Laura Spiekerman, Alloy Co-Founder & CRO – Building a Unicorn, Re-inventing Your Job Every 3-6 Months, and Finding Optimism in the Face of Adversity
Laura Spiekerman, Alloy Co-Founder & CRO – Building a Unicorn, Re-inventing Your Job Every 3-6 Months, and Finding Optimism in the Face of Adversity
Miguel Armaza sits down with Laura Spiekerman, CRO & Co-Founder of Alloy, an identity decisioning Unicorn
This article is part of Fintech Leaders, a newsletter with almost 30,000 dreamers, entrepreneurs, investors, and students of financial services. I invite you to share and sign up here: Substack
In this episode, I sit down with Laura Spiekerman, CRO & Co-Founder of Alloy, an identity decisioning platform that has built the command center for identity that covers the compliance and fraud fighting needs for banks and fintechs.
Founded in 2015, Alloy now serves over 200 clients, has raised over $150M in equity, and recently became a unicorn valued at $1.35B. Top investors include Lightspeed, Bessemer, Felicis, Flourish, Clocktower, Eniac, Primary.
We discuss:
Challenges and opportunities of working with sensitive client data and why their approach has become Alloy’s competitive advantage
Why her role as a Co-Founder and company leader changes every 3-6 months and how Laura manages to adapt to this reality.
“But since we hit our stride in 2018/2019... the speed of change and growth has just made it so that every three or four months, our jobs change, and it feels like everything breaks, right? Because the process that you've just put in place, the leader you just hired, the protocol you just established no longer works for the new reality. And so it's sort of thinking a few steps ahead and understanding that - ok, now we're in hyper-growth mode, things have to change.”
Collecting customer feedback and how Alloy stays close to the client
“We are super fortunate to have a CEO who will not give up his title as Head of Product… that means he's living and breathing what our customers want, what they're asking for, and what they say they want but what we think they actually want.”
Reflections from tough company moments and dealing with rejection back at the beginning of Alloy and how she managed to keep going and maintain relentless optimism along the way
And two great lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs:
Make sure the market knows you exist - Network like crazy, say yes to things, and remain open to a variety of possibilities.
Don’t worry too much about scale – rather than worrying about how to get your 100th client or get to $1 million in ARR, focus on securing your first 2-5 clients and get them to absolutely love your product. You will avoid being paralyzed by worrying too much on the end game.
Want more podcast episodes? Join me and follow 21 Leaders today on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app for weekly conversations with today’s global leaders that will dominate the 21st century in fintech, business, and beyond.
Full interview --> Spotify | Apple
Emerging Fintech Leaders
Three early-stage fintech companies doing amazing things
Brazil’s Divibank is building the next-generation investment bank for internet businesses in Latin America. Its data-driven platform provides companies access to non-dilutive capital, starting with revenue-based loans to finance digital marketing campaigns. As part of its smart-money proposition, the Divibank platform provides insights and performance analytics for clients to extract more value from their capital. Divibank has secured $3.6 million in seed funding earlier this year and is actively hiring!
Founders: Jaime Taboada and Rebecca Fisher
It only took opening 100 credit cards for founder John Garner to realize the system was broken. This led him to found Card Curator, an app which employs a proprietary algorithm to generate personalized consumer credit card suggestions. Card Curator empowers users to make smarter spending decisions, earn more loyalty points, and access free travel as well as other lucrative benefits. The Company is now hiring and in the process of raising a seed round!
Founders: John Garner and Bruce Garner.
There are over 40 million micro-businesses in Nigeria, and they all need banking services that go beyond a monthly statement. Recent Y-Combinator graduate Prospa set out to solve this problem. Prospa combines traditional banking services with operational insights and tools (e.g. inventory, vendor, and employee management solutions) to jumpstart growth for small and micro businesses. Earlier this year, Prospa raised a seed round from executives at fintechs the likes of Ramp, Nubank, Mercury, and Square, and plans to use the funding to turbocharge its customer acquisition and hiring efforts.
Founders: Frederik Obasi, Chioma Ugo, and Rodney Jackson-Cole.
Want to break onto the fintech scene with a feature in our newsletter? Introduce us to your startup here!
-Thank you for reading!
Miguel Armaza is Host of the 21 Leaders Podcast, Author of the Fintech Leaders Newsletter, and Co-Founder of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas.