look at me with a blank stare because they don’t know what that means. It means nothing to their world at all. All I did was walk into their store and start spouting a bunch of stuff that was about me and about what I was building that I was super excited about, but they don’t understand. It took me embarrassingly many visits—probably 100—before I had this unlock. I said, “You know what? I’m not even going to tell the person what I’m doing. I’m just going to walk in and ask a bunch of questions.”
I happened to get the owner of the store, and I said, “Hey, what can you tell me about your financing that you’re using right now?” He goes, “Well, honestly, we’re really happy with what we have.” And he started walking me through everything about their financing. I said, “Okay, well, tell me more about why you like them,” and just got really curious. If you ask somebody what they really like, they’ll eventually start telling you what they don’t like, if you’re just patient enough to listen.
And when you find out what they don’t like, that’s when you find out what you should actually start talking to them about. Going in with this presumptive notion that you know what your customer cares about is, one, very egotistical (which I was in that moment), but two, it’s a waste of energy and time. You’re just going to talk about a bunch of stuff that the person doesn’t care about. So, there was this unlock where I realized, Wow, I need to get the customer to talk about what the pain points are, and that requires curious listening.
Finally, he told me what the pain point was. He said, “You know, they’re asking for a big discount. When this financing company buys it, they’re going to buy it from me at 94 cents on the dollar.” Now I knew the margins we could have in this product, and I said, “Well, what if we just paid you the cash price for the item?” He said, “Oh, well, now we’re talking!”
It only took one sentence. Instead of walking in and talking about everything I cared about, I started talking about what he cared about. That was my big unlock. And I would say probably a lot of entrepreneurs don’t realize this, but your job in sales is to, one, do a bunch of reps. That means going out and you’re going to get a bunch of “no’s,” but you get right back up and you go again. And, two, listening curiously, because then your customer is really going to design your product for you.
William Leonard
Right? I see that, and product and customer discovery is one of the most critical things that we’re seeing even more prevalent today, in today’s day and age. As you know, with AI, it’s been so prevalent that people are building solutions in search of problems, versus figuring out the problem first and then building a solution, much like you did through reps, customer discovery, or what we call “shots on goal.” So, you know, that’s one of the key unlocks that you’ve had.
Boomer, I’m curious to hear what other key and non-obvious insights and learnings you had as a founder from the early days of building Koalafi. You’ve raised over $190 million now for the company, so there had to have been some interesting key unlocks and learnings from that journey. Give us more insight into that.
Boomer Muth
Yes, I think a big key insight was that you can move really fast in the beginning when you have access to every aspect of your product. This is a really beautiful time—I mean, I still romanticize about those early days because I was answering every customer call, every merchant call. I was doing the data analysis to figure out what we were seeing in our customer behavior. I was in our portal, figuring out what each customer was going through, talking to the customer, talking to our tech team on how to build the product and improve it.
I had this unique point in time where there wasn’t a bunch of communication across multiple people. The communication was inside my brain. And that’s a really powerful thing because communication is difficult. Building out a model and an organization with multiple people involved that communicates effectively and moves together is a very challenging part of scaling. It’s an important part. But in the very beginning, you have this beautiful time where you know exactly how everything works and how it fits together. There’s just beautiful innovation that happens when that starts happening in the beginning.
So when you start thinking about scaling, the question becomes: How do you continue to replicate that? How do you ensure that there’s trust amongst the team and you’re communicating actively and continuously? William, it’s still something that we think about every day. It’s kind of our most important job as leaders of the organization.
William Leonard
Boomer, that’s awesome insight, man, and I just have a tangential question to that, kind of off the cuff. But you talk about moving fast in the beginning when you’re so involved as a founder with every aspect of the business. I mean, you kind of have to be—you probably had a three to five-person team, and you’re touching every aspect of the product. How do you know when a product is working early on? What are the signs that this is repeatable, scalable and that our customers are actually going to adopt and use this product?
