Transforming Industries

Mike Pinkus: Over the last 10 years at ConnectCPA, we've had the privilege of witnessing the incredible journeys of over a thousand businesses. We've been there for the thrilling highs and daunting lows of entrepreneurship. We've celebrated wild successes and monumental exits, and we've also stood by businesses as they've navigated the stormy seas facing road blocks, and challenges that every entrepreneur encounters in their day-to-day grind. Join us as we dive deep into the stories of these resilient individuals who dared to dream, who persevered, and who were a testament to the power of entrepreneurship. This is their journey, their lessons, and their triumphs. Welcome to GrowthTales. I'm your host, Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA.

Mike Pinkus: Today, we have a really exciting guest in Solon Angel. Solon has over two decades of experience as an entrepreneur and is managing co-founded companies in the field of software development and technology. He's been a part of business launches, expansions, and he's even helped rescue numerous startups that were on the brink of bankruptcy and turned them around into multi-million dollar enterprises. So Solon knew from a young age he wanted to be known as a prominent immigrant entrepreneur. And in 2015, Solon founded the multi-million dollar company MindBridge, which became the leading AI-powered financial risk and discovery platform. These days, Solon has now shifted his efforts to applying AI around tax work through his new startup, TaxPay. Despite being a busy founder, Solon continues to share his knowledge, wisdom, and experience with other entrepreneurs to help them reach similar success through the Fresh Founders' community. I really enjoyed my conversation with Solon, and I hope you do as well.

Hey, Solon. Solon, thank you so much for joining me today on GrowthTales.

Solon Angel: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mike Pinkus: I've learned a lot about you over the last little while, and I know you're a serial entrepreneur, and I have a ton of respect for the fact that you've built companies in the space that I operate in, obviously on the technology side. For people that don't know you, I wanna start off with your first, like, really big success as an entrepreneur and ask you a little bit about MindBridge. What was MindBridge, and what is MindBridge, and what were you trying to solve when you built that company?

Solon Angel: So the, and I, I shared that story a few times, but I did not want to start MindBridge, and it turned out to be my biggest success. I mean, don't get me wrong, like turning around SoLink was, it's a success too. It's very successful—just raised 60 million by Goldman Sachs. And then, you know, growing the analytics division of CaseWare was from like, you know, we were 10, 20 people. That was not my business, but, you know, that's a big successful company too. Neo Case is successful too, but MindBridge is really the one that was more successful from like where I got involved, meaning literally walking into the registrar office, right? Asking the lawyer to—you know, taking the last $3,000 of your $10,000 bank account to pay lawyer's fees. I was nervous. I remember I was like, yeah, I was sitting in my kitchen with two babies, big mortgage, having to rebuild myself after a bad adventure, right?

Solon Angel: Which is what entrepreneurs do, right? Sometimes things work, sometimes they don't. And then, like, okay, I was hesitant. Okay, are you—you’re about to take a third of your savings. Massive deal. And the reason why is because nobody wanted to do it. Like, I was going around North America at Rodgers University where there's a forum of continuous assurance and auditing symposium where all the world experts are coming, talking about advanced statistics. And I was checking my hands, like AI, AI, AI. In 2014, 15, 2013—I was—you should Google 2012 Rodgers Solon Angel on Big Data. I was already talking about concepts that were the foundations for MindBridge, that in the space of financial reporting and assurance, right? You know, accuracy and truth in data, essentially around financial data—there were issues. There were massive issues.

Solon Angel: I was first-role witness of auditors that did not catch Ponzi schemes. Like literally, they were using a product of a previous company I was involved in called CaseWare, and I was seeing the systemic and endemic rise of financial fraud and white-collar crimes, right? And I remember looking at the data on how many good guys, so bad guys—which is good guys. There's 6 billion people on the planet or more. And there's like 300 million people in America, which is the number one economy. And, you know, the CFOs are saying that the data that we present to the public on financial—that are on the stock market—we have only, you know, less than 45% confidence on it, meaning 65% of it, they're not confident. And that's what the economic financial system relies on: trust. Trust in data, trust in the financial reports.

Solon Angel: And then the bad guys are feasting on that. They're like, you know, white-collar crimes, left, right, center—bookkeepers, accountants, executives. If you look at the Reports to the Nation of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, it was like a—it's a pandemic in the last decade. And I felt that, but I didn't know for sure until I met with the FBI on a scheme. I was literally several times at the headquarters in D.C. By the way, if ever you want to see people that are dedicated to the task, look at the white-collar crime division of the RCMP and FBI. They're so understaffed, so underfunded for what they have to do, right? They're fighting organized crime, terrorist organizations, and then just white-collar criminals left, right, and center.

