Receipts by OpStart

Receipts is a podcast from OpStart about the financial side of building a startup — the part most founders only talk about in private. Each episode digs into the real numbers behind the build: burn rate, runway, R&D credits, fundraising scars, the first real CFO conversation. The decisions that worked, the ones that didn't, and what the spreadsheets actually said when things got hard.Made for founders pre-seed through Series C — the ones doing the work, not posting about it. No spin, no recycled LinkedIn wisdom. Just candid conversations with founders, operators, and the finance pros keeping the back office in order so the rest of the company can grow.If you've ever wondered what the journey really costs, Receipts is the paper trail.Presented by OpStart, the finance team behind the build.

Receipts by OpStart is a business podcast hosted by Paul Anthony, with 10 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Paul Anthony hosts Receipts by OpStart, a business show with 10 episodes published.

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  Episode #9

  Student-Exclusive Uber: How Yelo Built a Data Business Instead

  Sep 23, 202633 min

  Liam Redmond joins Paul Anthony to talk about building Yelo, the ride and nightlife discovery platform he started as a Notre Dame undergrad and now runs full time from New York. Liam graduated in 2025 and has already been named to Forbes 30 Under 30. He describes the founder path in blunt terms, comparing it to chewing glass, but says it's a career he wouldn't trade. Yelo began as a lunchline conversation about Uber costs and grew into a student exclusive rideshare, paying drivers the full fare and undercutting Uber and Lyft by 30 to 40 percent. Liam explains how watching the ride data revealed something Uber's data never could: nearly all of Yelo's rides ended at bars, clubs, and house parties, which pointed toward a nightlife discovery business rather than a straight rideshare play. That insight turned into promoting venues directly, including one campus concert that pulled 600 people in line for a room built for 300. Now a year out of college and building full time in New York, Liam talks through why he thinks autonomous vehicles help Yelo more than they threaten it, how the team vets venues to protect rider trust, and why keeping the founding team young, with a head of growth who's 19, is a genuine edge rather than a liability. The conversation closes on what Liam calls the "hustle slop" glamorizing founder life online, and the more honest advice he gives friends who ask if they should start a company. In this episode, you'll learn: ● Why Yelo started as a "student exclusive Uber" that paid drivers 100 percent of the fare ● How a group chat splitting Uber costs became Yelo's first mobile app ● The data insight that ride bookings, not check-ins, are the truest signal of where people are actually going ● How one concert venue promotion turned into 600 kids in line for a 300 person room ● Why Liam believes autonomous vehicles help Yelo's business instead of threatening it ● How Yelo vets venues and uses rider feedback before promoting a business to the wider platform ● Why Liam thinks a 21-year-old founding team is now an advantage, and what he tells students asking about becoming a founder Timestamps 00:00 - Welcome and introducing Liam Redmond 01:01 - From pre-med dreams to a Notre Dame founder 02:46 - Building a "student exclusive Uber" from a lunch line 04:09 - Raising a friends and family round as undergrads 06:00 - The insight: ride data reveals where the party is 07:52 - Turning ride data into a venue promotion engine 09:17 - The viral moment: 600 kids outside one venue 11:03 - New York, and competing without competing on rides 14:04 - Autonomous vehicles and the DoorDash data parallel 17:20 - Vetting venues without losing rider trust 20:04 - Scaling beyond EDU emails and zero CAC 22:09 - "Hustle slop," and why founders feel so alone 28:15 - The 21-year-old team, New York, and what's next Connect: ● OpStart: https://www.opstart.co ● Paul Anthony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-anthony-8a256087/ ● Liam Redmond on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-redmond/ ● Yelo: https://joinyelo.com/ Hashtags: #OpStart #Yelo #Rideshare #NotreDame #Forbes30Under30 #StartupPodcast #FounderStory #Entrepreneurship #FoundersJourney #GenZ #ConsumerTech #NewYorkStartups #Marketplace #VentureCapital

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  Episode #8

  My Best Kept Secret: How Bonside Turned One Deal Into a Company

  Aug 26, 202629 min

  Neha Govindraj, founder of Bonside, joins Paul Anthony to trace a path that runs from Bain and Company's consumer and private equity practice to the operator seat at Glowbar, the 30-minute facial concept she started in New York and grew to about 30 locations across the East Coast. Running that business is where she saw how strong brick-and-mortar retail can be, and how few resources exist around it. The idea for Bonside came out of a deal she structured for herself. Traditional debt sat on one end of the market, with personal guarantees, covenants and six-month processes. Venture equity sat on the other. Neither fit a small-footprint model built to open 10 or 20 doors a year. So she built her own revenue-share agreement, then noticed she felt nervous telling other founders about it. That was the signal: keep it as a secret weapon, or build a company and put it in everyone's hands. Bonside now writes checks from $25K up past $5M, repaid as a fixed percentage of monthly revenue, almost always under 10%, until a set return is met. Underwriting runs on models trained on Bonside's own past decisions and the outcomes attached to them. The conversation closes on which problems a founder should actually solve themselves, why resilience matters more than runway, and the $60,000 payroll tax credit Neha almost never got back. In this episode, you'll learn: ● How Bonside structures capital as a fixed share of monthly revenue instead of a fixed payment or an equity stake ● Why check sizes run from $25K to $5M and why opening new doors is the number one use case ● The two datasets behind Bonside's underwriting engine, and variables like four-wall EBITDA at location two and revenue standard deviation across locations ● The math that made the market obvious: roughly five VC funds writing about three brick-and-mortar checks a year ● Why Neha spent early money on brand identity and design, a call most fintech founders would not make ● How raising debt differs from raising venture, and why a no from a debt fund is more useful feedback ● Why one operator took capital from Bonside five times and still owns 100% of the business ● The $60,000 payroll tax credit that was written off as an IRS delay, and how it came back in six weeks Timestamps 00:00 - Intro 01:17 - From Bain to Founding Glowbar 02:23 - How Bonside Structures Capital 04:14 - The Hybrid of Debt and Equity 05:11 - Inside the AI Underwriting Engine 06:57 - The Deal That Became a Company 08:44 - Growing With One Operator Across Five Checks 11:15 - Raising Debt vs Raising Venture 13:35 - Why Bonside Invested in Brand First 17:05 - The Operator Seat: Retail vs Fintech 19:02 - How Badly Do You Want It 21:25 - The $60K Tax Credit Fight 25:10 - What to Outsource, and Where AI Stops Connect: ● OpStart: https://www.opstart.co ● Paul Anthony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-anthony-8a256087/ ● Neha Govindraj on LinkedIn: [ADD URL] ● Bonside: https://www.bonside.com Hashtags: #OpStart #Bonside #BrickAndMortar #RevenueBasedFinancing #Fintech #RetailGrowth #StartupFinance #VentureCapital #FounderStory #StartupPodcast #Entrepreneurship #FoundersJourney #NYCStartups #AlternativeFinancing

