Fueling The FinTech Landscape, With Sarah Biller

The FinTech industry is full of innovations, but ultimately what are they for? Whom are these innovations serving? In today’s episode, FinTech advocate Sarah Biller joins us to talk about the current state of the financial services industry. Sarah shares top industry knowledge and her experience in using emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and data science. Tune in and find out where the financial industry is headed with these innovations pushing it forward.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/sarah-biller

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Fueling The FinTech Landscape, With Sarah Biller

Entrepreneur, Industry Advocate, Investor, Board Member, and Educator

My guest is Sarah Biller who I first met when she was the cofounder of a startup and I was working at State Street. She is an entrepreneur, executive, and educator with experience in the financial services, life sciences, and telecom sectors. She is also a force to be reckoned with in the FinTech arena, which makes up the vast majority of her focus.

Sarah began her career in the telecom sector working for MCI and then spent several years working for the Corporate Executive Board, a Washington DC-based research organization. Following that, she jumped into the pharma industry with stops at Cambridge Healthech Advisors, IndUS Pharmaceuticals, and later into financial services with time at Fidelity as a cofounder of a crowdsourced investment sentiment startup, and at State Street.

Along the way, she was one of the Founders of the FinTech Sandbox, which started in Boston and has served as an accelerator and advocate for hundreds of startups since its founding. Sarah has moved into a mix of investing, board roles, teaching, volunteer work, and mentoring. She has also worked alongside Cisco’s John Chambers and others to expand financial literacy and access to financial services in the entrepreneurial climate in her native state of West Virginia.

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Sarah, welcome. It’s good to have you on the show.

What a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

It’s been a while since we caught up, not as long as some other people who I hadn’t talked to in decades. We don’t have that issue, but you have a lot of different things going on relative to when you and I first got to know each other. I gave a little bit of an overview in the introduction, but give our audience a little bit more detail on the range of things you’re up to.

Thank you. I do think of those days when we were together and I could run into your office and get mentorship. It is one of the highlights of my life. Since we’ve last seen each other, I have continued with a strong footprint in FinTech. I still believe in the power of financial services to create upward mobility and help people have better financial literacy and live their lives.

On the other side of that, it is to remove the friction in the capital markets, which you and I have spent a lot of time on. In parallel to that passion, the base case for FinTech with my increasing observation was that FinTech itself was ceasing to be a vertical category or industry classification, like financial services. We’re starting to see it embedded in other places. It’s making it easier to get better quality healthcare because the payment models are removing friction, or it’s embedding itself in the financing of solar energy in the home. I became deeply passionate about the idea that maybe there’s a solution for inclusivity or sustainability that married those experiences.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been driven by an initiative in my home state of West Virginia. That is to expand the economy by supporting entrepreneurs who are in Appalachia and who are building impactful and investible companies. I’ve developed a niche around putting resources to work, whether they need capital in the form of venture capital or whether they need training, knowledge, talent, or access to customers. It’s been some of the most rewarding work that I’ve done in my life because it’s a place I love.

Let’s talk a little bit about that. We can get to other parts that you’re involved in a little bit later. How did this all start? You’ve got John Chambers involved and others as well. You’ve got some pretty big names in the scheme of things who are helping you take this initiative in West Virginia.

In fact, I have to give John all the credit. John Chambers, not while at Cisco, but post-Cisco after he retired from being CEO and Chairman of the Board, was invited by state leaders like Prime Minister Modi or Macron in France to begin to advise on this idea that you could have an entrepreneurial-driven economy or ecosystem. It’s hard for us to think about that in France, as one example, where you have a whole different employment model.

John very successfully helped them navigate that vision. We see, as an example, India as one of the most thriving startup ecosystems in the world. It’s one where they’re training in college. They’re developing tech talent. They’re rolling out and developing applications that meet the population where they are and what they need.

One day, John woke up, at least this is how he tells me the story, with an epiphany of, “Why am I not doing this for my home state?” I had some personal reasons to be back in West Virginia. We came together. He knew I was there. It was to contemplate what would you do if you needed to develop a systematic and repeatable process in an environment which historically had a single-source economy by and large. It’s an extraction economy and the jobs were created around that. What would you do first if you had to encourage the next generation of entrepreneurs to stay in the state and build their companies?

