His success may have a lot to do with disruption — and using that term in ways atypical of its first impression. Disruptions have led him to take different paths than he intended.
Williams ran track at West Virginia University during his freshman year, and he was happy to have made the team. With a double major in finance and economics, he was a busy young man; however, Title IX meant a reduction in men’s athletics and it was the men’s track team that took the hit.
Disruption.
“I started to think about other things.
“ I was very entrepreneurial in my days at WVU. I started a number of businesses around town and I eventually made my way to start a production company. ”
— Rodney Williams
Williams went on to create databases by class and dormitories, and email lists that were an efficient way to reach the student body.
The connection was inspiring enough to move him into beginning a multicultural fraternity, Alpha Omega Omega. “I was everywhere all the time,” he said. “I was participating in intramural sports. I went to nationals in flag football. I did a lot of things.”
Two years after his last WVU commencement, he also earned an MBA from Howard University.
His current tech company, LISNR, is a Visa-backed fintech company for which he’d already raised $40 million and was steadily growing — but he kept hearing from friends and family that they needed small, short-term loans for things like medical bills, insurance deductibles, or just to keep the lights on.
When he and best friend Travis Holloway looked into it, they found a much larger problem, one that many Americans face every year. A financial institution to help with those kinds of needs didn’t really exist.
“We had this idea, something we would doodle with after work, this concept,” Holloway said. In 2015, Holloway, a financial adviser with Northwestern Mutual, stopped doodling, left his job and told Williams it was time.
“We found an angel investor that invested $50,000, and that was the start of SoLo.” It is now the largest Black-owned consumer finance app in the country.
Williams said launching a financial services company was more difficult than attempting any other type of business, so they worked through accelerators [programs that help startups scale up quickly in exchange for equity in the new business] in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, leveraging legal resources.
After a beta launch in 2018, SoLo took on its current form in April 2020. “Along the way we would raise money from our angels who believed in the mission,” Williams said. “It took off in 2020 and it’s been taking off ever since.”
And if a business launch in the early throes of a pandemic seems risky, it was a time when people needed those small loans and they needed them more than ever, Williams said.
“The pandemic didn’t accelerate the problem, it just made people more aware. The problem has always been there. People with very limited savings and they’re over-leveraged, which means when they do have an emergency, they don’t have a solution to address it.”
Williams calls SoLo’s customers “the fabric of America”— Uber drivers, barbers, beauticians, mechanics — people who work every day, but cannot save enough to be able to live for a month if they lost their jobs.
“We have a lot of data,” Williams said. “We believe the average American will face a point when they need a few hundred dollars four-to-eight times a year. That’s just what happens.”
He’s aware of the problem and he’s also aware that average Americans take pride in their work and the independence they gain from it. That means, he said, they don’t often talk about financial issues and even deny the idea that they may need a micro-loan.
“Our financial system has not created the solutions we really need,” he continued. “And it’s really because [of who benefits] off of the predatory nature of the current system. The motive is not necessarily to help us.” Williams is aware that those who need loans the least are the ones who qualify most often. “That’s just how it works. Our banking system is designed to help people with money.”
And those without it are often left scrambling for an extra job or borrowing from relatives. Thanks to the energy and efforts of Williams and Holloway, SoLo Funds has created a community that crisscrosses the country, and the return has done exactly what they envisioned — provided access to capital while also providing a way for that capital to grow.
“We’ve grown because the community wants us to grow,” Williams said.
“ This is community-driven. We’re letting people dictate where their money should go, and I think that’s revolutionary. ”
— Rodney Williams
Another disruption? Possibly.
Williams also sees creating this community as a revolutionary act that flies in the face of current punditry.
“They’re telling us that we don’t love each other, that we’re not so empathetic, that we don’t care,” he said. “But every day I wake up and I see thousands of people lending and borrowing from each other because they understand each other’s positions. They’ve been there before.
“I see America as way more empathetic to each other than the world would want us to believe; it gets us back to who we really are. We’re just humans. We’re just trying to survive. We’re trying to do right by our family.”
Maybe for Williams, disruption has been about creating new positives all along.
