It’s a Chimed Life: A Q&A with Chime’s new Chief Product Officer, Madhu Muthukumar

Chime recently welcomed our first Chief Product Officer, Madhu Muthukumar (he/him/his). We sat down with Madhu to get to know him and his career journey a little better, as well as to hear what he’s excited about at Chime.

Let’s jump right in!

Let’s talk briefly about your background — you studied statistics and biology and then went to law school. What drove you to want to study those things?

Both of my parents were scientists who immigrated to the U.S. and growing up, they always dreamed I’d be a doctor… but I was always interested in other things. I was always curious. As a kid, I liked to take things apart and then try to put them back together. Math and electronics had some elements of that, so I found myself naturally interested in them. When it was time to go to college, I figured I’d make my parents happy, declare a biology major, and take a few classes I’d like on the side.

It wasn’t too long before I figured out that I didn’t really want to be a doctor, and from there, it was mostly a process of elimination to find things I wanted to do. I added a math major, took some computer science classes, and, in my senior year, really started enjoying philosophy and logic. That led me to take the leap into law school.

Law was interesting for a few reasons: (1) I thought the rules that people were making for other people were really interesting — it was a system that was constantly being taken apart and being put back together in various ways; (2) diving into how and why people made these rules and how the rules evolved was more interesting to me than biology or math, where most of the rules were already set; and (3) studying the law provided more immediate outcomes and impact than most of the other stuff I was studying. I figured that if I got a law degree, I could do something tangible with it — I could go defend myself, argue cases, or start a business — all of which seemed more practical than my previous pursuits.

When did you realize you might not want to be a lawyer?

Going to law school was amazing. Trying to practice law, however, was not the same.

I spent my first summer of law school working at a law firm that focused on capital markets — and was part of a team that underwrote the largest CDO in history. Safe to say, I learned a lot from that experience.

My second summer, I worked at a law firm that specializes in bankruptcy, and it certainly was more engaging. In bankruptcy, lawyers effectively take over a collapsing business, trying to negotiate and creatively structure contracts to balance the needs of a myriad of people who are in a bad spot. I realized that this type of problem-solving was a much better fit for me, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my favorite parts of bankruptcy law were the business parts, not the law parts — so, maybe I didn’t want to be a lawyer after all.

What did you decide to do next?

At that point, it really felt like the process of elimination was the only way I was learning, so I figured I’d stick with that approach. I got into and started taking classes at the business school and was introduced to the concept of management consulting by some of my classmates there. A bit of prep and a few interviews later, I was lucky to get an offer at a consulting company — and decided to try consulting as a way to learn about more businesses and functions.

Unfortunately, I graduated into a pretty tough economic climate, as the effects of the global financial crisis were still unfolding. As a consultant, that meant that most of my work was “streamlining” companies. Most of my time was spent focused on Tech, Media, and Telecom companies, but in actuality, I was mostly cutting costs and breaking the news to incumbents that they were getting eaten alive by the internet.

In hindsight, it seems obvious, but at the time, it was hard to convince companies with 100+ year track records that the internet would be a serious threat to them. After three years, it was pretty clear that I wanted to be a part of building the internet, not protecting the incumbents — so I knew being a consultant wasn’t going to be the right path anymore.

How did you get into tech?

As I was leaving consulting, I was offered a chance to join a public-private-NGO joint venture between the government of South Africa, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and McKinsey & Company. The goal was to build a set of technology tools that could improve the outcomes of the nation’s K-12 school system. I wasn’t sure it was the perfect next step (or that I was qualified), but the chance to build real, meaningful technology was too good to pass up, and I moved to South Africa.

From almost the first week, I loved it, but it was hard to explain why.

I wasn’t the engineer building the tools, I wasn’t the designer creating the interfaces, I wasn’t the researcher understanding community impact, and I wasn’t on the government’s budget team analyzing cost — but I was working with all those experts to try to build something meaningful. It was a blast. I wanted to do more of it.

I came back to the US and described my job to a few friends, and a few folks told me it was called “product management” — and the best place to do that was in tech.

… but I didn’t have any real tech experience, and nobody would hire me. I figured the only way to get experience was to volunteer, so I quit my job and showed up at the doorstep of a tech accelerator and offered to work for free.

I took on little tasks and analyses but told anyone who would listen that, eventually, I wanted to be a product manager. After a few months, a couple of folks in the community were impressed and introduced me to a few VCs, and after I did a few tasks for them, they introduced me to companies in their portfolios. One of those introductions was to Twitter, an up-and-coming social media company, and when I got the chance to join, I didn’t look back.