It resonated with me most acutely because I am that child. My parents, as a kid, were like, “You’re weird. You like math. You like science. Girls in West Virginia don’t. You might have to go somewhere.” I don’t mean that to be hokey, but that is a conversation that happens time and time again. John and individuals like Brad Smith who we know from our work in financial services is the immediate past CEO and Chairman of Intuit, and Ray Lane out of Oracle and then KKR have come together to help envision and drive outcomes in the Appalachian region more broadly around creating a startup state.

How did you and John meet each other?

I’ll give you an example of what my husband, who’s from Connecticut, says to me. I’m in my home in Boston where you and I knew one another and met. I can sniff out West Virginian from 100 yards away. The West Virginians, perhaps not unique, but I like to think in some ways unique, always stay together. I’ve been in a back alley izakaya in Tokyo and someone walks in with a flying WV hat on, which maybe some of your audience can envision. I’ll rush them like, “I’m a mountaineer, too. I’m a West Virginian.” If I had to think about how I met John, it is through those lifelong loves and experiences. In my early technology entrepreneurship days, I was able to reach out to him and Brad Smith. A West Virginian will always pick up the phone when you call, so he did.

That’s very nice. How’s that all going, the work that you’re doing with the two of them and many others?

It is a team environment. It is exciting from what you might consider a modest start, not even knowing what entrepreneurs we might find in our group. We’re called Vantage Ventures. We’re on West Virginia University’s campus. We have an office there. We have 40-plus companies that are in areas as diverse as health tech, telemedicine, data, and IoT. We do a lot of work with infrastructure, which is the expansion of the way energy is produced and stored, or in broadband.

We won’t surprise you. We have a very active amount of startups in the security space. That’s cyber security, digital identity, and computer visioning, but all the way through to what we define as security. That’s working with entrepreneurs in the AgTech space who view it as their mission to close the food insecurity gap. That is a tremendous challenge in the middle of the country, frankly. We’re also creating tools and technologies with teams that are building for financial security. We have a big FinTech practice.

We had the benefit of having Bill Gates and his team at Breakthrough Energy commit to a $750 million-plus investment in the state of West Virginia to build the next generation of iron-air batteries. This extends our ability to use renewable energy where you have a battery stack that might last 8 hours to 100 hours. You have almost a barbell effect happening in West Virginia as people are beginning to see the region differently and its ability to support innovation.

Do you feel the difference starting to take root on the ground in terms of changes in the economy in the state?

I do and people do. It has been an interesting period to introduce technology and the next generation of these emerging technologies that might be able to leapfrog where there have historically been obstacles in the state of West Virginia. It’s a mountain estate. There’s not been a lot of infrastructure developed. The first thing is culture. Do you see this desire to have your children not aspire to go into the mining industry, but aspire to see them be in the technology field or grow more broadly into these digital tools?

It has taken root. The state has begun itself. I know the culture is changing when the state leadership or the elected officials begin to partner with us in conversations, and they did from the beginning. It won’t surprise you. In the US, we have some acrimony between the Democrats and the Republicans. West Virginia is not a nerd to that situation, but they have come to the table regardless.

You have this amazing confluence of the public sector and the academic sector, which sits together at the table when we bring innovative companies through, as well as the private sector and investment capital. That has been a meaningful difference in a small place that has to work together to punch above its weight. It was that way. When my family came in the late 1700s, they had to work with their neighbor. It was too hostile of an environment. At this time, it is rewarding to sit at a board table with all these people.

Let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about FinTech Sandbox. You were one of the founders of the FinTech Sandbox, which started in Boston but has moved beyond Boston. Talk about the genesis of that and how you and your cofounders got it mobilized.

Innovation’s a team sport. I always want to think about the idea we value these single founders. Everyone’s like, “Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s been my experience. Nobody does it alone. One of the cofounders there is David Jegen. We had Jean Donnelly right in the beginning as our founding executive director. FinTech Sandbox is a not-for-profit as you correctly said. That started in Boston. We began noodling on the idea in 2014 when we saw the emergence in my category of entrepreneurs and capital markets in beginning to build next-generation technologies. In fact, that’s how we met.

I know. I remember.

You were open to this idea of here’s this crazy person trying to think about the debt markets and how to rethink credit modeling. I was not unlike other entrepreneurs at that time who were innovating in the wake of the credit crisis. There were new ways of measuring risk or developing portfolio and construction techniques using the basis of artificial intelligence. What was beginning to stall us all was the lack of access to data.