Boomer Muth
Yeah, it’s interesting, and it is more obvious than you might think, right? Because when you’re talking to the customers, you can hear it in their voice. That’s why it’s so important—if you’re founding a company, in the very beginning, you absolutely have to be talking to your customers. Because, they will show you the surprise and delight. If you don’t hear any excitement when you get on the phone with them, it probably means something’s not quite right.
In the very beginning, you’re going to be bending over backwards for them, and the combination of you bending over backwards and the product you’re building meeting their needs should create almost ecstasy in your customer. It’s not only that, but then you also start seeing referrals. The person I told you about—the store where I finally learned to listen—was part of a network of 40 different furniture stores up and down the East Coast. About two months after we started running with him, he said, “I gotta tell my buddies about you guys.” He set up a meeting where we could go and talk to every single one of them. And all of them signed up, and the ones that didn’t sign up did shortly after because they started talking about it.
So, if you don’t have your customers talking to other people in their network, sharing your product with others, and you don’t hear the excitement in their voice, that’s probably how you know you’re not quite there yet.
William Leonard
Right? Right, right. Now, Boomer, I want to continue the conversation and keep moving it forward here. So, one question I have for you is just around the broader ecosystem and experience that you had with Capital One, and how that really helped influence your experience of building Koalafi. Operating at an enterprise level as an engineer, and then transitioning to operating as a founder, serving the enterprise—what did you learn from Capital One that seamlessly translated to your time as a founder and CEO of Koalafi?
Boomer Muth
Yes, I think the most powerful thing Capital One provided was a structure for logical decision-making. In the early days, they called it “information-based strategy”—a statement without data is just an opinion. So, learning that data is your best way to understand everything you need for a logical decision was probably one of the most powerful parts of our learning.
You know, me and our other two co-founders, Rob Finnegan and Scott Barton, were both executives at Capital One. So each of us having that mindset—we’re not going to decide the next thing until we have information—was critical. If you can create quantitative data, it makes it a lot easier, but also understanding that qualitative experience is another form of data. Always using what we actually see to determine our path forward was probably the most powerful thing that Capital One delivered for our journey.
William Leonard
I love that. And Boomer, you’ve been in Virginia for the majority of your life now, it sounds like, and you’ve been able to see the ecosystem grow and elevate while you’ve been actively building a company. And I’m sure, looking retrospectively, it’s even more exciting to see the growth of Virginia. How have you seen this ecosystem evolve? And what is the most exciting thing that comes to mind when someone says, Hey, I’m building in Virginia? This is what I want to do.
Boomer Muth
Yes, Virginia—and I’ll speak mostly to Central Virginia, which is where we started Koalafi and also where I live—so I’m more familiar with the ecosystem. When we started 10 years ago, there wasn’t much of an ecosystem. If I could go back in time, I would have networked with other entrepreneurs a lot earlier. I think that me and our other two founders, we kind of learned together, and thank goodness we had each other. If we hadn’t had each other, it would have been impossible without a network or community. But I wish I had networked more with other entrepreneurs in the beginning.
We didn’t have a place to work, so our first five months were spent meeting at Panera. We would meet there to decide what we were doing. Then we thought we had enough revenue to sublease a conference room from a local accounting firm, so we were just sitting in a room every day, looking at each other face-to-face with no huddle rooms to break off for meetings.
Now there’s a wonderful infrastructure in Virginia. You’ve got Startup Virginia, which is in the 1717 building, and Capital One provides a lot of funding for that. It’s a phenomenal ecosystem because it provides co-location with other entrepreneurs and fantastic networking opportunities, but also offers a space to work and shared office space. You’ve got Lighthouse Labs, another great firm. For Black entrepreneurs, there’s the Jackson Ward Collective, which is doing incredible things to help entrepreneurs grow. You also have a couple of early angel funds like the Trolley Venture Fund, which invests only in Virginia companies, and Activation Capital, which is really focused on the biotech community but also helps the broader entrepreneurial group.
These are five firms that 10 years ago just didn’t exist. If you’re starting a company in Virginia right now, I’d say the first thing to do is talk to all of these organizations and get involved in the entrepreneurial community. There’s another group called Encorepreneur in Richmond that meets regularly—these are networking groups where entrepreneurs help other entrepreneurs.
