Sophia! Super excited to chat, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what Ansa does?
Yeah, happy to. So I'm Sophia Goldberg, Co-founder and CEO of Ansa. We're a seed stage startup based out of San Francisco. I will tell you more about that in a little bit, I'm also the author of the bestselling Field Guide to Global Payments, which is the 101 I think everyone in payments and fintech should read, and I’ve been in payments for about six years now. I worked across commercial and product roles out of San Francisco for Adyen for four and a half years. Before payments I did a kind of smattering of non-fintech things.
Love it. So we're going to jump right into talking about the book. Tell us about that experience. Why do it?
Hubris! Honestly, I thought it’d be easier, so I think that was part of it. It really stemmed from a gap I saw, which is also how I ended up building Ansa as well. I would call it my Jackson Pollock moment. When I started in payments, there was Payment Systems in the U.S. and that was the one tangible book you could go learn from. But that book really wasn't accessible. It wasn't helpful for me either, especially because I was at Adyen and a lot of the work I was doing wasn't U.S. payment systems-related. I was a complete sponge while I was at Adyen, and I built out some training programs. I got a lot of joy out of training new hires. I sat on the board of Payments Ed, which is the payments education forum. They do two conferences a year and it's very education-based. That made me realize that I like teaching and demystifying payments.
In the middle of the pandemic, when all of us were quite bored and watching Netflix and doing different things, I ended up rereading Payment Systems in the US and kept saying, like, "I would have explained that differently. I would have put these topics in a completely different order. Why don't I just try and do that?” A lot of people were writing at the time, and Substack was getting bigger but I didn’t want to just launch a newsletter. I wanted something tangible, something people could reference, something they could hold. I didn’t know how to do SEO, I don’t have a marketing background, so I didn’t know how people would find my writing if it were a blog. I also didn’t want to have to write every weekend for the rest of my life, so decided to go the book route. Part of that is also just because I love books, but really have something tangible to hand people that mattered to me too.
So you’re the founder of a seed stage startup in SF, but you’ve also written a book. You know, those are, in my mind, I think of them both as entrepreneurial ventures. When you compare and contrast, how do the early days of building Ansa compare to the early days of writing a book?
I've never been asked that question! I like that one. I think there's a huge amount of both overlap and difference. The overlap is it's a very self-starting endeavor, and you can tell folks about what you're either building or writing and that creates a great accountability network for yourself. But with a book there is a clear end. There is finality. Whereas a startup is the exact opposite, on the ambiguity spectrum. And so that's very different. Like there was ambiguity around the book of like, “Will anyone like this? Will it be any good? Will it be helpful?” and there's a vulnerability to that, but it's very different from a startup, where there's aspects of “Do we have product market fit?” Or “Does what we're building matter?” Like, “Is this going to change the paradigm of payments in the way we're planning and hoping it does?”
You also have a lot more people with you in the journey with a startup. A book is a very solo endeavor, and I remember working with my editor and interviewing people but it’s pretty solo. It’s rewarding, but I’m enjoying startup land so much more.
Love it. So you’ve raised $5.4 million from Bain. You spent six years in payments, four of those at Adyen, but you started your career out in consulting? Political consulting correct?
Politics and consulting, yes.
Help us get from A to B, with the amount of startups I meet on a yearly basis, I would frame that as a nonlinear career path.
Yes, I agree. And I think also within payments, I've been nonlinear. So in undergrad, I studied political science and art history. I think the common thread through everything is I'm just like a really curious, nerdy human. I just dig into things and keep digging and whatever keeps my interest the longest, I stay with. I'm six years into payments and I think I'll be here forever because it feeds that in me. So in undergrad, I did like the classic summer in investment banking, summer in management consulting, and-
The pipeline, as I like to call it.
Yeah, it was like, “Oh, I think I like banking,” and thankfully someone in my life said, “You're a really creative person. This is not a creative industry. I think over time you will hate it.” I've thanked that person so many times in the last decade for saving me from that, because I really liked the style of work during my internship. So consulting had that creativity. I liked it. But then I also worked in Parliament in the UK in undergrad for a year, I studied abroad in London and I really liked that. I really liked the tangibility of trying to help the world, but it was so slow. And so I didn’t like the pace of work, even though I loved the work. Then I worked on the Clinton campaign, and also liked that way of working. I liked the work itself, but it didn't go the way we wanted. So after that I went to grad school in the UK, and coming out of that with with Brexit and Trump having just happened, and me not really knowing what I wanted my career to be like because I had initially planned to be in public service international organizations, I actually just ended up at a five-person startup in Stockholm. That was purely because a friend of a friend’s dad was an investor. They needed someone who could just be a Jane-of-all-trades ops person, and they were like, “Sophia’s from the Bay Area, she must know startups!”
