When A VC Liked A Potential Investment So Much, She Left Google To Join Them

Benzinga's Fintech Focus Podcast features conversations with the biggest names in fintech. Subscribe to the Fintech Focus newsletter to get a roundup of industry news delivered to your inbox weekly, and check out upcoming programming at Benzinga events.

In this episode of the Fintech Focus podcast, we chat with Ana Sirbu, Chief Financial Officer of BlueVine. Ana previously worked at UBS and Google Capital where she headed up fintech investing, which got her introduced to her new company, a fintech lender that focuses on offering financing for small- and medium-sized companies.

It was a bit of a leap of faith for Sirbu, going from Google GOOG to a relatively new fintech lender. Now, BlueVine works with more than 10,000 businesses, offering more than $1 billion in loans. Listen to the podcast below to understand her motivation behind the switch.

Interview Highlights

You mentioned a number of well-known, successful startups that you had been introduced to while at Google, but what was it about BlueVine that made you want to take the leap and go work for them?

BlueVine was a very interesting business when I first learned about it. It was a team about 50 people at the time. Frankly, I thought the product was great. There was a clear white space in the market for financial services products for small businesses that had been historically underserved. In addition to that, I thought that the team that was in place of BlueVine could really continue to scale and serve more customers with the product that we had at the time, but also continue to innovate and add additional products.

The way I think about is the risk-reward was tremendous. There is a product that works well and that served our customers well. I mean, our customers are the number one priority for us. There was already a platform that was ready to be scaled, and on top of that, the team was great, really high-quality people all around that I could really see myself enjoying to work alongside.

What is BlueVine's key differentiator as it relates to its FinTech lending peers?
At BlueVine we really think through how do we serve a customer well from when they first get into contact with us and over a significantly longer period of time. As I mentioned, we have customers that do business with us for five years now. And that's how long we've offered our products for, and so I expect that that will continue for even much longer periods of time as we continued to do our work.

So, in general, the key tenants that we really focus on are speed, ease of use, and flexibility. With regards to speed, we offer our products in an extremely streamlined applications process, so you can apply in just a couple of minutes. It takes us anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to provide a decision on the application for our online factoring or our line of credit product. And, overall, we try to be responsive to our customers' needs. I think speed is something that's very important to our customers and we work hard to continue to deliver that continuously.

Read the full transcript here.