From $80K Monthly at 15 to Managing Tens of Millions

At 15, most teenagers are worried about homework and weekend plans. Benjamin Döpfner was building a software company that would generate $80,000 monthly revenue within four months of launch.

Now 22, the German-born entrepreneur is the founder and CEO of Vesto, a cash management platform helping over 100 startups optimize their idle cash. Since the Silicon Valley Bank crisis in March 2023, Vesto has experienced explosive 2x growth every couple of months, managing tens of millions in assets.

In this candid interview, Döpfner shares why persistence beats talent every time, how he turned repeated investor rejections into his biggest funding success, and why most entrepreneurs are overthinking their path to success. His advice? Stop making elaborate 10-year plans and just start now.

Benjamin: My name is Benjamin Döpfner. I'm the founder and CEO of Vesto. Vesto is a cash management platform for startups, so we help startups invest their cash, make the most of every dollar, and ultimately simplify their finances.

We're now helping more than 100 companies put their cash to work, and that equates many, many tens of millions of dollars of cash and assets under management. We're growing super fast. I think we've seen 2x growth every couple of months, so it's been a good couple of months, but we've got a lot more to go.

Benjamin: I've always felt like I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I think since I was very young. I hated authority. I didn't love school and I just hated people telling me what to do, how to do them.

I started my first company when I was 15 years old. I grew up in Germany, bootstrapped software business. Essentially we built software plug-ins for photographers and designers and creatives, and so I started this as more of a side project. I mean it was 15 years old. It was more of a hobby and within three, four months after launching it, it was doing $70,000 or $80,000 a month in revenue, and then that kind of kept on growing and kept on growing, and it kind of just catapulted to be its own great business, which I probably wouldn't have expected from day one.

Benjamin: Age is not the biggest criterion for success. Building a company, I think, oh, you have to be a certain age to start a company and also obviously the societal norms. For me, I kind of just give it a go and that first company started a side project in a company and so it kind of just created itself over time.

I almost never think about it and sometimes it's crazy to look back and people ask you like, wow, you're pretty young, but I think you just have to kind of go for it and not let it influence you and not let it impact your thinking, your decision making. You just have to run it as if you're anyone else.

Benjamin: I started Vesto really just out of my own frustration with the existing finance tools and softwares out there. You know, I started my first company when I was 15 years old, grew up in Germany, started that company, and ultimately grew that company over the course of a couple of years and just had a bunch of cash in a checking account, doing nothing.

And in fact it was worse than doing nothing because at the time we had negative interest rates in Germany, so the cash was really sitting melting away, and I was super frustrated by that. So I reached out to my bank, asked them how can I put that cash to work? Is there any way I can invest this cash? And ultimately the response that I got was, well, yeah, but the minimum deposit size here is 100 million.

I thought, well, why doesn't this thing exist for younger startups and small businesses and just growing companies, but in a tech-forward and easy to use way? And that's really what led to the idea for Vesto.

Benjamin: Right now we're really solving the core issue that the investor is solving right now is just a company with cash on hand, you know, a company raises money or a company's profitable and they have cash. Most of that's probably sitting in a checking account doing nothing. So a lot of businesses are just leaving money on the table by having all their cash sit idle doing nothing.

And so ultimately managing a portfolio of treasuries and money market funds and putting corporate cash to work is not an easy task, not a task that a lot of startups and younger companies can do. That's why we build Vesto is so that we can come in, automate that entire work for companies, and just make it really, really easy for them to earn yields on their idle cash, put it to work.

We've really got customers of all shapes and sizes now. I think of our core customers still startups between Series A and Series C is where we've found most success, but we now work with pre-seed stage companies, larger private equity firms, enterprise stage companies, and even just run of the mill small businesses.

Benjamin: I think when I initially started the company, I faced a lot of failure and getting it up and running. The company almost died before it ever started because I think when I had the idea for Vesto, I remember pitching it to people and people would just investors would tell me that this is a horrible idea, this is never gonna work.

When I first was raising the initial first round for Vesto, you know, cold emailed an investor, and they were like, yeah, let's get on a call. Sounds interesting what you're building, you certainly sound interesting. I wanna talk. And I ended up getting on a call and after the call they were like, yeah, probably not an investment for us, you know, and in other words they were saying you know this is not a good business.

Benjamin: I kept on following up every single week, month with just updates of like here's what we've built this month, here's how much revenue we have right now, here's who we hired, and after like 6 months of doing that, the primary investor was just like, you know what, I think the business model is interesting, it's getting better every month, but what really interests me about this business is just your persistence, the fact that you just don't give up after just being relentlessly questioned and after just being told no a bunch of times.

And so I think that was how we raised the first round of just being, just not giving up for 6, 7 months. People don't really care how old you are at the end of the day. I think they care about what company are you building, how good is it, what's the product, how are you serving customers, and it really just comes down to facts.

Benjamin: I think the biggest factor for success is just persistence. I think persistence always beats talent and genius or anything like that. You just have to be incredibly persistent in everything you do.

