Hi, fintech fam! 💜

The weather has recently been giving us a taste of summer.

How cool would it be if we could all come together and officially kick off the season?

Let’s make it official! Join us for our Fintech Is Femme Founders Summit on June 3 during New York's #TechWeek.

This event is designed to provide valuable insights to founders and operators so they can:

• effectively fundraise,

• discover their product market fit and voice,

• go to market,

• and learn about operational efficiencies.

To pull off another stellar event, we need your help! We’re looking for:

🔊 Speakers (reply to this email with your content ideas!)

💸 Sponsors (progress is possible, not guaranteed; we need support!) Email the Fintech Is Femme team at [email protected].

And grab your early bird ticket here before they sell out (fast)!

WHY UPGRADE?

There’s a big difference between how the mainstream media covers fintech and how I do it. Every week, I will provide you with the latest fintech news (minus the BS), profiles of inspiring women in fintech, and insightful analysis to help you stay ahead of the competition.

For our premium members, I send out updates 3x a week through our new column, "On Performance.” These columns will provide tactical advice to improve your entrepreneur and business leader performance.

Plus, premium members support female-led journalism and keep this work going. Because of your support, Fintech Is Femme is more than just a newsletter; it's a media empire and community for women to connect, learn, and support one another.

CAREER

Top Career Advice From Stash CEO Liza Landsman

Liza Landsman is one of the top fintech executives in New York City as CEO of Stash, a company with a valuation north of $1 billion. 

Given her experiences, she is arguably one of the top fintech executives, period.  

Her expertise combines operational prowess and venture capital knowledge. She has held key positions at Citigroup and BlackRock and worked at E*Trade for some time.

Notably, Landsman was one of the founding executives at Jet.com, where her strategic leadership helped the company achieve its massive $3.3 billion acquisition by retail giant Walmart. 

After this, she worked as a General Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA) for over five years. NEA is a global venture capital firm with a staggering $25 billion in assets. Her investment focus was on the consumer, e-commerce, and fintech sectors. 

Her diverse experiences have uniquely positioned her for her current role as CEO of Stash.

Ask Landsman how she landed in fintech; she'll lay out a career roadmap and confidently offer advice on pursuing it.

At the Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit on April 8, Landsman shared her playbook for navigating a career in finance and tech that led her to fintech in front of an audience of over 200 leading women in fintech. 

Here’s what she said.

Landsman understands the power of good financial habits because she doesn't come from a family with money. 

She was the first woman in her family to attend college, earning her Bachelor's degree from Cornell University. 

That came with student loan debts that Landsman soon realized her fresh-out-of-college literary agent job couldn't pay for.

"I come from a family of no money and waitressed my way through school," she shared. "My parents contributed what they could, and my grandparents contributed what they could."

So, after graduating from college, she entered the finance industry to make enough money to afford her student loans. 

She started her finance career in consumer finance, asset management, and investment. Landsman worked for what she called "a regular hodgepodge" of finance companies, including Citi, where she spent ten years.

During her time at Citi, Landsman had an executive coach who called her out on her constant talk about the "next job" she wanted. 

“That keeps your mindset in a narrow view when you need to be looking at a much broader universe of opportunities,” she shared. "When you talk about the job you want, you're essentially betting on 17 in the roulette wheel instead of betting on black.”

Translation: Consider what you want from your career instead of thinking about your job. 

Landsman's coach gave her a lens through which she could stop thinking about her job and focus on how she wanted to spend her time.

She calls these “self-inventory” checks.

Ask yourself all the time: 

1. What experiences do I want to have? 

2. What skill do I want to acquire? 

3. And what are my non-negotiables?

Landsman says the list of non-negotiables must be the shortest. She calls your list of non-negotiables a key superpower for clarity. 

She told the audience, "The turning point in my career came when I started using this." 

Landsman shared a story about a great boss in her previous job in one anecdote.

When one of her peers left, she was asked to take over his position. She began to question the structure of her division. Landsman felt that there was a better way to organize their business and that she was the one who should be running it.

This was a turning point in her career, allowing her to triple her scope and handle her first P&L.

But more importantly, this experience made her reflect on how she wanted to spend her time and what she truly wanted for her career.

This shift is empowering, and you're capable of it, too. 

Landsman starts by religiously conducting a self-inventory every year. Ask yourself: 

• What skills do I want to build?

• What experiences do I want to have?

• What are my goals?

"[Doing self-inventory every year is crucial] because starting with a North Star is important, but we are not static. We are nonlinear. And this evolution is something we have to bring into our process actively," Landsman said.

Landsman considers this self-inventory a “portfolio rebalancing” and credits the practice of self-reflection to a gift her mom gave her and her brother when they turned 21. 

Every year, Landsman's mother wrote her kids a letter, giving them insights into what was going on with her, what was going on with the world, and how she thought about the things around her.

Landsman encouraged the audience to do it for their children if they could and credits this "incredible gift" as an inside look into her parents' lives before they got divorced, what her mom was like in her 30s, and her perspectives on raising children of different genders - something that fueled her own introspection and career development.

Landsman realized that "two angels" lived on her shoulder through this introspection. The capitalist angel and the social values angel. Those angels needed to get along. 

(Sound familiar?)

Because she desired to have her two angels combine forces in a place where she spends so much of her time—her work—Landsman decided she could have a job that filled her cup and gave her room to make an impact. 

Enter Stash. Financial prosperity is no longer just for the ultra-rich; Stash is at the helm of that massive transformation. 

