Sign Louisiana Banking Notice To Quit Computer

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okay everybody welcome to the show i'm so glad to have you joining me i'm here in downtown little rock arkansas i'm excited about tonight's show as you come into the live stream please grab that url wherever you're watching if you're on twitter retweet this if you're on facebook share it for me and if you're on youtube grab the url and share it out let people know that you're watching the show and you're joining the conversation tonight i'm excited to talk about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship as a path to impact tonight we have a great guest to talk about this topic and i'm excited for you to meet her this evening so as you come into the live stream please please go ahead and share out those links so others can join us in the conversation as always please drop your comments your observations your aha's or your thoughts and questions into the comments section i'll try to do my best to bring those comments into our conversation and those questions specifically into our conversations if you have questions about sheena's background her experience in entrepreneurship and the company she's building now this is a great opportunity to get all the kind of behind the scenes of building a company it's not all glitz and glamour it is a lot of hard work a lot of determination and just plain not giving up um so i'm excited to have sheena join us on the show as i see more and more people coming into the live stream i'll just repeat uh feel free to drop your comments questions in the comments um and i'll bring those into our conversation please do me a favor here at the top of the hour and share out this this live stream so that we can let everybody know that the conversation is going on all right let's dive right in i'm excited to welcome sheena to the show tonight she was born in terry mississippi and she is a graduate of the university of southern mississippi with dual degrees in psychology and film we'll talk a little bit about that in 2016 she was featured in the documentary film she started it and in 2017 she published her first book she cut her teeth in entrepreneurship with her first company called sheena allen apps it was a software company and in 2018 she launched her current company and second venture cap way this company is focused on bringing banking services and education to underbanked and unbanked populations right here in our country this made her the youngest female to own and operate a digital bank in the united states she has been featured in inc magazine as well as black enterprise and she was named a 2018 business insider under 30 innovator in 2019 she was named to the forbes 30 under 30 list as well as the inc 30 under 30 list wrapping up 2019 she was named to the inc female founders 100 list we met several years ago through entrepreneurial groups and i've watched her growth and her journey over the last several years she impresses me with her determination her grit and her passion for this very important mission and it's my pleasure to have her on the show tonight sheena welcome to the show thank you for having me it's my pleasure i'm excited to dive in i mentioned that you have a liberal arts background in psychology as well as film and i share a background in liberal arts i have a music degree but i'm really curious how did you jump from psychology and film to entrepreneurship how did that happen uh yo it's crazy enough i was i was your model student in high school um i was the kid who got all ages and i played sports also i was in all the extracurricular activities uh but when it came time to go to college i didn't actually question college um to be quite honest i didn't know if i wanted to do college it was mainly because i was very deep into the arts so i was the person who wanted to kind of go into like drawing and painting and film uh but didn't feel like you know i should probably do a four-year degree um it also me decided to go to college um mainly because my parents be quite honest and when i got there i was like so what do i want to do now that i am here i didn't want to waste four years and just like i'm going to college just to go and there's a lot of things i kind of once kind of dip my my my toes into as they say so film was still my creative outlet um psychology was actually not about being like a psychologist or a mental psychiatrist i did psychology because i was more actually intrigued by more like the ielts psychology or more about the marketing of psychology so you know why is home depot orange and why are most social media why do they have the color you know blue involved and why don't casinos have windows like i was more intrigued with that part of psychology um so i that's what i double majored in and i'm actually minored in marketing which is kind of like a tie in between the two and my senior year of college so i made it through my four years my senior year of college had an idea for a mobile app and was not spoof anything technical but was like hey like you know i had this app idea i had i can't find it in the app store which app store was much different than it is now so this was 2011 so the app store was not as as crowded um couldn't find what i was looking for and decide that i was going to build it myself and that was my my first step into into the tech world wow and so you have this idea which all of us have had one or dozens of ideas of of of an app but you actually took the step to say let me go build this how did you even know where to start like especially this was probably right around the time i think the iphone came out maybe in 2010 so this was really early um how did you know where to even start when you had an idea like that um you know i it took me a while actually i i did a lot of asking around i was at southern miss so i went to southern miss um i remember kind of asking around campus and we had a computer science department but it i couldn't find anybody to like develop iphone apps uh because you mentioned the app store still very very young and so i started my mom is a business analyst so she doesn't do coding i was like is there anybody at your job that that codes and particularly maybe like an iphone app and she's like i don't think so we don't do that type of coding here um and then what i did was i went to the university of google as we call it and i was like how do i find developer for the iphone app pretty much this is what i did honestly and at the time one of the top uh freelancer websites used to be a website called guru.com i'm still around now but it's not it wouldn't be the top one that i would recommend but i went to guru and searched for a freelancer uh who does iphone apps found one and i actually took a loan out from my dad which wasn't much it wasn't it wasn't as costly back then to do like a no get an iphone um app done because you know you could find freelancers did it for pretty cheap and yeah that was my first step into getting my first app and what was crazy is i didn't know at the time but i found a developer who developed my app but i did my own spec sheets my own flow charts i did the designing myself did my own qa my own testing and i didn't even know the time i was doing all that to be quite but honest to find out that's what i was doing so yeah that was that was my first step into into the tech world and figuring it out all of my own that's such a i guess a part of entrepreneurship is figuring it out and not realizing until you're