San Francisco, CA | September 8 - 12, 2012
BillGuard has come a long way in a short time. The company launched its SaaS product, which automatically scans your credit card statements for unwanted and fraudulent charges, in May of 2011 at Disrupt. Yet, BillGuard has since saved its users nearly $1 million in unwanted or fraudulent charges in just over a year.
I sat down with founder and CEO Yaron Samid to discuss the path from Disrupt to today. Even with a brand new baby, he was full of energy as he remembered launching on stage at Disrupt NY 2011. It was a memorable Disrupt for me too — I had started working for TechCrunch the week before — and I distinctly remember an argument on stage between Samid and Fred Wilson over the BillGuard business model.
Samid warns against this. It’s never becoming for an entrepreneur to argue with a noted VC in public, much less in a competition. But things seemed to work out for the company either way, as BillGuard has raised a total of $13 million in funding.
Samid says that he’s actually grateful to have come in second place, rather than take the crown from GetAround. “It puts a chip on your shoulder,” he told me after the interview. “It makes you work that much harder, because everyone thinks your second best.”
Disrupt NY pumped out crazy awesome products like the Gtar, UberConference and OpenGlass, among some other great happenstances. But when we bring it back to the bay, things are only bound to be better than ever. We’ve got an amazing list of speakers, and some of the coolest starups I’ve ever come across. If you’re interested in buying tickets to the show, or checking out the Hackathon, just visit our events page for more deets.
BillGuard is people-powered antivirus for bills. BillGuard, a personal finance security company recognized by Online Banking Report as one of the top online banking innovations of all time, has developed a groundbreaking new approach to identifying deceptive, erroneous and unauthorized charges on consumer credit card and debit card bills. BillGuard uses crowdsourced big-data analytics to harness the collective knowledge of millions of consumers reporting billing complaints online and to their merchants and banks. The free service scans user’s e-statements...
Yaron Samid is the founder and CEO of BillGuard, a personal finance security startup harnessing the “collective vigilance” of consumers to protect everyone from unwanted and unauthorized charges on our bills. He previously founded Pando, the web’s leading P2P CDN with over 40 million users, and led product management and marketing teams at Zend, BackWeb and Register.com. Yaron is also the founder and organizer of TechAviv (www.techaviv.com), the global Israeli startup founders club and NYVideo.org. Current board seats include CloudLock...
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