On its way to an IPO, Stash raised $40 million in October 2023, just a few months after Landsman joined as the Chief Executive Officer. 

This is just one of several rounds raised by Stash since it was founded in 2015, but the mission has never been more relevant.

The number of Americans without an emergency fund is growing yearly, and there's a dire need for easy wealth-building solutions like Stash.  

"More than half of Americans don't know how money works or how to acquire it, keep, preserve, or grow it," Landsman said during her talk.

The app now has over six million customers and manages $3B in assets. Tell me again how direct-to-consumer fintech is dead. 

Because it seems alive and well to me. 

Beyond the economic proof that this type of investing works, Landsman fell in love with Stash because its model also psychologically understood investor behavior. 

She explains that Stash's founders modeled the fintech after Weight Watchers, understanding that humans easily get overwhelmed by major changes in their behavior–especially anything that feels restrictive. 

Just like Weight Watchers breaks down the idea of losing 30 lbs at once to just losing 1lb a day for its users, Stash proposes that you don't need $3000 to invest but rather as little as $5. 

Stash does the work for its customers of constantly rebalancing its Smart Portfolio based on market conditions. Hence, all investors need to succeed truly– to invest a small amount of $ over time. 

With Landsman as CEO, Stash and its core mission are in excellent hands. 

Beyond sharing her incredibly impactful story, Landsman also dropped some profound wisdom in my conversation with her on my podcast Humans of Fintech that all of us looking to lead and innovate in this space need to hear. 

Let's cover some of the highlights. 

#1 Doubt is for other people 

When I asked Landsman about navigating doubt, she responded that you shouldn't let doubt in the room when you are part of a startup's leadership team. 

Yes, there should be space for intellectual curiosity, but "if you don't have complete conviction in the mission of your business, you probably should invest your time elsewhere."

#2 Hope isn't a replacement for planning 

Landsman believes nothing is more hopeful than creating a product you think will make the world a better place for you and others. 

However, she warns that hope isn't a replacement for sincere planning and intention. 

"Give people a plan and a set of actions that will lead them to a better future; don't just hope for it."

#3 I repeat: Consumer fintech is not dead

As long as we believe that consumers will want to buy and sell stuff to make money later in life–no matter what the capital markets do—this criticism will remain a fallacy. 

There are billions of underserved people who don't have access to financial services—fintech's power is its ability to bridge this gap. 

Case closed. 

#4 It's always easier to be cynical than it is to be aspirational

The scarcity mindset is deeply ingrained in all of us. 

Why? Because it's fundamental to our culture's ability to keep people afraid of what is possible for themselves, especially those of us historically left out of opportunities to build wealth.   

Landsman confirms that one of the biggest obstacles to engaging people in investing is overcoming the initial fear of the dark.

People don't invest in retirement because they need to understand the benefits. More likely, they refrain from investing because they:

1. They don't have the money and, therefore, are afraid they can't afford it

2. They don't know how to do so correctly and are worried they will look stupid or make a mistake 

Direct-to-consumer fintech companies are responsible for finding the right way to lead the public safely through the dark so we can begin to turn on the lights. 

#5 Keep snowballing women into the room because it's working 

"It's not as good as it could be, but it's far better than it was, both in terms of representation and just openness," she shared.  

Though it's a slow, painstaking process, each woman who breaks through that glass ceiling creates more momentum and leaves the window open for others to follow. 

#6 Don't concern yourself with critics on the sidelines

With all the obstacles ahead, particularly for women, Landsman emphasizes the importance of only listening to those with skin in the game and participating in making our economic system more democratic. 

She's not interested in the opinions of those criticizing her from the sidelines, and we shouldn't be either.

Speaking of our summit, did you know people got job interviews, booked speaking gigs, and met million-dollar connections? 

This is exactly what Fintech Is Femme’s goal is: to help you (and your company) make a lot of money and provide value to your community.

On June 3rd, we’re doing it again, but this time, the spotlight is on the founders. How can founders thrive in this economy and build a company resilient to downturns? 

Email us here with the subject line “Partner - June 3rd,” and let’s discuss our exclusive inventory for you to get your brand in front of these high-impact founders.

_{WTF ELSE?}

• Fed courts nonbanks for FedNow growth 

• Paris-based fintech RockFi raises €3m to become the “new wealth management”

• Cairo-based FinTech Bokra secures $4.6m to revolutionize WealthTech in MENA

• Fintech startup Ramp sees 32% bump in valuation, Mercury expands into consumer banking

_{I WANT IT, I GOT IT}

• 📚 Today’s Read: Who’s already read the iconic Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye? Admittedly, it’s been on my must-read list for a while. I’m hopeful that once I finish my own book manuscript, I’ll get to pick this one up right away!

• 👀 Today’s Watch: In 1972, the first-ever Black congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, launched a trailblazing campaign to become the president of the United States, and Netflix made a movie about it called Shirley, starring Regina King.

• 🍣 Today’s Eats: I turned 30 last week! To celebrate, we went full Filipino style and ate at one of my favorite spots, Gugu Room.

_FINTUNES

🎵 Doja Cat - OKLOSER (Live at Coachella 2024)

I can't get enough of Doja Cat - she's all over my feed lately, and I'm loving it. Her headlining performance at Coachella was absolutely incredible. Not only was she the second Black woman (after Beyoncé) to headline the festival, but she was also the first female rapper to do so. It's hard to put into words just how high she set the bar with her performance - it was truly unforgettable.

Check it out for yourself!

That’s all for now! Stay safe, everyone. Hug your loved ones. See you Thursday!

Love,

Nicole

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