Data is an industry. It’s 2,000 years old. It’s been around for a long time. Data has mattered in a lot of decisions. The procurement process was hard. It was onerous. It was expensive. It’s not a criticism, but you can imagine. If you’re a Bloomberg sales guy, who are you going to talk to? Is it the industry executive like you who might buy 25 terminals or the little startup who might buy 1? In those conversations, the credit goes to David Jegen here for observing disparate dots of challenges across each of the entrepreneurs. He thought, “What if we created a vehicle in which the data providers came to the table and we were able to get data more quickly into the hands of promising startups?”

Those who were able to do with it did something with it. They had coded a landing environment and analytics. Through those lunchtime discussions and lots of tears, because your company needs data, we came up with a FinTech Sandbox concept. Unique to that idea was to make it a not-for-profit. It was very strange in financial services to say that we’re going to create something that’s not going to make money, but it’s going to be for the good of the industry and it is going to further innovation.

The success that it has had these years has surprised us all. We have over 250 startups who’ve gone through FinTech Sandbox and availed themselves of the data sets that our data partners provide. They represent most categories of FinTech that we think about from payments to lending to institutional retail investing. We have InsurTech. We have a lot of RegTech across the swath.

Also, what has been rewarding to us is that we have entrepreneurs on every continent but Antarctica who reach in. We have Latin America. We took in our first entrepreneurs from Africa. We have a big European presence. You’ve been a long-standing advisor to us in this work. When you think about heart projects and my own experience, if you suffer the problem, figure out how to fix it, and don’t help someone else who’s coming behind you, it’s a pretty lame life. I will say that FinTech Sandbox and its work to help other innovators who are doing extraordinary things for the financial services sector has been one of those moments of great joy. That’s where we are. Thank you for asking about it.

Sarah Biller: FinTech Sandbox is working to help other innovators who do extraordinary things for the financial services sector.

It’s been close to ten years now in 2023 that it’s been going and, to your point, it’s had incredible success. That’s in terms of the number of firms that have gone through it, the way it’s blossomed, spread beyond Boston and has become more of a global name in the FinTech space. I’m curious to get your view. Apart from the data, which was the genesis of the model in terms of supporting the startups, what are the other types of support that FinTech Sandbox gives them that they particularly value?

Beyond data, the first other aspect is quite qualitative, but it’s the community aspect. Everyone who comes around the table with us, and I look at you as a perfect example, is because you have a meaningful knowledge set that you’re also willing to share. That’s not always true in financial services as well. If you looked at the qualitative aspect of that community, it is our drive to enable them to demonstrate what they’ve done with the data very publicly.

We are the organization that is behind Boston FinTech Week. In 2022, can you imagine at Boston FinTech Week, we had the Assistant Secretary General of NATO speak to the attendees on a call-to-action that the world needs a more resilient and community-driven financial services sector? FinTech Sandbox is the origin story for these leaders to help all of us see our role in a better, safer, and more inclusive financial services sector and world. They appreciate the mentorship and access to industry individuals who understand, too, that we have an arm’s length relationship with commerce. We want to do good, and everyone who comes to us wants to do good.

We also provide infrastructure tools to enable the sharing of knowledge. You don’t have to recode it to an API that we’ve seen other startups do. We’ll connect you with a startup that’s using this data to unlock it. That doesn’t help anyone’s competitiveness. It’s a utility to be able to connect to these APIs. We’ve sought to inspire that collegiality in an industry that is not known for that. That’s another point of appreciation. It does help that the venture investor community closely watches our portfolio at FinTech Sandbox opportunistically for investments.

We’ve had some good success stories. Name a few of your bigger success stories.

The universe shines on people that are trying to do something good even if it’s crazy. Right out of the box, one of our first companies can show many at this point. Six years out from their exit, we are the largest exit to date for an artificial intelligence-powered FinTech company. In that purchase, they attributed to the fact that they had data early on from FinTech Sandbox to train their models. We had a clear indication that FinTech Sandboxes who had access to data could build meaningful, large, and valuable companies that others would want to purchase. That’s one example.

The other might be Petal Bank which has introduced new capabilities and service models to a chronically lower economic marketplace and individuals with emerging financial mobility. We enable them through our data sets, but what they’ve done is they understand that the exhaust data that their customers are creating on their bank could be useful to others. Petal has created its own data model. You see this mentality of giving back and serving across the category.

