How to Transcribe Podcast Episodes into Accurate Text

# The Founder Hour Podcast
## Episode: Building Fintech from the Ground Up with Sarah Chen

---

**[00:00]**

**Host (Mike Adams):** Welcome back to The Founder Hour. I'm your host, Mike Adams, and today I'm thrilled to be joined by Sarah Chen, founder and CEO of a fintech company that's been making serious waves in the B2B payments space. Sarah, thanks so much for being here.

**Guest (Sarah Chen):** Thanks for having me, Mike. I've been a listener for a while, so this is a bit of a full-circle moment.

**Host:** That's awesome to hear. Let's dive right in. I want to take our listeners back to 2019, because that's when your journey really started. Walk me through what those early fundraising days looked like.

**Guest:** Yeah, 2019 was brutal, honestly. I had left my job at a larger financial services firm with what I thought was a really compelling pitch deck and about eight months of runway in personal savings. I assumed, naively, that I'd close a seed round in maybe three months.

**Host:** And how long did it actually take?

**Guest:** Fourteen months. I took over a hundred investor meetings before we closed our first check.

**[01:23]**

**Host:** Over a hundred. That's a staggering number. What was the core objection you kept hearing?

**Guest:** Two things, really. First, I was a solo founder at the time, and a lot of seed investors want to see a co-founder dynamic, especially a technical counterpart. Second, the market we were initially targeting was crowded. We were building a consumer budgeting app, and investors had seen a dozen of those pitches that same quarter.

**Host:** So what changed? What finally got that first check across the line?

**Guest:** I stopped pitching the product and started pitching the infrastructure underneath it. I realized during those hundred meetings that the thing investors kept leaning forward for wasn't the consumer app — it was the payments rails we'd built to power it. That became the seed of the pivot, although I didn't fully act on it until later.

**Host:** That's such an important insight. The feedback loop from rejection actually reshaped the business.

**Guest:** Exactly. Every "no" was data if I was willing to listen.

**[02:41]**

**Host:** Let's talk about that pivot. You officially moved from B2C to B2B in 2021. What did that transition actually look like day-to-day?

**Guest:** Painful. I want to be really honest about that because I think pivots get romanticized in startup media. We had about 40,000 consumer users at that point. Not massive, but real people who loved the product. Telling the team we were sunsetting the consumer app was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made.

**Host:** How did the team react?

**Guest:** Mixed. Two engineers left within a month. They'd joined to build consumer software, and enterprise API work just wasn't what they signed up for. I don't blame them at all. But the folks who stayed became the core of what we are today.

**Host:** And commercially? How quickly did the B2B thesis validate?

**Guest:** Faster than I expected, which is its own kind of lesson. We signed our first three enterprise pilots within four months of the pivot. The deal sizes were roughly 30x what we'd been projecting on the consumer side. It was a humbling reminder that sometimes you're sitting on the right business and pointing it at the wrong customer.

**[04:15]**

**Host:** That's a great line. Let's zoom out on the pivot for a second — if a founder listening right now is wrestling with whether to pivot, what's your framework?

**Guest:** Three questions. One: are your best customers asking for something your product isn't? Two: is your team energized by the current direction, or just loyal to it? And three: if you were starting today with what you know now, would you build what you're building?

**Host:** That third one is the killer.

**Guest:** It's the one I avoided asking myself for almost a year.

**Host:** Let's shift gears to hiring, because I know you built a distributed engineering team across three time zones. That's something so many founders struggle with.

**Guest:** We have engineers in New York, Lisbon, and Singapore. It was not a deliberate strategy at first — it was a talent strategy. We hired the best people we could find, and they happened to be spread out.

**[05:48]**

**Host:** What did you get wrong early on?

**Guest:** Oh, so much. The biggest mistake was assuming async communication would just happen organically. It doesn't. You have to build the muscle. For the first six months, we were defaulting to synchronous meetings, which meant someone was always on a call at 10 p.m. or 6 a.m. Burnout crept in fast.

**Host:** How did you fix it?

**Guest:** We implemented what we call "handoff documents." At the end of each region's workday, the team lead writes a short summary — what shipped, what's blocked, what the next region should pick up. It sounds simple, but it transformed our velocity. Suddenly the sun never set on the codebase, but nobody was working weird hours.

