The MoneyPot
Welcome to The Moneypot, the podcast from Money20/20.
Money Changed. Know more!
The MoneyPot
Hena Mehta's Leap from Finance to Tech Entrepreneurship in India
When Hena Mehta decided to swap the dizzying heights of Wall Street for the bustling tech scene in Bangalore, she wasn't merely changing jobs—she was rewriting her life story. As founder of BASIS, the financial app changing the game for urban Indian women, she joins us to share the triumphs and trials of such an audacious career pivot. If you're teetering on the edge of a bold professional leap, this episode will not just inspire you—it will arm you with the wisdom of someone who's journeyed through the uncertainty and emerged with a venture that speaks to her heart.
This conversation goes beyond Hena's narrative; it's a masterclass in transforming passions into impactful enterprises. We navigate the complexities unique to women in finance, underlining the power of education and trust in shattering long-standing barriers. Whether you're a woman in the finance sector feeling underestimated or an entrepreneur at the crossroads of a career change, tuning in means unlocking insights into how aligning values with work can lead to groundbreaking innovation within the fintech landscape. Hannah's journey is more than a personal success—it's a beacon for any of us seeking to blend purpose with our professions.
If you want to hear more from Hena, Hena will be speaking at Money20/20 Asia in April at Bangkok, Thailand, along with 250 other speakers. We hope to see you there.
Follow us on LinkedIn
This is Ascential Audio. Hello everyone, welcome to the Money Pot. I am Sheryl Chen, Head of Content at Money 2020 Asia. For this series of the Money Pot, we will dive into the scary topic of career pivots. We will speak to formidable women who have left their jobs to create their own fintech startups and discover the why behind what they do. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Hannah, the founder of BASIS, a financial inclusion app for urban Indian women. Basis is also India's first prepaid card for women. Prior to founding BASIS, hannah was in Goldman Sachs in New York for six years. Joining me this week to explore this is none other than Money 2020's Europe Content Lead and financial journalist, Mickey Tesfaye, Hi Mickey.
Micky Tesfaye:Hey Sheryl, how are you doing?
Sheryl Chen:I'm good, Micky, have you done a career pivot before?
Micky Tesfaye:Yes, I have actually, funnily enough. You know, before I joined Money 2020 as a journalist, I used to sell dog food in Ethiopia, so I think that's a bit of a career pivot there, wouldn't you say?
Sheryl Chen:It is. I would like to have you on a podcast just to talk about how you used to sell dog food and then you jumped into fintech. But we're so glad to have you with us. Let's dive into the conversation. Hannah, thank you for joining us today. Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what triggered the shift away from Goldman into the startup world?
Hena Mehta:Sure, hi Sheryl, hi Mickey, it's so lovely to be here. Thank you for having me. So, yes, I guess you could call it a career pivot. I was at Goldman for nearly six years, right out of college. I'm a computer science engineer and I joined Goldman as a technology analyst bang in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. It was a very, very interesting time to be on Wall Street. I got front row seats to all the mayhem and craziness that was going on, and I love that.
Hena Mehta:Goldman was my first job out of college and we can go into why and, like I said, a very interesting time to be building in the space. I tell everyone I was in fintech before the word fintech really became mainstream. I was building software for a large bank, and so I was an engineer for about two, two and a half years and I moved into a more sort of a program product management roles so still building technology products, but in a slightly more cross-functional capacity. Yeah, so about five years into my stint at Goldman, I think I was just craving to build something that had a little bit more of a tangible impact and where the growth curve was a little bit more steep. And I'm Indian, I grew up in Bangalore in India, and I've been following the startup ecosystem as much as I could sitting in Manhattan, and it seemed far too interesting to be left out of. So I remember I quit my job. I remember sending in my resignation and I sold all my stuff in my apartment in New York. I booked a one-way ticket to Bangalore and I was like I'm getting out of here, let me take the sleep of faith and see what's happening and we'll go from there, and so that was the first time I moved back to India.
