Ep. 64: Building a financially feasible business by aligning with customer incentives feat. Sruthi Lanka, CFO at Public

The Backbone: a journey inside finance at a startup

Sruthi Lanka, CFO at Public

As CFO, Sruthi oversees finance, data, and people operations. Prior to Public, she served as VP and Head of Strategic Finance at MoneyLion, the fintech startup and challenger bank. She was MoneyLion’s first finance hire in 2017 following its Series A, and built the team that forecasts and monitors the firm’s financial performance, overseeing financial planning, capital optimization, fundraising, and Board engagement. Previously, she worked on mergers and acquisitions for RBC, and at Goldman Sachs. Sruthi also serves on the Board of the nonprofit Women Creating Change.

Sruthi has an MBA from Duke University and a B.Tech. in Electronics Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in India.

I chat with Sruthi about:

1. Her career journey starting off as a computer engineer turned finance professional with experience across product development, pricing, corporate development, capital raising and mergers and acquisition. Prior to her current role as the CFO of Public, she was the VP of Strategic Finance at MoneyLion and before that spent time in investment banking at RBC Capital Markets and Goldman Sachs.
2. Public — what the company does and what it’s all about.
3. Payment for Order Flow and why Public decided to move away from this model to tipping. What considerations she had to take into account to determine if this would be financially feasible for the company.
4. Public recently crossed 1M members on the platform. As the company grows towards realizing its mission to open the stock market to everyone, the biggest challenges and opportunities she sees from her seat as the CFO.
5. Themes and interesting investment conversations happening in the Public community, including Sruthi’s favorite themes and investments she’s tracking these days on Public?

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