So I started in the consulting world, and in the consulting world,

it was a great kind of ecosystem for learning a lot about business in general.

And I started being able to apply a lot of what I knew about the web

to the world of business.

And as I'd learned that, more and more, this was at the height of the Dot Com

boom, I saw, and ultimately wanted to participate in something of my own.

So I wanted to leave the consulting world eventually and say,

I want to create a product of my own, I want to have something that is mine that I

can continue using, whereas in consulting, it's very much you're creating something

for other people, you don't really get to reap the benefits of it.

So that eventually led to me meeting up with Jai Shekhawat who had both

an idea and he had some seed capital for a concept at the time called B2B People,

which eventually became FieldGlass.

So it was kind of a indirect route to get to FieldGlass.

>> I've actually had a lot of fun in what seems like even a longer period of time

than about 15 years in my career and

leading up to that, being a Russian immigrant,

immigrating with my family from the former Soviet Union at the tender age of eight.

Growing up in the north suburbs of Chicago and then joining a lot of my high school

classmates at the University of Illinois, studying finance and math.

Interned at an investment banking job out of college, end up getting a full-time

offer to go be an investment banker, but thankfully didn't get pulled in 2001,

2002, couple recessions ago, and learned a lot over a very short period of time but

then very quickly decided that I wanted to pursue other endeavors.

And so I was able to quit and

start a company that now is called Enova International.

We started the business in 2004, and then Avant,

and Avant we launched at the end of 2012, it's been a crazy three years and change.

My two co-founders at Avant, like my prior company,

were actually former interns of mine at my first company.

University of Illinois graduates, a little bit younger than me,

a lot smarter than me.

One runs our technology organization, the other runs our analytics organization.

Both were participants in the Y Combinator start-up incubator program

in San Francisco before Avante and, really,

their personal experience is what led us to start Avant, as they were trying to get

a loan from a traditional branch based lender and had a terrible experience.

And so we conceived this business really with a premise being to change

the offering to consumers across the world in

providing them a better quality product, better service, when it comes to credit.

That's kind of a long way of saying but we've had a great run.

We're about, as I said, a little over three years old.

We have originated nearly $3 billion of loans on our platform,

have about 950 employees to date, operate in the US, UK and

Canada and currently have an unsecured loan product,

are currently launching an auto finance product to really re-vitalize

the auto finance vertical, and are looking to a launch a credit card, and

have raised over $600 million of equity capital, have raised over $3

billion of various forms of debt funding and overflow commitments

to buy loans off of our platform from various forms of institutions.

>> Very non-traditional.

I was a 1975 graduate of the US Air Force Academy.

I spent 28 years on active duty in the Air Force.

Which was a great experience, but a lot of leadership opportunities.

My last three years, though, were at the University of Illinois.

I was the lucky person that was the Professor of Aerospace Studies at

the U of I., which is commonly known as the ROTC unit.

So I got a Ph.D at St. Louis U in business administration, kind of finance,

management science, and that comes into play because when I left the Air Force,

the Illinois Farm Bureau has a credit union.

It was about $150 million of assets and they were looking for someone to be

the CEO that understood asset liability management and that really was,

most of my doctoral work was in risk based capital so it was pretty easy.

And so from there I spent two years as a CEO of a credit union.

Became the Treasurer of Country Financial which is a affiliate of

the Illinois Farm Bureau.

Went into a private company, an employee owned company in Champagne for

three years and then came back to be the Chief Executive Officer in 2012.

So a real non-traditional route in insurance, for sure, but

I will tell anyone that every one of those steps really prepared me for this.

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