Venture Café Cambridge in collaboration with CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center)'s Social Impact Program, hosted a recent Fireside Chat: DEMOCRATIZING ACCESS: BREAKING DOWN INNOVATION BARRIERS featuring Crissi Cole, #founder of Penny Finance.
Moderated by Kris Mondlane of CIC Captains of Innovation, the discussion centered around Crissi’s journey as a #startup founder looking to expand access to financial literacy, particularly for women, through her startup work with Penny Finance.
After beginning her carrier and spending 10 years at Goldman Sachs, starting Penny Finance was based on the premise that there was a problem with access to financial literacy and support. Crissi built Penny Finance out of the passion to solve this problem.
Some points in the discussion that spoke to this included:
➡ Women retire with half the wealth of men.
➡ 83% of consumer spending is made by women. This became the target demo for Penny Finance.
➡ The only way an advisor can make money is to work with people that have money, that leaves too many people on the outside looking in. Women are disproportionately affected by this.
➡ The impact of Covid all but ended her Mom’s business. The struggle to save the family business became a key driver to the creation of Penny Finance.
Key background came during her time at Goldman where the COO requested her to pivot into Product development. This gave a background in systems that provided the backdrop to create Penny Finance.
Once the process of building the platform was in motion, in three months time an MVP was built (which by Crissi’s own account was not great) and pushed it out the door with the question ‘Can a machine replace a human’. 6k people later, that question was answered ‘yes’ and the intent to build the business pushed forward.
Throughout the process of prototyping, MVP roll out, recruiting friends on Linkedin for staffing, going after funding, and coming harrowingly close to the whole thing going bad, some key takeaways included:
➡ Networking no. Relationship building yes. Know who you need in your corner. Give before you take. Try to seek out people who are not like you.
➡ Bottom line on finding funding is ‘How do you make money?’. At the end of the day, it’s the VC world. Accept it.
➡ Investors have bias, can’t help it.
➡ Once Crissi accepted that the potential for failure is a reality, so long as the family was good, so was she. Focus on the things that love you back.