One of our most interesting outcomes from FinTech Sandbox is this momentum that was created around creating regulatory FinTech Sandboxes. Innovate Finance in the UK was the one who took the sandbox model, lifted it up, and said, “You want to bring startups and data providers together? We’ll do one better. We’ll bring the regulators to the table, too.” That has made a critical difference in this period of innovation across the globe. Those are two startup examples and one matter of how to affect the way that this cycle of innovation has been sustained through a partnership with regulators.

Janine Hirt was one of the other people that I interviewed for this show. Certainly over here in the UK, the FCA probably of all the regulators was the first one to say, “We want to promote a FinTech industry as part of our regulatory agenda.” Others have taken up that banner, but they were the first. It certainly has been a big thread through everything that the Innovate Finance Group over here has been involved in.

They created a sea change in the way other regions participate with entrepreneurs. We see that vision in Singapore. We see it in the United States with states creating their own regulatory sandbox. It was the UK’s vision for what we could do with this cycle of innovation. Imagine if we had not begun to digitize our financial services sector and still had to go into banks during COVID. It would’ve come to a stall point.

A lot’s happened there and the tremendous success of the Sandbox over the years. You’ve moved into doing some investing on your own. Talk about some of the companies that you’ve invested in.

Thank you for that question, too. It’s hard not to be an entrepreneur and want to see other entrepreneurs succeed. One of those challenges is access to capital. I have three areas that I’m very excited about in the investment world. The first is the ability for every individual to participate in the investment in private assets, whether it’s emerging companies that match your value set that you want to participate into private asset categories that sometimes have been in the upper high net worth category like Timber, but Timber intentionally managed for carbon credits.

I’m invested with a company and sitting on the board of Rialto Markets. We’re the partner to Rubicon, which is Texas Pacific Group’s effort to systematically move carbon credits into the market of other portfolio companies. It is a very exciting time. There is a lot of vision around these small companies. It wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have entrepreneurs who think about what it means to create a frictionless movement of that capital, store that information, and digitize those securities, frankly.

I’m also an investor and on the board of KALYP, which is based in London. It’s two colleagues of ours from State Street whom I have a deep and abiding respect for as experienced executives. I want to underscore the criticality that FinTech innovation happens because people who know what they’re doing are the innovators. It’s been an enormous pleasure to work with seasoned operators that put around them the capabilities and the capital to do what they have done for years in their careers in the FinTech startup world.

The last area that I have started to invest in personally and spent a lot of time on is the community banking sector. I’m an investor and a bank director in a community bank in Nashville, Tennessee called Thread Bank. That has been perhaps one of the most rewarding environments because it is seen firsthand how the application of technology enables the next generation of community bankers to meet businesses where they are.

Our definition of community has changed. Going back to how we started this conversation, my small town in West Virginia had one bank. It was on the corner. The banker knew people in person and lent to them based on reputation, or maybe because they knew my father. I got a loan for my first car there. That has changed dramatically. How do we strengthen our community banking sector, our lending models, and our ability to reach individuals where they are, not assuming that they’re going to be right in front of us on Main Street? I’m very excited about where we’re taking the community banking sector through the eyes of FinTech.

You’ve interacted with a lot of entrepreneurs and seen a lot of stories play out, some massively successfully and some less successfully. What do you think makes a difference? Are there some key themes that make a difference between the ones that have a big success, the ones that have some success, and the ones that fizzle out?

I’m going to quote Warren Buffett. I’m going to go back to some lessons I learned from the Berkshire Hathaway team doing some work with them. That is that the best entrepreneurs are trying to avoid being stupid. They’re not trying to show that they’re the smartest people in the room. They’re beginning to use their experience and their emerging knowledge of new technologies. It’s not because of hubris, but because they know that they can make a meaningful difference.

I categorize when I sit in front of a ton of entrepreneurs, “Is this guy or gal going to not be stupid with the power they’ve been given in FinTech?” We could point to some examples in the marketplace where the belief that you were smarter than someone else got ahead of you. It’s a dangerous proposition when you’re dealing with the financial services sector.

That is very true. You were one of those entrepreneurs back in the day.

I hope you’re being kind in saying I didn’t want to be stupid.

I’m curious. When you look back at that era, what did you get right and what did you not get right?

In self-reflection, I probably could name 1,000 ways. As Thomas Edison said not to make a light bulb, I can tell you 1,000 ways not to build a predictive analytics platform for institutional debt investors. It’s knowing that in open honesty. The modest thing that we did get right is an understanding that data was coming onto the desks of professional bond buyers and sellers that were not neatly structured.

