An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
“Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable”
When building a company, you’re always going to be uncomfortable and just have to get used to that. If you can turn being uncomfortable into a challenge, or a competition, and take pride in being uncomfortable, it allows you to accomplish things you previously thought were impossible.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Santomo.
Anthony Santomo is a financial technology entrepreneur and the Founder/CEO of Ampla, a fast-growing VC-backed financial platform built for SMBs operating across the CPG supply chain. Prior to Ampla, Anthony was one of the first employees at Attentive, a Series E technology company valued at more than $10 billion. Anthony also worked on several high-profile transactions during his time in Leveraged Finance at Macquarie Capital and prior years at Barclays Capital. He graduated Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an All-American and Captain of the Men’s Division-1 Lacrosse team.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I grew up in NJ and spent my time with a close group of friends competing in sports, in school, and everything in between. This relentless competitive dynamic defined much of my childhood. After high school, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, where I was Captain of the Men’s Lacrosse team and named All American and Academic All American my senior year. I’ve always thrived in competitive environments and appreciate the team camaraderie that athletics bring out in people, and a lot of those principles have carried over to my professional endeavors.
After college, I started building my career at Barclays and Macquarie Capital. I left investment banking to join a fellow alum (now mentor) from Penn who was starting a new company based in NYC. This company is now known as Attentive and is a Series E tech company valued at more than $10 Billion. I was fortunate to have joined as one of the first 10 employees and was the first Account Executive on the GTM team. Similar to Ampla, Attentive services modern consumer brands. Speaking with countless brands at Attentive, I saw how underbanked this segment of the SMB market was and realized that many of the struggles brands endure while scaling can be attributed to a lack of financial support. It’s those insights, coupled with my experience in finance, that led me to build Ampla.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
We started Ampla to help founders and operators scale their business by filling a long-standing gap in the financial solutions space. Our first product addressed the working gap between the large cash outlays for inventory and marketing and when the brands ultimately receive retail and ecommerce payments. Contrary to popular belief, as these brands see more success and scale, this working capital gap becomes increasingly more elongated as they are required to produce and hold more inventory at various locations across the country. I discovered this pain-point while working at Attentive, and I was able to validate this insight by observing my father in-law’s nationwide trucking and warehousing business that predominantly serves the CPG industry. As emerging consumer brands expanded and scaled their marketing spend, they would have difficulty supporting the demand for their product. Without the right financial backing would be either forced to turn down orders or dilute themselves by raising equity.
Some of the more established solutions, like traditional banks, typically don’t have the proper technology to properly underwrite modern consumer brands with multiple omni-channel revenue streams, and therefore cannot provide a meaningful amount of capital to support their future growth plans. Other newer solutions like “flat-fee” MCAs will typically advance cash based on a single ecommerce revenue channel by leveraging POS software. These “flat-fee” MCA solutions make it very difficult for operators to calculate their true all-in cost because they implement a “flat-fee” and “percentage of revenue payback structure”, which leads to unsustainably high annualized costs. This means that the more success a business has in driving revenue, the faster they will pay back the advance, and the higher their annualized cost of capital will be. We view this at Ampla as misaligned incentives.
Ampla removes all of these headaches by providing a funding solution that works across all revenue channels and that is embedded within an all-in-one financial platform.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I prefer to think of this as a learning experience rather than a mistake, but our business was originally named, “Gourmet Growth,” because we were dealing almost exclusively with brands in the food and beverage space. I wanted a name that harkened back to that category, hence the “gourmet.” It turned out that the name wasn’t all that descriptive and many people thought we were a food brand ourselves. There was also a leaf motif going on with the logo that almost made us look like we were selling plants.
As the business grew, and we began to consider raising outside capital and expanding beyond F&B, we knew we needed a better name and brand. That said, we’re not ashamed of our old name or brand at all. The lesson for me here was not to overthink things — we came up with the name “Gourmet Growth” super quickly, and put it out into the world. It worked for a certain amount of time, until we needed a change. I think it’s a great example of not letting perfect be the enemy of good.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Throughout my career, I have been lucky to have numerous mentors and Ampla would not be where it is today without these mentors. I would never have been able to start Ampla without my experience at Attentive. I was fortunate to be able to learn first hand from Brian Long who I view as one of the greatest technology operators of our time. Brian Long, Brian Malkerson, Andrew Jones, and many others showed me what real 0 to 1 growth looks like.
When starting Ampla, we had key mentors early on that shaped the way we think about our business. In particular, I’d like to call out Matt Grossman, Jeff Mitelman, and Ted Kosev. Each of them were instrumental in the strategy and operating plan early on that ultimately set us up for the success we have had.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
“Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable”
When building a company, you’re always going to be uncomfortable and just have to get used to that. If you can turn being uncomfortable into a challenge, or a competition, and take pride in being uncomfortable, it allows you to accomplish things you previously thought were impossible.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We have a number of products currently in the works and have an amazing team to build them. We are building an all-in-one financial platform for emerging brands where they can get access to capital, banking, bill pay, credit & debit cards, and more. We plan to expand across the entire supply chain so that all parties can win together. Stay tuned.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
A few years ago, I read a book called Relentless by Tim Grover. Tim Grover was the personal trainer for Michael Jordan, Dwayne Wade, Kobe Bryant and countless others. Throughout the book, Tim recounts untold stories about each of them and the essential traits shared by the most intense competitors in sports but also in business. As I mentioned earlier, athletics played a huge role in who I am today and I try my best to learn from the greats in this book.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“The most prepared wins the negotiation.”
This is a quote from my college lacrosse coach, Mike Murphy, but this applies to everything, not just negotiation. Coach Murph was a mentor to many of us at Penn and set the tone both on and off the field. If you fail to prepare you are preparing to fail. In sports, games are won during practice. In work, the same is true and therefore I take the same approach. At Ampla, we do a tremendous amount of research before building a product, we prepare pre-reads before meetings, and we don’t sign agreements without extensive deliberation over terms.
In negotiations, I do my research to try to understand what the other person is looking for, what they’re after, what I’m willing to concede, what my boundaries are, and from there, the negotiation can be fruitful for both parties. As Stephen Covery explains, it is important to create Win-Win situations that are mutually beneficial and satisfying to each party.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Personal discipline and responsibility. Building Ampla has been an incredible experience but I would not have been able to do this without the habits of personal discipline and responsibility. Only once those habits are established, you are self-sufficient. Once you are self-sufficient, you have the freedom to attack bigger goals, such as building a company or building a family. If you are unable to take care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of others later.
Build a large network. Surround yourself with the best people because people who don’t pursue their own dreams won’t be supportive as you pursue yours. Being authentic and genuine will make you relatable and increase your influence. Personally, this has helped me build an incredible network of friends and a happy family. Professionally, it has helped Ampla bring on some of the very best talent, attracting folks from financial institutions, consumer brands, tech unicorns, as well as other start-up founders and operators. I attribute much of Ampla’s success to our Amployees, investors, and customers.
Be relentless. “In anything you do, it takes no talent to work hard. You just have to want to do it.” — Tim Grover
How can our readers follow you online?
On LinkedIn as Anthony Santomo, and of course https://www.getampla.com and all the company socials LinkedIn Twitter Instagram
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Anthony Santomo Of Ampla On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
