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Lightspeed girls nikki8/16/2023 And then we just started building and we started you know getting into the pitch deck, and then the prototype, and then yeah ever since then it’s history. I contacted Lucy and Victoria a few months after the ideation phase and said hey do you guys want to join I need some co-founders I really want to build this out. So yeah that was my initial pain point that’s how the company started. But really how it formed into was just a lot more of a sophisticated model of like peer-to-peer payments for embedded daily transactions, a social network, and then adding on new features like crypto. So I thought there has to be a better option for this it’s almost 2021 what are we doing here? Why is it so difficult to gift assets especially that was around the time of the crypto boom here so you know I think for me it was that starting point that initial pain point that started the company. She had to go redeem it and there was a lot of other issues around this whole gifting of stock. I had to pay a lot of fees, I had to fill up paperwork, and then when the stock got to her, it came as a gift card to her email. It was a very difficult way, to send it you had to buy the stock, to then sell it, to then send it which then triggered a tax event. So we three have known each other for a while, but the idea really came up when I started you know looking for ways to send my friends stock for Christmas in 2020. Lucy’s our COO, before this she was at The White House and Goldman Sachs and Victoria was an engineer before this at Coinbase. So we met a few years ago and then I met her sister they’re twins they’re located in Hawaii. ![]() So I called her a ride and we’ve been friends since then. Her phone died after, and then she needed to ride to the airport. Funny story Lucy and I met at a Goldman Sachs interview. So my two co-founders and I met a few years ago in New York City. Superb, so how did you get the idea for this how did you come with the idea it just yourself or is that something your co-founder came up with how did that ideation happen So our really big target market here is GenZs and millennials who tend to transact the most really love this transparency aspect of investing. So you can log on to the platform you can see what your friends are investing in, you get a rolling feed of all the transactions happening and you can also send them their favorite stock or crypto for dinner last night or for their phone bill or for a gift so you’re really transacting in payments rather than cash on a transparent system. But what makes us so special is it’s a social network. It’s a social investment peer-to-peer payment so you can invest in your average everyday stocks and eventually crypto. So I quit my job at Mackenzie and started Staax full time in 2021 and what we’re building here is essentially a Venmo meets Robinhood tech platform. I moved to new york city to study finance, and then I ended up pursuing a finance degree there worked at a few firms I was at KKR for a bit after that I was at Mackenzie and I was overseeing a fund of eight hundred million dollars and I realized there just was a big gap when it came to wealthy individuals investing versus my everyday college friends, so I knew that you know fintech was the route I wanted to go and that was the tools to bridge the gap. My background is in finance so before this, I grew up in the Bay Area in California. So I am Nikki Varanasi I am the CEO and founder of Staax. Oh live and breathing So the question i will ask you is briefly tell us who you are and what are you building Thank you for being here how are you today Hi Desiree and Al, it’s so nice to be here thanks for having me In today’s episode, we have Nikki the woman behind stacks Nikki welcome to the show ![]() Listen to the full podcast to learn all about Nikki Varanasi and her building journey with Staax. ![]() In 2021 she quit her job and committed herself to build Staax. So Nikki wanted to create a solution that can not only make it convenient to gift stocks but would also act as a social platform that encourages Gen Zs and Millennials to get into investments. She realized, that gifting assets was a complicated system, with much paperwork, additional fees, and taxes that were unnecessary. They never come out fully formed…People aren’t going to know what you’re interested in or your talent until you put it out there.įor Christmas 2020, when she decided to gift her friends with stocks, is when she finally found the problem she wanted to solve. As someone who always envisioned being a founder/investor Nikki always knew she wanted to build a fintech solution to bridge this investment gap through. It was during this tenure that Nikki realized there was a big gap when it comes to the making of investments between wealthy individuals and everyday college kids.
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