We understood instinctively that the data that was most important to them oftentimes didn’t show up in the financial statements of the companies they were evaluating the debt offerings to. It was embedded in unstructured pieces of information. It may be the local newspaper that talked about the manufacturing environment this company had that might not then pay its workers well. I built my company many years ago. That is when we started. You saw the increasing use of video as a means to communicate important information. It was hard systematically to mine those video casts.

What we got right was understanding that there were new factors that were influencing risk and that were emerging, but buried because of the variety of data and the velocity in which it was coming to individuals. The volumes were extreme. We call it big data. It started many years ago. If I had to think about it, we understood instinctively, and it goes back to the power of FinTech Sandbox, that you had to think about where your information was coming from more holistically. You had to structure it differently and better. Certainly, you had to normalize it because of all these disparate sources.

That would be my hindsight observation. It served me well because I always look for companies that understand, too, the criticality of data in helping individuals, institutions, companies, banks, or whatever makes decisions. Those who disregarded probably have not learned the lessons that we did in the credit crisis about being able to parse data correctly and see risk.

Sarah Biller: Data is critical in helping individuals and institutions make better decisions.

To some extent, you were ahead of your time in a way because you were focused on the early use cases of artificial intelligence. That has gotten a lot more traction in the FinTech space certainly since then. Your data source was a tough data source because you depended on institutional investors sharing their honest opinions about something, which they’re generally very guarded with. It’s a different form of a data challenge than the one the FinTech Sandbox was built to help with, but it’s a data challenge nonetheless, right?

For sure. I think about us matching up what they were telling us with what was being said in different mediums of data. FinTech Sandbox, though, thankfully, has evolved with the emergence of new and differentiated data sets. If you looked at our data sponsors, thankfully, they took the top as the Thompson Reuters of the world and the S&Ps. Our data providers are coming from a vast array of categories. If you need weather data, we have the weather channel because you’re building an ESG model or new insurance.

It is a fascinating evolution, and we’re not done. If we believe that we can build an inclusive and sustainable financial services sector, which is what the markets are telling us. It’s this intergenerational transfer of wealth. The shareholders of these big corporations want you to contribute. As a company, a financial services sector, and an investor in a social value system that’s quite different, you need those new data sets. Your intent is to go get them, find them, and help the data providers uniquely see that they have a role, too, in making the world better.

Going back to FinTech Sandbox, you created an unbelievable data utility in the scheme of things. You got a few early adopters. Thompson Reuters was right there at the beginning. They were there right at the beginning. If you think about it, the marginal cost of them providing data to a nonprofit sandbox group is next to nothing. The potential upside is that’s potentially a future customer for them that could grow into something big.

This is not to pick on Bloomberg, but it’s your example of the Bloomberg salesperson not going to focus on somebody who may buy one terminal. You created a scalable way for them to access the startup community. In some ways, that was the matchmaker role that the FinTech Sandbox played to the benefit of everybody.

I hope it continues. The other thing that was non-obvious to us when we started is the quality of the entrepreneur that would come to FinTech Sandbox because they had access to data. We don’t take equity, but the quality of the entrepreneur who went out and said, “I need this data to prove my point,” were also creating some of the most unique innovations in the market.

You think about Kensho and its ability to look at unstructured data and provide investment advice that would take a research analyst three days to figure out. They could mine through that data much more quickly and help draw a conclusion that didn’t replace the analyst but augmented their understanding. That wasn’t around until you had these innovators begin to intersect hot technology with data.

I like to think that we didn’t know that we were going to do this, but we did help spur the next generation of important products to the financial services industry that helps them have a better business, but also help individuals, small businesses, and municipalities. You name it. They help pensions and nurses. We’re in a new cycle of that opportunity.

It has ebbed and flowed a little bit, but the FinTech space as an area of investment remained pretty strong over the years.

I’m going to make this an argument that I don’t feel comfortable making. It’s stuck with me for the past couple of months as we’ve gone through a downturn in the idea of FinTech investing where everything has contracted with the economic uncertainty. During COVID, what we saw, and I go back to that example, were digital banking and digital procurement of life insurance. Someone used to have to come to your home and take your blood. That’s not the case. There are digital insurance agencies.

