It’s a Chimed Life: Meet Eva Behrend
“What I love most is taking complex problems and breaking them down for people,” says Eva Behrend, Chime’s VP of Communications. “By making hard-to-understand ideas more relatable and understandable to the people they impact, you can make change and drive progress.”
Eva has worked across several industries and roles doing just that, from starting her career as a high school English teacher to editing textbooks, working for an elected official at Los Angeles City Hall, and then moving into the private sector and the tech industry.
“My job as a teacher was the hardest job I’ve ever had,” she says. “Then I found my way to City Hall, where I fell in love with policy work. It was so interesting to me because I had to take policies and break them down, making them applicable and interesting to officials and normal people. My job was to get people excited about the complex policies that would really affect their lives, like transportation, development, and waste services.”
From City Hall to the corporate world
During her time at the City of Los Angeles, Eva found her work deeply compelling, but after several years, she wanted to diversify her experience. She moved into the private sector — first to a consulting firm and then to communications giant AT&T.
“When I was at the crossroads of deciding whether to continue on the path of public service or trying something else, someone wisely told me that it was time to step out of my comfort zone — and that doing so would make me a more thoughtful person in my career,” she says. “And I think it really did.”
“By diversifying who you work for, you become a better advocate for other people and a better employee because you have a more 360-degree view of the world.”
Quickly, Eva learned that the corporate world is very different from City Hall. Later, when she moved into the tech industry, she saw an overlap: “I found tech to be a marriage of the structured, slower-moving corporate world and the fast pace of City Hall,” she says. Working for an elected official equipped her with several startup skills: doing many things quickly, wearing many hats, and figuring things out on the fly.
“City Hall turned out to be very similar to working in high-growth tech companies, and my experience at AT&T helped me understand corporate structures and how to work internally with cross-functional partners,” she says.
Taking on tech
Throughout her career, Eva has always wanted to be at the forefront of something new that will positively change and shape people’s lives and how they interact with the world around them.
When she took her first step into the world of tech startups, she joined Uber, where she led communications and policy. “It was the first time I was exposed to the idea that new technologies existed for which regulations and policies hadn’t yet been written,” she says. “We had to think very deliberately about how to move policy forward in a helpful way that protects people without stopping innovation.”
From Uber, Eva jumped into a new industry altogether when she joined SpaceX. It posed a similar yet entirely different challenge: explaining why innovation can help us move faster and how to do so safely, reasonably, and responsibly within an incumbent industry. “Being the new person in the room is always a good challenge for communications,” she says.
As Eva tackled communications for these companies, she saw firsthand their impact on established industries like transportation, space travel, and satellite internet. “I realized our work was so much more than just doing a job at a big tech company,” she says. “It provides real value in the world and changes how people interact with the world around them.”
A love of communications
As she’s grown in her roles across communications, Eva has learned many skills and discovered what drives her in her career: her love of breaking down complex ideas.
“It can be difficult to communicate complicated ideas to people, but if you listen, learn, and explain things more simply, you can achieve a lot more buy-in,” she says. “Breaking down ideas allows you to share them with more people and bring them along. It helps everyone around you feel like part of the ideas and fosters pride in your collective work.”
As an example, Eva looks at the work Chime is doing. “If more people know about the work we’re doing — and I’m not talking about them becoming Chime members, just simply knowing Chime’s mission — the more people will understand the need to change the industry and get on board,” she says. “I truly believe that the more we can communicate, be honest, and share the good work we’re doing, the better it is for everyone.”
Her path to Chime
Unsurprisingly, Eva had never worked in fintech before she came to Chime — just as she hadn’t worked in transportation or aerospace travel before she joined Uber and SpaceX. But Chime carried a thread that Eva has weaved through her career: finding companies that bring a new concept, service, or product that is doing good and has a solid business model. “If we want to have a sustainable, lasting impact on the world, doing good and seeing business growth have to exist simultaneously,” she says. “Chime was compelling to me for that reason not just as a communicator, but as someone out in the world wanting to do good as well.”
Since joining Chime, Eva has taken on internal and external communications, media relations, and consumer and policy communications. She’s met with almost every team at Chime, becoming entrenched with cross-functional partners like the government affairs, marketing, product, legal, and people teams. “We rely heavily on the rest of the company to understand what’s going on both within and outside of Chime,” she says. “We get to see under the hood at every aspect of the company, which is very exciting and carries a lot of responsibility with it.”
At Chime, Eva has discovered a unique facet to the work she and her team do: every U.S.-based Chimer has the opportunity to be a member. “Experiencing Chime as a member is one of the most powerful ways to understand our members,” she says. “I spend a lot of time thinking about this because we try to use the member experience to inform everything we do. That includes how we share information in all-hands meetings — something I’m intimately involved in — and how we equip our many partners across the company with the right information.”
“One of the inspiring things at Chime is the number of member stories we use to help inform our decisions. They aren’t just numbers on a dashboard — they’re real people using our products and services across the country — that help us decide which products to invest in based on the stories we hear directly from them. We care deeply about how we affect people from day to day, and the fundamental premise upon which our company was built is that good business is good to our customers. If they do well, we do well.”
When she looks back at her first six months at Chime, Eva is proudest of the cohesive nature of her team and cross-functional partners and how they’ve come together to understand each other and how to support Chime and our members better. “We’ve come together, developed a team, and brought on new people, all while enhancing internal channels and communications about members so people can understand how proud they should be of their work and the massive opportunity to make a difference that still lies ahead,” she says.
Many more stories to tell
With her, Eva has brought to Chime the overarching belief that technology can enable other opportunities that traditional institutions haven’t been able to. She has also brought her love of explaining such technology and innovation in a way that makes people want to learn more.
Eva is excited to see how Chime will move the needle on the impact on our members, supporting them on their financial journeys in new and innovative ways. And she’s most excited about doing it alongside the people she’s met: “The longer I’m here, the more it’s firmly cemented that everybody is genuine and real and here for the right reasons,” she says. “We all believe in what we’re building, and I’m excited to keep telling that story and helping people see the magic in it, from employees to the press to our government partners and, most importantly, our members.”
