Right now, Lisa Falzone is on the brink of something big. Six years ago, she was laid up, flat on her back after slipping a disk while moving a couch.

Falzone was 25 at the time, a recent graduate of Stanford University, with big dreams but little time to pursue them.

"It was actually pretty lucky," Falzone told Mashable about the injury. "I had always wanted to start a company, but finding time to focus while working for someone else was difficult."

The company she would end up co-founding thanks to her injury, Revel Systems, is now one of the most successful new players in the point-of-sale market, competing with the likes of Square and ShopKeep for a global market value around $42 billion.

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That success has led Falzone to consider taking Revel public. The company has already achieved a valuation of $500 million and raised more than $100 million. If Revel stays on track, Falzone could become the first woman to take a company from start to $1 billion IPO.

That's the kind of thing Falzone could only dream about back in 2010. Falzone had graduated from Stanford three years before, where she had been a competitive swimmer. While moving from an apartment in Menlo Park to Palo Alto, she felt a pain when she tried to pick up her sofa. Falzone had herniated a disk.

The injury left her bedridden for the better part of a year. Falzone seized the opportunity to come up with a business venture. She toyed with a variety of ideas, but nine or so months into her recovery, between physical therapy sessions, she began to consider the concept that eventually would become Revel Systems.

"When [I] found the idea of Revel, I really was just so excited and had so much passion," Falzone says. "I knew it was a huge idea."

Falzone teamed up with Chris Ciabarra, who she connected with via a blog she was keeping at the time, and the two hatched a plan. They wanted to create a point-of-sale system that would work with the iPad, which had just come out, to replace the archaic systems (like the bulky credit card machines at your grocery store) that were, and often still are, the norm.

"[We wanted] to help people start their businesses and grow them," says Ciabarra.

The injury lingers (she's unable to stand or sit for more than a few hours at a time), a painful reminder of the time that ended up becoming her springboard to success.

Hip to not be Square

Revel's business is relatively simple. At its core, the company provides an easy way for customers to pay businesses — a service that is commonly known as "point-of-sale."

Revel replaces credit card swipe machines with an iPad-based system, as do many of its competitors.

Today, the company has 20,000 active POS terminals, employs more than 400 people and works with massive companies like Goodwill and Ben & Jerry’s, and you can find Revel systems at events like the SuperBowl.

Lisa Falzone, far right, speaks on a panel at Collision Conference Image: Flickr/CollisionConf

Revel is most often compared to Square, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, who is also CEO of Twitter.

Falzone doesn't much care for the juxtaposition. She points to Revel's features that provide businesses with data about their company as well as a way to integrate inventory reports and purchase orders to differentiate the companies.

There's also the matter of how Revel makes money. Square takes a percentage of each purchase. Revel charges a flat monthly fee of $100 along with an upfront charge for the terminal.

"Square gets their money from payments, we make money just from software. I feel like it’s comparing apples and oranges," Falzone said.

That sweet Wafel money

Wafels & Dinges, founded in 2007 as a single food truck, is the brainchild of Rossanna Figuera and her husband Thomas Degeest — and a loyal Revel user.

"We are very data driven, very numbers driven," Figuera tells Mashable of their choice to use Revel. Figuera once worked at JP Morgan before she was a head hunter for Wall Street. "It was very important for us to have numbers and data built in."

Today, Wafels & Dinges has 11 locations (including a brick and mortar store), expansion made easier by the data provided by Revel Systems, Figuera said.

But Wafels & Dinges is just one of many companies that utilize Revel Systems’ software and hardware. Those around Falzone say the company's success couldn't have happened without their CEO's willpower.

“She’s not somebody that tries, she's somebody that does,” her cofounder Ciabarra says.

One story Falzone likes to tell occurred in 2010, when she convinced a man at a coffee shop to invest in her new company.

Falzone was working out of Cido, a café in Saucelito, California. The then 25-year-old was making calls to investors. She was trying to raise funding to build the company's first prototype, and she wasn't getting far.

“I was desperate,” Falzone says. “But you can never act like you’re desperate. The game of raising funds is similar to dating,” she jokes.

Falzone says a man sitting at the next table over overheard her, and the two got to talking. She says that the man had a daughter who wanted to be an entrepreneur. (Falzone declined to name the man or connect him with Mashable, citing a confidentiality agreement.)

"He really liked my enthusiasm and passion, and was willing to do whatever it took to make this dream a reality," Falzone says.

The two parted ways that day, but she followed up, and eventually persuaded him to take a chance on her, and she says he wrote her a check for $28,000.

What the future looks like

Fresh off a successful partnership with Indy 500, Revel is exploring how to expand, and Falzone and her team are looking to tap into consumers for more revenue.

The company plans to explore on-demand delivery on college campuses and has been working on the international market — including Cuba, where it’s already begun to sell its products.

“They're dying for technology," Ciabarra told the AP.

The company also plans to open offices in Canada in the Middle East in addition to their offices in the UK, Australia, Lithuania, Singapore, San Francisco, among others.

Spotted in #Poland! Businesses all around the world are looking to #RevelUp. pic.twitter.com/s3VyAlndYI — Lisa Falzone (@LisaFalzone) May 20, 2016

Falzone and Ciabarra plan to take the company public in the next two years. But there are still some kinks to iron out.

Perhaps their biggest concern is avoiding the bumps in the road other large companies have come across when they became publicly traded.

“We don’t want to end up like many of the companies out there today that go public,” Ciabarra says. “They go up, then they go crashing down."

Dorsey’s Square did exactly this after its IPO. Square’s stock price fell below its IPO price just two months after the company went public.

Women in business

But business isn’t all that’s on Falzone’s mind. She also deeply cares about gender equality in the business world and wants to encourage women to pursue careers in the tech industry.

She launched a $10,000 scholarship called the Revel Scholars Program that is given to two girls each year with an interest in tech entrepreneurship. Falzone also mentors the recipients.

“I think more women need to start companies. More women need to get into tech,” Falzone says. “I really want to push women to believe in themselves.”

However, Falzone doesn’t believe the road for women in the tech world is necessarily easy.

“People aren’t used to women in leadership positions — they’ve never seen a woman take a startup from its founding to a billion dollar IPO,” Falzone says.

And she’s right. Only 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women and they famously struggle to raise funding. “Investors likely to invest in things they’ve seen be successful before, and they’ve never seen that.”

Indeed, the club of women that run billion-dollar companies is an elite one. Mary Barr of General Motors, Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard and Indra Nooyi of Pepsico are among the few.

“I love being the underdog. I like it when people doubt me,” Falzone says. “It fuels my success.”

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