The Past and Future of Web3, with Rockstar VC & Entrepreneur Sarah Biller

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Sarah Biller is Shaping the Future of Women in Fintech for Social Change

Sarah Biller is at the forefront of financial technology innovation, advocating extensively for the role of women in fintech and their potential to drive social change. As a co-founder of FinTech Sandbox and The Mass Fintech Hub, Biller has been instrumental in providing resources and support to fintech startups aiming to revolutionize the financial services industry. Her career spans multiple leadership roles where she has consistently pushed for the integration of cutting-edge technologies in finance, from AI to blockchain, to increase accessibility and efficiency in financial services. Her endeavors highlight the importance of inclusive financial environments and showcase her commitment to leveraging fintech as a tool for societal improvement.

With an academic background initially in chemical engineering from West Virginia University, Sarah Biller’s transition to finance was marked by her curiosity and desire to apply structured, scientific approaches to complex financial systems. Her journey through various facets of finance, including roles at prominent institutions like Fidelity Investments, has equipped her with a deep understanding of the financial landscape and the transformative power of technology within it. Biller’s work extends beyond her executive roles as she is also involved in academic circles, teaching and shaping curriculums that focus on the intersection of finance and technology at Brandeis University. This educational role underpins her belief in the power of informed, knowledgeable individuals to make sound financial decisions and innovate within their spheres.

Sarah Biller’s influence in the fintech industry is also evident through her participation in various boards and advisory roles that focus on financial innovation and strategic development. Her voice is significant in discussions about the future of finance, advocating for ethical practices and sustainable growth through technology. Beyond her professional achievements, Biller is a champion for diversity and mentorship, particularly for women in fintech. She actively engages in mentorship programs, speaks at industry conferences, and contributes to panels and workshops that aim to empower the next generation of financial technologists. Her leadership style and dedication to fostering a culture of inclusivity and innovation make her a pivotal figure in the ongoing evolution of fintech. Through her work, Biller not only helps shape the current financial technology landscape but also ensures it is resilient and equitable for future challenges.

Episode Transcript

Sarah Biller: We’re in a period where they see fintech as an agent of positive change, that fintech is not just the application that’s making a better financial services system, fintech as a tool for poverty alleviation, fintech is a tool to drive better, cleaner water sources, fintech is a tool for our climate or better health, and is a legitimate application in their minds. I get approached by a lot of young women who are doing just that, the understanding that they can be problem solvers, nothing against the guys. It’s not an either-or moment, it just happens that when someone says to me, I want to figure out how my small-town bakeries can have better access to loans. Lots of times, it’s a girl.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, there. Welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for being here. Today, I had an amazing conversation with Sarah Biller, a fintech visionary known for many accomplishments in the financial world, including her work as the co-founder of FinTech Sandbox and The Mass Fintech Hub. Sarah is not just an innovator in the field, she’s also a passionate advocate for women in fintech and business in general. So join me as she shares insights on the evolution of fintech, the impact of emerging technologies, and her commitment to diversity in the industry. Joining me now, Sarah Biller. I was going through your LinkedIn experience, and there was an incredible amount of positions listed that instead of having an end date, still said, “Present”. You’re a bank director at Thread Bank, board member for Rialto Markets, executive director of Vantage Ventures, co-founder, and member of the board for FinTech Sandbox. One that wasn’t listed, but I know you to be the founder and board member of Mass Fintech Hub and Adjunct Faculty, Master of Science, and Fintech Digital Innovation Program for Brandeis University, I don’t even think I’ve listed them all. But I think the only logical question I can ask after that is how do you function without sleeping?

Sarah Biller: I have to say, just like the financial markets, it’s a 24/7 opportunity these days. I think what you’re reflecting back and you haven’t said it but I’ll say it in a way that I hope resonates with everyone, is that there’s immense opportunity across all of the significant categories in fintech today. For instance, in the flow of capital into private markets, we’ve never seen such a change in the evolution of technology to enable everyone to be a private company investor. Rialto markets enable that, and I’m deeply interested in seeing capital flow in places where innovation is taking place. So that’s, if you look at that anchor and on the other side of that, it’s very similar to a role in Thread Bank, which is a community bank that is with intentionality and investment, digitizing the core so it can better serve the individuals in its region, which happen to beginning in eastern Tennessee in the Appalachian region. Those individuals are, by and large, small business owners. They are the engine of growth of our economy. So I see it’s a very intentionality of investigating all areas of fintech but with common threads that exist that can one discipline private capital and into really high growth companies. That’s why you invest in these things, can be married with the small businesses, and those lessons can be ported back and forth.