in it like what you've actually done i i think that's really important to demystify some of these things that as entrepreneurs sometimes the very famous entrepreneurs get awareness and it's you know this isn't this is a hard grind and it's really you know it's a lot of luck it's you know asking a question somebody you know finding getting lucky when you find a developer that turns out the right way and we all know the entrepreneurs that found the wrong developers too and and challenge i'm sure you have those stories as well building apps so i'm curious kind of in your background you you you were really interested in arts and kind of just came at this purely from this is a problem a thing i want an idea i have and i want to build it because i don't find it anywhere else what when you were looking at kind of working into entrepreneurship were you surrounded by entrepreneurs had you seen did was that a viable option for you growing up or had you seen or either of your parents entrepreneurs or the people around you entrepreneurs or was it just something you truly stepped into um you know my dad would like mow lungs on the side if you want to call that being an entrepreneur um i had a i have an uncle who owns a flower shop so i guess like small um type of things like your mom and pops are kind of just side hustles as we also call them um but true entrepreneurship no um i didn't it was i it was truly just figuring that all on my own you know and i and in my first company i can say like i made those mistakes as far as like file taxes we get employees and payroll taxes i didn't have anybody to kind of like piggyback off of from that i mean i asked people eventually but as far as seeing it or i have some of my family um where i saw them kind of piggyback off of that no it was one of those truly just kind of stepping stepping outside of the comfort zone and figuring it out excellent um i'm going to pause here as as you all the audience as you're coming in i've seen more and more people coming into the live stream um we're here with sheena allen the co-founder or the founder of and ceo of capway and we're talking about her entrepreneurial journey as well as we're going to be diving into the world of fintech and banking and really this mission of providing banking services and education to underbanked and unbanked people in our country it's a bigger problem than you may expect or you may be surprised at the scope of the problem um i'm excited to dive into this topic but as you come in as we go through this conversation i do want it to be a conversation please drop your comments in the comments wherever you're watching if you're on facebook or youtube wherever you are drop your your questions or your observations in the comments and i'll bring those into our discussion as well um i'm excited to continue this conversation so i want to pivot a little bit sheena and talk about capway but first i'd like you to share with us a little bit about the current banking landscape in the united states specifically when it comes to the underbanked or unbanked number one what does that term mean or those terms mean and how big is the problem in the united states yeah so unbanked means this that means that there's someone who does not have a bank account at all um they're relying only on alternative options and then under bank means that this is someone who probably has a bank account or some form of uh working with the financial institution but they're still not getting the what they're needed to be really financially healthy and that can range from you know they have payroll cards right technically they have direct deposit but you know there's there's not really a system that you can build from outside of payroll cards or you know maybe they're using cash app or maybe they're using venmo or paypal um but a lot of people don't understand that those are actually just prepaid cards so it's not an actual bank account it's not a banking system you're not really growing um financially by using those services so um unbanked no bank account at all under bank probably have some form of access to some type of financial tool or institution but it's nothing that's going to help you grow to be financially healthy overall and do you have any kind of idea statistically like how how much of of how many people in the united states are experienced this lack of access to the banking system um do you have even ballpark figures of how big that is how big that problem is um you know there's there's a lot of data out there um some none of it necessarily is all the same but um some of the numbers range from one in four households in america is unbanked or underbanked um all the way to about anywhere from 25 to 50 million americans being unbanked or underbanked so you somewhere within the ballpark of all this where you find people uh who is completely lack access and that's talking just unbanked under bank that's not even getting into the conversation of being financially underserved that's just unbanked under bank in general we're not even talking we're not we didn't get into like the predatory and the living paycheck to the paycheck and having to pay minimum balance fees that's just purely unbanked the underbank but when you scale that to talking about overall financial underserved those numbers grow greatly yeah absolutely and i think there's i remember as a child probably nine eight or nine years old i started carrying papers um and one of the first things that my parents did or my mother did was take me to the bank and she set up a banking a little checking account and a savings account with me you know with her on the account and so i was exposed to that so early and i i lived in a big enough city where you know we had lots of banks around and and i could get an account and i never realized that there are people that just don't even have access to it um how did you go from most people don't actually know that what's what's really interesting is you'll be amazed um at the comments that i got a chance to see and how many people were so surprised when covet happened and you saw the government that was like wait we're trying to give people stimulus checks but we didn't realize so many people don't have a bank account and we're going to figure out how to get paper checks out you know to so many americans and it was a lot of people that i was seeing like on twitter or some social media in general they would be like how you how do you live in america and i have a bank account and i think it was a lot of you just didn't realize that there are a lot of people who don't have bank accounts in america yeah absolutely have you as you were going so how did you go from you know building apps to starting a fintech company because those are really different kind of i mean it's still technology enabled but that's a really broad jump and a and a huge jump like that of all the industries i would jump into or not jump into is banking education you know a lot of these healthcare perhaps you know like these things that takes a long time to make changes how did you how did you decide i'm gonna take on this gigantic mission yeah um you know it kind of honestly goes back to even when i started my first company and that is not knowing not knowing what i was getting myself into kind of helped along the journey um you know and the reason i compared that to my first company is i remember getting into technology and and um going out to san jose which is kind of like the heart of silicon valley where you know