We have a responsibility to continue to build out these tools that strengthen our financial system and that strengthen financial services for people no matter where they’re sitting. I say that not wanting to be preachy. It sounds even poor form to say, “You have a responsibility in the industry to continue investing in innovation,” but I don’t know another word to put towards it. It’s a big market opportunity, but it’s also we must continue to support our innovation cycle. We can’t go back no matter what economic uncertainty we’re confronting.

Sarah Biller: We must continue to support innovation. We can’t go backwards, no matter what economic uncertainty we’re facing.

It ebbs and flows, but it’s not going away.

I agree.

I’m curious. I wanted to go back to the early days of your career or even before your career. You were in college in West Virginia. What did you envision yourself doing back then?

I have a Finance degree, so I knew at some point, I’d end up in financial services. My parents probably would’ve preferred that I had stuck with engineering and maybe build the next Golden Gate Bridge or something. What I learned very early on that informed all of the ebbs and flows in my career, to use your words, or bobs and weaves probably is better, is that I could always go home. No matter what risk I took, my door in West Virginia was always open. Not everyone is lucky enough to have that. I don’t think I knew at that moment, but for the fact that I was infinitely curious about business problems.

I became pretty sector agnostic. I was very sector-agnostic. I’ve had two companies in life sciences. I worked in the telecom field. As soon as I got into financial services, I knew I had found my home because it has such a meaningful way. That is an overused word, but it embeds itself in big, hairy problems. I don’t know if I knew early on except for the fact that if it was hard and someone told me it couldn’t be solved, I wanted to be right in the middle of it.

I was going to ask you that very question. You pretty much answered how I would’ve thought you would answer, which is that you’ve been fueled by a very strong intellectual curiosity through the years.

It also could have been bullheadedness. It depends on what day it is.

They both come in handy. What’s a day in the life look like for you professionally? I’m sure there’s a lot of variety.

It’s incredibly busy looking at ways to connect disparate dots. I’ll give you an example. We have some work going on with an affiliate of the United Nations who sees certain segments of the United States as a place where we can begin to actualize the UN sustainable development goals. My call immediately preceding this was how do you build a home that is financially attainable for the working poor that pays back? You begin to introduce new technologies like solar panels on the roof that the individual can take the excess residual power and sell it to the grid, or the home delivers clinical healthcare up until acute care in the home. You live better and you’re smarter.

Underpinning all of this visioning is how you create the jobs or the vocational training that creates a sustainable income. Someone owns this home. They don’t rent it. They’re on their pathway to financial mobility. It is the financial syndicate that would rethink credit for individuals who historically don’t have like 1099 like you and me because they’re working three jobs. That’s a pretty exciting day. That’s a problem set that’s real and can be solved when you begin to connect people like John Chambers to the problem or individuals who support the way you frame a problem, like at the UN.

My days still have a strong thread of financial services in FinTech. I’m taking that discipline and putting it against different problem sets to expand economies. Our country needs a place where everyone feels like they have the ability to lift themselves back up. I took that away from my upbringing in West Virginia and I still carry it strongly.

That is a laudable goal and a laudable focus. When you think about what you’re doing, you’ve done a lot of different things over the years in different industries. To your point, you played different roles. You’re an entrepreneur, investor, mentor, etc. What are the strengths that have helped you consistently have the impact that you want to have and the things you’re doing?

I hesitate to talk about strengths categorically. I could talk to you about learnings instead. I’ve referenced back to an earlier statement I made. Nobody does it alone. One of my learnings is you keep your network of doers. You keep them close and you draw on them. You align people with their strengths to solve some of these problems. I learned that from my grandmother. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll share a little story. I’m a storyteller.

My two grandmothers grew up in the same town. West Virginians are like that. You don’t go too far. Both sides of my family are from the same small place. Both of them competed on Sundays after church to bring the best pie to church. One day, I observed one grandmother asking another woman to bring a pie, which was a special thing that she could make. It was this cherry pie. It was very interesting to me. I was curious. I’m like, “Why would you let her bring your pie? You’re proud of your pie.” She said, “It’s because if you want people to be responsible, you give them something to do. They have to show up with something. They have a part in solving the problem.” That’s a good lesson for us in life.

If you want to be observed as something where you’re affecting change, making an impact, or building a business, enable people to feel like they’re accountable to be part of the outcome and they share in the joy. If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that you don’t do it alone. Everybody has a rule and a strength. For me, it’s been discovering that. That’s what’s helped me juggle 1,000 balls. I’m surrounded by 1,000 people who do great things.

Since we’re focusing on learnings, what are the things that you’re focused on learning?