Kevin Rosenquist: You’re a mountaineer, a West Virginia grad. What did you study when you were there? Judging by what I know about you, you strike me as a planner. What did you see yourself doing when you graduated?

Sarah Biller: It’s a really short story of how I ended up in finance. I started as a chemical engineering student and definitely thought that I would be using a lot of natural law. I’m a nerd, I’m a total self-proclaimed flag-fly nerd, and I loved it. But it became quickly apparent that the role was going to send me to places that probably were not naturally suited for my personality. It’s pretty hard to be a naturally curious person when chemicals are explosive, for example. So it’s dangerous.

Kevin Rosenquist: Maybe not hard, but dangerous.

Sarah Biller: Very dangerous. So I said to my really fantastic father, I said, “Dad, I think I’m going to move out of engineering.” He’s an engineer. He’s like, “All right, what are you going to do?” I’m like, political science. he’s like, one semester and figure it out. All frankness, the next logical place that had such alignment with the structure and the quantitative nature of it. The application of natural law happens to be finance. If you look at even the basis of modern portfolio theory, the way that we think about it today, the optimization of stock portfolios and other things follows the law of thermodynamics. I hate to say it for all of us who are finance people, we’re really scientists. We just look at bits of data, and movement of money, just like you might look where you’re structuring a compound for some adjacent v product. So that’s how I ended up with finance. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with it, because when you grow up as a mountaineer, like I did, in a rural community, you don’t really have broad exposure. Some of my contemporaries had, and I think through a series of good fortune, found myself in a progressively more interesting place in finance. But there’s no way, I think I would have known as a young girl growing up in West Virginia that you and I would be talking later, we will, about the application of Web3 and its dimensionality to how we make financial markets move better. So for what it’s worth, life is long. It gives you lots of shots to do interesting things.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sure. A lot of twists and turns, no doubt. What was your first job after school?

Sarah Biller: My first job, I was recruited actually out of school to work on the mortgage desk at First Union Bank, and it took me to DC, and that had an interesting observation set because that was it ended up being during a period of time when there was great turmoil in the credit markets and the mortgage markets. I don’t want to tell you how old I am, but people can guess.

Kevin Rosenquist: I don’t think we’re that far apart.

Sarah Biller: Thank you, I’m going to take that as today’s compliment and I won’t have to eat.

Kevin Rosenquist: I’m being honest, I’m not trying to caress egos here. I’m being honest.

Sarah Biller: Very thank you, Kevin. Well, if you remember the sort of the mortgage, the fracturing of the mortgage markets pre-credit crisis, by the way. So we’re talking a little bit before that but gave me a chance to really see and develop a true passion and love for the way that the debt markets could both be used for good and also in challenging times. But that was my first job and promptly the desk was sold to a private mortgage company, and I went from there into work with the technology company with a CTO, I still partner with. He’s at MIT. Then I ended up going to a company where I built businesses for corporate treasurers. Again, in that sort of best practices and liquidity and bond markets, that was called the Corporate Executive Board. Then I won’t go through my whole resume but this is probably the most important thing since you mentioned the whole being a mountaineer is I ended up from there being on the venture capital team at MCI, the long-distance company. All my friends were like, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Everybody wants to be in venture. I literally have the same story, I just told you about my dad. I called him like, Dad, I’m in the venture. I don’t know what it is. He’s like, I don’t know either. So anyway, you can laugh at those intersecting moments now, which I do. But that trajectory of jobs just then very much narrowed into what we’re going to talk about today, which is a persistent curiosity to solve big challenges, leveraging the capital markets to do that, and the power of data in many ways. I see a very data-driven future for all of us even before we launch ChatGPT.

Kevin Rosenquist: Fintech or financial technology was starting to become a thing around the time that you left school, right? At least in terms of the broader application and understanding of fintech beyond, like the back-end systems of financial institutions.