Hena Mehta:So Bangalore is where I grew up. My folks and my family still live here, but professionally it was the first time I was in India and beginning to work in the Indian ecosystem. That's not when I started my own company, though I actually I was an early member of this mobile payments company called EasyTap back in 2014. I was actually the first product hire on the team, so I sort of eased myself into entrepreneurship, if you will. I love the founding team, I love the problem that EasyTap was working on, and I was fortunate enough to find that role and build in a space that was new to me. It was still fintech, but you know, on the payment side and a market that I was yet to become an expert in, etc. So that was my story on that first leap of faith that I took, where I quit this cushy, high-paying, fairly stable job at one of the largest banks in the world to move back to India and work at a small, growing startup.
Sheryl Chen:You know that's so interesting because you talked about taking the leap of faith away from New York, moving away from New York and moving back to India. Right, and for many Asian parents, they really dream about providing or giving the American dream as like the letter to success for their children. How did your parents take to the news when you told them that, hey mom, hey dad, I'm quitting my job at Goldman, I'm coming back to work at a startup.
Hena Mehta:Yeah. So there are, I think, multiple layers to this conversation. I think, on the more emotional side of things, my parents were excited that I was, you know, coming back home. So I think that that was the more positive part of this move. Of course, to your point, and my parents paid for my undergrad education in the US and I think for them it might have been like, okay, we've spent all this money to, you know, get our daughter into like an Ivy League college. I was at Penn for computer science and then she's deciding to move back to India to work for you know, a salary that's like 20% of what she was making at Goldman. So I think there was, there were those thoughts.
Hena Mehta:My mom has always been a very like, yeah, sure, do well in school and make sure you, you know you have a career you're proud of, but also pursue you know what you're passionate about, etc. And that sort of hasn't changed. My father comes from a little bit more traditional way of thinking you know, do well in school, go to a good college. So he went and all very meritocratically, you know, studied at one of the top business schools in India and then got you know what was considered at the time one of the best jobs in the country, which was at Unilever in India. So he spent three decades there, right, so a very stable career. He was able to, you know, have financial stability, career stability, all of that, and for him that formula just works right.
Hena Mehta:So I think, in a lot of ways, that there was that sort of shift in thinking where it was almost like, well, your parents, you'll send me to this school where I actually, you know, had the confidence to take more risks and, like, try to pursue, you know, different kinds of opportunities and I think career paths are looking very different for our generation. Right, like as Cheryl Sandberg, I think, in her book Lean In, talks about how it's no longer a ladder, right, it's more of a jungle gym, and I'm very grateful that I had the guts to actually quit that and literally move back, without a real, really a concrete plan, but knowing that I wanted to do something, you know, maybe a little bit more exciting and learn more and learn faster and grow faster.
Micky Tesfaye:That's a really interesting perspective. I guess. One question maybe I can ask you on that subject of moving back to India, though, is how come you decided to move back? Right, I think you said you went to college in the US, right? I guess, once you've gone to college in the US, your adult life, your working life, was not in India. So you've made a career pivot, and so far as moving from a conventional corporate world to, say, the exciting world of the startup world and then, I guess, on top of that, there is the geographical change to you. Right, you could have done it in Silicon Valley or any other place how come you also chose to do it in India? Is there a kind of? I guess the thing I wanted to get at was was it just a career perspective, or are there broader values that drive this kind of thinking when you're thinking about what you're going to do?
