Speaker: Alvin Mayers , CEO, Argus Technology Group
Tell us about you and a little about your company company. Name, title, name of your company, and what your company does.
Alvin Mayers : Hi my name is Alvin Mayors and I'm Ceo and founder of Artist Technology Group. We are a payment enablement company. What that means is we provide a platform that enables software developers, independent software vendors and other e commerce providers to accept payments through a variety of methods. We connect directly to Visa Mastercard. We have access to Cryptocurrency, Buy Now pay layer. We make it easy to accept payments by providing our expertise, experience and technology. Yeah. Uh, simply put we take payments off of the developers hands and we provide all of the functions for them all the way from accepting their new customer to making sure that they get paid out our goal. And our job is to make payments easy and allow the customer, our client to focus on their business, which is the software that they make.
Why did you decide to apply to the Capital Readiness Cohort?
Alvin Mayers : The question is why did I decide to apply to the capital capital readiness cohort? The simple answer is I need to learn. I need to learn how to raise funds. I have an M. B. A. In business. I've been a senior executive at a lot of large organizations or several large organizations. I know how to run a business. I built technology and payments. I've been in the payments industry for 20 years. I know my business, I know the technology and I know how to run a business. I don't know how to raise funds. I don't have a network, I don't have uh, I don't have access. I don't even know where to start to begin to raise funds. So having uh, the education and the direction with something. As I talked with my mentors and um, you know, several people that, that are advising me. They pointed me in this direction to help me learn, how am I going to go about raising funds for this for this new organization?
How would a scholarship to the cohort support your venture and its goals?
Alvin Mayers : yeah, a scholarship at this point in time, it would be extremely valuable to me. I am a solo founder, self funding the business. At this point myself, I am doing everything. So every dollar that I've invested, I am really focused on making sure that that's leading me to our top line revenue. I'm struggling now. I really want to be in this program, but I'm struggling to convince myself that um That I can part with the $2,000 that's not going towards directly towards um you know, sales, getting our first customer and that sort of thing. So every dollar that I am investing into the company, I am really focused on drawing a straight line to to revenue. So this scholarship is really going to help me um again learn um and grow the business, get started someplace in raising the funds that we need to to grow the business again. As a solo solo founder, I'm doing everything at this point in time. Um and as self funded, I'm also putting every dollar that I have uh into making this thing successful. So um really anguish over um you know, any any capital expense that's not uh you know, directly either building, building a platform or driving customers back to to our site. So um the bottom line is this uh this scholarship will, will allow me to do this uh this venture or this this program
What do you hope to take away from the cohort?
Alvin Mayers : Yeah, what do I hope to take away from this program? For me, it's it's very simple uh in education, help me begin to frame a story, help me begin to learn how to make the pitch to uh to raise funds, and secondly, help me establish a network, establish the right people to talk to, or someplace to start with the right people to talk to at this point time, I don't even have a starting place, um I wouldn't even know where to go to try and help uh and try to raise funds for this entity. Um So that's what I'm really hoping to get away from it, just in education, in in how to raise funds, and secondly, a starting place for for a network.