In my living room, I’m reading 12 or 13 different books. My learning never stops. I am infinitely curious. I am learning. I’m very interested in the immersion of the digital and the physical, the application of Web 3 will impact our delivery of products and services in financial services, and the dimensionality of data that’s thrown off from that environment.

I wrote an article for FinTech magazine about the metaverse. I took a lot of flack for it, but I stand by it. We’re entering this period of a new renaissance for financial services. This confluence of next-generation technology will change. I’m deeply interested. I’m learning new technologies, new applications, and new ways that data gets shared and captured in an environment that we have never seen.

That learning has helped me understand, too, not just the way that commerce might be conducted, but going back to how healthcare might be delivered and how an individual who is defined as handicapped likely won’t be handicapped in our next generation of work. I’ve got this big itch to understand that completely and marry it with what we learned coming out of the Middle Ages. I am a dork at learning about the Middle Ages.

I thought I was bad. I had 4 books going, but I’m down to 2. I’ve never been at 12 or 13.

That composite view of the world is important. I am interested. Do you have a book recommendation?

One book I finished, which took me a long time to read, was The Power Broker about Robert Moses. It is a very dense book written in the ‘70s. It is meticulously and incredibly researched considering that the author did not have the internet at his disposal. He must have worked incredibly hard to produce that book. It was a fascinating look at how this guy wielded power over the city of New York and the state of New York for 40 years. It was dense, but it was very interesting.

It tells you a lot about times, places, and what you can do when you know about how power works. I also have a little bit of literature I’m reading. We need to revisit the 1930s-era paper on the theory of the firm. Did you ever read that?

I don’t think I have read that one.

It’s the study of the creation of a new firm structure and firm strategy for how you treat customers and things. It’s time for us to rewrite it.

With business history, some of the ideas that are much in vogue have had cycles before. It’s like fashion. Things that were fashionable back in the ‘50s, in some ways, are coming back in terms of the way that businesses work. Even though certainly the macroeconomic-political, geopolitical, or technology environment is massively different than it was in the ‘50s, there are still some ideas that get dug out and resurrected and have a renaissance. It’s crazy.

I’m hearing increasingly what’s in vogue or what’s very interesting to the next generation of students is they want to own family businesses. Go into where you see, in the middle of the United States, the transition of a family business ownership structure to children who don’t want it, whether it’s a print newspaper. If you use that as an example, a newspaper where you use the digital tools they understand where they’re digitally native to digitize that. It is such a cool world.

As you said earlier, it may have been before we started recording, it is good to live in interesting times.

Thank you for that.

Do you have final thoughts to share?

We’re doing a show, but I had the benefit of your friendship and mentorship for a long time. I enjoyed it. The intellectual exchange that we had makes me want to rethink a little bit, too, what’s next? Where does a career take you? What do you learn? Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

I appreciate your time. Thank you for doing this.

I’m the same.

—

It was great catching up with Sarah and hearing about the breadth of work she does as an investor, board member, mentor, volunteer, and educator. If you’re ready to take control of your career, visit PathWise.io. If you’d like more regular career insights, you can become a PathWise member. It’s free. You can also sign up on the website for the PathWise newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Thanks, and have a great day.

Important Links

• Sarah Biller
• FinTech Sandbox
• Vantage Ventures
• Janine Hirt – The Effect of Public Policy and Non-Profits with Janine Hirt
• KALYP
• Thread Bank
• The Power Broker
• LinkedIn – PathWise
• Twitter – PathWise.io
• Facebook – PathWise.io

About Sarah Biller

Sarah Biller is an entrepreneur, executive, and educator with experience in the Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Telecom sectors. She is also a force to be reckoned with in the FinTech arena, which makes up much of her current focus.

Sarah began her career in the telecom sector, working for MCI. She then spent several years working with the Corporate Executive Board, a Washington DC-based research organization. Following that, she jumped into the pharma industry with stops at Cambridge Healthtech Advisors and Indus Pharmaceuticals, and later into financial services, with time at Fidelity, as a co-founder of a crowdsourced investment sentiment start-up, and at State Street. Along the way, she was one of the founders of The FinTech Sandbox, which has served as an accelerator and advocate for hundreds of start-ups since its founding.

Sarah more recently has moved into a mix of investing, board roles, teaching, volunteer work, and mentoring. She has also worked alongside Cisco’s John Chambers and others to expand financial literacy and access to financial services in her native state of West Virginia.