Hena Mehta:That is such a great question, miki and I yeah, you're right A lot went into all of the thinking I was doing. Very fundamentally I think you use the word values, right, I think on some level and I was on a visa in the US Again, I was fortunate enough to get on the H1B and Goldman was even kicking off my green card application. So, yeah, to anyone else there would be like are you crazy to be quitting that and moving home? And so I did give up all of that. But yes, fundamentally I just I felt that I should be able to pursue the things I want to and not just be staying in a job because my employer is sponsoring my stay in a country, right, and I think that that did get to me. I did love the work I was doing at Goldman. It's again, such a great company and at the time I was there there was just so much going on, so I don't really think it was like, oh my God, I hate my job and I want to get out of here, but if I want to do something else, I should have the freedom to do it. And so being an immigrant and having all of these restrictions and where you could work, etc. I think Silicon Valley was exciting but of course my visa situation would have been I'm not saying impossible, but a little bit of a stretch to, also given where I was in my H1B cycle etc. And, like I said, I think India was at the time the startup ecosystem was super nascent, just up and coming, and I knew that story would be very, very exciting and I wanted to be a part of that. So I think multiple things aligned.
Hena Mehta:It did take me almost, I think, a year or so between when I started thinking about the move and then finally actually acting on it and quitting my job and coming back home, and I don't regret it of one bit. It wasn't very reactive, it wasn't like I had a bad day at work and I'm resigning and I'm leaving this place. It was very sort of thought through. I remember even journaling, and I don't mean like long pages of my experience, but just how I would feel after work and about my career prospects and what I would want to do, and I sort of noticed some patterns over six months that then told me that, hey, this is probably the right time to be going back and taking those risks. I really didn't have too many responsibilities in life, and if not now, then when right. So those sort of thoughts sort of triggered the move.
Micky Tesfaye:Yeah, I mean, that's so fascinating, and especially if not now, when. I guess one thing I want to ask you a bit more about is earlier on I said I had this experience of kind of moving back or a career pivot. So I went to Ethiopia and tried to, or did, do my own business for a short period. But I guess there is something really exciting and just really appealing in that when you tell that story, right, when you tell other folks about this experience you've had lots of it is seen in a positive way, right. Wow, that's such an exciting journey. It's rightfully so.
Micky Tesfaye:But I guess my experience initially right, when you do take such a big step, actually the day to day could be quite frightening because ultimately a lot of what you are doing is captured in long-term goals and values, but actually in the day to day those don't align so much in terms of actually making everything happen. Right, you have the fears, you see, like you've been working nine to five and now you're back in your country, for example, or in a different environment. You're kind of open-ended in terms of what you're going to do. So was there any kind of tools or ways of thinking that you think like there was something I relied on to get me through some of these kind of unseen challenging times, to kind of help me get through and help me realise this long-term goal I had.
Hena Mehta:Absolutely right. So again, I think the thing that helps you or your perspectives are very dependent on what caused that move right, if that makes sense.
Hena Mehta:So I moved back purely out of my own will. It was very voluntary, right. No one was forcing me to come back, there wasn't? I don't know. You hear a lot of these stories where there were like family issues and things like that where folks do need to sort of move back home for certain things. But mine was very like, it was just me, it was very self-driven, and I think that makes you look at things also very differently, right?
Hena Mehta:Of course there are the day to day of traffic and like pollution and there are a lot of people here even after living in New York, like in Indian and urban Indian city is very, very crowded. So those things do get to you, especially if you're sort of used to, you know, a certain, I don't know even a small, like a type of commute or things like that. But I think the way you see it and I often tell people you tend to look at those things with like the rose-coloured glasses as they see it, and I do think that perspective would have been very different if I had to move here because I don't know, a company made me move or something in my family happened that I had to come back, etc. And then I feel like I would be far more frustrated with those sorts of things. So that's more in the day to day Professionally. Yes, I think professional culture in India is very, very different from how US companies operate, especially, and I was also moving from a 30,000 person company to a 30 person company, so it was very different.
Hena Mehta:But I think for that there were, I think, your network you sort of create like your own little group of advisors, if you will. So there are other folks who sort of been there, done that, how did they cope? You know what were the things you did. And I will say, though, it did take me about six months to feel fully settled and like, yes, I can do this and things like that. It wasn't just like, oh, I came back and I was, you know, just kind of, you know, well adjusted from day one. So there is a little bit of that adjustment, but if you've made up your mind to like make it work, you can kind of oversee or be more OK with things which would, in other situations, just be a little bit more more frustrating.