Solon Angel: And basically, those are the Jedi, because there's only 75,000 certified fraud examiners out there. Less than half a million accountants in North America, less than 150,000 auditors, and you have 300 million people. And then those 300 million, they just decided, "Who cares about the rules?" I'm like, there's a problem here. This is essentially—you’re saying the Jedi have to reestablish order in the general population, but they don't have lightsabers, right? They're going there with, like, wooden sticks. And I'm like, can someone please give them a lightsaber? It's called deep reinforced learning and adaptive resilience techniques. It's called linear... uh, there was another one we used a lot—Benford's Law on the statistics side. It's called tons of techniques around modern data analytics and advanced statistics—that’s what it was called before. And then machine learning was an emerging field.

Solon Angel: And then I remember seeing, you know, the first DeepMind demo about what it could do. And I’m like, "Guys, could someone please take those tech and just apply it there?" So I went to my former employer—they ignored my emails. I went to the largest associations in the U.S., which actually had kind of a project on the way, but I thought they were going too slow. It turned out they did bring it to completion, but like way after MindBridge was in market, right? And it didn’t serve the market yet in depth. Could someone help the CFOs, right? And MindBridge became all of that. I was just going out there saying, "Could someone please do that? Could someone please do this?" And then my vision—other companies in the space—goes to the challenge.

Solon Angel: So that’s how my vision started. It was not a—also, I was very concerned about the impact it would have at home and on my health to do something of that scale from scratch. I tried to pad the impact as much as possible by partnering with great executives and proven entrepreneurs in the space. One of them took the helm as CEO, and then the third CEO of MindBridge also had a proven record in his field. That kind of stacked the odds in my favor, right? But that’s what MindBridge was. It was the world’s first AI auditor—I think we trademarked that even. And the name came from bridging the gap between the human and the machine. That’s what it is.

Mike Pinkus: Wow, Solon. I didn’t know about failed ventures. This is new to me. And I also didn’t know—how did you, how did you fund things in those early days?  Like, I know you raised capital—but, like, how did you do it? Like right up..

Solon Angel: Consult…

Solon Angel: I work seven days a week, and, you know, I have very low tolerance for—I don’t know how to say it. You just do it. Like, I mean, I basically—I have two babies, a mortgage, and I work Monday to Friday between two or three consulting agreements. And then guess what? Sunday afternoon—kids nap. Saturday afternoon—kids nap. That's when I was working. Evening—other people like to watch TV—I poured through a hundred emails or 200 emails a night to outreach, to do sales on LinkedIn. I would automate my emails to go during daytime, acting as if I was the one emailing during business hours. But I was doing it until one in the morning. Yeah, you work your ass off, right?

Solon Angel: And then very quickly, I attracted angel investors, some that I had to be more forceful with than others because they couldn’t comprehend. And I did it the wrong way because I wasn’t an expert in the field. So—I’m speaking too fast here—like, I was an expert in the field of, you know, advanced data analytics for auditors, right? And so I would go to the market, to the money markets, and I would go to investors and say, “The way we do material assessments is wrong. I’m going to fix that.” And people looked at me like, “What are you talking about?” Like construction. They just—there was—I had to dumb it down because there’s a disconnect. I was using expert language, right? I was so deep into it, obsessed. And I was saying, “ART sucks for financial data analysis,” you know, “money flow theory,” and “doing analysis of money flows is better than doing regression.”

Solon Angel: And people would hear me like, “What is he talking about?” And so I had to distance myself from the action and dumb it down. And so what I did—it was borderline tricky from my perspective—but I had to dumb it down and say, “I’m going to fight fraud.” And everyone understood. And all of a sudden, I got $1.5 million verbally interested and $300,000 in the bank. And I’m like, “Yeah, fraud is a big deal.” And you can even find articles in the press that say like, “He’s going after a massive project, a massive thing. We should invest in that.” There was a lot of that going on.

Solon Angel: And yes, for sure, what we did—fight fraud. MindBridge has an incredible risk scoring engine. But 99% of the value is in accuracy, not in—you know, they call that unintentional errors or intentional errors, right? In reality, there's more unintentional errors happening—mistakes in the systems—than human malice. There's more good humans trying to just do a good job than bad actors trying to screw the system, generally. Making mistakes. So MindBridge is really good at that. Anomaly detection in that sphere.

