Maia Bittner, Fintech Engineer and Co-Founder of Rocksbox and Pinch

For our latest episode, we welcome Maia Bittner. Maia’s journey as an entrepreneur started as a kid when she was selling used cameras on the internet and learned HTML to customize her eBay page. She fell in love with computers and technology as a way to solve problems, but resists the notion of building software for software’s sake. As she shares, “99% of the time, the hard part of building a product is not a tech problem. It's building MVPs, finding customer value and often it's faster to do that stuff and better if you do it without software…I'm an engineer and I still write code and I like a lot of parts of it, but... maybe don't use software to solve everything.” Maia talks about the transition from being a founder, where you have total control and ownership, to going through an acquisition with Chime and becoming an employee of a larger organization. She shares the secret to unlocking a role she loves: finding a place in the organization that lets her run internal experiments and launch new product tests quickly, akin to being back at a seed stage startup. Lastly, Maia shares why fintech is such a rewarding area to work and how she’s continuing to learn and build community through her side project: FinTechBookClub. Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. This episode, Maia highlights two early stage founders building fintech companies: @hotgirlintech and @swaykaey The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them. This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening! The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.