Shivani Siroya is a rebel—an outsider in the entrepreneurial landscape. Siroya built a company whose founding pillar is "Radical Trust"—a "fundamental belief in people." As the founder and CEO of Tala, Siroya is fully invested in helping people through fast, personalized loans—oftentimes providing opportunities in the financial market that wouldn't be available to that person otherwise.

Siroya's journey to entrepreneur was shaped by her work as an analyst with the UN Population Fund, where she realized that lending money could empower people, could empower entire communities to thrive. Taking "risks" was no issue—because Siroya's priority in entrepreneurship is to solve a problem—compelled by the selfless intention of helping others. Learn the power of networking, her advice of women entrepreneurs, and why Siroya focuses on equity, not inclusion. Here's Siroya:

In my family, “work” has always been synonymous with doing something bigger than yourself, and finding something that you truly love and can pour yourself into. Growing up, I loved comics and wanted to be a superhero that could change the world. I saw this in my mother, a doctor, who allowed her patients come to see her on credit because she knew and trusted them—I learned early what credit and trust could mean for a person’s life. 

I grew up in New York and spent a lot of my childhood in Rajasthan, India where my family lives which gave me a global perspective. Through these experiences, my parents taught us to understand how differing access to resources and opportunities can impact our ability to be successful, and affect the choice and control we have over our destinies.

Our careers present a significant opportunity to choose our own path, and with it, the impact we can have. My career moves reflect the two great loves in my professional life: numbers and people’s stories. I pursued investment banking after college as a means of fulfilling one of those obsessions. While it was educational and fast-paced, my heart wasn’t in it—and the gaps that I saw in the global financial system reinforced that I really wanted to be working with people and changing the financial system as a whole. Later, microfinance (and my work with the UN Population Fund) showed me what the key problem was—and the experiences I chose to pursue afterward helped me figure out how to solve it.

On Her Path to Entrepreneurship

After graduate school, I worked as an analyst with the UN Population Fund and conducted research across West and Sub-Saharan Africa to study microfinance and other economic development programs. I was spending a lot of time with small business owners, and became a walking Quickbooks for their lives. When some of them needed capital for their businesses but had no way to get it, I was so frustrated by the situation that I actually started lending to them myself.

One day, a friend asked me how I decided who to lend to. This was my first "aha moment"—I realized that I was sitting on troves of non-traditional data that told a story about people’s lives that I could use to make a lending decision. This was a financial relationship that I wanted to figure out how to replicate at scale. Eventually, I realized we that much of this same daily life data was recorded on consumers’ mobile phones. So we worked to build an app that could capture data that customers shared with us and turn it into a credit score.

On Entrepreneurship + Taking Risks

Entrepreneurship is indeed risky, but I set out to solve a problem, not start a company. I didn’t know if Tala would work or how long it would even last, or even that it would become a mobile technology company, but I was passionate about the challenge and knew I had to try.

I founded the company while working a full-time job, allowing me to also build up savings for when I needed to take the eventual leap. I’d work a full day in a corporate strategy role, and leave the office to work a full night with a scrappy team. As we started to see success in our approach and more people joined our initiative, the need to see ourselves as a company, and not just a scrappy team, developed. Having strong foundations is one way to de-risk the rapid growth journeys that startups often follow. Over the past few years, we took a step back, documented our history, and made moves to define our culture and the values that are foundational to our work.  We’ve summarized this all in our founding principles, and a concept we call Radical Trust.

On Her Advice to Women Entrepreneurs

One of the key lessons I’ve learned is that I need to trust myself, our data, and our vision enough to take risks. In the journey from idea to the company, I’ve learned the importance of developing expertise and listening for insights. I’d recommend the following:

Do your homework. Understand the problem you’re trying to solve and then don’t assume that technology or social media is the way to solve it. I didn’t set out to build a tech startup, it just happened to be the best solution to the problem I wanted to solve. Technology is a means, not an end.

Identify your hypothesis and test it. The learnings that come from experimentation are invaluable, and technology offers a cost-effective and efficient system for reaching people and getting and measuring results.

Listen to your customers, and don’t come into the conversation assuming you already have the answers. If what they’re saying about your product or service is something you don’t want to hear, or hard to respond to, it’s in your best interest to listen. Your success depends on it.

On Networking + Why It's Key

No matter how passionate you are when starting a new venture, the reality is that it’s hard, and sometimes, lonely work. The fellowships I’m a part of have created a strong sense of community, where I can meet with other entrepreneurs and impact-driven leaders to share ideas and best practices to help each other get through hurdles that we’re all facing.

This, along with seeking out mentors, has been foundational for my growth. When launching Tala, called InVenture in the early days, I benefited from a long list of mentors, empathetic listeners, and general advice-givers and I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. I’d talk to anyone who was willing to listen, and even did cold outreach to nearly 1,500 people on LinkedIn if I thought their background or experience could be helpful to me. In the process, I became more open and collaborative, but I also learned to trust my own vision.

Pursue mentors you can learn from, and communities you can contribute to and grow with. Remember that mentorship and networking are most successful when you have a strong sense of purpose and confidence in your own abilities.

On Prioritizing Equity, Not Inclusion

Tala’s focus is actually on diversity & equity. While inclusion initiatives have been meaningful, I believe the next frontier is equity. This means less of a focus on ‘including’ people, which implies that one entity maintains power, but a focus on examining systems and working towards a full redistribution of power.

This is important to me because it’s the same belief Tala is founded upon: everyone deserves access to the same opportunities and resources so they can have a choice in their [financial] lives and control over their destinies. At Tala, our work is focused on reinventing the financial system, and it’s only made sense that our culture and the way we work should parallel this value. I also believe that our company’s diversity is the key to our ability to innovate and solve a critically-nuanced problem. People who grow up in New York cannot singlehandedly solve a problem for people who grow up in Nairobi. But when these two individuals have seats with equal influence at the same table, a true solution can form.

On Being an Outsider—And Thriving

I actually think most successful founders are rebels, of a sort. We’re trying to do new things and take on entrenched systems or ways of thinking. What makes me and our company different is that we’re outsiders; I don’t fit the profile of a stereotypical Silicon Valley founder, and our team is solving a problem and serving a customer base that is well outside of the SV bubble.

But we take pride in this outsider-ness and it fuels our desire to prove the potential of our business and our customers. The reality is that we are tackling a gigantic market opportunity—the billions of emerging middle-class consumers who have been overlooked and underserved by traditional finance. Like any founder pitching a vision, I heard a lot of “no’s”—there were plenty of investors who didn’t think the idea would work, who didn’t believe in these consumers, or who thought I was trying to run a nonprofit. But I’ve also been fortunate enough to find backers who see the opportunity the way we do and are excited by our vision.

On What's Next

Tala’s vision of global financial access, choice, and control is unchanging, but our mission, how we get there, evolves with our understanding of our customers and their needs. Right now, we’re focused on providing access to fair, flexible credit, and creating a community where our customers can connect with each other. Tomorrow, we may be providing other financial services on our platform or enabling our customers to transact more seamlessly with each other.

For my personal growth, I’ve been focused on leadership—both my own and other senior leaders at our company. We’re currently building out our executive team, which is an opportunity to define Tala for the long haul and determine how we want to look in 1, 5, even 20 years. I don’t want us to lose our ambition or all the qualities that got us to where we are today, but I also know that we need to grow in a way that provides a clear, stable path for all of our teams.