Today we’d like to introduce you to Brendan Kennedy
Hi Brendan, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I am first and foremost an adventurer. For my whole life I have traveled the world, seeking to find the most interesting and fulfilling experiences where my professional and social lives direct me. I grew up a New Yorker, but since leaving home to head west to California in 2004 for college my journey has kept me on the move. By this time I’ve lived in 4 countries outside the U.S. – Spain, Mexico, France, Brazil – and 6 cities within the U.S. – NYC, Boston, LA, SF, Dallas, and finally, Austin. I’ve had the privilege of studying at the some of the world’s best academic (Stanford, MIT) and culinary (Le Cordon Blue Paris) institutions. My career started in enterprise technology, where I worked in sales at Accenture, VMware, and later Salesforce. But following my MBA at MIT Sloan the entrepreneurship path started calling. I am now a three-time founder who has raised more than $10M and scaled multimillion dollar brands. Fathomd, Inc, an Edtech platform for MBA games was my first company and brought me to Texas originally in 2015. I later founded NxTSTOP, a D2C and B2B global apparel brand serving Delta airlines, Virgin Atlantic, WHSmith and Avis Budget Group (among others), and I successfully exited this company in 2022. My latest venture YourOwn, was founded with one of my closest friends and longest running professional colleagues, Josh Lory, to simplify and accelerate the way people can access financial services, and brought me to Austin as the perfect environment to build and grow the company.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
NxTSTOP was one of the most lucrative, rewarding, and yet overwhelmingly challenging experiences I have had. It taught me the lesson that you can have a great product, great team, and great GTM strategy, but if you can’t be innovative with finance you won’t be successful long term. This was an inventory-heavy business – apparel – where typical working capital requirements are tough. Further, it was born during the time of the pandemic that was additionally hard on supply chain, and then further challenged by inflation. We were extraordinarily successful in the outset but hit financial roadblocks to scale up that ultimately forced me to exit the business differently than I had hoped. I am so proud of the success we had, and learned some important lessons to help me be even more successful in the future.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
In 2023, primarily because the challenges I experienced in funding the scale up of my company NxTSTOP, I started to get very thoughtful about how personal financial data is required to access all credit, insurance, wealth and tax advisory services, yet data sharing suffers severe limitations for both consumers and institutions. I had the idea to start YourOwn Wallet. It is the first digital wallet that brings together all required income, asset, investment, cryptocurrency, liability, and tax history into one unified Financial ID for verification and instant sharing. YourOwn’s unique value is to reduce the time and effort traditionally required to collect and transfer personal financial data to a financial partner – to, for example apply for a mortgage, a loan, or work with a wealth/tax advisor – from days to only minutes. We are extremely proud of the fast traction – 15K downloads in just a three months – as well as institutional partnerships with banks and Big Tech players soon coming online. I encourage people to download YourOwn Wallet on the app or android store. You can also download it at www.yourownwallet.com
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Luck I believe is mostly the outcome of good planning and preparation. If you put yourself (or your business) in the right place at the right time for things to happen, you increase the odds that they will. Sometimes these two come together unexpectedly. For example, Since I’m such a traveler with Delta Airlines, I’d achieved million miler status prior to 2020, and was extremely familiar with the airline’s goals and culture. In 2021 an RFP went out to vendors to help supply Delta with masks and other apparel for COVID, to which my company NxTSTOP responded. We were one of the smallest companies applying, but we ended up getting lucky and beating out 50 other potential contenders because I was able to leverage all of my Delta history and knowledge to supplement our product pitch. The Delta folks loved me, and we won the bid.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.yourownwallet.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourowninc/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/yourownwallet/
- Twitter: https://x.com/yourowninc
- Soundcloud: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yourownwallet.app&pcampaignid=web_share&pli=1
- Other: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yourown-wallet/id6499210996?platform=iphone