Solon Angel: But the beginning was hard, man. You know, I say it’s not for the faint of heart to have, you know, two or three consulting gigs to make sure that you don’t miss your mortgage payments, and at the same time, build something from scratch. And then, luckily, the funding environment at the time started getting better in Canada, but I still had to go to the U.S. to attract serious capital rates.

Mike Pinkus: Which—it’s maybe changed a little bit, but it still is the conventional wisdom, I guess, even now, right?

Solon Angel: It’s just a lot of numbers. Canada is like, what, 30 million people here or something? It’s 300 million south of the border. The economy is more dynamic and there's more appetite for risk. And the tax code and their whole structure around investing in startups is very different, right? I mean, the simple fact that someone that succeeds in my position could start a charity, start doing good work, and be writing it off easily—without having to be a registered charity—and things like that, right? It’s very different.

Solon Angel: Like right now, I’m really passionate about first-time founders below the age of 30 years old. That’s my jam. I have two to three 20- to 25-year-olds—girls and guys—that are trying to start a business. And I’m limited in what I can help them with because otherwise it has to impact my lifestyle, right? You know, if I could turn the community that we run into a charity so that everything that goes there can be tax-deductible, I can tell you that community would grow a lot better, a lot faster. So—you can’t compare the U.S. to Canada. It’s not comparable.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. And for Solon, for MindBridge—as you were growing—do you mind me asking, how long did it take you to get traction? Like, you’re trying to find mortgage payments, babies—like, how long did it take you to get, like, seven figures in revenue and beyond? Like, when did you get product-market fit? Was it years into the business, or...

Solon Angel: Uh, well, you have product-market fit from day one. They're still going after the same first use case of enterprise CFOs, AI-on, and also using the CPA firms as partners in that mission—working with them and servicing them. So I came in—again, a very famous guy in Silicon Valley told me, "You are not doing a startup." I'm like, "Okay, what am I doing?" He said, "You're doing a start-in." Because I was an insider in the industry already, and I was working—like Marc Benioff was at Oracle before he launched Salesforce. He was in the CRM space, right? So it was a "start-out," we said—a start-out of CaseWare, which is very low-risk. So the market fit was there since day one.

Solon Angel: Now, significant revenue—I mean, the first seven digits was not a big deal for me. The first eight digits was the big deal, because all the way to the eight-digit point, we didn’t have a sense of how predictable, how big the business would be, and how crucial in the ecosystem of tools and apps it needed to be for large enterprises and large accounting firms.

Mike Pinkus: How long did that take, Solon? Like, for eight figures?

Solon Angel: Five years. Yeah. It took years. But we knew we were onto something—even without sales. Forget the sales—they came within two to three years, meaningfully. Early on, when I went out there—remember, this was 2015—when you Googled AI, when I bought the AI domain, there were like 75 or 100 AI domains. Now there are thousands. I should have just squatted on AI domains—I would’ve made more money. That would’ve been a better business model!

Solon Angel: But you have to remember, if you googled "artificial intelligence financial reporting," "artificial intelligence auditing"—for three years, there was no one but MindBridge. So I knew we were onto something. Also, inbound requests on LinkedIn—my LinkedIn was exploding. The web, conferences—we already had traction and interest. People were talking to us, asking us, “If we don’t do it with you, we’re going to try to do it ourselves.” There was so much interest so early on that we very quickly capitalized and converted that interest into signed contracts as soon as the product was ready.

Solon Angel: But even before the product was ready, we were engaged in doing pilots on the core engine that we were building—to compare without the proper UI. We still hadn’t finished the UI, but we compared the way people worked. We convinced them that the output—even not fully integrated—was already superior, based on emerging techniques in data visualization and anomaly detection.

Mike Pinkus: Wow.

Solon Angel: And we had a very experienced team. I was very—and by the way, of course, you look back and you take it for granted in the moment, but you look back with a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation, even more after the fact. The timing, right? Yeah. The timing was everything.

Solon Angel: Look, if you study the IdeaLab in California, they'll tell you—look at MySpace, Facebook, the iPhone—and Mark's brilliance at Facebook to jump on the mobile app right away made Facebook. There’s a reason Instagram is all the rage now—it was mobile-native, more than Facebook. Again, brilliance to stay afloat and not mess around with the innovator’s dilemma. But to us, the timing was everything.

Solon Angel: Were we the first ones to talk about AI in financial data analysis? What needed to happen? So yes, of course. Sometimes you have one executive that’s ego-fueled, thinking all that interest is happening because he’s so smart. But when you have a wave—like the wave of AI happening—and you’re at the right place at the right time, you just need to make sure you have the right team aligned to capture that interest and convert it, right?

