Shahirah Gardner has walked the hard yards of startups.
Having built B2C payments app and B2B data intelligence platform, Finch (after leading it to multiple awards including Finder’s Best Digital Wallet , Best Personal Finance App and Money 2020 USA Global Fintech to Watch) Shahirah has trodden the founder’s path across the globe.
Now a Skalata Venture Partner, she’s seasoned to deliver true mentorship.
Tell us where you got your first taste of the Australian startup ecosystem.
My career started in tech PR in Silicon Valley. I worked for a few global tech PR agencies specialising in startups and scale-ups across lots of interesting sectors - clean tech, healthcare, gaming. I developed go-to-market, PR and comms strategies, helping companies launch, build brand awareness, manage investor relations, digital marketing campaigns, all the way to IPO.
"I loved the fast pace and high energy of founders. When I moved back to Australia in 2014, there were so few tech-focused agencies so I started my own consultancy to continue working with early-stage startups, many coincidentally, in fintech. Having made the transition from the US, I started to notice a lot of things that hadn't landed in Australia, especially from a consumer technology perspective which got me thinking."
Australia has so much potential when it comes to innovation. When you say a lot of things “hadn’t landed”, which sectors are you referring to?
Finance was the most obvious to me as I was quickly becoming familiar with the fintech landscape. In the US, everyone was using Venmo to pay friends and Mint to manage their finances. In Australia, we had neither.
There was a clear gap in the market and an enormous opportunity to address an underserved millennial segment looking for simple and personalised ways to understand and manage their money.
It’s invaluable when a partner has the firsthand account of starting up. Tell us more about Finch?
Finch today, is a data intelligence platform that helps banks, businesses and financial services deliver advanced personalisation through transaction data analytics. Our mission is to make it easy to access real-time customer insights to deliver personalised experiences. We analyse over $2 billion of transactions per month for banking, personal finance, lending, payments, loyalty clients - basically anyone wanting to better understand their customer’s real-time financial behaviours.
Like many B2B companies, our origins are in B2C - Finch launched in 2017 as a Peer to Peer Payments, Personal Finance Management and Merchant Payments app, powered by our proprietary machine learning data intelligence. We raised a $2.25m seed and built a community of over 100K Finchers before pivoting to focus on the data side of the platform.
Being the first to launch a financial app of its kind in Australia is a great feat and couldn’t have been easy. Did the Australian market pose any specific challenges?
When we launched Finch App, we knew how Venmo had achieved the network effect in the US and expected somewhat similar behaviour. We were so wrong! We underestimated the market’s understanding and trust of fintech as an alternative to the Big 4 banks and found initial adoption quite challenging.
We got all sorts of questions like: Is this a scam? How can you move money if you’re not a bank? Can you see my bank balance? Customers just couldn't wrap their head around the idea that we were a new payment solution that was regulated, backed by a banking license, but was not a bank.
On the flip side, it also coincided with the timing of the Financial Services Royal Commission, which exposed the big banks to grave and unethical misconduct.The growing public distrust presented an opportunity for us to build a better financial experience, that genuinely placed customer’s financial interests first.
Sounds like it was a hit with consumers, though you eventually moved solely into B2B. Was there a reason you had to let the consumer side of things go?
After building a community of 100K customers on Finch App, in 2020 we made the difficult decision to shutdown the app. We were a small team and couldn’t invest our time and resources into winning both markets.
From the beginning, we knew that our data intelligence could have a far wider impact on customers than we could ever achieve ourselves. But we had no idea how quickly we would achieve it. Within six months of launching our data APIs, Australia’s largest scheme provider became one of our earliest enterprise customers.
What advice would you give to founders in similar situations?
"You have to be led by customer feedback and market demand. While it’s essential to be attached to solving your problem, you can’t be attached to the solution."
Pivoting is one of the most difficult challenges a founder will undertake: it involves restructuring, restrategising, recalibrating and ultimately, closing one chapter to move onto the next. We made the decision over 3-6 months and explored every possible scenario. We built 6 financial models to play each one out, to make absolutely sure we understood the opportunities and tradeoffs.
We shut down the app in February 2020 and the pandemic hit in March.
Outside of Finch, you’re an active member of the startup commmunity, and part of the founding team of The Giant Warm Intro (which you named!). Can you tell us how that came about?
Raising money is always a challenge. As a female or underrepresented founder it’s even harder. When Paul Naptahli at Rampersand initiated the project and presented the challenge, I knew I wanted to be a part of the solution.
"The Giant Warm Intro is essentially an annual event designed to level the playing field. It connects Australia’s most active VCs with early stage founders in 1:1 sessions in a fair and inclusive environment to meet, chat, pitch, and help demistify the world of VC. We have over 90 of Australia’s most active investors involved, and last year we matched 279 founders with investors - 80% identifying being from an underrepresented group."
You’re a founder yourself, so you must know what that roller coaster is like. Any tips on avoiding burnout?
The funny thing about burnout is that it can arise when things are going right. Nothing’s breaking, so there’s no reason to stop… and then you realise oh, it’s you. You’re breaking.
The first year of Finch was relentless. I was trying to learn as fast I possibly could while building, hiring, selling, speaking to customers. At the time, my version of a good routine was heading to the gym in the morning and then diving into a 10 -12 hour work day. There was little time for anything else let alone a social life, family time or hobbies. In hindsight, commitment is great but I put enormous pressure on myself and I wasn’t in a good place.
After opening up and chatting to friends (at a time when founder mental health was not really a thing) I decided to make a few simple changes.
First, meditation or just quiet space. I alternated my morning gym sessions with 20 minutes of yoga and 20 minutes of breathing. (I still went to the gym to do it so that there was no excuse) I found it impossible at first. The most I could do was 2 minutes! Then 2 became 3 and so on. I still do it daily today. Meditation always brings me back to centre and provides a new lens of clarity.
Second, going home and getting rest. It’s easy to work across the clock to get things done, especially when the work is never ending. So I set a 7pm calendar invite saying ‘GO HOME’, and quickly learnt that 90% of things can wait until morning. A quote I frequently reference from Brad Stulberg, Peak Performance: stress + rest = growth. Applies to elite athletes and founders the same.
Finally, spend time in nature every day. Nature restores, heals, releases and most importantly, gets you out of your head. I wish I understood this earlier. My advice to you is leave your phone at home once a day; go for a swim, a hike, walk to the park, watch the birds, anything. You literally rewire your brain by reconnecting to nature. And best part, it’s totally free.
So ultimately, what will it be like for a founder working with you?
"I have complete empathy and respect for your journey because I've been there. And I’m still on the journey myself. I know that your highs are high, and your lows are unimaginably low. I know."
If we work together, you will hear some radical candour. I value honest, direct, and respectful feedback. I’ll challenge you. You’ll hear some things you won’t like. And we definitely won’t shy away from tough conversations.
"As a new founder, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is evaluating conflicting advice and feedback. Not all advice is good advice, and I’m here to help you learn to trust your founder instincts which can be hard when you are looking to others for guidance. Ultimately, my role is to teach you how to solve problems and make good, fast decisions with incomplete information, but I will never make them for you and I will never tell you what to do."
Finally, sometimes founders, just want someone to listen. No judgement, no advice. Holding space for founders, sitting in it and with them when times are tough is something I try to offer if and when the dynamic is right.
The biggest advantage I have at Skalata is that I'm still running Finch. Helping founders makes me a better founder, advisor and human. Grateful we get to learn together.