your all your big tech companies are and like some people it was asking me like what made you jump from mississippi to silicon valley and i was like well i googled it and google said that if you want to do a tech company you go to silicon valley i had no clue honestly had no clue that you know being from the south being a female being black like that is not what you do you know as far as not what you see in the tech world because i didn't know i never questioned it twice it was like i want to do this and i'm going to figure it out kind of honestly the same thing with banking i mean i knew that banking was a highly regulated industry i think that's kind of just what most of us know who have had who had access or understand who understands at least banking um we know that it's a highly regulated industry because when we sign up for bank we have to go through like social security number and all that um but i did not know exactly how in depth it was towards uh regulatory laws risk compliance um what all it would take to build a bank um so not knowing was one thing that didn't stop me from doing it because i didn't know get into it it was going to take so much and when i got into it i was like i'm here now and then the the second thing that really got me into it was i did purposely go into it wanting to make a hange and so when i was seeing that you know we were moving to a cashless economy you know there's places now that you know and i'm especially in bigger bigger cities when i'm in bigger cities i'll go into a restaurant and there's a sign on the door that says no we don't accept cash or our card only and so knowing that we were moving to a cashless economy i knew there would be a lot of people who were already unfortunately part of this huge income gap or or access gap and then you're going to add on being having to be cash that's on top of that it's going to be a huge issue and so the benefit that i knew that i had was i had the personal experience of coming from a banking desert you know i come from terry mississippi but i had the professional experience of building an actual tech company so my thing was how do i put those two things together and really make a change uh when it comes to the lack of access to not just banking itself but financial tools yeah absolutely i think that's part of which is interesting like the mission of what you're trying to do is not just the access to the tools which is really important but also how do i use these tools i notice on facebook several uh comments have have come in about people being misinformed about tools are unaware how to use the tools whether it's debit cards credit cards you know and then there's even more sophisticated tools you mentioned payday lenders and these things that the predatory lenders that really prey on people not knowing this information and i i'm curious about your journey as an entrepreneur as you as you dive in and you don't realize kind of what you're jumping into maybe and you begin to go out there and look for people who will buy into your mission that will understand what you're trying to do you go to silicon valley as a black female founder and there's broad disparities in tech you know with uh founders of color and and women and all of these layers how do you begin to break through when you're maybe meeting with vcs or investors or different people saying hey i have this vision for this digital bank especially if they are not don't even know that this problem exists how did you start to approach that that problem um you know it's funny because that was it's still not easy let's not make me i don't want to sound like it's still easy but it is you know especially when i first started doing this and i was pitching to investors you know i had investors who would ask me you know that did you make up the word unbanked or you know is there a market even big enough for people who don't have access to financial tools and i mean they were these were genuine questions but when you have a lot of investors who've only lived in places like new york or boston or san francisco you know they've never made their way outside of those areas so they don't know um you know i remember doing our pitch deck and i i was pitching and i'm not fish deck there's a there's a um i talk about the fact that there's like no wells fargo in the state of louisiana and somebody like stop in the middle of pitching was like is that correct on your slide like there's no wells fargo in louisiana and i was like yeah there's no wells fargo in louisiana it's like you know there's no chase bank in mississippi there's no i mean people in these bigger states and who live in these bubbles they think that national banks are like everywhere and like so that is actually not how it works um they are not everywhere and then when you think about people who have just historically been underserved um they don't really trust even the bigger corporate banks anyway you know they have a history of discrimination they have a history of redlining they have you know their history is pretty long when it comes to why i don't want to trust you or probably bank with you anyway um but it was it was and still is actually quite difficult um i pitched recently and i was in in my in my pitch i spoke about how 52 of americans live in the same nine states california florida texas new york like 52 of america live in the same nine states and usually when you think of corporate banking when you think of where most of financial services and tools have in place they've been placed to those 52 percent of americans however 48 is still a huge number that forty percent though it didn't know spread out a call across the other 41 states and it's like no one's really paying attention of how do we bring the next generation into the next generation of finance because my my mom my grandmother they walked into a branch and they started a bank account and they went to a teller and handed the tail of their money um nobody whose 20s is thinking about walking into the local bank branch and starting a bank account you know millennials are actually coined the unbanked generation i mean if you google it you'll see they're calling the unbanked generation where we are um because we made that shift from i'm going to walk into a bank branch to i'm going to do everything on my phone and then you have the generation that's coming after millennials which is gen z and the only thing that they've ever known is digital so they're not going to be quick to walk into a bank branch but what has happened when speaking of that and when i'm pitching for investors like have to try to get them to understand and when i'm pitching is if i take a kid right now and out of little rock arkansas and he's never been outside liver little rock arkansas i guarantee you that if he's probably 18 19 20 he's on social media so although he's never been outside of out of little rock social media has shown him the world he now know what it's like in new york he now know what it looks like in japan and in doing that and being social he also now wants to participate having netflix having spotify order from amazon prime but you have to have plastic to be able to do those things and if i've only known being cash based or if i only have a savings account in my local credit union i'm now limited to being able to participate as a millennial or the gen z into today's cash economy and that's a whole world out there that's 48 of people who are in that same bucket that traditional banking has completely