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Well, I think we're early days still in this market. I think we have like seven to ten years of growth or strong growth in the BNPL space. So I think it's going to be a rising tide for all the players.
That was Charlie Joachim, co-founder and CEO of Sezzle. I'm Motley Fool producer Matt Greer. Now at our recent Motley Fool member event, Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner talked with Joachim about entrepreneurship, competition, and the business of buy now, pay later.
We're going to talk about Sezzle in a second, but I think I just want to start with your background. What caused you to become an entrepreneur? What made you think about starting the first company you started and how did it lead you to Sezzle?
Well, I wasn't the lemonade stand kid, that's for sure. I was a video gamer. I love science, technology, coding, building computers, basically a nerd. But no entrepreneurs in my family or friend group are anywhere nearby. I just always thought it was interesting. And I think my first job out of school, I wasn't that pressured. It wasn't that high of a bar. I had time on my hand.
I was tinkering, playing with stuff. I remember building a Dropbox-like product before Dropbox. And I wish I would have known how to start a company back then. And then it just kind of happened. I was talking to my cousin about starting a company, going to business school. And it was during the global financial crisis. And we just said, let's do it. Let's try it.
I mean, I think we're both adventurers. And We just decided to do it and just jumped in and learn the hard way, every which way and the first company, that's for sure.
How many companies have you started? Just two. Just two, okay. What is happening with the first company? What was the business and what is it doing now?
So it's a company called Passport and we did mobile payment apps. So first of all, we had the wrong idea at the start though. We started into parking hardware, way too hard for us with low capital. We went into mobile payments for parking and... Everyone thought we couldn't do it because at that time there were two big leaders, Park Mobile, Pay By Phone, that were leading the way.
And, you know, people in the parking industry were like, you guys should just give up. And we just didn't. We just kept on innovating and adapting. We invented the wallet functionality. We invented white label. And we just worked our way up. And that company is currently a market leader in that space. That is a private. It's a private. Separate company. Yeah. Got it.
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