Episode 101: Richie Serna CEO & Co-founder of Finix
Richie Serna is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Finix. Finix is on a mission to create the most accessible financial services ecosystem in history by building the global operating system for fintech, starting with payments. Prior to Finix, Richie was an early employee and engineer at Balanced, the first developer-friendly payments API for online marketplaces. He was also a consultant at Booz & Company and earned his B.A. in government from Harvard University.
Richie, welcome to the Pandcap Show! We are so excited to have you.
Q: Can you please share a little bit about your journey with our audience?
A: My name is Richie Sernia - CEO & Co-Founder of Finix. I started my career in a rather non-traditional way. I started in management consulting, which I did for 2.5 years in New York at Booz & Company. From there, I realized it wasn’t necessarily the career for me, so I ended up making the jump to tech back in 2013, quitting my job and learning software engineering. The first company I worked at was Balance, the first payments API for marketplaces. And after we ended up exiting that business to Stripe in 2015, I started Finix.
Finix is on a mission to create the most accessible financial services ecosystem in history, and we’re doing that by creating the global operating system for fintech.
Q: Richie, what inspired you to start a company in the payments space?
A: After we exited to Stripe, many of the engineers from Balance were getting recruiting attempts from vertical SaaS companies - companies that were selling software to the church industry, to the vineyard industry, and every industry you can think of. They were asking us to come in-house and build out payments systems for them - and that was the lightbulb moment of, oh we’ve developed this really incredible domain expertise in this complex industry, what if we turned this into a company?’
We started to see the evolution of the payments ecosystem over the last few years. We started to notice that basically, every software company is becoming a payments company, and you may not even notice it. One of my favorite stories is Macy’s, for example. They make over 45% of their revenue and profit from their credit card business. They are a retail business that is really a payments business behind the scenes. And we’ve seen this playbook over and over again.
Q: You pioneered the Cap Table Coalition. Can you tell our audience a little bit about what that is and why it was important to start it, and how things are going?
A: The Cap Table Coalition is basically an organization that’s on a mission to diversify Silicon Valley and the ecosystem that’s there. What we’ve seen over the last few years since I’ve moved to San Francisco is people always talk about the lack of diversity in silicon valley - but they traditionally focus on the employees and the teams that work at these startups. People rarely talk about the lack of diversity when it comes to the investors and the board members. So last summer, around the time of Black Lives Matter, a lot of big firms were talking about their focus on diversity. But when you look at their teams, it didn’t reflect the world that they were tweeting about.
When we thought about how we can have an impact on the ecosystem, we thought about creating more opportunities for marginalized investors - Black, LatinX, LGBTQ, Women - and how we can take a stand. We ended up allocating 10% of our Series B round to Black and LatinX investors. We ended up having about 80 investors who invested in an SPV. And it was partially inspired by Act One’s Diversity Rider, which is trying to do something very similar on the investment side. We thought of this as a way for founders to take a stand and control who is on their cap table and create more opportunities for others. After we announced this, we received an incredible response and a bunch of other startup founders reached out and said ‘this is really cool, how can we do that?’ Whether they didn’t have the network in these communities or for some other reason, they really needed help with it; so we thought about how to scale this out. And so that became the founding story of the cap table coalition.
We now have over 300 investment members. We had 16 companies who actually raised funds from the cap table coalition and over 30 who pledged to do this as well and we’ve deployed over $16M. In the first hundred days, if you were to extrapolate that amount of capital that we’re now deploying, it would be equivalent to a $200-$300M fund.
Well, thank you, Richie, so much. It’s been wonderful having you on the Pandocap Show. We look forward to seeing your success - not only today but for many years to come.