Sarah Biller: I will say this since you mentioned Brandeis, thank God, I’m not on faculty right now because it would probably be the breaking point. But I say this when I teach this idea that the evolution of financial services over time is an entry point for individuals pursuing a degree in fintech, this master of science and I say this with honesty. Fintech itself, though, we feel like it’s relatively new and this is how we define it. It’s 3000, 4000 years old. Fintech shows up in the Old Testament. When you think about the measurement of Jesus in the temple and the use of scales to evaluate the purity and the exchange of dollars, that’s what financial services have been for thousands of years. It’s been using the latest technology that’s available to it to remove the friction in the payment cycle and the movement of money. So though we’ve looked at this arc that we’re on now, we’re about a decade and a half into this incredible period of innovation in financial services, the industry itself has always looked for the next best way to move value, stores of value. Double-entry accounting and then we talk about the Medicis, right in Florence, the development of a ledger so they could pay in advance, all those things are just that I think what we would consider, particularly, in the innovation economy, as just precursors for where we are today and then it’s an exciting time to look at that arc of history and understand it and not be afraid of it. I think that’s another important aspect that we all need to understand. Technology has been a great enabler over time for individuals, for small businesses, for a girl from West Virginia,

Kevin Rosenquist: We’re going to talk about some fear later, some newer stuff.

Sarah Biller: I know you would ask.

Kevin Rosenquist: When did you become interested in fintech, in the actual industry itself? Was there anything in particular that drew you into it?

Sarah Biller: For sure. Even though I had a degree in finance I’d wound my way through. Thank you for that sort of introduction. Well, my way through a very non-linear career, when you’re, again, going back to this idea of being drawn into problems in somewhat sector agnostic, I found my way to fintech really in the mid-2010, 2012. I had come to fidelity and saw at that moment an incredible organization at the centerpiece of helping individuals prepare for the next chapter of their lives. That’s a mutual fund business, at the end of the day, is a de-risking strategy for all of us to save for a better future. It was an exceptional organization, with highly principled people. I was there during the credit crisis, and it lent me a great deal of understanding that there were new applications of technology because fidelity is quite technology-oriented, and the intersection of data that actually could help us explain risk better. I peeled out to start a company that was built for institutional bond investors. we were looking at reading, if you will, literature using rudimentary NLP techniques. We applied Random Forest, which was the first available artificial intelligence capability.

Sarah Biller: We’re looking to understand the rise and fall of non-financial factors that may be influencing credit risk in the high-grade and high-yield marketplaces and I was hooked. I began to understand that when you intersected technology and data, you actually had the ability to actually build. It is, of course, an imperfect crystal ball, but you can make better decisions in the financial markets when you begin to use these disciplines and new and different ways. We were so passionate about our ability to understand text-based structuring that we also adopted a social tool called a Bayesian estimation technique, which had been long used in the social sciences to unpack the ability of students to become educated. Is it that or is it the student? Is it the teacher? Is it the school? Is it the school system? The same way that you might think about credit risk. So there are endogenous and exogenous factors. So the flexibility, the adaptability of all of these experiences I had came out because we began to apply nontraditional technology platforms, non traditional technology sources, anticipate credit risk changes in the debt markets and we had some success, that’s when I was hooked.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s when you’re like “Oh! This is big, this whole thing is big.”

Sarah Biller: It’s really big. I think that’s what we can’t forget. Perhaps we know it better than we knew it then. But Financial Services is embedded as all overused word in every aspect of our lives, it was then and it is now. Every place you go, there is an element of finance that is involved. Health care, renewable energy, supply chain, not just financial services. I always say this, it’s not just that fintech took us out of the guardrails of an industry category of financial services and made us a horizontal or vertical or embedded in every horizontal framework there. We’re embedded in every category.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, so fast forward or well, I guess we’re going back because you said 2012 but I wanted to talk about 2008, the global financial crisis. At that time, people were becoming very disillusioned with traditional banks, and probably rightfully so from most people’s perspective. How impactful was that the surge in technology-driven financial services in your opinion?