Sheryl Chen:So I just wanted to, because we have talked about, like, the roads that got to here, right. So I wanted to, also because we want to talk about our discovery of why, behind what you're doing. So, having had traveled on the roads that got you here, could you tell us a little bit more about the genesis of basis and why, specifically, are you creating this platform tailored for the urban Indian women?
Hena Mehta:Yes, so this was triggered by my own pay points. So the story is that. So I was at EasyTap, so I moved back. I was a PM at EasyTap and I was applying to business schools and I checked every box right Create recommendations done, good essays, decent GMAT score, like I feel like I, you know, checked all the boxes, fortunate to get into one of the world's top business schools.
Hena Mehta:And then, after I got that admission call, I think two or three days later, I was like, well, I'm going to have to pay for this right. And $200,000 is a 27, 28 year old, I mean, it's not a small amount of money for anyone, but in your mid to late 20s it is a lot. And then two years of you know no income, things like that. I knew I didn't want to take on that much of student debt because that would then dictate what my career, post, my MBA, would be. I would have to go for a well-paying, mostly a corporate job, right? Because that's how I could, I would be able to pay back these loans. So I knew I didn't want to go down that path. So then I was like what were my options? And I realized I hadn't invested my money at all through my 20s and at the time I went to B school, I had about eight years of work experience, more six years of them at Goldman. So I did earn a decent amount of money, but I never did anything with it, other than maybe just saving a few I don't know $1,000 here and there. And I think that was sort of my wake up call as an adult, saying like, ok, your life goals and your whatever it is career goals other goals are all mostly financial goals and I didn't actually think of this as a money problem. It was a hey, career wise, and it was a personal goal of mine to get an MBA and all of that. And well, long story short, I remember consulting a good friend of mine who's a financial advisor now my co-founder and I'll get into that, and my family, of course and then I ended up liquidating my 401k Thank you, goldman for that and my family pitched in a little and I ended up taking a small loan, something I knew I could pay back, comfortably Right. So that's how I ended up financing these two years. But that struggle, that challenge, really stuck with me. I was like, why didn't as a 21, 22-year-old, why wasn't I like putting my money into the capital markets? Why wasn't I doing something more productive with my money? Then that, and in post-business school, this entire challenge stuck with me.
Hena Mehta:I knew I was moving back to India because I loved again building in this country, so that was always part of the plan. This time I moved back with this hypothesis on how women tend to get left out of financial services. Financial services as an industry has been designed for men, Not because of it's not anyone's fault. It's because men have been used to be the owners of wealth and make the financial decisions, et cetera. But obviously times have changed. So when I moved back to India, I validated that the situation I was in it was not isolated to me.
Hena Mehta:I remember interacting with over 500 women across the country and my hypothesis was around urban women, so women very much like me, maybe a little younger, a little older, roughly in the age groups of maybe 21 to 40 or something. I saw that nine out of 10 women were in the same boat, generally valuing independence, well-exposed, educated, but when it comes to our money we are clueless. That, to me, was hugely problematic. So, and most of the not most, I would say all of the platforms that existed, whether the more legacy institutions like larger banks in the country, or even some of the new age consumer fintech apps that were coming up. Their user bases were 90 plus percent men, so there's clearly this large underserved market that no one was building for.
Hena Mehta:Again, no fault of anyone's, I think it's just historically how the industry has been, and lots of blind spots.