**Host:** I love that. What about culture? How do you build cohesion when people rarely share a room?

**Guest:** Intentionality. We fly the whole engineering team together twice a year — once for planning, once just for bonding. No agenda on the second one. And between those, we invest heavily in written culture. Our internal documentation is probably overkill by most standards, but it means new hires can onboard without needing to catch someone on Zoom.

**[07:32]**

**Host:** Let's talk about hiring mistakes. Any stories you're willing to share?

**Guest:** Plenty. The biggest pattern I've noticed is that I used to over-index on pedigree. Big tech names on the resume, fancy schools. Some of those hires worked out, but my best engineers consistently came from non-obvious backgrounds — bootcamp grads, career switchers, folks from smaller startups where they had to wear ten hats.

**Host:** Why do you think that is?

**Guest:** Scrappiness. At an early-stage company, you need people who see a problem and solve it, not people waiting for a ticket in a well-defined sprint

# The Founder Hour: Sarah Chen on Building a Fintech Company

**Host:** Mike Adams
**Guest:** Sarah Chen, Founder of [Fintech Company]

---

**[00:00]**

**Host:** Welcome back to The Founder Hour. I'm Mike Adams, and today I'm talking with Sarah Chen, founder of a fintech company that's grown from a struggling startup to a serious player in the financial technology space. Sarah, thanks for being here.

**Guest:** Thanks for having me, Mike. I'm excited to talk about the journey.

**Host:** Let's dive right in. I want to start at the beginning. Take us back to 2019. You were trying to raise seed funding. Walk us through what that experience was like.

**Guest:** It was brutal, honestly. I had this vision for a consumer-facing fintech product. I thought we were solving a real problem—helping people manage their money better through mobile automation. But the reality of fundraising was completely different from what I imagined.

**Host:** In what way?

**Guest:** Well, for starters, I was a first-time founder. I had no track record, no network in the venture capital world. I was meeting with investors who would listen politely, nod along, and then send a rejection email two weeks later. The feedback was always vague. "We're not sure about the market timing" or "We're focusing on other areas right now."

**[01:45]**

**Host:** How many pitches did you do before getting that first yes?

**Guest:** I stopped counting after 50. I think it was somewhere around 70 or 80 before we got a check. It took about nine months of constant pitching. I was working a part-time job, building the product on nights and weekends, and spending my days in coffee shops trying to convince people to invest.

**Host:** That's a grueling process. What kept you going?

**Guest:** Honestly, stubbornness and naivety in equal measure. I didn't fully understand how hard it would be, which was probably a good thing. If I'd known the odds, I might have quit. But I also believed in the problem we were solving. Users loved the product. We had real engagement. So I knew the issue wasn't with the idea—it was with me learning how to tell the story better.

**Host:** And eventually you did close that first round?

**Guest:** We did. We raised $600,000 in seed funding from a combination of angel investors and a small seed fund. Most of them were people who believed in me more than the business at that point. They were betting on the founder, not the company.

**[03:30]**

**Host:** Let's fast forward to 2021. By that time, you had product-market fit, you had paying customers, but you made a major pivot from B2C to B2B. That's a pretty dramatic decision. What led to that?

**Guest:** The B2C model wasn't scaling the way we needed it to. We were acquiring users, but the unit economics didn't work. Customer acquisition cost was too high relative to lifetime value. We were essentially paying way too much to acquire customers who weren't sticky enough.

But during the process, we noticed something interesting. Small businesses were using our product and asking us for more features tailored to their needs. They wanted team accounts, they wanted reporting, they wanted integrations with their accounting software. And they were willing to pay significantly more for those features.

**Host:** So the pivot came from customer feedback rather than a strategic decision from above?

**Guest:** Exactly. We listened to what customers were asking for. The B2B segment was right in front of us, and we were initially dismissing it because it wasn't our original vision. But at some point, you have to be willing to follow your customers.

**[05:15]**

**Host:** How disruptive was that pivot to the company?

**Guest:** It was incredibly disruptive. We had to rebuild the product. We had to retrain the sales team—well, we basically had to build a sales team from scratch because we didn't have one before. We had to rethink our pricing model, our go-to-market strategy, everything.

And there was emotional resistance from the team. Some people had joined because they believed in the consumer mission. Pivoting felt like admitting failure in some ways, even though it wasn't.

