While George Cook grew up in the family of bankers that founded Somerset Trust Co., he isn’t one himself, at least not in a traditional sense. As the co-founder and CEO of Pittsburgh-based fintech startup Honeycomb Credit, Cook is looking to make it easier for small businesses to gain access to capital by having members of the local community directly invest their cash into small businesses with a crowdfunding platform that offers interest rates between 6%-12%. It’s a method that seems to be working. In September, Honeycomb announced it surpassed more than $10 million in total funds raised across its platform for small businesses in 19 states. Cook believes the direct connection made by local community members and the businesses near them will only help to further grow the platform and also the amount of funding being made available to emerging enterprises.
What’s the story behind the name of Honeycomb Credit?
We were just kind of playing around. We really liked this idea of the community building something together, bringing in resources from a community together. Our working title was Foster Finance, which was pretty bad. I picked Foster Finance. Ken Martin, my co-founder, hated it and insisted we switch it up, and so we started playing around with the idea of bees, like bees coming together, building the hive, just the way they work together. And we started workshopping that with our classmates and everyone was like, well, bees are scary, they sting you. We said, OK, how can we capture that community essence of bees working together without the scary stingers of bees and allergies and everything that comes with it? And we had a very long spreadsheet of all of the different bee themes you could possibly think of, and we were both at our summer internship. I remember I was walking out of my office and got a call from Ken and he’s like, “I got it … honeycomb.” And I said yep, that works, and the rest is history.
What is your personal banking background?
My family has been running a small community bank in rural Appalachia for 130 years now. That makes me a sixth-generation community banker. I grew up in the family business and spent a lot of time working there as a teller. There was a building they repossessed that I painted one summer. I did it all. I was basically the janitor at one point, and I started doing commercial lending there as well and really kind of fell in love with commercial lending.
What is it that led you to pursue the launching of a fintech startup, and why did you decide to include a crowdfunding element?
I was doing some work in big data credit analytics at TransUnion Chicago … and I started to see this trend that everyone was replacing relationship banking with a black box algorithm … a magical algorithm that’s going to tell you which business to give a loan to and which business not to give a loan to. But you’re missing this really important X factor of is the business a good fit for the community? Do they treat their customers well, do they make a good product, do they treat their employees well? Those are things that a relationship banker intuitively understands, and whether consciously or subconsciously, they’re baking that into that underwriting decision. But that was all disappearing. Everyone was saying big national banks are the future. They’re going to eat up all the community banks. We’re losing one community bank every day, and everyone is trying to replace the relationship with the algorithm. And I said that doesn’t work. It’s not scalable inherently. And so when Ken and I were thinking through what our answer to the problem was, we kept coming back to how do we bring local community knowledge back into the fold, but we knew we couldn’t build a big branch network. We couldn’t hire thousands of people across the country to be relationship bankers. So how can you do that in a scalable way? And for us, the answer was to let the people in the community who know the businesses best to be the local community banker.
Can you tell me a bit more about Napoleon, the company’s chief nap officer, and is that a salaried position?
He is not salaried right now. Napoleon is my 12-year-old West Highland white terrier — Westie. He’s a cranky old dog. He loves to nap, and we were trying to find a position for him in the company, and he kept falling asleep. So he became the chief nap officer, and he comes into the office every once in a while, and he’s got a little nest under my desk that he’ll curl up in. But he’s a great guy, a little morale booster. Everyone enjoys having them around.
Where do you like to eat?
Right now, my favorite is probably Casa Brasil up in Highland Park. Just great, fresh Brazilian cuisine. Keyla Cook runs it, no relation.
What kind of audiobooks do you like to listen to?
I listen to a lot of nonfiction. I alternate between American history and nerdy business strategy books. Right now, I’m listening to “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea” by Marc Randolph. I recently listened to the phenomenal biography of Abraham Lincoln, one of my favorite historical figures. I am constantly reminded that running a startup is a challenging thing — every day there are new obstacles in your path — and just learning about Abraham Lincoln, like if you think you had a hard day, just thinking for a second what it would be like to have to live through the Civil War and lead a country through that while at the same time getting land grant universities done and the transcontinental railroad and winning a war all in four and a half years. It’s always really refreshing to me to take a step back and say, I don’t have it that bad, I have it pretty good, all things considered.
BIOBOX
Title: Co-founder & CEO, Honeycomb Credit
Age: 34
First job: Ski check clerk at Seven Springs Mountain Resort
Education: B.S., economics and statistics, George Washington University; MBA, Dartmouth College
Current residence: Bloomfield
Family: “My amazing wife Elizabeth and a cranky old Westie named Napoleon.”
Hobbies: Hiking and cider making
Causes: Supporting locally owned businesses