Hena Mehta:Even though many people may deny it, money is gendered, and we also saw that in terms of how women made financial decisions, how women viewed risk, how women view long-term wealth, how women see protection plans like insurance, how women's income patterns play out, how a woman's retirement may look Like. If you look at all of these different angles, there are financial services needs to design for women with a very different lens, and so we basically saw this massive problem that no one was really systematically solving for. It was always seen as a marketing problem. We will do some pink ads around women's day and offer I don't know discount brokerages and maybe women will start investing in stocks, like that was typically the attitude, versus actually going deeper and understanding what are women really looking for? How can we get women to have that confidence and that trust and actually take full control over their money and their financial lives, and that's what sowed the seeds for basis, and we decided to build a full-stack financial services platform, hyper-focused on urban Indian women.
Sheryl Chen:That's really interesting and sadly, I can say I relate to that and I was also looking through your website and you have these thought leadership pieces which are so interesting like very bite-sized but very interesting. There's this piece on how to invest in gold and then also another piece on how Taylor Swift is, whether she's really single-handedly saving the US economy, and it's topics like these that really make pieces of info, knowledge, accessible to the mass market. Aside from education community, what else have you seen that basis is doing that really helps push the needle to make more women invest, more financially savvy.
Hena Mehta:Right. So I think, with basis as well, we didn't dive into the transactions layer upfront, although that is what our business model is being built off of. We did focus on community content, education, primarily because the largest barriers, the hurdles that we saw that women had were around knowledge, trust and relatability. I just don't know enough. So it's better if I keep my money as a deposit in the bank. I don't trust the information I'm seeing, or maybe some advice I'm hearing from my bank or whatever, and so, again, let me just stick to safer things and maybe finance isn't for me. Right, let the men handle it.
Hena Mehta:It's not uncommon to see women would like dads would handle their daughter's money and then or it's a woman depends on her brother or a male partner or whatever, to basically take care of this for her, just because you don't feel like it's for you, right, and that, of course, is because of yours, of maybe conditioning and what you've seen, et cetera. So we had to sort of challenge and we had to solve for these three things. First, and do your point, cheryl, on making money as a topic more accessible and relatable to an audience that previously felt extremely left out, the good news is that we've seen the intent to want something is very, very strong, right? Very few women we would speak to would say you know what, this doesn't matter, or I'm just fine if someone else is taking care of it for me, etc. But the large majority would say, yes, we want that privacy, that control, that autonomy over our money. How can we do it Right? So, yes, you did talk about these.
Hena Mehta:Few like content was a huge part of it. Even small things that may seem small, right, we always refer to an investor as a she right, and I remember seeing comments from our community saying that small change just makes me feel like, yes, I am an investor, right, I'm good at this, I got this right. So, a lot of those things I think, the messaging the content, how we talk about money, challenging a lot of stereotypes as well, right, women are always and I think we can blame, I don't know, the broader like media landscape and pop culture and stuff where women are seen as like very frivolous and really bad with money or super risk averse and, you know, don't want to take risks with their money, and all of that is isn't true, right? And so we had to sort of also challenge that and make a lot of these topics more digestible and accessible for our audience. And it does help that this company is being run by two women, right? I think that also fundamentally helped our audience build a trust in us. Like when we launched our card and you did mention it, cheryl we did launch a first in India, the first card designed for women, where we have a women centric rewards program, the first in the country.
Hena Mehta:And folks, when we launched a waitlist, folks were just signing up and we asked them why did you choose to sign up for this? And they were like well, basis is doing it. So we know it's going to be something that that is going to be relevant for us, right? So I think that trust gets built. It depends on you know who's running it, the platform, how cohesive the community is.
Hena Mehta:We've invested a lot in building and nurturing a safe space so you can come into our community and trust that you will get you know, good suggestions, recommendations. You'll be able to connect with your peers and even other experts who've been there. Done that, even if it's sensitive topics that you didn't have a place to go to elsewhere, right? So we've had topics around divorce and like family debt. During COVID we had women who lost, you know, their husbands and had to figure out how to pay for their kids education. We had a woman who had to suddenly figure out how to get a will register because her dad got, you know, very sick, and all of these topics where you didn't have a channel or space to go to before basis. So all of this contributes to building that trust layer first, and then, of course, adding on the financial services and products layer on top of that.