overlooked and so that is what i have to break down more of like numbers and show maps and this is the world of a lot of people that most people is completely overlooking and you know you spoke about the literacy piece even before this and the education is is so important it's important for i'm i'm giving literacy to investors in one degree but when i'm speaking to the audience that we're serving i'm speaking a different type of language but it's still about education and so you know we do a lot with literacy you know it's as you know we do a lot of financial literacy it's not just giving quote-unquote banking it's how do we give the education behind finances and so an example is you know in our finance one of our financial literacy programs one one of our more popular pro questions is we asked in our in our uh in our financial topic under assets and liabilities we asked the question about what's your dream car and we get people to give a range of things but i'll give you an example somebody says my dream car is a range rover and we're like cool okay range rovers costs 150 000 when you drop off that car lot and you get to your house right over work and most people will choose an option of 150 000 and it's like no the minute you drive that car off that car lot it depreciated in value uh you know when we get to the stock market is how much do you pay for your last pair of nike shoes you might get someone that says oh i paid 250 for some lebrons i love them then no we come back and say you could have bought two shares of nike for that same pair of nike shoes it's not us saying hey stop everything you're doing and buy into the stock market but i want people to understand that it is feasible for you to do that and most people just don't understand and they feel like it's not touchable it's untouchable for them and we want to make sure people know that everything from how debit works for credit works how the stock market works make sure that you understand how depreciation works it's not just giving banking it's really giving a whole system um and i i start my startup capital i will say the minute i started even though we've grown since then we've scaled since then things have changed you pivot when you do know startups but one thing that has not changed is i knew from the very beginning i was in this to challenge um the traditional banking system i was in i was in this to challenge the current financial structure because it just does not work for a lot of americans yeah when you think of 40 percent of of us live outside of or more than 40 percent live outside of the reaches of the of the system it leaves so much on the table asset wise as well as talent-wise all these other things that are intersectional with access to capital and access to you know being able to use services simple things we don't think most of us don't think about like you mentioned being able to have a netflix subscription or spotify subscription and all of those things when you started with this idea when it started to germinate was there a specific event that happened or something you observed that made you think oh there's something here or how did you know like because now you have all this the data and statistics you've built for your pitch when you go to talk to people but i don't know like until i've heard you or seen you on social media talk about these issues i didn't know um a few i think a month or so ago you were on twitter with um alex or instagram with alexis ohanian and you all were talking about this thing and i was like whoa this is i think that's when i reached out to you because i was like this is an issue we need to talk about um what is it where did you see that or how did the idea start to germinate it was really looking at people in my family looking people in my community not mentioning you know being from terry uh mississippi i this is what i grew up is all that i knew and when i left mississippi uh seeing people kind of do things differently in bigger states and bigger cities um and just understand that not only were we financially underserved because we were living in banking deserts just the tools and the things we had access to are just not the same and i don't there's no reason that because i don't live in new york city that i shouldn't have access to the same financial services the same financial tools no i'm not paying i don't know three thousand dollars for a month for an apartment but that still has to do with the fact that i'm still part of the same credit system so i'm still being judged by my fico score the same way that you're being judged by your fico score and which is a whole other conversation because credit scores are going to reflect a lot of people's true financial behavior but um because of where you're based or because of how much money you make shouldn't mean you don't have the same access um to becoming financially healthy and that was another thing i think that i became very frustrated too with just even when i kind of got the idea for cafe and i kind of started diving deeper into it and i would just see comments and i would see people say things i'm just like that is just not the case you know it was well somebody's been patient to paycheck and somebody would come in and say oh well you should just work harder you should get another job and it's like most of these people have two or three jobs already like what do you mean they should get another job or you know i and i have i had an uncle who passed away um not long after he retired and he actually didn't have a retirement and you know i remember the conversation with him and it was because lack of edu financial education and when he got that job he was 20 you know imagine he's retired 65 um he was like i needed all my money now retiring a retirement account 401k plan meant that i had to put a percentage of my paycheck into like this this fund account and i needed like all of my money not realizing that you know when i retire if i don't do that i'm pretty much left with nothing with it for this for baby boomers at least they do have social security but you know they expect that millennials and gen z might not even potentially might even have social security so honestly it's a lack of education but it's also a lack to a lack of some of the services that are needed to be financially healthy uh long term and so when you started caplay did you was the original idea to provide the education component or did you always know this is going to be a bank a banking organization um how did those two kind of elements blend in the in the birth of the of the of the company it was always banking so we started i started out knowing that i wanted to do banking um financial literacy of the education component was not far behind though i am a strong believer in that you can give somebody education financial education but if you don't give them the tools to put the education to use it's kind of no purpose in giving them the education um you know the analogy i'll use i think we've always talked about i learned x in school and i don't use it at all anymore uh like why did i learn that i think it kind of goes back to financial education now i'm an advocate that i think you should be talking to your kids at five about money 10 about money my nephew's 11 i talked to him about money but at cafe my purpose of it was if i'm going to give you a banking system i want to give you the education that you can also use our banking system to put that information to use um and so literacy was always a component