Sarah Biller: It was extraordinarily impactful and perhaps it was the opening that we were looking for after we had seen, I would say, at that point, the last cycle of innovation was in the 70s and 80s, where you began to see these sorts of cobalt-based systems being implemented in banks as an example, the core. But what the credit crisis showed us was an opening for technology and new ways of thinking to come into the marketplace. It was matched, by the way, with the declining cost of technology. It before had been extraordinarily expensive, but all of a sudden you had AWS come onto the scene with off-prem cloud environments where you could hold data sets, you could run algorithms against them. It was pennies on the dollar relative to building and on much more accessible, much more accessible. So I think if there’s any gift that came out of the credit crisis, it was the opening for entrepreneurs like myself and others to begin to think there was a better way to revisit some of the basic tenets that we had ourselves been acting on in the traditional industry. I think not to be too nerdy but nerd away. We’ve been building portfolios for quite some time, based on the premise of the efficient market hypothesis. The tenets, of course, it’s a trusted playing field. Everyone is equally able to discern information, information asymmetry works its way through prices, and there’s the depth of liquidity in the secondary market. Well, now you have a man believing that you have a machine that’s doing high-frequency trading. So you’re beginning to even have to test and rethink the basic premise in which the financial markets work in a period of rapid innovation and adoption of technology. I always say that the adoption of technology or the building of technology for financial markets is only outpaced by unease customers’ expectations that technology will be at our fingertips. We demand a lot, we’re pulling through this build of new technology.

Kevin Rosenquist: Absolutely. We do demand a lot. The things I demand from ChatGPT, I’m like, come on, how do you not know that? Come on, man.

Sarah Biller: That’s actually a really important point. It doesn’t know that, it’s only as smart as what is fed into it. I think we’ll probably talk about that later as well because we are entering into a new period of discontinuous innovation, we’re in discontinuous innovation. ChatGPT dropped in and all of our world’s changed.

Kevin Rosenquist: Everything changed.

Sarah Biller: It’s not even on first base, that was a pretty good bunt.

Kevin Rosenquist: I like the analogy.

Sarah Biller: Just wait till we begin to think about it. Not in its current form, which is a call and response in many ways based on more thousands of pages you and I can’t read. We see its flaws, when you say, how do you not know that? But wait till it has the evolution where it’s interactive, which we’re heading toward.

Kevin Rosenquist: Which it already somewhat is. Just from the first time I heard of ChatGPT was when everybody did and then now you use it today and it’s definitely considerably better.

Sarah Biller: Considerably better. I’ll give you a really fun example. So I’m participating in a conference next week and I’m speaking on digital identity, a little wonky topic. The conference planner sent me a note and she said, I think you’ll enjoy this. I asked ChatGPT to develop a playlist for this conference, which is on the future and digitization. It is an amazing playlist. It’s got like Mr. Roboto, it’s got the end of the world as we know it, the computer developed this massive playlist. You read through the songs and that’s cool. Then at the end, ChatGPT said, I hope you enjoy your conference. Wow, we are entering into a whole new world of the application of technology to the way that we create trusted applications. Again, in financial services, you won’t know if it’s a man or a machine. You don’t even know it now.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s interesting because I find myself sometimes like I’ll be like, okay, cool, thanks. I’ll be like, oh no, I’m not talking to it. I don’t have to say thank you. I’m not talking to a person. But I’ll be like, just from getting used to, like being in Slack or WhatsApp or whatever, I’m just cool, appreciate it.

Sarah Biller: Pretty soon you’re going to be telling your ChatGPT in case you missed it. It’s amazing.

Kevin Rosenquist: I always tease my wife because she says, please and thank you to Google. She’ll be like, hey Google, can you please blah blah blah. I’m just like, honey, you don’t have to do that.

Sarah Biller: I used my Google Assistant this morning, it was like five in the morning and I’m like, Google, please read my email to me. It was like, with pleasure. You know, I hadn’t even gotten out of bed.

Kevin Rosenquist: You’re like, it’s like, thank you for being nice to me, everyone else is so mean.

Sarah Biller: Maybe that’s another good thing with technology.