Micky Tesfaye:That's such a fascinating experience, especially that you know that some of those anecdotes, I guess my last kind of question is when I've been hearing you tell us your story.
Micky Tesfaye:I guess one of the overriding things that comes to my mind is the parallels of your career journey with, I guess, some of the folks in your community and what you're trying to achieve right, mostly that of a kind of an information problem, especially with, for example, you touched on.
Micky Tesfaye:You know you wish you'd kind of were more attuned to saving early in your career, for example and then with some of the people in your community, for example, the anecdotes, right. If that information had been available to them earlier, they could have perhaps been better protected. But also, I guess what you're trying to achieve, initially to help folks with their journey, their financial journey, is to inform them of what they can do, to inform them of who they can be. Right she as an investor, I guess, is what I'm hearing so from your journey. How, what information can you give to our listeners that you could, that could help them, you know, in their future, whether it's in their career, a pivots, whether it's when they're building their fintechs what have you learned that could guide folks to be the best version of what they're building and what they're trying to achieve.
Hena Mehta:Yeah. So I do think about this a lot and I again sort of see it in three different layers, right? One is just your conversations with yourself, right, like really understanding what you want to do and why, without really worrying about I don't know what everyone else is doing. Right, I went through that when I graduated business school. I think I was one of the very few people who actually decided to jump into entrepreneurship right after, and I couldn't help wondering like, oh, what if I did go for that consulting or banking or you know, like a senior product role at a large company? But I knew this was something like basis or something I was passionate about and something that would make me happy.
Hena Mehta:Two is the second layer is your sort of immediate environment, right, I think it is very, very important to have that support system in place, especially for women, because if you don't have that and here I'm talking about your home, your family that you need to have that support that cheers you on, because it can be especially I mean, entrepreneurship can be a very lonely journey, but any sort of career path you take, it gets easier if Things at home, like no one's you know, putting any pressure on you, any kind of pressure on you being at home, like I said, especially for women, where there are sort of different expectations. And three is the broader Sort of ecosystem. Right, like find your tribe, find your community, you know, and not, not, not, and let this happen more organically, right, I wouldn't say like go out and, you know, check the boxes and say I have a mentor for this and I have a mentor for that, but just organically build those relationships in the broader ecosystem, because you Constantly learn, you constantly sort of know what else is out there and things you can do to improve, whether it's your business or you know other things in your career. And I think, yeah, these three things are in place. It is, it's not a, it is a journey, right. So it you're never going to Feel that you've made it. I think that's that's sort of the, the irony of what all of us are doing, right, we, we want to keep doing more, and I think that's great. But really just understanding and and setting up these layers for yourself. At least, this is what has helped me, in fact.
Hena Mehta:For point number Three, on the broader ecosystem, I actually ended up starting the leanin community in Bangalore Because I wasn't able to, and and I know, mickey, we touched upon this like adjusting to a different Sort of a company, culture, geography, etc. I wasn't meeting many professional women. When I had moved back, I was one of three women in that company. One in one was an HR, one was in finance, I was in product and so I was like how could I connect with, you know, more women, pures, more senior women and, and you know, just kind of have that, that space, that that support group, that community, and that actually triggered Creating this community of leanin members, which is still running, by the way. It's a now. It's now about and we are about 3000 professional women strong and it has become that, that tribe, right, and I so I think that is Super important. Um, and yeah, these are. This would just be my quick two cents on on that.
Sheryl Chen:Thank you so much, hannah. So that is all the time we have for this episode of the money pot. We want to thank Hannah for gracing our show today. If you want to hear more from Hannah, she will be speaking at money 2020 Asia in April in Bangkok, thailand, along with 250 other speakers. We hope to see you there.
Micky Tesfaye:You can be part of The Money pot at money 2020 show. Please send us pictures to podcasts at Money 2020. com and don't forget to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for listening. We Love Our Fintech Nerds!