to the banking but the core of what i want to build has i was always a banking but financial literacy just played a very huge role in that well and and that to your point if if you don't have the literacy to begin with if you don't have the knowledge you don't and you don't know where to get it i i tell my students in in my entrepreneurship class the most difficult thing an entrepreneur one of the most difficult things an entrepreneur has to uncover is what they don't know they don't know and i think it's the same in this scenario where if you can want the best for your children or your grandchildren but if you don't have the knowledge or the access you can't hope to pass it on and we only see what is modeled in front of us or what we see like i mentioned i went to the bank and my mom got me this account and i did those things and i made better choices or worse choices based on my knowledge and and several of the comments in the in the comments have said the same thing you know i have a colleague who uses somebody and my friend daniel said he has a colleague that uses a credit card as a reverse savings account and just basically goes into debt every month opposite of savings and and but if you don't know and to your point you have you know multiple jobs you're trying to make ends meet you you know you need all your money to survive it puts you in a really precarious environment yeah i mean that's a it's it's a two-way street when i say that as i mentioned i want to build banking but i want to make sure that literacy was part of that so that they could use information at that time i think the same thing is opposite i think that if you give someone access to banking or you give them access to tools or that they have never had before but you don't give them the education on how it properly works it's the same thing um you know probably one of the best examples because it's a well-known example that's used a lot is you give a basketball player who came from a lower income background then you he goes to the nba and he makes 20 million dollars and then you wonder why you know he blows through his money well he wasn't really giving the proper education of how it works to have 20 million dollars right now and so i think it works both ways i want to give them the banking along with the information of how to properly put the information to use through our banking but i don't want to give them banking without the education at the same time so once again the court what the court from the beginning was banking but education has always it will continually play um a huge role for catway yeah absolutely the next uh and i'll break in here we're about halfway through um so glad you all have joined us for the show we're talking with sheena allen she's the ceo of capway founder of capway has been building this company now for the last two or three years and really working to scale access to financial services specifically targeted for the unbanked and underbanked in our primarily rural communities but those those areas outside of these the reach of these large mega banks one thing you said a few minutes ago that kind of i mentioned at the beginning that i admire your grit and determination and sometimes when we use those those are buzzwords but you said something i always knew it you said i always knew that i was wanted to do banking banking services came first and then the education but you also said that i wanted to really challenge the infrastructure challenge the systems and i think this is a really important point um specifically within the context of capitalism and entrepreneurship how valuable entrepreneurship or building a startup can be for pushing real systems change how do you see that in the mission of your company in really challenging these systems that have been established for millennia perhaps you know hundreds of years for sure and in our country for a couple hundred years specifically to exclude you know at first women and people of color and non-land-owning men and you know all of these things it was specifically structured to exclude people how do you see your mission in pushing to be able to challenge those systems that are entrenched um you know it's i once i figured out what i had taken on you asked it earlier like you know that you know you were taking on it first no i did not uh but once i realized the magnitude of what i was taking on one thing that i carry with pride one thing that i do every day when i'm getting two hours of sleep um is the fact that people have really relied on or become fans of capweight not just because of the software that we have not just because you know our banking looks cool it's because i look different as a founder when you think of most banking products whether it's traditional banking whether it's some of these other mobile banks neobanks if you probably look across the board the founders they're probably going to be older asian or white males and this next generation that is coming up from millennials and gen z they're just totally different um you know i think that this next generation is so resilient and they're so different and you know even when it came down to what has been happening the last few months and you've seen a lot of like the the black lives matter uh movements you look up and you see every race marching it's not just one race it's not just one the other is you look and it's mostly i mean it's people of all ages but this next generation is just totally different and i say that the same when it comes to banking and me leaving a bank account bank a bank i mean general people get bank accounts it's i come from the south which you don't really see when it comes to somebody trying to own a large a large bank um i'm black i'm female i'm young you know i'm not one of the older older guys um who you see with banking and so when people leave us notes where they write in emails or they leave notes on social media it's honestly from people of all colors sometimes of all ages but it's definitely the younger people who will say hey i feel like you get me you know you're not one of the old guys like you you actually know what it's like to be 30. you know what it's like to be 25 so you're going to build something that it's going to help me in you know in the next you know the next level of my life um but then also even outside of that is i think there's a level of hope that everybody gets when something different comes and i once again i take great pride and i take great responsibility in doing that so it's not once again it's not just about being the title of being something under 30 or for forbes or uh it's like the title of being the youngest female black females on a digital bank it is actually saying people are going to look at me and say this is the change this is not once again it's not the older the white male that's running the bank account the corporate way this is somebody who understands me i see myself in this person they're going to build something that's going to be from my generation onward um and this is what's going to i now understand it because it's not going over my head it's i'm i'm big even internally i don't say this just because i don't know i'm doing this live even internally i'm always like anytime someone says something like dummy damn like no like we're not dumbing anything down this is never a situation of us dumbing something down we're simplifying it and we're bringing it to a situation where we're meeting people where they are um unfortunately when you don't