**Host:** Did you lose people?

**Guest:** We did. Our first employee left because she felt so strongly about the consumer mission. It was painful. But in retrospect, making the pivot with a team that believed in the new direction was important. The people who stayed got it. They understood this was what the company needed to survive and thrive.

**[06:45]**

**Host:** Once you committed to the B2B model, you made another big decision—building remote engineering teams across three time zones. Why did you decide to go remote?

**Guest:** Cost was part of it. We couldn't afford to build a team based in San Francisco or New York. But it wasn't just about cost. We wanted access to the best talent, and that talent doesn't all live in expensive coastal tech hubs. We were looking for experienced engineers, and remote work opened up the entire country to us.

**Host:** How did you structure the teams?

**Guest:** We ended up with clusters in three different time zones. We had people on the East Coast, the Midwest, and the West Coast. The idea was that this would give us coverage and reduce the gap between time zones. But the execution was much harder than I anticipated.

**[08:00]**

**Host:** Tell me about the challenges.

**Guest:** Coordination was the biggest issue. With a three-hour gap between the earliest and latest team members, you can't do real-time collaboration for everything. We had to get very intentional about asynchronous communication. We documented everything. We over-communicated. 

There were also cultural challenges. It's much harder to build camaraderie when people aren't in the same room. You have to be deliberate about creating those connections, and we weren't great at that initially.

**Host:** What did you learn about managing remote teams?

**Guest:** First, you need really strong documentation and processes. You can't rely on hallway conversations or someone tapping you on the shoulder. Everything has to be written down.

Second, time zones are actually more manageable than I thought if you're intentional about it. We scheduled all-hands meetings at times that were reasonable for everyone. We designated certain hours as "core hours" when everyone had to be online and available. We made the Midwest team the central hub because that's where most of our other functions were located.

And third, you have to invest heavily in tools. We use Slack, Linear for issue tracking, Loom for video walkthroughs. These tools became extensions of our company culture.

**[09:45]**

**Host:** You mentioned culture. How do you maintain culture across distributed teams?

**Guest:** We're still working on this, to be honest. We do quarterly in-person offsites where everyone comes together for a week. Those are incredibly valuable. We also have regular one-on-ones between managers and team members, which I think is even more important in a remote setting.

But I'll be frank—the culture we have now is different from what it would be if we were all in one office. It's not worse; it's just different. It's more structured, more intentional. People are more thoughtful about their communication. There's less passive information sharing and more proactive documentation.

**Host:** Do you think you'd do anything differently if you were starting over?

**Guest:** With the remote teams? Probably not. The remote structure was the right call for us at that stage. But I would invest in culture and communication infrastructure from day one. We had to rebuild some of those systems retroactively, which was inefficient.

**[11:15]**

**Host:** As we wrap up, I want to ask about what you'd tell founders who are going through what you went through in 2019—struggling to raise funding, wondering if they should keep going.

**Guest:** My advice is twofold. First, validate that you're solving a real problem. Talk to customers obsessively. If they don't care about your solution, no amount of fundraising skill will change that. But if they do care, keep pushing.

Second, fundraising is a skill that can be learned. Your first pitch will be terrible. Your fiftieth pitch will be better. Your eightieth pitch might actually be good. Don't take rejection personally. Most investors are looking for signals that you're the right person to bet on—that you're resilient, adaptable, and obsessed with solving the problem.

And finally, stay flexible. Your original vision might be right, or it might be wrong. But staying close to customers and being willing to pivot when the evidence points in a new direction—that's what separates successful founders from ones that fail.

**Host:** Sarah Chen, thanks for sharing your journey with us.

**Guest:** Thanks for having me, Mike. It was great to talk about this.

**[12:00]**

---

[00:00]

**Host Mike Adams:** Welcome back to *The Founder Hour*. I’m Mike Adams, and today I’m joined by Sarah Chen, founder of a fintech company that has gone through a remarkable evolution over the past few years. We’re talking about the early days of fundraising, the decision to pivot the business model, and what it really takes to build a remote engineering team across multiple time zones. Sarah, thanks for being here.

**Sarah Chen:** Thanks for having me, Mike. I’m excited to be here.

**Host Mike Adams:** I’d love to start at the beginning. Take us back to 2019, when you were raising your seed round. What was that period like for you?