Solon Angel: But we were all very, very proud to say that we were the first doing that. Now, is it... You know, I personally think we got lucky also with a really good set of hires, right? And then also having a group of engaged investors that, along the way, cared a lot about MindBridge—sometimes a bit too much. You know, you can care so much that you prevent someone from breathing sometimes. But while it didn’t seem pleasant at the time, I can tell you the outcome is something that I wish every entrepreneur experiences.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. Well, I think the reason why it’s so rare that entrepreneurs experience outcomes like the one you had, Solon, and MindBridge, is because you have to have an appetite for risk and—like, you had a visionary mentality and a risk appetite to do something before it was a thing. Like, if you told me in 2014, 15, 16, “I’m starting an AI venture,” all I would be thinking is, like, “A) this is a huge risk,” and “B) oh for sure.”

Solon Angel: Like—

Mike Pinkus: You’re so early. You’re so early. You know what I mean?

Solon Angel: Look, yeah. But I partnered with two entrepreneurs—Eddy Fathi and Robin Grosset. You look at their backgrounds—they're not like, you know, just anyone. In 2015, Robin had an exit. Eddy had an exit, right?

Mike Pinkus: How did you meet them, by the way? How did you meet your—

Solon Angel: Partners? Fresh Founders.

Mike Pinkus: Oh, okay.

Solon Angel: Fresh Founders and community building. I was already very community-oriented. I had co-started Ottawa Product Management Association. I had co-started the Product Hunt group in Ottawa. And then basically, there was a group called Fresh Founders in Ottawa where early-stage, first-time founders were going. I just saw them struggling with attracting higher-class talent—people with networks in Silicon Valley, Europe, some in Asia. And I volunteered to help them bring better quality, higher-level speakers to the group. I became visible very quickly within a year.

Solon Angel: And frankly, I was doing that so I could hire—for another venture called Solink at the time. I was trying to find people to replace myself in that venture—to find a product manager, engineers, and so on. And then, you know, one thing led to another. Organically, my first investors introduced me to Eddy. Eddy networked with another group called L-SPARK in North Tower. Talk was there. We ran into someone else who introduced us to Robin, who was—you know, frozen—in jail at IBM Cognos. That’s not true—he wasn’t in jail! But you know what I mean—he’s an entrepreneur at heart. He was feeling confined in the corporate-ish environment.

Solon Angel: And I’ll be honest about one thing—most founders want to stay in control. Very few founders have enough self-awareness to recognize what they're good at and what they’re not good at. I read a book by Brad Feld that talked about different types of founders, different strengths. All I was obsessed with was faster. I just wanted to go faster and take all the safe shortcuts possible to the outcome. And maybe, looking back, we went too fast—but to me, I was like, “We need business acumen.” Wait—have I built a hundred-million-dollar business? No. Then I need to find one who has.

Solon Angel: Have I built that scale of analytics platform, managed engineering? No. So I need to find an implementer who knows that. And Robin had something like 18 patents to his name. And then, you look back and say, “Okay, well, domain expertise—that was me.” So I looked at a book, and it talked about the triad of expertise you need to start a startup with success: business acumen, technology implementation, and domain knowledge.

Solon Angel: I can tell you—when I looked at them, they knew nothing about the industry. They didn’t know what a VIKR was. They didn’t know the difference between a networked firm and a firm in an association. They didn’t understand how the Big Four was structured. They didn’t understand why accountants suck with technology sometimes—no offense to you, Mike.

Mike Pinkus: No, I hear you.

Solon Angel: And there was a lot of domain knowledge I had. I had tens of thousands of accountants in my network, and I knew if I brought them a prototype, it would just pop. So, we basically divided and conquered: one looked after tech, the other business—both helped with hiring and building a team. I helped a lot there too. We played to our specializations. If I didn’t do that early, sure—I could have gone a bit slower, been more focused, proven things more. It would’ve been a less brutal journey. But I can tell you—we would not have achieved that level in such a niche market without stacking the odds in our favor.

Mike Pinkus: Mm-hmm. And again, you obviously had great vision, Solon. I can tell you this—I worked in Big Four, in an audit group. Now, hindsight being 20/20, it’s common sense that the things I was doing as an associate, a senior associate—those things wouldn’t naturally catch fraud. Yes, they’d catch some things, but there’s no way that process didn’t need a facelift, especially for crazy public companies with huge datasets. AI—and the fact that you saw that—requires vision. Because thousands of people sat in those seats but didn’t think, “Is there a better way?”

