You’ve had the opportunity to work in different capacities at Apple, Google, and YouTube. How would you summarize the culture of innovation at these tech companies in comparison to Funding Circle?
Each company is unique in what they offer to their employees and end users. I learned great product marketing techniques from my time at Apple with a focus on aesthetics and great story-telling to market the first iPhone campaigns focused on small businesses. At Google, rolling out the first Google Wallet product, our focus was always on the user interactions as well as leveraging strong partnerships to build off reciprocal strengths. At YouTube, our focus was on discovery and delight in entertaining our users and building safe communities. At Funding Circle, its been an exhilarating combination building our team culture around our core mission and values (they’re even painted on the wall!) – think smart, make it happen, be open, stand together and live the adventure. At Funding Circle, I think we uniquely live these values in everything from our weekly mission and value awards where individuals are nominated for performance based on our values as well as the foundation for our bi-annual performance reviews. As a start-up, I think ‘critical to be able to rally the team around these core principals, manage expectations and performance and move fast for growth with a team that can continue to replicate.
You serve as co-chair of the Year Up Bay Area Leadership Council. What is the focus of this program? How does your background in Fintech assist with this?
Year Up is a national organization focused on empowering youth to cross the opportunity divide through a one-year, intensive training program that provides low-income young adults, ages 18-24, with a combination of hands-on skill development, college credits, and corporate internships. The Bay Area leadership council focuses on strategic initiatives set by executive team to work on corporate partnerships for internships and full time employment, fundraising, mentoring and other activities to grow the YearUp Bay Area network for their students. As a member of the FinTech community, we’ve had several members enable large corporate partnerships such as Bank of the West as well as expose students to different career paths they may take within a corporation.
The diversity numbers within the tech community have received quite a bit of attention lately. What has your experience been with respect to this issue? Do you believe it is improving?
I do think this is a challenge.
I believe this is something that will always need acknowledgement, desire to change and focused effort across industries, not just tech. When an issue is brought to light, my experience has been most desire to improve and may just need coaching as to how to identify biases and actively work beyond them. From the most diverse teams, come the most diverse of ideas that can typically reach the broadest market which for a majority of businesses, is the ultimate goal.
What key career advice would you provide to younger women interested in participating in FinTech?
Go for it! FinTech continues to be an exciting, growing space with lots of different avenues to pursue from ecommerce to payments to lending. There are lots of opportunities whether you are experienced in the finance community or are new. The exciting thing is, so many of the business models are brand new (like Funding Circle) so expertise is still being developed and there are lots of skill sets you can leverage from previous roles like sales, marketing, blogging, analytics, partnerships or operations – or even on the ground experience, like for us at Funding Circle, many of our employees grew up in families of small business owners!
Side note – Many studies have shown women control 70-80% of consumer spending and typically the ‘CMO’ – Chief Mom Officer – makes the financial decisions for their household. This means more ecommerce & shopping product roadmaps should be designed for the end consumer in mind – women!
Several countries in the Nordics have introduced quota’s with respect to the number of women serving on company boards. Do you agree with this approach?
I think being aware of wanting diversity in your company and on your board is a positive thing for a business and could be an appropriate goal, although I don’t necessarily believe in a forced quota. The top priority for a board seat must be for the candidate to bring deep expertise, sound judgement and wisdom of your industry to bring value to you as an executive and to your team and shareholders.
Who(m) do you believe has had the most influencing with respect to influencing your own career?
My father – he’s always been my most trusted mentor in having sage advice on everything from what to look for in a role and in a company to negotiation tactics to investment advice. I know I am lucky to have his guidance and its been a very rewarding area of our relationship to continue to grow, especially as my career continues to progress.
I do hope we see more female founders in the FinTech space – it’s something that will be exciting to watch for.
What do you see as the leading future trends for FinTech? How do you believe Funding Circle is positioned to address these?
Transparency and with it, creating greater access to financial services are some of the most exciting trends we’re addressing at Funding Circle. A marketplace, by definition, has to be transparent for both sides to participate and provide value to each other. We pride ourselves on setting the gold standard for transparent terms for small business owners with the Funding Circle experience, and actually just launched the Borrower Bill of Rights as part of the Responsible Business Lending coalition last month in DC to inform small business owners of their rights. With more and more services coming online, there’s greater access by users to services that were once held to smaller groups of people to gain access to new products.
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