understand your audience you're going to always think and build something one way when your audience is probably thinking an entire different way so i mean let's say an example i gave was when people talk about oh you need more than you should get more than one job i'm like most people have two or three jobs or you know you should do this and it's to your point my grandmother say something very similar she used to say it's hard to blame someone for what they don't know and that's one of the issues that we've had for so long and i think that capaway has given people hope and so i definitely take great pride in being the founder and in pushing the envelope and challenging the infrastructure and is that going to be easy without question um not at all you know you have a lot of these big banks that have some of these regulatory people in their back back pocket the lobbyists in their back pocket and rightly so there no there were three trillion dollars two trillion dollars um but my goal isn't to walk around with three trillion dollars and take 35 billion dollars from somebody in fees my goal is how do i change the next generation so that we at least get access and opportunities um across the board i think this that's really important um when you were talking about like not dumbing down this information but really making it accessible it goes back to this conversation of access access to resources access to opportunity all of these things that systemic inequity has robbed all of us of as you know to become a richer more vibrant more diverse country daniel commented here he said my mom worked in human resources at a company with mostly immigrant workers and she would strongly encourage those new hires to participate in the 401k but almost nobody took up the company on that when you are trying to reach people who have been excluded from access to tools and systems for building and and passing on wealth that's that's a huge thing particularly in well lower socioeconomic communities but particularly in in african-american communities where literally assets were robbed out of banks out of you know the land was taken from you how do you begin to reach those that your target audience with a message that connects because you can say hey it's so important you're going to be 65 someday you have to invest in your 401k and in your case hey you know they're going to eat you your your payday lender is you know eating you up with interest and fees and all of these things how do you begin to um introduce people to your product and service in a way that um helps them make that transition if they've never and maybe generationally nobody in their family has used a bank or trusts the bank yeah so i mean you know what i what i always tell people is there's also no great percentage that you're not gonna be able to change their mind um and to take to try to change their minds is a waste of resources and time uh maybe not a waste of resources because i think that i want to give everybody the opportunity um now if they take the opportunity i i can't control that but i definitely want to at least expose them to it but even with exposure there's sure going to be some people who are just going to say like nope not going to do it's not for me but there's also now with this next generation of millions and gen z people who are more open and willing to try it and a lot of time it comes from being actually more social and approaching for more of a social point than it does from more of like a very structured corporate feel and when i say that is you know when i when i tell people that we built cap cafe purposely with more of a social field in a corporate field if you look at our website look at our app our wording got coloring um you get usernames versus no just using your real name that would be from a social piece and the reason for that is people actually underestimate social influence even when it comes to money and so the example i'll give you is if wells fargo right now said you know steve we're going to sit down a few people and have a conversation about money just imagine you're in a group of people right now and wells fargo is having this conversation about money i guarantee you most people will hold back or and or not speak at all when it comes to money however think about going on facebook or going on twitter people literally just spilled their whole life out on social media they'll be like i'm broke i don't have any money like you know i'm trying to fight people literally tell social media their entire life story like struggles ups downs um and people have in this next generation becoming very very comfortable with doing that and so that was one reason that we built cafe more from a social field than it does from a corporate banking field so that's one thing uh the second thing is the way that we even acquire customers and so we have a b2c which means we go direct to consumers somebody hears about cafe they can kind of sign up and use us which is great but we do a lot with b2b to see through partnerships and so what's that is through schools whether that is through employers whether that's through community organizations and when we do that would allow us to do is really kind of focus on one audience at one time and really educate them on things that they probably wouldn't have known or had misconceptions about beforehand you know i know growing up you know my dad hated credit cards he would tell us growing up that if you can't afford it if you can't put on your debit card you can't afford to pay cash for it then you don't need a credit card to put it on there and then i got older and i realized okay everybody needs at least one major credit card but my dad never believed in credit cards he always believed that you couldn't pay for it you should you shouldn't have it um so it's a lot of unlearning um that you have to do and that is something that actually goes part of our literacy which is unlearning some things that's just generational and that's really important to us what we do at calway and kind of changing changing the mindset so a social feel the literacy but with that literacy it is part of unlearning what has just been there for generations yeah that's something that colton in the comments mentioned earlier he said i have friends that are taught that credit cards are bad so they never use them not reeling realizing they've been miseducated and and to the point that this is something that is not maybe it was correct for one time but it's not you know it's a dif it's different now like things are changing so fast like even when i was young like we wouldn't we didn't have the digital capacity that we do now where i can basically use a bank without ever like without ever going to the actual physical bank like i prefer i walked into my bank when i started like open an account and i said do i ever have to come back to your to your i was like i just never ever want to come back here and so i think that's changing a lot i'm one of the things i want to hit on before we kind of as we wind in the last 15 minutes of this conversation is this this task you have taken on of building this company and and there's a lot of a lot that goes into getting this type of venture off the ground um can you talk a little bit about the the challenges that are real kind of real world that you faced maybe at the beginning or as you've gone through the last few years um again like i said i think a lot of people look at entrepreneurship as you know after it's happened the flash bang the