- MIT-educated engineer Lisa Shields became an "accidental entrepreneur" when she founded digital wallet company Hyperwallet following the dotcom crash.
- Hyperwallet struggled at first but soon became successful, with Shields eventually exiting before the company was sold to PayPal for $400 million 2016.
- Now Shields runs Vancouver-based fintech FI.SPAN, which has partnered with JPMorgan Chase, and has advice for would-be entrepreneurs.
Creating a business isn't easy, but it's the lessons that you learn from those tough experiences that make the difference in the long run, according to FI.SPAN founder and CEO Lisa Shields.
In the early 2000s, Shield — an MIT-educated software engineer from Canada — co-founded a digital wallet technology company, Hyperwallet. The businesses was beset by the difficulties you might expect for a first time founder, with funding hard to come by in the midst of the dotcom crash.
"My co-founder left early on and every two weeks we were doing a payroll dance to try and pay people which was a really jarring experience," Shields, who describes herself as an "accidental entrepreneur," said in an interview with Business Insider. "Our key issue was we were chronically underfunded, so our key takeaway from that period was the struggle to raise capital."
Shields had brought in initial funding from friends, family, and even her aunt's friends from the bridge club, and said sitting around the Thanksgiving table with her investors every year was "tough."
However, after a "bootstrapped" first eight years, by 2009 Hyperwallet was profitable and things were looking up. Shield's involvement in the company lessened after a private equity exit in 2014, but she stayed on as a board member as the business was sold on to payment giant PayPal in 2016 for $400 million.
Despite the years of difficulty in getting the company to grow from the ground up, Shields says those experiences are incredibly valuable for founders, because they help make founders more resilient. That resilience makes it easier to persevere, she said.
"A lot of new entrepreneurs are in this current ecosystem, where you've had a much easier ride," she said. "They will soon learn it won't last forever."
"If you'd asked me before, I would have said run and hide do not start a tech company," she said. "But when you assess things in retrospect, you tend to gloss over the dark times and actually sustained hardship can be really beneficial."
Shields opted to found FI.SPAN in 2016, following her exit from Hyperwallet. The company looks to provide partnerships and integration opportunities to financial institutions and she says that repeat entrepreneurs have an "unfair advantage" in terms of experience to aid them through difficult times.
VCs are still looking for the same things as before in terms of product market fit and raising money is not "a piece of cake" but Shields says the industry's impression of fintechs has changed a lot in recent years. FI.SPAN has now raised $6 million in VC funding with $4 million coming last December, according to Finovate.
"The difference now is the attitude of banks and financial services is towards partnerships," she added. "Where previously investors were looking for what you might call full-stack vertical fintechs, now it's about openness and banks have a partnership attitude."
FI.SPAN partnered up with JPMorgan Chase last year and has signed agreements with three other, unnamed top tier financial institutions in the US. Shields says that the change in attitudes in the industry has meant that hundreds of companies are springing up all over the place to meet some of the opportunities created by new openness in financial services.
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