Chris Caurla

Heartwarming immigrant banking story: The State Bank of Texas is owned and mostly run by Patels. Poor Indian immigrant Chan Patel comes to Stanford for grad school, becomes a successful hotel entrepreneur. He finds that lenders are unfairly discriminating against Indians & decides to open a bank to solve the gap. He needed $2M of capital to start, so he crowdfunded from F&F, gave lifelong directorships to everyone who committed $100k (mostly other Patels who still form the board today). They opened the bank on Black Monday (1987) with a single paid employee (& a bunch of unpaid family members who took bank training courses!). They've never had an unprofitable quarter, & now have $2.7B in assets. The business is still mostly lending to Indian-Americans in the budget to mid range motels/hotel segment. This is a very large niche - Indians own 60% of the hotels in America, and most of the owners are Patels... AKA the "Patel Motel Cartel"