you know oh you built this billion dollar company that's a unicorn and you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars and it kind of idolizes that lifestyle that's not for 99 of the entrepreneurs is not reality um what have been some of the challenges that you've overcome or had to face starting to build a company like this um gosh where do i start uh the highlight reel yes i am it's funny even my friends my family i was like you're traveling all the time you're in these nice hotels and planes all the time i'm like so i'm usually in the hotel by myself yeah my room service is super lonely i hate flying like you guys look at it one way and i'm over here like every time you're on the plane it's like laura please let me not be like the 1 800 800 million person who drops out of the sky and is playing so it's not all glamorous as it looks i'm not complaining because i'm very blessed but it's not as glamorous people think um some of the obstacles um probably number one which is probably most obvious being a female is fundraising uh women raise i want to say less than six percent of venture funding and women of color raised less than one percent so less than one percent it's not even a whole whole percent or less than one percent so fundraising without question is is the biggest obstacle because of just the the stats show why um outside of that it is actually really tough i think one thing's underestimated in startups it's really tough uh building a really great team um i'm sure you know you tell your students all the time but i would tell even people who come under know who i mentor that the startup game especially early is a higher fire game you're going to hire somebody and they're not going to be able to do anything that that you need them to do because starting world is totally different from the corporate world and when i say that startup world is you're going to hire somebody and they have to understand that i'm pretty much going to give you one task and i'm going to throw you in the woods and i'm going to hope you come out and you did it properly versus a corporate job it's like they give you a b c and d and startups i give you a i give you z and i need you to go figure out how to do it between and that's everybody's not meant or built to do that um so building teams are actually quite difficult to get a really great team um for a startup eventually you get there but it definitely takes some higher fire um pieces to finally get there um so fundraising building teams finding our fit was actually was a difficult piece um most people expected us to be in new york or to be in san francisco um and honestly i spent time in new york um i spent time in san francisco i was spending time in the bay the lower um and not not north which is san francisco take more of the silicon valley side um but i i just i didn't want to be there it wasn't because the best the best is not there because clearly that's what they are but for me it was how do i how am i able to build cheaper um because your burn rate can make or break you um how can i feel cheaper and how can i build something that i i start to feel that i wasn't gonna be able to break out of in silicon valley so many people still have aspirations when they start a tech company that i want to go to silicon valley um and i think you people need to really think about what they're building and if that's really a good fit for them um you know we joke all the time now that silicon valley's problem is how do i get this car to drive by itself and you know it has its own impact and reason why they're doing it which is not all bad um but when i look at real world problems being from where i'm from it's it's food deserts it's baking deserts it's people hat live in the delta region um they get sick and there's no hospital they can perform what they need it's a life or death situation that's no people kids who are having to catch two buses or walk because there's no public transportation in their city like that's my version of a real world problem and i think real world problems and so um finding a place that fits for you and you i think we've seen i would say maybe over the last three years that we've seen people kind of migrate out of the bay new york boston you see cincinnati become big atlanta has grown on different places are kind of are kind of uh more startup hubs now but i think it's really important to not try to just run to silicon valley or new york and that was something that was a hurdle for us where do we fit that's going to really benefit us and build this company out um and probably the last one is you you have to be a really great leader when you're when you're running a startup uh meaning that you need to put yourself first emotionally mentally physically but at the same time you're kind of putting yourself last i know that probably sounds like a huge oxymoron in some degree but um for myself i make sure that you know i'm mentally healthy i make sure i try to get enough sleep when i can um meditate you know i read books in the morning time i try to go outside to make sure i get a breath of fresh air but at the same time if it came down right now that i had that this company had ten thousand dollars in the bank i'm gonna pay my employee before i pay myself because that's what it means to be a startup founder so there are certain parts of you that you have to put first because you are a leader and you know the saying goes you can't feed somebody from an empty plate but at the same time as a startup founder you're technically kind of putting yourself up last because you eat less if you came down to who gets paid this month um so i think those are all hurdles that i think are overlooked when it comes to um being being uh in the startup world in our entrepreneurship in general um one more i'll mention i think that regardless if you're doing tech startups if you're doing anything the one thing that i think is completely overlooked is the sacrifice you know i tell you know i typically all the time when my friends are going out and partying or they're taking trips sometimes i'm in the office and it's like are you coming and it's like this deadline is due tomorrow and i have this investor and i have shareholders and no i can't just drop everything and go out for not a party because i have responsibilities sometimes nine to fives are great for some people um i actually hate the whole thing of like everybody should be a leader and you know you shouldn't be a follower i think everybody plays a role in the ecosystem of the world i am 100 the person that respects the janitor i respect the employees that i have that don't even call employees i call them team members um i respect the entire ecosystem everybody is meant to do something everybody's not meant to be a leader everybody's not meant to be a founder uh everybody's meant to be a ceo you know there's a lot a lot that comes with that world um that most people don't talk about because as you mentioned we only see the tech crunch headlines where it's like ex-person is now worth 100 million dollars they raise 20 million dollars and that's great but how much equity have they given up how much sacrifice have they had to do to get there how many friendships or relationships have they lost to get there um that's the part that no one really talks about but it is definitely part of the journey that is absolutely the real talk i tell my students the best the best capital to raise his revenue and really understanding this idea of when you take investment