Where did your career go from there?

Twitter was growing fast, and I was afforded a lot of opportunities. I started on the Business Strategy team for a few weeks but quickly transitioned to becoming the PM for experimentation and experiment tools. From there, I got to work on the growth team, and after some success, I was asked to lead machine learning and recommendations products — including search and trends. As those teams had more impact, I was asked to take on more products and product teams, eventually moving to New York and London.

I learned so much, and I had so much fun, I rarely thought about where my career was going. To some extent, I still felt like an impostor — a failed lawyer masquerading as a PM — and that chip on my shoulder motivated me to do more. After about four years, though, that drive ran out.

Part of my impostor feelings at Twitter came from joining the company after it was already a bit larger and the fact that I knew relatively little about mobile apps compared to my peers who had spent years working on them. As I was doing research in Japan, I fell down the rabbit hole of virtual and augmented reality systems, and I saw the chance to get in at the ground level of something that felt like the future. When I got back to the U.S., I got introduced to the team at Oculus, and it felt like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

While I thought I’d learn how to build novel hardware, I actually learned much more about product management and design. Oculus had been acquired by Facebook, which gave me the chance to see new ways of product building and compare and contrast what I had learned at Twitter with product leaders at companies like Instagram and WhatsApp as well.

How did you get into fintech?

During my time at Oculus, I got married and my wife and I had our first child. Both of those events led to a lot of self-reflection and long-term thinking and kept returning me to the question of “where am I going with all of this?”

This time, though, I felt like the process of elimination had taken me as far as it could. So, I tried to think about what I had enjoyed the most in my career to that point and decided to be a bit more methodical in choosing my next role. I wrote out the things I liked doing: product management, law and government, math and finance, building hardware and software — and I got to a shortlist of two things that felt right: Fintech and Healthtech.

So I started interviewing companies.

I met ~30 fintech and ~20 healthtech companies, looking for teams that weren’t afraid of building real, deep technology, who wanted their products to be everyday icons, and who were driven to change how the whole world worked.

That led me to Robinhood.

And then you took what you call a ‘professional sabbatical’ — tell us about that.

My time at Robinhood was a huge professional success, but it was also extremely draining. We grew from <100 employees to over 5,000 in 3.5 years. We went entirely remote during the pandemic, acquired a few companies, and launched new physical offices in New York and London. At various times, I was asked to lead content, marketing, and other functions — mainly because things were happening so quickly that we didn’t have many other options. We went through a horrible public error during the GameStop and AMC “meme stock” explosion, and less than one year later, we went through our own IPO. I don’t know exactly what “burning out” feels like, but it couldn’t have been far from where I was.

After the IPO, I knew I needed to rebalance how I was spending my time — so I quit. With the time back and less immediate pressure, I was able to spend more time at home and reflect on the stress and success more deeply. Part of that outline included writing daily, which I did in a tool called Notion…

… and then a few months later, as I got the itch to work again, I asked for an introduction to the team at Notion, which led to my joining the company.

What brought you back to fintech?

Notion is amazing. I love the people and the product — but 12 months in, I didn’t feel the same as when I was building at Robinhood. I realized that, for me, few things lived up to the feeling of helping people with their money.

Money is important. It’s personal. It’s emotional. It’s a daily debate for so many people — so when you get a chance to impact how people act with their money, you know you’re making a tangible difference that you can be proud of. As much as I was happy with building productivity tools and experimenting with cutting-edge AI, I wasn’t fulfilled in that same way. So, I quit.

Why are you excited to be part of the team at Chime?

This is the first time in my career that I’m coming back to a field I’ve worked in (I think that’s a good sign?). I know the type of work I want to do, I know the problems that I want to try to solve, and I know how fulfilling it can be to be a part of a team that makes a meaningful impact on people. I have a story I want to tell my kids when they grow up about what I worked on and why I worked on it. I feel like I can bring all of those things together at Chime.

I believe that this company has a unique opportunity. Everyday financial services in America are going to change rapidly in the next five years: People are not going to walk back into a branch. People are not going to accept unnecessary fees. People are not going to accept subpar digital experiences. When I see all the ways Chime can lead the way — proven by its own track record — I get excited about the possibility of what we can do tomorrow.

Welcome to the team, Madhu!