**Sarah Chen:** It was much harder than I expected. In 2019, we were still very early. We had conviction about the problem, but we didn’t yet have the traction investors wanted to see. I went into fundraising thinking that if we told a compelling story and showed the size of the opportunity, that would be enough. What I learned quickly was that investors wanted evidence. They wanted signs that customers not only liked the product, but would consistently use it and eventually pay for it.

**Host Mike Adams:** Was that your first time fundraising?

**Sarah Chen:** Yes, it was my first time raising institutional capital. I had no real playbook for it. I was learning everything in real time, from how to structure a pitch, to how to manage investor follow-ups, to how to handle rejection without letting it derail the company.

**Host Mike Adams:** What were the biggest struggles during that seed process?

**Sarah Chen:** The biggest challenge was hearing “not yet” over and over again. It wasn’t always a hard no. Sometimes investors would say, “This is interesting, come back when you have more traction,” or, “We like the vision, but we’re not sure about the market timing.” That kind of feedback is difficult because it’s not completely dismissive, but it also doesn’t solve your immediate problem, which is that you need capital to keep building.

**Host Mike Adams:** How long did that process take?

**Sarah Chen:** Longer than I thought it would. I originally assumed it might take a couple of months. It ended up taking much longer because we had to refine the narrative, improve the product, and keep the company moving while I was spending a huge amount of time in fundraising conversations.

[02:01]

**Host Mike Adams:** Did you ever have a moment where you thought, “This may not happen”?

**Sarah Chen:** Absolutely. There were several points where I thought maybe we were too early, or maybe I wasn’t telling the story in the right way. Fundraising has a way of making you question everything. You start wondering whether the market is real, whether your product is differentiated enough, whether you’re the right founder to build it.

**Host Mike Adams:** How did you push through that?

**Sarah Chen:** Two things helped. First, staying close to users. Every time I spoke to customers and heard their frustrations with the financial tools they were using, it reminded me why we started the company. Second, I started treating fundraising as a process of iteration rather than a judgment of my worth. Every conversation gave us data. If five investors were confused by the same thing, that wasn’t random. It meant we needed to explain the business more clearly.

**Host Mike Adams:** That’s such an important mindset shift. Was there a breakthrough moment?

**Sarah Chen:** There was. Once we tightened our messaging and became much more specific about the customer problem and the market we were going after, the conversations improved. We also got better at showing early signs of engagement in a way investors could understand. That changed the tenor of meetings from polite curiosity to serious diligence.

**Host Mike Adams:** So you got the seed round done, and then the company kept evolving. One of the major moments in your story is the pivot from B2C to B2B in 2021. What triggered that shift?

**Sarah Chen:** The short answer is that we were listening to the market. We started as a consumer fintech product because we believed individual users had a real pain point. That was true, but what we discovered was that acquiring those users at scale was expensive and slow. At the same time, businesses were reaching out to us asking whether our infrastructure could support their financial workflows. That was a huge signal.

**Host Mike Adams:** So the market was effectively pulling you in a different direction.

**Sarah Chen:** Exactly. Sometimes founders think of a pivot as giving up on the original idea, but for us it was really about following the strongest signal. We realized the underlying technology we had built was more valuable as a B2B solution than as a direct-to-consumer product.

[04:05]

**Host Mike Adams:** That sounds obvious in retrospect, but I imagine it didn’t feel obvious at the time.

**Sarah Chen:** Not at all. It was emotionally difficult because when you build a consumer product, it becomes very tied to your identity. It’s the brand people see. It’s the thing you’ve spent years talking about. To say, “We’re going to change this,” can feel like admitting failure, even when it’s actually the smartest strategic move.

**Host Mike Adams:** How did you know the pivot was the right move rather than just a reaction to short-term pressure?

**Sarah Chen:** We looked at the data very carefully. On the consumer side, we saw engagement, but weak unit economics. On the business side, we saw stronger willingness to pay, larger contract opportunities, and clearer retention patterns. We also noticed that our product roadmap made more sense in a B2B context. Features that were nice-to-have in consumer became mission-critical in enterprise workflows.