Yeah, like, “Oh okay, seen the Golden Gate Bridge before? She's got it.”
I had one 45 minute call with the founders and was like, “Yeah, I'll move to Sweden.” It felt like one of those things that I'll only ever regret not moving to Sweden in my early twenties. And I am really grateful for that experience because I realized I really like operating at a small scale, the dumpster fires of being super agile and being super collaborative. For me, it's just a really fun and rewarding way to work. But I didn't really care about the subject matter. I needed something that got at my interests more, so I took a step back after leaving and I realized I love the physical mechanisms of the global economy. I studied trade economics in grad school. I really love commodities and freight, and I found payments to be a similar area but with way more technology companies for me to explore working with, and that’s how I found Adyen.
Yeah. That is an incredible story. I don't call it the dumpster fire stage. I call it the amoeba phase or the primordial ooze stage of startups.
“Primordial,” I also call it primordial, yeah.
So Sophia, before we go any further - can you tell us about what Ansa does?
Of course, so what we're building at Ansa is white label closed loop Payments-as-a-Service, which is a lot of jargon to mean embedded customer balances or customer wallets. So that can look like the Starbucks in-app payment method, right, where you want to be able to launch this ability for consumers to prepay for your products. It can also look like a metro system's payment rails. It can also look like how you're able to do micro transactions on a digital platform. There's many, many different verticals where closed loop payments can be really powerful. We're building a very horizontal platform for that.
Really where our ethos stems from is the fact that payments have stayed primarily the same for the last 70 years in the US, but commerce has changed a lot. So with that in mind, our goal is really to be more commerce enablement than a payment layer that merchants have to build hacks on top of to get the customer experiences they want. Everything we do stems from this open ended question of, “Can we not only help existing commercial models function better, but what kinds of monetization can companies build with their customers– because we now exist– that we haven't even thought of yet?”
Okay so taking micro payments as an example, you could feasibly power what I think people have talked about for a long time of a consumption-based digital media model. An example I could think of is paying 10 cents to read, you know, Ezra Klein in the New York Times because he's the only reporter you care about at the New York Times. Is that one example of a use case Ansa could power?
Yeah, exactly. And so we could either power the backend system if, say, the New York Times wanted to build it out, or we could actually enable that for a startup who wants to do that as their core value proposition. In that example, they would build the consumer experience and they would also build all of the distribution to different digital media destinations, and on the back-end we’re doing all of the payments infrastructure, the authorization engine, integrating with the networks to enable that type of interaction.
How do you cut through the noise of a crowded fintech infrastructure market? Like let’s say I’m a vertical SaaS company and I just wanted to get my 1% net take rate on payments. There’s now so many providers, too many providers who can do that for me whereas with Ansa it sounds like you want to enable newer use cases. So I guess part of my question is, how are you thinking about the kind of customer education and the process of evangelizing your product?
Yeah, so we're in the early innings of it. We came out of stealth a few months ago, and we’re getting a lot of inbound interest from people looking to build on top of us. That’s a great validation from the market, and so part of what we’re doing is honestly just seeing who finds us, and then picking the verticals that already have a decent amount of education on the opportunity. Like taking coffee and quick serve restaurants, the Starbucks experience is a great case study that’s out in the wild. People are aware of it, people know the benefits it has on unit economics, on cash flow, on retention. So I think part of our job in the early days is really just finding those innovators on the leading edge, and doing everything we can to empower them.
Do any companies come to mind as North Stars for you in terms of your inspiration for Ansa? Or even when you think about the journey, the vision 10 years out, the one where Ansa is a success. What does that look like?
I think my vision for where we are in 10 years is being a network rail here in the US, and what we do in that environment is provide commercial flexibility, enable commerce to flourish, and enable business models to flourish.
With that in mind, our North Star, at least for me, is Apple–Apple’s fintech products, specifically. I mean their consumer products are great right? We all eat them like candy now, but on the fintech and payment side I think about them so much because they show the power of network effects and they care so much about customer experience and user experience, which is where so many– soooo many– consumer fintech products fall flat. They just have innate care and understanding of how people will use and interact with their products, and we’ve seen that with Apple Pay, we’ve seen that with Apple card, we see that with their high yield savings account… for me it’s just masterful to watch this monolith of a company launch product after product after product. Apple is like the silent fintech.
