FTT Jobs #1: Job of the Week: Better Mortgage — Q&A with Alloy’s Co-Founder

9 min readApr 22, 2020

A quick intro from Ian and Tom
Hey folks — thanks for joining us for the inaugural issue of FTT Jobs. Our goal with this newsletter is to help people build their careers in the fintech industry. Each week, we’ll send you a great open role at a fintech company, a Q&A with someone prominent in the fintech industry, some career advice, and some links to help you sound smart when you’re talking to your friends.
If you like this first issue, which we’re publishing for free, sign up at the link below! FTT Jobs is $5 a month, but the first month is free if you sign up now.
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The moneymaker

In this section, we’ll highlight an entry-level or mid-career job in fintech.

The company: Better.com

What do they do? An online mortgage lender

What’s the job? Associate, Business Operations, Real Estate

Why is this a great job? It’s a new business line that’s growing quickly in a well-established startup with lots of funding from Kleiner Perkins, Goldman, and more. You’ll get to see be involved in new initiatives from the ideation stages all the way through to launch.

What will you be doing?

Shape strategy and operations for the real estate business
Gather and analyze data from the market and the business to generate actionable insights
Run strategic planning processes
Project manage key initiatives

How do I apply? Apply here

Q&A

Laura Spiekerman, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Alloy

Hey everyone, Ian here. Alloy’s one of the more interesting early stage fintech companies I’ve come across (PS-they’re hiring, too.) Regulation makes fintech difficult to innovate in, and rules around anti-money laundering and “knowing your customer” bog down startups when they’re getting off the ground. But after you get over that hurdle and you’re growing well and getting users, you need to worry about fraud and managing risk: one of the most fundamental parts of financial services.

Alloy simplifies all that by letting customers add a number of KYC and AML related fraud services into their platform with a single, easy to use, API. The ease of integration makes Alloy the go to destination for companies looking to mitigate fraud and verify their users more quickly. Alloy’s raised $15 million, including a Series A round in September 2019 led by Bessemer Venture Partners. I highly recommend checking out their post here.

Laura is not only a friend of mine but also the cofounder and Chief Revenue Officer at Alloy. I asked her a few questions about her journey through the fintech industry, and what she’s excited about for the sector’s future.

1. How’d you get into fintech?

I was on the law school track, and when I decided not to go, I thought back to what I’d studied in college, microfinance, and tried to figure out what I could do with that. I found two guys who’d started a startup in Kenya called Kopo Kopo, and joined them to help build out merchant payment (and eventually cash advance) software on top of the M-Pesa rails.

2. When hiring for people on your team, what are some qualities and skills you look for that aren’t on the job description?

I look for problem solving and a willingness to pitch in on anything & everything. Especially in the beginning, you need people who can identify and solve problems, even if they don’t have skillsets that feel relevant to the problems at hand. Now that we’re growing more, I look for people who think about the future and about scale — I don’t want just someone who fixes my problem today; I want someone who thinks about what these problems and processes will look like when we have triple the clients, headcount, API calls, etc.

3. Are there any projects or some work experience that would make a candidate stand out?

I love concrete examples. Don’t talk in broad strokes or metaphors. I’m really interested in challenges you faced (whether strategic, operational, team-building, etc.) and how you went about approaching them. I’m also interested in projects where you went outside of your mandate — is that usual for you? Show me when, how, and why you go outside of what you’re expected to do.

4. Other than your company, what other fintech companies do you think are really exciting?

I’m a huge fan of Nova Credit. They have an incredible team, and their mission is even more important now that our government is increasingly enacting xenophobic and racist policies.

We also work closely with Middesk and Hummingbird, both of which solve problems for our clients and so partnering with each of them has brought a bunch more value to the industry we serve. In particular, Middesk has been a hugely supportive partner with us as we help SBA lenders get loans out to struggling small businesses during the COVID crisis.

5. What’s an underrated sector of the fintech industry and why?

PFM’s [personal financial management, which is a tough area of fintech to crack]. Just kidding…As you can see from my Nova Credit & Middesk mentions, I have a soft spot for better data, whether that’s credit or identity data. A lot of the financial services industry (legacy and new) is built on incomplete, incorrect, and not-real-time information about people and businesses, which leads to suboptimal decision making.

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The Main Event

Focus is the scarcest resource in large organizations

I love reading Ayo Omojola’s blog posts and he’s someone I’ve admired for awhile now; his stuff on fintech is illuminating and incredibly insightful. So, for our first issue, it’s really a pleasure to have Ayo write a post for us on big companies. Ayo’s worked at one of the biggest companies in fintech: he was the co-creator of the Cash Card and an early leader at Cash app inside Square (my favorite consumer fintech product, in case you couldn’t tell from how much I gush about it on Twitter) and is currently the head of product at Carbon Health (if you’re interested in healthcare, they’re hiring a ton and working a lot on COVID related projects.)