Another thing that has inspired us at Koalafi is realizing that we didn’t have this kind of support in the beginning. Now, when people join our team, we tell them we’re going to make them uncomfortable—and that’s our gift to them. There’s no story of growth without discomfort. Part of that discomfort is the entrepreneur group we started over three years ago. Every month, either an entrepreneur or early-stage investor comes in and talks to our team members who are interested in entrepreneurship.
We also started an entrepreneur startup competition, which we’ve done for three years now. Entrepreneurs come in, pitch ideas, and we take no ownership stake. The winner gets paid for three months to only work on their idea. If, at the end of those three months, they decide they’re ready to take the leap and jump into their startup full-time, we celebrate it, cheer them on.
William Leonard
That’s awesome.
Boomer Muth
We’ve had a round track, yeah. What’s that? Yeah.
William Leonard
How can founders find out more about that? That sounds like a really interesting program that could be beneficial for many of the listeners of this podcast.
Boomer Muth
Well, if you’re interested in working in a company that supports that, go to Koalafi’s website and look at the open jobs. So, it’s only, you know, Koalafi employees that get to take part in that. But I’m excited to celebrate our first winner. Three years ago, he went on and got venture capital. I think he raised like $3 million at a $10 million pre-money valuation and is doing great things. Our next co-founder, our next founder, she won a year ago. She’s already making more money than she was making here. And then our new co-founder, our new winner, she is still inside of her three months, and I get the chance to meet with her every two weeks and find out how she and her partner are doing. They’ve built a social media consulting firm called Legacy Marketing. So, it’s really cool to watch. I think that’s our responsibility. If you see some level of success, I think your responsibility to society is to help others find the same. Helping others be the best version of themselves is really important to Koalafi, and I think it’s important to a lot of entrepreneurs.
William Leonard
Yeah, I love how you entertain them with a lot of the state programs, are building this foundational flywheel of entrepreneurship and encouraging people to take the leap. I think one of the big things that holds people back is, you know, that fear of taking this leap and not being paid or compensated, and you know, worrying about covering bills and the “what ifs,” instead of just going out to take that leap. So, the fact that you all are kind of creating this bridge to entrepreneurship is awesome. And, you know, as you think about the work that you’re doing, along with many of the state programs and funds as well, what is, what is Boomer’s big vision for that entrepreneurial ecosystem in Virginia?
Boomer Muth
Uh, yes, I, um, I wish I had the time in my current role to spend more time with the ecosystem, um, but I will not be in this role forever, and I would like the majority of the remainder of my life to be helping other people realize their full potential, and particularly in this risk-taking entrepreneur space. You know, a lot of us walk around with limiting beliefs, right? We believe there are a lot of reasons why other people can do things, but we can’t, and honestly, it’s BS, right? We, as I think the story of humans, is the story of people not living up to their full potential, and so helping others realize that you’re gonna fail along the way, and that is the only way that you learn. And the key that sets people successful up from others that don’t is they get back up. They don’t say, “I guess I wasn’t meant to do this.” They say, “Wow, I learned something. I am meant to do this now. I will do it differently.” And so I would love to take a bigger part in the community. I am not spending enough time in the community, but that will change.
William Leonard
Boomer, I appreciate the transparency and the vision and the ambition for how you want to continue to move this ecosystem forward. You know, one quarter, one day, one year at a time. And this has been a super fun episode for me to record, just to hear your story of being a band member, an engineer, founder, salesman, and the risks that you took to go out and start your entrepreneurial journey. Boomer, this has been a great episode. We really appreciate the insights and the presence here today.
Boomer Muth
Thank you, William. I really appreciate it. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.
Likewise, Boomer. Take care.
This is the Virginia Startup Podcast, a resource for the founders and the investors who call Virginia home. The Virginia Startup Podcast is produced thanks to Valor Ventures. Valor leads seed rounds in transformational software companies headquartered in the South. If you’re a Virginia founder, please reach out to us at valor.vc. And if you’re raising your first pre-seed capital, consider applying for a free grant through our Startup Runway Foundation program. You can find out more at startuprunway.org