Kevin Rosenquist: It could be. I’m going to ask you a very generic question, so feel free to take it where you will. Where do you land on crypto as a whole? In terms of the fact that there are people that are so into crypto and I always said a bit of a slide, it was pretty dropped off a cliff not that long ago. Where do you, how do you feel about it, about the future of it and its legitimacy?

Sarah Biller: It is a go-anywhere question. It is personal, I think, to each individual. I’ve professed my profound love for technology and its ability to make the world better. We’ve seen many cycles of technology, but I’m not a crypto fan.

Kevin Rosenquist: A lot of people who I know that are similar worlds or similar backgrounds for you feel that way.

Sarah Biller: They have a wallet. Unfortunately, bought crypto quite early, but what I’m more interested in is the technology itself. Not that we have these stablecoins that are running alongside, so to speak or Luna. What I’m more interested in is the capability that we have a more near real-time settlement opportunity, that we have the ability to use the rails that it’s been built on, the tokenization to, again, that persistent quest, we have to remove the friction in the movement of money, in that, to me, has been our lifelong quest since we started, like pounding out on cuneiform tablets how we paid this guy to labor at the pyramids. It is, I think, on our critical path to discern how, for instance, to use those capabilities. One example might be the movement towards an earned wage access capability across the world, paying people the day they work. Just think what would happen, particularly, in our working poor if they didn’t have to wait two weeks in arrears for a paycheck. We digitally, no one can see me, but I’m holding up my phone.

Kevin Rosenquist: This will be on YouTube as well. So some people will see you.

Sarah Biller: I really like that. The day you labored, that money went into your account and you didn’t have to resort to payday lending. You didn’t end up two days short of two weeks of needing to buy groceries. So you made really bad decisions against your paycheck. That’s what I’m interested in with this incredibly talented group of people because there’s no question, they’re hacking every day in areas that traditional innovators are not. I think we bring it in, I think we bring in the capabilities. I also think, to be honest, in a rapidly digitizing society, services being one of the most forward-leaning places for that, it’s going to go one of two ways. It’s going to be an experimentation where the fraudsters win, the bad guys win, and a fully digitized world or it’s going to be where the good guys prevail.

Kevin Rosenquist: Where the bad guys don’t have an opportunity like they do.

Sarah Biller: I’m going to bet that in the period that we’ve seen where crypto has been designed with intentionality, the rails, the capabilities, and the immutable ledger concept enable us to better know who we’re dealing with. I can foresee a world and I just had this debate this morning with some folks where the whole financial services system is permissionless. You don’t have to do anything because the system knows you so well, just as we talked about, it knows your wife’s preferences, and it acts on her financial decision, whether it’s her retirement account or how her health care is paid for. I can see a world where that just is we don’t have to do it anymore.

Kevin Rosenquist: I’m glad that we’re going in this direction because I’m with you. Decentralization, smart contracts, all that, the blockchain itself, I think a lot of that is really fascinating and has really great use cases. If people even know what it is that people are skeptical of Web3, of blockchain, most people, I don’t think, understand it at all. What do you think needs to happen for Web3, for this technology that we’re talking about to be adopted by the mainstream, or at least not shunned by the mainstream? Because I think a big part of it probably is that crypto is linked in everyone’s mind to blockchain technology, and for good reason. But a lot of people don’t realize that it can separate, that you can separate it. How can we get people on board?

Sarah Biller: I’m a firm believer, it’s the individual and the retail investor as we might say in financial services. But I’m a big believer that at the table also needs to be our private sector, our individuals, our academics, and our regulators or public sector policymakers. We need a place for centralized education that adds clarity that reduces fear but lends itself to understanding in a very discerning way what we’re up against in a digital world. So we have remarkably failed to deliver financial literacy in a systematic way in our country.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s kudos. That is very true. We were talking a little bit about sports before we jumped on here, and there are some amazingly terrifying stories of athletes who lose everything because they don’t know. They don’t have any idea how finance works in any way, investing paychecks, taxes, any of it. I totally agree with you. When I left high school, I didn’t know anything about this stuff. I didn’t get a good education on it, I really didn’t.

Sarah Biller: When do we start treating people’s financial health, well-being, and knowledge like a public health problem? Let’s draw that conclusion that we’re going to be committed as a country, as an innovation, economy, as a public sector, that we’re going to do education. I think that’s where, Kevin, we’ve got to get to a point where, when do people start to understand it? Well, first, when they understand the basics of what it means to them.