I’ll stop talking and let you read Ayo’s great post below. Also check out his website and other posts on vertical neobanks and banking-as-a-service while you’re at it.

“The ability to focus is negatively correlated with an organization’s size. What I mean is; as organizations get larger, they have a harder time executing on projects that require focus, for an extended period of time. This gets even more difficult if the project domain is orthogonal to the organization’s core business (even if solving the problem is existential for the organization). One of the hardest things for large organizations to do, is maintain focus for senior, highly effective people in the execution path, for an extended period of time.

For many people who have worked in big organizations, this experience will look familiar:

There’s a big new project, it’s exciting but it’s speculative — it is orthogonal to the core business. Let’s call it the Shiny Strategic Project. Not everyone agrees about how important it is, but all agree that if it works, it will be a huge win. Conservatively, it will take 10 months to ship, and the founder/CEO/most senior decision maker (I’ll call them the GM for this example) is really excited. It might be for a new business line or new product that doesn’t leverage the core business, but it is not the core business.
The company staffs it with a small team of highly seasoned, effective people who are dedicated, mission driven, and can be trusted to ship. Very often these will be pretty senior individual contributors (ICs) with a solid track record and reputation inside the company.
The team starts work on the project and things are humming along. It’s not exciting but it’s foundational work, they have a lot of agency, few people are meddling. The GM checks in less frequently as the days go by. They’re thinking about earnings, fundraising, recruiting, the next announcement, the next product launch: all things where the payoff might be smaller, but it hits sooner.
Around month 5, a crisis hits the core business. It starts small, then it gradually sucks more and more people in. This could be scaling related, or could be an exogenous/discontinuous macro change. In either case, the crisis is existential if left unaddressed.
An executive who didn’t sponsor the Shiny Strategic Project (either someone new, or someone who didn’t really agree with the value but didn’t want to rock the boat, or maybe even someone overseeing the crisis) looks over at the Shiny Strategic Project and says “hey those people over there are really senior and we could really use their help”
The people working on the Shiny Strategic Project haven’t shipped anything in a while (understandable; they’ve been working on this for 5 months) and they’re getting itchy. They want the dopamine hit, the business is shifting, it is perhaps questionable that this Shiny Strategic Project is that strategic given this crisis, and anyway, a new startup has emerged that has an API that can do that thing
The Shiny Strategic Project execution team raises their hands to step into the crisis and help. As good citizens, they’re being selfless, the whole company is pitching in, morale is high, and everyone is stoked to be pitching in together. They stop working on Shiny Strategic Project. They pick up the slack, make a massive contribution, and the company has risen to the challenge of the crisis. Everyone celebrates.
Shiny Strategic Project is (temporarily) unstaffed. What now? To go back, our project execution team has to now regain context. They’ve had a good time working with a new group, etc. Someone also needs to work on the crisis area and ensure nothing breaks again. A decision must be made.
It’s the holidays, hard to get the right people in a room to make a decision. Everyone kind of tools around, and punts on making a decision.
Everyone gets back, and agrees Shiny Strategic Project is still indeed strategic — the team was already halfway through when the crisis hit, and a lot of the foundation is in place. There’s still that startup with the API out there, but they’re not doing the exact thing the company wants, and any ways they’re only seed stage. The company assigns some new hires to the Shiny Strategic Project, and puts a couple of the original project executors back on it. The remainder of the original project executors get re-assigned to other teams, maybe even including the team managing the crisis, maybe for the new New Shiny Strategic Project, etc.
By this point, its month seven. 2 months of productivity have been lost, and half the team is no longer on the main project. A project that originally took 10 months to execute will now take 15 (5 original months, and 10 additional months with half the original team)

Couple caveats; first, this isn’t the only reason why noncore big company projects flounder; it’s just one that is poorly understood. Second, founder/CEOs of very successful companies very often don’t understand this problem. This is because the projects they focus on actually tend get executed, because no one wants to risk messing with their baby, and to the people executing that project, the benefits are obvious, continuous and immediate in terms of CEO engagement, visibility, and so on. The pet project of the founder/CEO doesn’t go through anything that looks like this. Every other project with a long timeline in a large organization faces this risk.

Focus is a huge advantage of an early stage startup, because there really isn’t anything else to do. There’s no crisis impacting the core business, because there IS no core business. There’s no need for a Shiny Strategic Project. There’s just the one thing you must do to survive, which is find product market fit, and if you don’t do it, you won’t survive.”