Hi fintech fam 💜

Happy August! We’re in those last sweet weeks of summer — I’m sneaking in beach days whenever I can while going full throttle on fall events and activations.

First up: Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit: SF Tech Week Edition is officially in the works! It’s happening October 8 during SF Tech Week and shaping up to be our biggest West Coast gathering yet. (Full site, speakers, and agenda are coming soon — but you can peek at the details and snag early-bird tickets here.)

Then: Money20/20. I’ll be speaking, podcasting, and hosting events at the show. Want to make a splash there together? Hit reply and let’s chat.

Even sooner: August 13, I’m teaming up with Unit21 for Risky Business: The FinCrime Ops Tour in NYC. Want in? Details below.

And for today’s read: One top-tier investor and one data scientist share their blueprints for how fintech founders and operators can actually win.

Let’s get into it.

$3 trillion. That’s the global cost of financial crime — and it’s only growing.

Nearly 80 million U.S. consumers lost money to scams last year. It’s time to stop watching it happen.

That’s why Fintech Is Femme is teaming up with Unit21 for Risky Business – The FinCrime Ops Tour: a curated, invite‑only event series where real fraud fighters and AML leaders share unfiltered playbooks on staying ahead of AI‑powered crime rings.

No jargon. No fluff. No sales decks. Just raw, actionable insights. Consider this your invitation.

NYC kicks off August 13 with a live panel: “Future‑proofing Your FinCrime Ops — Automation, AI, or Elbow Grease?”

Seats are limited. Our community is invited.

INNOVATION

In venture, Laura Bock calls it “one giant experiment.”

The QED Investors partner — who went from pipetting in a biophysics lab to writing multimillion-dollar checks — says her scientific training still guides how she works.

“When I went to college, I was definitely a bit of a science nerd,” she told me on Fintech Mavericks. 

“I studied chemistry, biology, physics, and spent a lot of time in the lab,” she said. “I soon realized I hated pipetting and I was not going to be patient enough for an academic life. But I do think that a lot of the scientific mindset has stuck with me.”

That scientific mindset shows up in her investing style. “You can apply the scientific method to venture,” Bock said. “You observe, you make a hypothesis, you try to gather data, analyze the results, make a decision.”

I couldn’t help but laugh — because that’s exactly what I did as a journalist, too.

Reporting is one long hypothesis test. It’s also what I see the best founders do daily: treat their business like an experiment that never stops.

“The best companies are the ones that compound learning the quickest,” Bock said. “They don’t ignore negative data the same way they don’t ignore positive data. They’re unbiased when it comes to listening to the market.”

That ability to listen — without bias, without ego — is what separates the founders who survive downturns from those who burn out in them.

Bock didn’t start her career at a startup demo day. She started in banking and insurance consulting — two spaces she describes as “a totally different world” from the fast-moving tech ecosystem.

So she had to learn the other half of venture: the part no spreadsheet can prepare you for.

“The networking piece was the steep learning curve,” she admitted. “Obviously, venture is private investments, which means you can’t just find the data anywhere. You have to talk to people, you have to hustle. It takes time to get into the flow of the tech community.”

Seven years later, that scientific approach, paired with her venture-honed instinct, has given Bock a unique lens on what makes companies succeed. And right now, she’s betting on a few big shifts:

But Bock also knows that these opportunities mean nothing if founders can’t communicate them effectively.

Which brings us to her favorite analogy:

“Raising capital,” she said, “is like writing a novel one chapter at a time. You need urgency, deep founder-market connection, tangible traction — and a vision of what the future could look like that makes it impossible to put down.”

If Bock’s strength is applying the scientific method to venture bets, Peter Walker’s superpower is making complex data digestible.

As Head of Insights at Carta, Walker sits on top of one of the richest private market datasets in the world.

But his job isn’t just to crunch numbers. It’s to translate them into stories that founders, investors, and operators can actually use.

That means leaving the whitepapers behind.

“PDFs and static reports don’t cut it,” Walker told me on Fintech Mavericks. “You need to make data usable.”

Walker built a 130,000-strong LinkedIn audience by posting clean, clear, snackable insights on startup valuations, fundraising trends, and employee equity.

But if you think he’s just tossing out charts, you’re wrong.

Walker has a system.

For his first year and a half at Carta, he blocked out 8–8:40 a.m. every single day to create content. Not to scroll. Not to tweak old slides. To create something new.

“You need to track cycle time,” he said. “How long does it take you to create one good-looking piece of content? That number should be going down. Once you can make a high-quality graphic and post in 10–15 minutes, you can show up every day.”

His format is simple: a square graphic with a chart in the middle, framed by clean headers and annotations. The goal? Make one insight unavoidable.

And then — post it. Even if it sucks.

“Your stuff will suck for a while,” Walker said. “Put it out anyway. Consistency beats polish.”

This might be the most important lesson for founders: you don’t need to go viral. You need to be consistent.

Because brand-building isn’t about ROI from a single post. It’s about showing up so often that when people in your space think “founder,” “fintech,” or “future of XYZ,” they think of you.

Both Bock and Walker agree: AI is changing the game.

For Bock, it’s making direct-to-consumer fintech possible again by automating financial advice and product customization. For Walker, it’s making it easier than ever to create — but harder than ever to stand out.

Which is why they both point to the same X-factor: taste.

“Technology isn’t a moat anymore,” Bock said. “Anyone can replicate features. But taste — that ability to create products people actually love — is hard to copy.”

Walker sees the same thing with content. “You’re not just posting data. You’re building a brand. People are buying from people they respect. That requires taste.”

In a sea of sameness, taste is what cuts through.

If you’re a founder, operator, or investor trying to break through in a noisy market, here are 3 tactics straight from Laura Bock and Peter Walker that you can apply this week:

The throughline between Bock’s boardroom experiments and Walker’s content lab?

The courage to test, learn, and iterate — in public.

Whether you’re raising your next round or writing your next post, don’t wait for perfect conditions. Get your reps in. Tell your story. Build your taste.

Because in this era of AI-driven sameness, the companies — and the people — who will win are the ones who make experimentation a habit, and storytelling a priority.

What experiment are you running in your business right now?

Reply to this email or tag me on LinkedIn. I want to hear it.

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That’s all for now! See you Thursday!

Love,

Nicole 💜