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  Episode #7

  How Abacus Is Reinventing Wealth Tracking: Alex Kruszewski on Service Presented as Software

  Jul 1, 202657 minS0

  <p>Alex Kruszewski, Founder and CEO of Abacus, joins Paul Anthony for a homecoming conversation that traces an unlikely path from investment banking to building what he calls a brand-new category in wealth technology. A Notre Dame finance graduate, Alex began his career in investment banking and private equity at firms including Evercore, Madison Dearborn Partners, and BDT, before a step into pharmaceutical operations turned into a sale process that ended with Eli Lilly buying the business. That outcome led the founding family to ask him to stand up Goldfinch Capital Partners, a Chicago-based family office where, at 27, he served...

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  Episode #7

  How Abacus Is Reinventing Wealth Tracking: Alex Kruszewski on Service Presented as Software

  Jul 1, 202657 min

  Alex Kruszewski, Founder and CEO of Abacus, joins Paul Anthony for a homecoming conversation that traces an unlikely path from investment banking to building what he calls a brand-new category in wealth technology. A Notre Dame finance graduate, Alex began his career in investment banking and private equity at firms including Evercore, Madison Dearborn Partners, and BDT, before a step into pharmaceutical operations turned into a sale process that ended with Eli Lilly buying the business. That outcome led the founding family to ask him to stand up Goldfinch Capital Partners, a Chicago-based family office where, at 27, he served as CIO running the investments. It was there that Alex hit the problem that would become Abacus. Everyone talks about allocating capital, he explains, but almost no one talks about the unglamorous work of tracking it. At Goldfinch, answering the deceptively simple question of "what are we worth right now?" required six-figure legacy software plus two full-time accountants, and it was only ever as accurate as the last person to key in the numbers. Abacus fuses software and service to solve that garbage-in, garbage-out problem, building each client a "financial digital key" that ports in public equities, private equity, venture, real estate, debt, and documents, then keeps it continuously correct through a White Glove services team of ex-bankers and private equity professionals working alongside agentic AI. Paul and Alex dig into the model Abacus calls SPaaS, service presented as a software: clients get the interface without ever having to fill it in. From there the conversation opens up into pricing philosophy in an AUM-obsessed industry, why Abacus deliberately stayed in stealth, and a genuinely useful stretch on team building, incentives, and founder life with young kids. Alex closes with contrarian advice that cuts against startup culture: don't do it for the money or the title, and don't do it at all unless the vision is so big it's the only thing you can work on. Key Takeaways ● Allocating capital gets all the attention, but tracking it is the real unsolved problem, and it only stays accurate if the underlying labor is flawless ● Abacus builds each client a "financial digital key" that consolidates every asset class and document, then permissions it out to advisors, CPAs, or AI tools on demand ● The SPaaS model (service presented as a software) delivers the interface without making clients do the data entry, pairing agentic AI with human domain experts ● Alternatives resist standardization, so human relationships and domain expertise, not just API pipes, are what actually keep the data current ● The best AI use case is not replacing people but freeing them from the annoying parts of their jobs so they get back to the work they were hired to do ● Great teams come from defining a narrow scope, identifying what makes each person tick, and incentivizing them accordingly, not from hiring generalists Connect: ● OpStart: https://www.opstart.co ● Paul Anthony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-anthony-8a256087/ ● Alex Kruszewski on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-kru/ ● Abacus: https://www.abacuswt.com Hashtags: #OpStart #Abacus #WealthTech #FamilyOffice #StartupPodcast #FounderStory #FinTech #ServiceAsSoftware #SPaaS #SmallBusiness #StartupLife #Entrepreneurship #AI #FoundersJourney #PrivateEquity

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  Episode #6

  Why Homeowners Overpay - And How Abode Money Fixes It

  Jun 24, 202646 minS0

  <p>In this episode, we sit down with Tyler Bliha, founder of Abode Money, to unpack how he’s building an AI-powered financial manager for homeowners.</p><p></p><p>Tyler shares his journey from investment banking and private equity to early-stage fintech, and how his experience at UpEquity helped shape the vision behind Abode Money. We also dive into why homeowners are often overspending on property taxes, insurance, and other recurring housing costs — and how Abode is using AI to simplify and automate savings.</p><p></p><p>We discuss:</p><p>• Why property taxes are the perfect wedge into t...

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