**Host Mike Adams:** How did your team respond when you told them you were pivoting?

**Sarah Chen:** Better than I expected, but only because we were transparent. I walked the team through what we were seeing in the business, what wasn’t working in B2C, and why B2B gave us a better chance to build something durable. I think people can handle change if they understand the reasoning behind it. What creates anxiety is ambiguity.

**Host Mike Adams:** Did the pivot change the culture of the company?

**Sarah Chen:** Yes, in a good way. We became more focused and more disciplined. In B2C, there’s often a tendency to chase growth metrics that look exciting but don’t always translate into a sustainable business. In B2B, you’re forced to understand your customer more deeply. You have to think about implementation, reliability, compliance, support, and how your product fits into someone’s operations. That made us a much stronger company.

**Host Mike Adams:** Was there anything you had to unlearn as a founder during that transition?

**Sarah Chen:** I had to let go of the idea that consistency always means staying on the same path. Sometimes consistency means staying committed to the problem while changing your approach to solving it. That was a big lesson for me.

[06:09]

**Host Mike Adams:** I want to talk about another area where you’ve learned a lot: hiring and managing remote engineering teams across three time zones. That’s a challenge many founders are dealing with now. What did that look like for you?

**Sarah Chen:** At first, it looked messy. We had engineers spread across three time zones, and in the early days we assumed that if everyone was talented and motivated, things would naturally click. They didn’t. We ran into communication gaps, delays in decision-making, and situations where work would stall because one team was waiting on another team that had already signed off for the day.

**Host Mike Adams:** That’s the hidden complexity of distributed teams. On paper it sounds efficient, but in practice there are lots of handoff issues.

**Sarah Chen:** Exactly. We learned quickly that remote hiring is not just about finding good people. It’s about designing systems that allow good people to work well together. That includes documentation, meeting structure, decision ownership, response-time expectations, and clarity around priorities.

**Host Mike Adams:** What were some of the mistakes you made early on?

**Sarah Chen:** One mistake was relying too much on synchronous communication. We were trying to recreate an office environment over video calls, and that just doesn’t scale across time zones. Another mistake was assuming everyone interpreted urgency the same way. One person’s “I’ll handle this soon” might mean in two hours, while someone else hears that as tomorrow morning. Those mismatches create friction.

**Host Mike Adams:** How did you fix that?

**Sarah Chen:** We became much more intentional. We invested heavily in written documentation so engineers didn’t have to depend on meetings to understand context. We created clearer handoff processes so work could move from one time zone to the next without losing momentum. We also defined decision-makers more explicitly. If every decision requires everyone to weigh in, distributed teams slow to a crawl.

**Host Mike Adams:** That’s a great point. Clear ownership becomes even more important remotely.

**Sarah Chen:** It does. We also changed how we hired. We stopped evaluating only for technical ability and started screening more carefully for communication skills, self-direction, and comfort with asynchronous work. A great engineer in a co-located team does not automatically become a great engineer in a distributed environment.

[08:14]

**Host Mike Adams:** Did you find that culture was harder to maintain across those time zones?

**Sarah Chen:** Yes, and I think founders sometimes underestimate that. Culture in remote teams doesn’t happen by accident. In an office, people absorb context informally. They overhear conversations, they ask quick questions, they build relationships in small moments. In a distributed company, you have to create those moments more deliberately.

**Host Mike Adams:** What did that look like for your team?

**Sarah Chen:** We tried to balance structure with flexibility.

Of course. Here is the professionally formatted transcript of the podcast segment.

***

**Podcast:** The Founder Hour
**Episode:** Building a Fintech Juggernaut with Sarah Chen
**Host:** Mike Adams
**Guest:** Sarah Chen

***

[00:00]
**Host:** Welcome back to The Founder Hour. I’m your host, Mike Adams, and today we have a very special guest in the studio, Sarah Chen, the founder and CEO of Finara, the B2B payments platform that has been making serious waves. Sarah, thank you so much for being here.

**Guest:** Mike, it’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

**Host:** So, I want to take our listeners back a bit. Today, everyone sees Finara as this incredible success story, but it wasn't always a straight line up. Let's go back to 2019. You were out there trying to raise your seed round. What was that experience like?

**Guest:** It was brutal. That’s the honest answer. In 2019, fintech was a hot space, but we were initially a B2C, or business-to-consumer, product. We were trying to help freelancers and gig economy workers manage their invoicing and cash flow. Every venture capitalist we spoke to loved the vision, but they hammered us on the cost of customer acquisition.