Solon Angel: No, they didn’t. No. There were a lot of people at the time who were talking about it, but they weren’t stacking the odds in their favor.

Mike Pinkus: Right.

Solon Angel: I mean, if you look back, everyone was talking—in that space—they were like, “Analytics is the next phase.”

Mike Pinkus: So what didn’t they do, Solon? What was the angle you were taking that was different—that you applied an AI tech spin to the problem?

Solon Angel: Yes, but that’s a great question, by the way. What I did different is: I did not underestimate the change of methodology that would come with it.

There were practitioners in the Big Eight—20 years ago—who wrote in Journal of Accountancy about moving from sampling to risk-based assessment of materiality. One guy even built an entire VBScript in Excel for it. And I looked at that methodology and thought, “That’s the modern way.” The only problem—he was 15–20 years ahead of his time.

Solon Angel: What I did different was: I didn’t get sucked into the tech. I didn’t disconnect from the practitioner’s experience. But here’s the mistake—I started at the end. I first wanted enterprises to adopt it. We started with an enterprise risk management approach—going after the big logos. That failed. It wasn’t the right way. It wasn’t necessarily my idea, but that’s what we did. Eventually, we circled back to servicing enterprises—where the biggest problems were.

Solon Angel: I just didn’t disconnect from the practitioner's reality. At some point, we forbade our account managers, salespeople, and marketing from talking about AI. I said, “If you can’t describe our value without mentioning AI, because of the hype, then you're doing it wrong.” You need to speak the practice owner's language. We even built our own implementation methodology, because we saw that existing methodologies were outdated. We hired methodology consultants to help firms adopt the tech correctly.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah. That seems like a great approach. And again, you're right—you could’ve ridden the hype wave and said “AI” every time you pitched. But instead, you focused on solving a real problem in a relatable way.

Solon Angel: Yeah. But there are other companies that did better in my version, in the same timeframe. When I look at what they did—they focused a lot on being product-led. They didn’t do traditional market engagement. They did product-led growth. For seven years, they did less revenue than MindBridge. Then suddenly, they popped to the same level.

Solon Angel: The difference is—they were an after-effect. When people bring in MindBridge, it’s about redesigning the core of the practice. Profound change. With others, it’s more of a plug-in.

Mike Pinkus: Mm-hmm. And Solon, I want to pivot here and ask you something. You had a really good outcome—which is already a big achievement, something most people never experience. But entrepreneurship is hard, especially at scale like you did. You’re now onto another venture. I want to talk about TaxPay, but—you didn’t have to do another one. Why are you a glutton for punishment? Why do you want to scale and go through this journey all over again? Let’s jump into TaxPay and what you’re looking to achieve with it.

Solon Angel: Yeah. So, the decision was made over a dinner at Fresh Founders—again, community—with a couple of other entrepreneurs. Look, it's very important when you're in doubt as an entrepreneur to recharge and surround yourself with other entrepreneurs because they understand you. They're your same type of animal.

Mike Pinkus: Did you take time off, by the way, Solon? Did you take off any time after?

Solon Angel: No. No.

Mike Pinkus: Okay.

Solon Angel: I took two weeks to visit my family. Two to three weeks. I don't believe that when you’re young, in good health, fully able to speak, walk, talk, and argue back, that you should stop producing in society—unless you need to do some soul searching or enjoy a hobby. If you're capable, it's almost like a civic duty. Think about this: if you’re 75 years old, there are things you can’t do anymore, right? You talk to an 80-year-old man and ask, “Would you like to have the energy to take risks, shake things up, and make things happen like you could at 35?” Most likely, they’ll tell you yes.

That’s my little test—I live by this principle: Make the 80-year-old version of yourself proud. 80 year old yourself will be grateful.

Mike Pinkus: Like Bezos.

Solon Angel: Oh really? I didn’t know that. That’s something Ozan shared. So I was sitting at dinner and I asked, “Okay guys, great—what do I do now? Just go take it easy, be a French man in the South of France, drink some wine and date beautiful women? What’s the plan here?”

Mike Pinkus: Doesn’t sound like a bad life.

Solon Angel: Yeah, but I’d get bored. I’m more companionship-oriented. That doesn’t sound appealing. So I debated—should I go sell or should I go back and fix this problem we started working on as a prototype? It seemed to be a real need.

Then one of my friends—actually, the first investor in MindBridge—said, “Solon, can’t you do both?” He said, “Why don’t you just take one day off a week and that’s your day to be in South of France?” Around the same time, a direct flight to Paris opened up in my city. Before that, it took two flights to get there. Now, I could go for the weekend and come back.

