Every founder has an origin story. Mine starts with a broken refrigerator.
My parents came to this country from Honduras with almost nothing but their work ethic. My father worked as a janitor, my mother as a housekeeper. When our refrigerator broke and we needed a new one, my father went to a local Sears to apply for credit. He was denied.
So he did what his community had always done. He turned to his coworkers and formed a susu — an informal lending circle common in African and Hispanic cultures, where members take turns contributing to a shared pool and receiving support when they need it most. No credit check. No interest. Just trust.
That first susu got us our refrigerator. But it didn't stop there. My father formed more circles, and eventually those circles helped my parents open Wendy's Grocery Store in New Jersey. Years later, after the family sold the store, my parents moved to Greenville, SC — the same city I'd eventually build Susu Lend in — and began investing in real estate.
From a fridge to a grocery store to real estate. None of it came from a bank. All of it came from community.
That's the story I carried with me through my own career in IT, through business school at Cornell, and into the moment I decided to build Susu Lend. I wasn't inventing something new. I was trying to formalize something my family already knew worked — and make it available to anyone the traditional system has overlooked.