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Hot of the Pod 🎙️ Sruthi Lanka: CFO @ Public.com
In this episode, I caught up with Sruthi Lanka of Public.com.
Sruthi Lanka is the Chief Financial Officer at Public.com, a platform that makes investing easy, accessible, and social. The Robinhood rival launched in September 2019, and has since acquired 1 million users, achieving a valuation of $1.2 billion.
Before joining Public, Sruthi served as Head of Strategic Finance at MoneyLion, another emerging fintech startup. But Sruthi isn’t new to the financial trade. She previously spent time as an engineer at Goldman Sachs and in investment banking at the Royal Bank of Canada. Beyond her core roles, Sruthi has worked to empower women in and outside her industry, founding a women’s organization while at Money Lion, and now sitting on the Board of Women Creating Change, a non-profit that uplifts under-resourced women in New York City. She holds an MBA from Duke University and a bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in India, one of the country’s top engineering schools.
Excerpts from the pod below:
You went to one of India's top engineering schools. Reflecting back, did you see yourself pursuing finance and fintech? Or was that happenstance?
At the time, if you asked me if I saw myself in this seat, I would most definitely say no. But the dots connect backward. I grew up in an environment where a love of math and science was very normal. In fact, everyone in my family is an engineer. My brother, my parents. And so these super smart people that I was surrounded by were just terrible with money. They lost tons of money on poor investments, and unfortunately, received wrong advice along the way. And I think that really speaks to how much of a mystery there still is around our finances. Very smart people don’t know how to handle their money. And so, that’s what led to my curiosity about the topic. That's really why I ended up joining Goldman as an engineer. For me, it was a foray into this new world that I was very unfamiliar with, but where I could still play to my strengths.
You mentioned that Public is two years old. The hype around startups has really blossomed over the last couple years, but many people still associate significant risk with going to work for a very young company. How did you come to terms with that?
Honestly, the cool thing about the level of risk is the level of responsibility that comes with it. Another thing that is true of everyone at Public is that you wake up knowing that the things that you're working on are going to have an impact. There's no fluff.
And this was one of the things that drove me crazy about investment banking. I'm sure you had that experience. There was just a ton of wasted work with lots of smart people around the table. There were tons of inefficiencies and bureaucracy in the system. None of that exists at a well-run startup. Not all startups are well-run, so you should do your homework. But I would argue that having a strong principles focus, which we do, really helps to remove some of that dysfunction. But for me, it's really comes down to the level of impact that you show up and have every day.
Public stands out from other investing apps, because it integrates the social networking aspect, but it's also received criticism for it, because there are concerns about people taking financial advice from strangers. How do you respond to those concerns?
The key thing is that Public is a fully-verified social network. And the reason why this is extremely important is because it's usually the completely anonymous sites where those risks are highest. Basically, it leads to what is traditionally known as pump and dump risk. And this is actually a technical term. You can pump up a stock and then sell out of it. That’s rarer at Public because you can actually go to every single person's profile, see what they're trading, and see what their portfolio looks like. Because every user goes through identity verification, it's a much safer social network and honestly, a model that we'll see other social networks move more closely toward — like Twitter’s new blue checkmark verification process. That's really how you create a safe space.
The second is: we have a very active community team. They are constantly monitoring the conversation on the platform and asking questions like: How are people interacting? How are people posting? Most users are very good about caveating that they're not providing investment advice and encouraging people to do their own homework. Every community has its fabric and its tone. The tone at Public is very much: do your homework, go off and do some research, and then come back and talk to us about what you found. And that's exactly the kind of space we want to create.
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