So it became a “that and that” function—not “this or that.” I could enjoy family, go to the South of France, and still build something. That made sense to me.

Solon Angel: There’s a guy called Dan Martell—he has a very active YouTube and content habit. I kept Googling things and kept finding his content. Funny enough, it always brought me back to his book.

Mike Pinkus: Buy Back Your Time.

Solon Angel: Yeah. I told you about that book, right? Funny enough, it’s right here. Great book—highly recommended. I’m at another entrepreneur’s house and they have it too. I remember Dan talking about his loss of momentum after an exit—he bought a boat, did wake surfing, and when he wanted to start again, he said it was a slog. That freaked me out. I was like, no—I’m not losing my momentum.

Mike Pinkus: Like a fighter who doesn’t go back in the ring—you get rusty.

Solon Angel: Exactly. I knew I wasn’t going to retire at 39. I’ve helped a few other startups over the last 2–3 years. Also, I know I have a very intense personality—people tell me that. I don’t feel intense—I feel like I’m not intense enough. I end my days with the feeling that I could have done more.

So I knew I would do another one. I had five ideas. Instead of stopping to feel what that feels like, I knew that once MindBridge was scaling and had a management team that didn’t need a “shaker and mover,” I would pivot.

Solon Angel: When we moved from “pirate” to “organized army,” I struggled. Once people were doing a more thorough, slower, higher-quality job, my interventions actually disrupted them. If I did more—people weren’t happy. They’d say, “We didn’t ask you to do that. Don’t touch that—it’s not your project.”

So I had two days a week where I was underutilized. I helped two other startups grow from $100K to $2M in revenue in two years during my last year at MindBridge. Otherwise, I would frustrate people—I’d go to the CEO and say, “Can I help with that?” and they’d say, “No. Stay in your spot.”

Eventually they’d come back and say, “Quarter’s bad. Need more top-of-funnel. What can you do?” Then I’d get to bang things around and make it happen. But that stop-and-go dynamic told me: MindBridge was done for me. The mission wasn't fully accomplished, but the execution belonged to others now.

Solon Angel: Everyone at the top of MindBridge was better than me at execution. I’m an entrepreneur—that’s what I’m made of. I literally had my departure email written 2.5 years before I left.

Mike Pinkus: That’s amazing. And Solon, with TaxPay, I’m excited about it because you’re staying in the space I operate in. I see a ton of utility in solving a major pain point for businesses. What are your goals for the next 2–3 years for TaxPay?

Solon Angel: Um, the—so TaxPay is very interesting, right? So it's completely different than the previous venture, 'cause the previous venture was all about internal tooling for the accounting firms, right? They were all about what they use to serve the clients. This is different. TaxPay is basically enhancing the client experience. Yes, there's a tooling component and productivity and efficiency and new revenue model for the firm because it's a client accounting service, essentially. But TaxPay is really focusing on the taxpayers and helping people only pay the tax they owe, right? That's what I'm obsessed with right now.

Like, look—hate it or hate it, or like it—don’t forget that Al Capone was caught because of tax, not because of crime or anything like that. You have to pay your taxes, and it’s a good thing to pay your tax on time.

Solon Angel: But when your accountant sends you—three days before the deadline—a six-digit or seven-digit check to pay of taxes, and you have to physically walk into a bank and scramble or use TANK coupons or things like—it’s just bad. And then all the revenue agencies... look, we printed—here’s the motivation with TaxPay—we printed an obscene amount of money in the western world during COVID, which you'll see in history was not needed. A bit of hand sanitizers, and some masks, and some social distancing would've done wonders. We didn’t need to freeze the whole economy, right?

Solon Angel: So, in that light, the governments have to increase collection. It’s as simple as that. They have to modernize the system—but it’s government. So in the meantime, there's a lot of unfortunate situations that are going to happen where, you know, late penalties, fees are going to increase, the systems are clunky, the accountants are limited. There’s a shortage of people in accounting—that you know well.

Solon Angel: So with TaxPay, we're just trying to streamline the process all around, you know, TaxPayments. And there’s many ways people do it today—like, it’s not like some people don’t pay their taxes. People do e-transfers, credit cards, some people have some accountants that do some payments for them in a limited fashion. But the process around that is still too clunky. And I'm going to employ every tool in my toolbelt—RPA, AI, fintech—you know, whatever you want—to remove micro workflow problems along the way. That’s what I’m focusing on.