Kevin Rosenquist: What do you think where does that start? Does that start in high school? How do you feel to go about it?

Sarah Biller: I think a financial plan starts in K through six. Seriously, begin there, these are basic one-on-ones that will go through life. I just admitted I deeply loved everything about my P-chem classes and my stochastic calculus.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh my God, that’s awesome.

Sarah Biller: But let me, I am a rock. I’m like a big fun of taking that on me.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh My God. No, that’s just, Oh, calculus kicked my butt in college.

Sarah Biller: Your head just exploded. If we had to go the other see, how about knowing how to read your digital sort of mobile payment capabilities, compounding interest? I think we start early. You start and it’s fun. It can be gamified.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s true.

Sarah Biller: You just gave a really great example. These young men in particular write these fantastic athletes, lay it all out on the field and they leave. they literally don’t know that they owe thousands of dollars of taxes. We’ve taken that challenge, which we’ve. observed time and time again in professional sports, now we’ve pushed it on young men in college, young men and women, the whole Nil system. So I have a whole skinny on that at some point.

Kevin Rosenquist: As a college football fan, so do I.

Sarah Biller: But it’s a teaching moment. So I think, again, I go back to it, we’re doing a disservice to everyone if we don’t give them the tools they need to be completely in charge of their financial well-being, and then they can make all the decisions they want, be hands-off. But some of the best legislation that has affected change in our country is going from a situation where you enter into employment and you have an option of a 401K. When I started work, you used to have to opt into it. Today, you have to opt out.

Kevin Rosenquist: Interesting.

Sarah Biller: Much better off for it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Obviously, AI is going to affect us all and many if not all aspects of our life. I follow a lot about what’s going on and I’m very fascinated by it. I know you are the same. We could do a whole series of podcasts on AI, but where have you seen the impact of AI thus far in fintech, and what do you think will be the most impactful application of AI in fintech?

Sarah Biller: Well, I think at this point the application of AI and fintech is table stakes. I cannot remember the last time I saw a startup across my desk that wasn’t using AI in some capacity. The reality is that it is relatively ubiquitous now. A lot of that is broad brush strokes, and the use of AI, but by and large, that is a technique, whether it’s in payments and the optimization of the payment rails profoundly happening in lending and credit. A critical aspect of banking, whether it’s community, regional, or global banking, AI is permeating all of those activities. I think the biggest opportunity for us today, well, let me talk about the risk, is, unfortunately, a pretty trite answer, we don’t know what it’s doing.

Kevin Rosenquist: That was my next question, would be like, how scared are you? Or should everybody be?

Sarah Biller: I think that this is where you lace up, to use a sports analogy. We get on the field and we develop tools in parallel to the evolution of AI that’s happening. I love that as an investment thesis and as a concept, companies are coming forward and being able to tag AI-generated activity. So far, I don’t think you’re an avatar, but we’ll see. Exactly but we are in a position where this could have been a generated exchange by computer. So I think I’m not scared by it to use your words. But I think what I am is persistent, needing to see how we can manage alongside it. We have trips and wires in the marketplace when things get too heated or too out of bounds. Those are systematically generated activities. That is that same analog, that same idea can be ported over into the application of AI. The worst thing it can do is take us 25, 30 years back and where we’ve come, everyone talks about the unintended consequence of bias happening. It’s real.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sure, of course.

Sarah Biller: You said you yelled at your ChatGPT. Why don’t you know that? Well, the worst part is it actually has a predilection to make stuff up. So there is a need for a secondary and tertiary moment in the toolkit of those of us that are applying AI and everyone’s applying AI, so it’s just not us. That’s where I see a new form of technology taking shape. A new opportunity is that we just need to lean into this moment and adapt. It’s not fair to say the genie is out of the box, that has such a negative connotation, but it is everywhere in our lives, whether someone knows it or not.

Kevin Rosenquist: And fast. I think that one of the things that makes it so uncomfortable for so many people is the internet and social media like any other technological revolution, I feel like it didn’t happen. Maybe the internet did, but you still had only for people who had access to computers. So everybody has a computer in their pocket now. So AI is just in our faces immediately. So I think that’s one of the things from people I’ve talked to that makes them very uncomfortable.