you're selling literally selling a piece of your company and it's easy to read those headlines of oh they raised hundreds of millions of dollars but the headline the very next week or month could be they lost hundreds of millions of dollars because like you said their burn rate you know was that and now they're you know defunct and not right now we get the whole people being voted out yeah i raised a billion dollars but now i lost control of my board and they don't like what i'm doing so i'm voted out of my own company so yeah it's absolutely the reality of the world so you talked a little bit about these challenges um as we kind of wrapped up this conversation i'm curious about when you look back over the last four or five years of the the people the organizations the um the groups maybe you you mentioned you know you work with different part trying to build partnerships as customer acquisition method and tool um who are the champions you've found along the way or what are the champions that have actually lifted you up in this process because you've been at it a long time and you still have a long way to go for what you want to accomplish to really make generational change who are some of the champions or what are some of the champion um organizations that have lifted you up uh i mean there's been so many um that's not really fair right it's like it's kind of like giving the oscar speech and saying i'm going to leave out a director or a producer you know i think everybody that you meet plays a part and i when i say that i really mean it because another thing is speaking even to the entrepreneurship journey and it may include myself some of the people who've helped me out the most have been even entrepreneurs who have failed and i think we have this bad habit that we only want to go watch like the entrepreneur who was like really successful and get advice from the really successful entrepreneur but i guarantee you and i think i'm guilty of this myself most entrepreneurs who are really successful some of them kind of sugarcoat the journey they make it sound like i got here and i you know i don't know i slept two hours but then i made 20 million dollars like no that's really not really the truth of how it really happened but when you speak to someone who has failed they give you the truth of how they feel why they feel and what you can potentially do not to fall into those same steps so entrepreneurs not just organizations but entrepreneurs that i've met along the way who's failed of course entrepreneurs who have succeeded um you know organizations especially in the south who are still very supportive uh the delta region authority in on bay mississippi who i met you know early earlier in my journey um who i still you know stay in contact with now and when i reach out or i'll reach out it's still a really good relationship there's a lot of organizations now that focus on like minorities so uh google has um entrepreneurship program now for black entrepreneurs um there's a lot of women focused on organizations that i've been part of or dealt with that's been really great and sometimes also investors you know early in my journey backstage capitals was an early investor in us and arlen hamilton uh has been great and one thing i loved about arlen was there are so many investors who say oh we're here to invest in unrepresented founders uh however you define it as women as immigrants that's black as brown but you have a lot of people who say it but their portfolio don't actually reflect what they're saying and backstage arlen christie their portfolio reflects that so it's been a mixture of people honestly who have i appreciate every single thing that they've done along the journey and i i've never taken it for granted yeah that's something i've followed arlen too on social media over the last several years and seeing somebody who has walked it also and like really wants to reach back and help others to succeed is really impressive um as as we wind down the last minute here how can people um connect with capway what's the best way to connect with capway um to open an account those types of things and and where do you go from here what's next on your horizon yeah so connect with capway definitely download the app ios and android so the google play store and the app app store um if some reason you don't have either you can always go to our website which is capaway.co that's c-a-p-w-a-y dot c-o uh so definitely download the app get an account sign up for our country literacy get some feedback we have a few things within there we have some money talk sections that we have and different things like that so definitely just get engaged love feedback also from here you know we're we're focusing really on these next few months of scaling as far as the banking piece we're scaling the banking really listening to our customers what they like what they don't like what they want to see added and there's a few things that we have coming up as far as milestones over the next few months few years ranging everything from micro lending to different types of accounts building credit um challenging the credit system inside the financial system so yeah we have a uh we have a nice road ahead of us lots of hard work but you know i'm looking forward to to change the numbers of where we are now with uh unbanked underbank underserved like a financial services so you know i don't know if i did my job based off of not just changing the numbers which are which changing the data is really important but you you know when you've had a true impact or not yeah absolutely i think that's going to be an exciting thing to watch as the as the attention and kind of the focus of our nation really shifts to this younger generation that is driven to make change in so many ways there's so much opportunity and i'm excited actually i i years ago when you were starting this this uh company i was watching what's happening i'm excited to get the get the app downloaded and um honestly if i never have to see a branch and i can just bank you're the bank for me so uh seriously it's like i just want to be able to deposit with my phone and transfer my money and so i'm excited about people you like you know how like when when basketball players are football players like it was so cool because i was out and this little kid had my jersey on like i'm the more the person slide i was out and this person was peeing with the cafe card so like this yeah that's me that's exciting all right well i want to say thank you first off to our audience for joining and um those of you who will join afterwards and and see this on a replay on youtube or wherever you find us i'm so grateful that you've spent this hour with us in this important conversation um join us for future reframes where we take conversations that matter in a variety of industries a variety of perspectives typically focused around business technology education and equity and all things and so i'm excited to continue this journey i want to thank you sheena for joining us it's great to catch up after many years we kind of see each other in passing on social media usually twitter or something or linkedin but uh i appreciate the work you do um and it makes a difference it's so important for the the company or the country that we all aspire to build and to create a more um as our founder said a more perfect union for everybody um so thank you for your time this evening and best of luck with continued success with everything capway does thank you so much