Mike Pinkus: That’s amazing. And I agree with you—it’s because I see it firsthand. It is a major, major problem. And it’s ironic that you have self-driving cars, but you can’t just go to a business owner and say, “Hey, click a couple buttons and—or we’ll pre-schedule your full year. Don’t pay—”

Solon Angel: Don’t click. Or don’t even click. Like, this should be automated. It needs to be magic. Look at the Shopify experience—when you check out on a Shopify store, where you put your phone number and everything is handled. It remembers everything.

Mike Pinkus: Oh, it’s amazing. It’s so cool. Yes.

Solon Angel: Right? Yeah. It’s like magic. Why would it not be like that?

Mike Pinkus: It should be.

Solon Angel: It should be. The reason why is because of disparate systems and things breaking apart. And then there’s people that do a great job on the API front—and you use some of those tools, right? And those people have their hands full on the API side as well, right?

Solon Angel: Like, I—if I—basically, if—you know, it’s like—it’s everywhere. There’s inefficiencies around, you know, the tax work. And I’m a huge fan of companies that are very dedicated to serve the profession—like Wolters Kluwer—and they continuously invest in innovation and try to enhance. But you also need to help them. Sometimes it’s not—for a giant worth $40 billion, it’s not worth solving a $100 million problem or $200 million, right? They have so much other billion-sized problems to solve.

So I’m placing in that spot of micro problems that are super annoying on a day-to-day basis. And we’re building a suite of tools for that.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, I think it’s an amazing next venture. And I think—just because of your track history—I am confident you’re going to execute on it. So I have one last question, because I know we’re a little bit over, Solon, and I want to be respectful of your time. You’ve been involved in a lot of ventures—any couple pieces of advice you could give to other—not only startups—but like businesses that are going through their growth journey, and they deal with the struggles of entrepreneurship, the ups and downs. Any advice you could give that you’ve learned through your journeys with your businesses?

Solon Angel: Yeah, it always takes three times longer and three times harder than you think it’ll be. But you’ll be surprised what you can achieve.

Mike Pinkus: Like, so stay the long haul?

Solon Angel: It's stay put. Stick to it. I mean, first of all, why do you do what you do? If you're playing a game—and I talked about that in another podcast not too long ago—like, you know, why do you do it? You know, it’s bound to failure. Like, you have to ask yourself, what is your intrinsic motivation? And when you have clarity on what motivates you, then you have to be true to yourself, right?

I was in a very unfortunate situation where I had to be almost in front of a situation of literally—you know, divorce, like someone that wants to separate. I was married at the time. And then, you know, it’s like—the other person is acting in a way that you know is not compatible, right? And it’s like, do you stop everything because of that? Is that who you are? You’re going to go this way—and then you try to mitigate the side. But then I remember saying, “Okay, one day I have to look—my children will judge me.” I said, “I have to explain perseverance, dedication, courage to them. I’m going to have to explain to them commitment, sticking to what you start, responsibility, leadership.”

And then what? So what, I’m going to tell them, “You know, things got rough and I just quit?” That doesn’t work. You have to be true to yourself. So if you have an inner motivation, if you go down that path—stick, stick true to it. Be your truth and shine through your truth as much as possible.

But also be very, very mindful that you have to time your goals. Like, if you say, “I want to do that within that timeframe”—I had a goal for MindBridge. And by the way, we achieved exactly close to 100K of revenue. So within three years, I wanted to have 1.5 million or 2.5 million revenue. We came exactly to that.

And by the way—hint—if you achieve 50% of that, you change this in your assumptions. If you achieve a quarter of that, you change that. And if you achieve less than a quarter, you stop, because then you're not on the right trajectory of what you're trying to do. You have to be very, very clear on your definition of your commitment to yourself.

Another commitment to myself was—with this—and I told that to the executive team, and they did the list problem. They thought I was not being truthful, but I told them: “The moment we are five years old, you have to look for someone else to do whatever I’m doing, because my itch will start. The moment we have X million dollars in revenue, you should not need me anymore. You should find professionals.”

And then literally, I was talking about leaving in February 2020. And then COVID happened. Everything planned changed—I couldn’t leave anymore. But it’s very important when you start into an entrepreneurial adventure that you have a very strong sense of who you are, what you want to do, and commitment to yourself. Be true to yourself.

Mike Pinkus: That’s amazing.