Sarah Biller: I’ll go back to a point that could be argued over a drink, to be honest. But we’ve been building AI models since the 50s. So it hasn’t happened overnight. It’s older than our parents.

Kevin Rosenquist: But I think the introduction into our daily lives, all happened very fast for people to feel comfortable with it.

Sarah Biller: Fair enough. We became aware of it. Again, I think it goes back to this core belief I have that we are smart, intelligent people. We begin smart and intelligent, let’s start educating early.

Kevin Rosenquist: I like that. On a personal note for you. You’re a very inspiring and influential person. You’re a champion for the growth and prosperity of Boston and New England startups and businesses alike. you’re also committed, very committed to helping women become more prominent in fintech and the business world as a whole. It would seem this is probably way too big of a question. I’m good at that today, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Why is there still in 2024 such a gender gap and inequality when it comes to pay and opportunity for women in business?

Speaker4: I don’t know.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s a good answer. Do you feel it’s getting better? Is it making progress? You work hard at it, at trying to help women. Do you see progress?

Sarah Biller: I do what I see progress is that women are now when other women aren’t at the table, they’re advocating where we have steeled ourselves to the moment of advocating for the next generation, for younger women. That’s if my seat is here doesn’t hurt me to have another woman at the table beside me. But I think there’s progress, I do, I think that we’re in a period, you mentioned, we talked a little bit about sort of the credit crisis and how that shaped perceptions and how it might have diminished our trust in the financial services. Not your words, but mine at that time. I think we’re in a generational shift, and I spend enough time in the classroom and talking to students and hiring a lot of 25-year-olds to know that we’re in a period where they actually see fintech as an agent of positive change, that fintech is not just, as I said, the application that’s making a better financial services system, fintech as a tool for poverty alleviation, fintech is a tool to drive better, cleaner water sources, a fintech is a tool for our climate, or our better health and is a legitimate application in their minds. The other thing is, I get approached by a lot of young women who are doing just that the empathy, the understanding that they can be problem solvers, nothing against the guys, it’s not an either-or moment.

Kevin Rosenquist: That seems to be the case. It’s like it has to be one or the other and it doesn’t.

Sarah Biller: it doesn’t, it just happens that literally when someone says to me, I want to figure out how my small-town bakeries can have better access to loans. A lot of times it’s a woman, it’s a girl and it’s just okay. That to me is I have such hope for the future because we messed it up. So let’s keep going.

Kevin Rosenquist: There does seem to be a lot of hope in Gen Z. A lot of the people that I’ve talked to are the people that I’ve known through different things. I don’t know a lot of them, but I do know some. There is definitely a built-in equality, built in empathy, as you said, in them, that I think maybe doesn’t exist as much in the or didn’t in a lot of ways in your generation. I’m a Gen-X. So it’s different. It’s just different.

Sarah Biller: It is different. we are in a period where collaboration will matter. Competitive forces, we’ve always thought about it as being a good thing in the industry, you want more competition for sure. There was a body of study that came out of Yale some years ago, but it talked about Co-opetition. I think that a guy named Barry Nalebuff, it’s so fascinating.

Kevin Rosenquist: It is interesting. I haven’t heard that before.

Sarah Biller: So thematically, how do we begin this event? It’s just amongst ourselves, boy meets girl, we decide that we’re better problem solvers together than we are diminishing voices or degrading. So I think we’ll get there to the question about women having a seat at the table, and equal pay. I think we’ve made some decisions to solve problems differently but seems to be panning out. If not, again, life is long. Hopefully, for everybody who’s listening, so many shots on goal to do good.

Kevin Rosenquist: I agree. Well Sarah it was great talking to you. I really appreciate you being here and thanks for all you’re doing.

Sarah Biller: Kevin, I can not tell you how much I appreciate a chance. The questions you ask of me and of others you’ve had on the podcast have helped me be a better, broader thinker. So thank you for all you do.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that, Sarah Biller. We’ll talk again soon.

Sarah Biller: Thanks, I look forward to it.