On top of that, and I might get some flack here, but I’m actually a huge fan of the Apple App Store. Like yes, people hate the 30% tax, but I think the brilliance of the App Store is in some ways similar to the ethos we’re trying to build, which is all of the complexity that a company doesn’t have to care about. If you’re launching an app and you’re here in the US, you don’t have to worry about local entities in 150 countries and currencies to reach customers there because the App Store is the merchant of record. They handle all of that complexity. There’s something so magical in the amount of work they've put in to create that platform of commerce on their operating system, which they take a lot of rent for. But I think of that as a North Star in how to light up commercial use cases, and we’re trying to do the same with Ansa.
I love it. Changing topics a bit here, but how important is serendipity to you, in your career and in your life? How important do you think it is just to be open to the possibility of something new?
Huge. Serendipity is huge. Like you said, it's about being open to it, right? It's putting yourself out there, being open-minded, chatting with and getting to know folks. Like our first customer was entirely serendipitous, I was just chatting away about everything we’re trying to do. With another large prospect we're talking to, one of our engineers was talking about what he was building at a holiday party; someone overheard and said that their company needs that. There's all kinds of that stuff in life. It happens all the time.
Okay so rounding things out here, I’m going to ask three final questions. A bit rapid fire. First one, in three words or less, how would you describe the early culture at Ansa?
Easy. Curiosity, integrity, and fun.
What advice would you give to any founders who are looking to build in fintech? And I would also maybe also extend that out to operators as well who are looking to work in fintech.
Interact with the ecosystem and build a network. I found the folks that work in fintech and invest in fintech, build in fintech, found in fintech to be a really supportive, amazing group of people. Build a presence in the ecosystem, go to happy hours, get on Twitter, join Slack groups, go to conferences. Because I think a lot of the serendipity we talked about earlier will come from building your network and ecosystem, and you'll learn a lot about what you like, what you want to do, and what the opportunities are, especially in the early stage. I think that's my biggest suggestion.
The other is like, moving fast and breaking things doesn't apply to us in the same way it does in every other part of tech. Maybe health tech is similar, right? You got, you know, HIPAA and everything, but like you can't move fast and break things when you're touching money. And I hope this next wave of fintech founders, myself included, proceed with a bit more of a sense of responsibility than maybe the last few years have had around that.
100%. Okay so my last question is, one of the reasons why I was super attracted to the tech environment was the culture. Relative to banking, consulting, the legal professions other similar white collar careers, in tech you’re very encouraged to say “Hey I don’t know,” or “Hey I need help,” so speaking directly to the TWIF audience, what do you think the TWIF audience could help you with at this stage as you continue to build Ansa?
We are building our team and looking for great people that align with our mission and want to come build with us. So I think that my main ask for everyone is: Are you interested in joining our team? Come chat.
The other side is given our scale, we don't do a ton of marketing yet, so as you hear about folks that need this use case, spread the word of Ansa like, “Hey, there's this closed loop platform that could be really helpful to a wide range of merchants and platforms.”
Awesome, awesome. And okay, I lied, I have one other question. I just thought about it and I’m super curious about it, but when you think about just your development as a person, because it's come up a bunch of times, whether it's curiosity or serendipity, what do you think fostered that? Was that, you know, this is just part of Sophia, you're a naturally curious person. Was it your parents? Was it teachers? Was it a specific subject in school, extracurriculars? What do you think that was?
Well, that's a really good question. I haven't reflected on it quite that specifically. I think I've always been a really independent kid. My mom tells the story of me trying to walk to the grocery store in my diaper when I was three– alone, just like walking down the street. But I think it really does also come from my parents letting us just try anything and quit anything. So like I tried violin and hated it after two lessons, my mom didn't make me stick with it. It was also, like, “You can quit it, but you have to go pick something else.” We were a big reading family as well, so I think that was another part of it. Like, if we wanted to watch TV when we were sick, we had to read a chapter of a book first. There's like some of that stuff that, now looking back on it, was probably intentional for my parents, like building curious children. But I think the freedom to find what I liked helped a lot.
Sophia, I love it. Thank you so much for sharing a bit of your story and what you’re building at Ansa.
Dez, thank you so much for having me! Was so fun to come on.