I think when I look back at Vesto and really all my ventures in my entire life, the greatest moments of success have always come from just being relentlessly persistent, just not giving up, you know, no matter how many times you're told no or this is impossible or this probably won't work, you kind of just have to keep going and persist, and I think that's just the biggest thing.

Benjamin: Building the product took a long time, you know, I was thinking about it in my head for probably 2 or 3 years, and then actually developing it and building it and doing the engineering of it. Probably took maybe 6 months to 1 year to build that first MVP, and I think that was too long.

Generally, you should be a little bit embarrassed about your first product and your first MVP, and there should be some faults to it, but that allows you to learn a lot faster and get it in customers' hands and get feedback on it, which then in turn helps you make the product better.

So I do think that's super important for us. We were in an interesting position where we're a fintech company. Our product can have some faults maybe on the design and on the UI, but if anything actually goes wrong with the core financial services and the core financial product, that's just unacceptable. And so we had to be extra careful and really have our MVP be more of a very, very polished and very highly tested product.

Benjamin: I think probably the biggest mistake that we made in the very early stages of the company was just focusing fully on product, but I think when we started the company that the core focus was just let's build the best product for our customers. That's a very good thing to do. I think focusing on building the best product for our customers is obviously hugely important, but I think in the very early stages of the company didn't really focus at all on distribution, go to market, and I think we really kind of catch up there and figure out, all right, how do we actually distribute this product to our customers? How do we actually get this product to our customers.

I think the cliche saying of build a great product and they will come is certainly true to a degree, but I think they won't come at scale. So that's something that we have to figure out and really catch up on.

Benjamin: We've grown a lot since the banking crisis back in March with Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic that really accelerated our business. All of a sudden people went from never really thinking about cash management and where's our cash sitting, how much is it earning? Is it diversified to all of a sudden that being the first and foremost priority for companies and finance teams, and that really just catapulted our growth. We took off ever since March and have been growing super fast since.

I think the way we built Vesto from the ground up was to essentially have it be as safe and secure as possible and so operationally we're registered with the SEC as an investment advisor and we're never in the flow of funds, so we never actually touch our customers' money. People are looking to get away from that traditional banking fractional reserve banking model and looking to go into this custodial model where their cash is held ultimately under their name and even if their provider fails or goes out of business, their cash is still safe.

Benjamin: There's an interesting competitive landscape where I would say there's two ends of the competitive spectrum specifically for our cash management product. One end is the super simple self-serve, easy to use products that really lack in functionality, and so folks end up leaving money on the table with those. And then the other end of the spectrum is like really sophisticated institutional banks of the world, but you've probably got to be a multi-billion dollar company to even utilize those.

And so what we're trying to do at Vesto is really bring that level of product and experience and service that you would get with this institutional great experience, but make that really easy and make that really accessible and make that something that you can set up in 10 minutes, not 10 months.

But ultimately the longer term vision of Vesto goes a little bit further than that, really 5, 10, 15 years out. We want to really build a financial operating system, a financial control center for companies, and we're essentially using this cash management problem or product as the foundation for that.

Benjamin: I think the biggest mistakes that startups make when managing their finances, one of them is just not looking at their finances and not actually having a good understanding of what's going on. I see this all the time, and the system of the financial world has made this a little bit harder because people have different bank accounts and payroll systems and expense management tools, and it's kind of just this mess, and they don't even know where to look, so they have to go in and consolidate everything and reconcile everything just to understand basic things like, you know, how much cash am I burning, how much cash do I have on hand?

And so I think ultimately the biggest mistakes that startups and especially founders make sometimes is just not looking at their finances and actually not understanding what's going on. And I think that's pretty easy to solve and something that is so important to solve.

I think another big mistake that the founders make is actually just not thinking about profitability and revenue and just making money at all. I think in the past 10 years in this zero interest rate environment that we've had in the past 10 years or so is just led a lot of investors and a lot of founders to find it OK to just be burning tremendous amounts of cash with no real path to profitability and no real path to revenue.

Benjamin: Being young, dropping out of school, you know, it really puts a chip on your shoulder because if you fail, you've got not much of a shoulder to sit on and say, all right, well, you know, maybe I'll just go back and do the other thing. So for sure, being young and taking that big risk, it really makes you want to prove yourself and just work that much harder and be that much more persistent.

Goals and dreams that motivate me and that drive me, it was part of this interview series and they were just like, what do you want? And I was very confused by the question because what do you mean? Is it something material? Is it something immaterial? Ultimately what I want, what drives me is not something material, it's not an apartment or a house or an amount of money. It's more really just building something and something that really lasts.

I think when I'm 80 or 90, I want to look back and be able to say I've built a product or I built a company that's going to be around for hundreds of years. I think that's super exciting, especially in the world of startups where everyone's thinking on such a short-term horizon and building companies that grow and fail within a matter of months or years. The idea and the vision, the mission of building something that lasts for hundreds of years is incredibly exciting. It's incredibly difficult, and there's very few businesses who have done that, but I think that's something that's super inspiring and motivating for me.