[01:52

[00:00]  
**Host:** Welcome back to The Founder Hour. I'm your host, Mike Adams, and today we're thrilled to have Sarah Chen, the founder and CEO of FinTech Innovate, a leading fintech company revolutionizing payments for small businesses. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us.  

**Guest:** Thanks for having me, Mike. I'm excited to be here.  

[01:30]  
**Host:** Sarah, let's dive right in. Take us back to 2019. You were just starting out, trying to raise seed funding for your fintech startup. What were some of those early struggles?  

**Guest:** Absolutely. 2019 was tough. We were building a consumer-facing app for personal finance tracking, but investors were skeptical. The market was crowded with apps like Mint and YNAB. We pitched over 50 VCs and angels, but kept hearing the same feedback: lack of differentiation and high customer acquisition costs.  

**Host:** That sounds grueling. How did you keep going?  

**Guest:** Persistence and iteration. We refined our pitch deck five times, focusing on our unique AI-driven insights. Finally, after eight months, we closed a $1.2 million seed round from a small syndicate. It was a relief, but we learned quickly that funding is just the beginning.  

[03:00]  
**Host:** Fast forward to 2021. You made a big pivot from B2C to B2B. What sparked that decision?  

**Guest:** User retention was our Achilles' heel in B2C. People downloaded the app, used it for a week, then churned. Metrics showed we needed stickier revenue. During the pandemic, we saw small businesses struggling with payments and invoicing. We repurposed our tech for B2B tools—seamless payment gateways and automated invoicing for SMBs.  

**Host:** Bold move. How did customers respond?  

**Guest:** Immediately positive. Our first B2B pilot with 20 beta clients turned into paid contracts within months. Revenue grew 300% that year, and it positioned us for Series A.  

[04:30]  
**Guest:** The pivot taught us to listen to data over assumptions. B2C is sexy, but B2B offers predictable revenue streams.  

**Host:** Wise words. Now, scaling a fintech means building strong engineering teams. You've hired remotely across three time zones—US, Europe, and Asia. What lessons have you learned there?  

**Guest:** Remote hiring is a game-changer but requires structure. First, we use async communication tools like Slack threads and Loom videos to bridge time zones. Daily standups are recorded, so no one misses out.  

[06:00]  
**Host:** Any hiring pitfalls to avoid?  

**Guest:** Absolutely. Early on, we hired for skills over cultural fit, leading to misalignment. Now, we prioritize values like ownership and adaptability in interviews. We also invest in onboarding: two-week virtual ramps with mentors.  

**Guest:** Across time zones, trust is key. We measure output, not hours—OKRs and bi-weekly demos keep everyone aligned. Turnover dropped 40% after these changes.  

[07:30]  
**Host:** Impressive. For founders listening, what's one non-negotiable in remote engineering teams?  

**Guest:** Clear documentation. Every decision, API change, or process goes into a shared Notion wiki. It prevents silos and speeds up onboarding for new hires in different zones.  

**Host:** Great advice. Sarah, looking back, what's the biggest lesson from your journey?  

**Guest:** Resilience through pivots. Startups aren't linear; they're about adapting to reality. Stay lean, validate fast, and build for customers who pay.  

[09:00]  
**Host:** Amen to that. Let's talk growth metrics. Post-pivot, how has FinTech Innovate scaled?  

**Guest:** We've grown to 5,000 B2B customers, processing $50 million in payments monthly. Engineering team is now 25 strong, fully remote. We're eyeing international expansion next year.  

**Host:** That's phenomenal. Any advice on fundraising in today's climate?  

**Guest:** Show traction early. In 2019, we had prototypes; now, investors want revenue proof. Bootstrap if possible to retain control.  

[10:30]  
**Guest:** Also, network relentlessly. Warm intros beat cold emails every time.  

**Host:** Solid gold. Sarah, this has been insightful. Where can listeners learn more or connect?  

**Guest:** Check out fintechinnovate.com or follow me on LinkedIn. Thanks for the chat, Mike.  

**Host:** Sarah Chen, thank you. That's all for this segment of The Founder Hour. Tune in next time for more founder stories. I'm Mike Adams—see you soon.  

[12:00]