Hey all! Welcome to the very first edition of the NYC Founders Club newsletter. Most likely, you’ve met at least one of us at an event we’ve hosted, but here’s a recap:

What’s the New York City Founders Club?

A curated community of active, VC-funded, high-growth founders in NYC started by three YC founders. We run the largest YC Alumni community, and we want all founders to have access to an incredible network for advice, hiring, and camaraderie.

Who are we?

What does the NYC Founders Club do?

We are making NYC the best place to scale your company into a unicorn. We do this in 3 ways:

What should I expect from this newsletter?

Let’s get started! 🚀

Thanks Alison Greenberg for the share!

“We’re Cobalt ID. We use AI and graph analysis to stop business fraud for banks and lenders. We’re particularly good at catching fraud rings and shell company schemes that legacy solutions consistently miss.”

What inspired you to start Cobalt ID?

“I’ve always loved impossible problems. I first learned about the fraud/identity problem when I worked on fintech at Google where identity was a huge blocker that prevented us from building a bunch of things we wanted to, then when I moved to Waymo I realized if we can make cars drive themselves, we can absolutely solve fraud too.”

“Our first customers came from conferences, word-of-mouth, and warm intros. But we would go to conferences and just approach random people. It worked incredibly well. Maybe because I’m Canadian and I’m aggressively friendly.

It was initially hard because fraud teams are super skeptical. They’ve been promised a million solutions in the past and let down every single time.

But they also care deeply about the problem. That means that they were willing to provide us a lot of early feedback which helped shape the product.

Also, talking to them taught us how to build trust. Being super specific about the problem, and using industry jargon that only insiders understood - like fraud rings and shell company schemes - really helped people take us more seriously early on.”

“Founders get tons of advice, and a lot of it sounds good – like the classic ‘sell before you build.’ But, for our space, that wasn’t very helpful advice. We were solving a problem with mostly technical risk, so trying to sell the idea before it worked was a waste of time. If you’re solving a problem with technical risk, like we are, the reaction you’ll get is ‘obviously, if it works, I’ll buy it.’ You don’t need to prove demand – you need to prove it works.”

“I am a big restaurant person, especially in New York. I love my New York food. I think I have a few oldies, but goodies I always go back to. I'll give you a pizza one: Rubirosa.”

Read our full interview with Priya here.

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Thanks for tuning in to our first NYCFC newsletter! We hope to see you at one of our events.

– Aakash, Adam, Mike, and Jordan

P.S.

New here? Check our website to learn more and apply to our next cohort!