Solon Angel: And surround yourself. Surround yourself. And last but not least—you must surround yourself and organize all your personal life around it. I just talked about this with my team this morning, because they always laugh that Solon’s worst day is Friday. I get so anxious on the weekend calls because it’s a loss of momentum in the team. I—

Mike Pinkus: Caught you on the wrong—

Solon Angel: Wrong day.

Mike Pinkus: Cannot?

Solon Angel: Yes, I’m anxious. How would you have a bunch of things to do and then—like, I’m so anxious about it. Because there’s a loss of momentum over the weekend. But that’s what humans do—we take weekends. I don’t always.

So in this situation, it’s going to be—you know, you have to surround yourself, because the mindset—I’m so, so, so happy in what I’m achieving. For the first time in my life, almost, I have that symbiosis where I can do what I do without worrying about being misjudged, misunderstood, or having things get in the way that constantly stop it.

You have to be very candid because it’s not fair to you and to others. It’s the same as saying, “Hey, you’re being selected by the national committee to be one of the athletes representing Canada or the U.S. at the Olympics. But hey—you’re not going to train every week.” Right? That’s inconsistent.

So if you’re going for something like that—it’s hard. It requires dedication. People think, “Oh, it’s just doing a startup.” No—it’s not just doing a startup. It’s trying to do a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars, multi-billion-dollar business. That requires the same discipline and mindset as someone saying, “I want to go for gold.”

So nobody judges—if you have a cousin or brother or sister that says, “He’s training for the Olympics,” everyone understands that. But when you say, “No, I’m trying to make this a real success. And it’s hard. And I want to change the standards of the profession,”—which is what ended up happening at MindBridge. I was nominated on the advisory board of the International Assurance and Standards Board to be a—to help them, right?

Those things require a level of commitment that the rest of the world will misjudge you for—but that should not stop you from doing it.

Mike Pinkus: That’s great advice. And with that, Solon, I want to thank you. I know you’re a busy guy and I really appreciate you taking the time to share this—also the backstory. Because, yeah, like the authenticity of sharing the fact that it wasn’t all glory before MindBridge...

Solon Angel: Of course not.

Mike Pinkus: The fact that you shared that—I appreciate that.

Solon Angel: My first startup—my first—so MindBridge’s stealth name was Squanto. I always have a stealth name before really coming out. The first start was called Squanto, which was the first name of MindBridge as well. It was Squanto for a year before we came out to the world with the real world.

Mike Pinkus: Oh really? I didn’t know that.

Solon Angel: Yeah. And basically, my first one was in export-import of precious woods from Brazil to France.

Mike Pinkus: We—a pivot.

Solon Angel: Yeah, I know. That was my first business at 19 years old. And then I learned a very valuable lesson through failure. Eight or nine months into it, they introduced an eco-certification called Eco Cert in Europe, where you’re not allowed to import rare woods from third-party countries into Europe.

I had my first 30,000 euro—which was a massive amount for me as a student living on like 1,000 or 1,500 euros. We were like, “Wow, we have a business going on.” It was so meaningful for me. And then discovering the power of government rules and intervention was a very painful lesson.

But yeah—of course—that’s... there was one or two failures like that. But luckily, a lot more successes than those. But you learn every time.

Mike Pinkus: Like they say—you only need one.

Solon Angel: Well, luckily I’ve had more than one so far, so... yeah.

Mike Pinkus: Well, I’m going to continue to follow TaxPay and all the things you do, Solon, and I follow you on social too because I know you’re an outspoken guy in our space—and I love that as well. We share a lot of the same viewpoints. So I just wanted to thank you for hopping on and hopefully we’ll continue this conversation offline at some point.

Solon Angel: Dinner is on me, anytime.

Mike Pinkus: Awesome. Thanks so much, Solon.

Mike Pinkus: That was Solon Angel, founder of MindBridge AI and TaxPay. Solon built an eight-figure-plus revenue company in MindBridge and shared many important lessons about the journey. However, two stood out the most:

Number one: When you're passionate about your purpose, you reframe the way you see work. Most people can't wait for the weekend, but Solon would constantly get anxious as the end of the week would draw near because he believed the team would lose momentum. Even after the big success of MindBridge, Solon still wanted to get back at it with his new venture, TaxPay. He could have moved on to becoming an investor or taken an easier path for the next stage of life, but he has always preferred to let passion and purpose guide his career decisions.

Number two: It is important to help others. Solon loves helping young entrepreneurs through the Fresh Founders community get to the next level. Giving back is about more than just helping people—it's about becoming a mentor and sharing lessons you've learned on your own journey to shortcut the path to success for those to follow.

That's it for today. As always, keep scaling up and breaking barriers.