Life After On Deck
A few months ago, I quit my job at Goldman Sachs to join the On Deck Founder’s Fellowship and start Aura. I had initially planned to build a company to democratize private equity investing with women in mind. However, like many founders in the early days, I pivoted.
While designing the equity crowdfunding platform, I spent more than 100 hours conducting interviews with women about their experience investing. Although I wanted to democratize access to private equity, I specifically wanted to find ways to encourage women to invest in alternative asset classes. However, during this time, a topic that kept coming up was, “I want to invest, I just need help getting started.” I also heard the phrase, “I just take my boyfriend’s investment advice” so many times, I decided to start my own investment newsletter and called it “Not Your Boyfriend’s Investment Advice” (“NYBIA”). You can subscribe here.
What happened next?
As soon as I started NYBIA, I knew I had hit on something important. I used humor and personal storytelling to create an accessible space for women to learn about investing and improve financial literacy. Each week, NYBIA’s following continued to grow exponentially as women from around the world reached out to me saying, “I’ve never been interested in investing until reading your blog. Now, I want to start but I don’t know how. Can you help?”
It was around this time that I met my co-founder, Courtney Cardin, who was in On Deck developing a “Duolingo for financial literacy.” We began sharing notes about what we had learned and quickly realized that we were working towards similar solutions — improving financial literacy and closing gender and generational wealth gaps. With a clear mission and aligned vision, we were able to get started and begin solving the problem right in front of us — financial anxiety among women. We combined forces and shifted our collective focus to address the underlying causes of financial anxiety and help savers put their money to work.
Where is Aura Now?
Aura is a holistic financial wellness and investment platform built with women in mind. We leverage behavioral psychology to curate a hyper-personalized investment management tool that helps reduce stress and anxiety about money and improves financial returns. We will also offer access to on-demand financial advice and community, so users do not have to face the journey alone. While we are built with women in mind, we are a gender agnostic platform and everyone is welcome.
Why Are You Building With Women in Mind if Aura is for Everyone?
Financial markets and related products are often designed with men as the default and women as niche users. This has left a massive hole in the market — women control $7.7 trillion in wealth — a number that is expected to grow to $30 Trillion by 2030. However, 79% of women feel stressed about their financial situation, they are 80% more likely to be impoverished in retirement, and women maintain 71% of their wealth in cash as opposed to 60% for men. While financial stress and anxiety is a universal issue, we are addressing the problem through a female lens.
Still confused?
Think about Bumble. They were built with women’s experience with dating in mind but the app is still for everyone. In fact, by serving women, Bumble was able to expand into alternate revenue channels that other dating apps have failed to pursue including Bumble BFFs for people looking for friends and Bumble Bizz for people interested in networking. The lesson is clear — when you listen to and design for women, you build trust and open opportunities to grow together. For that reason, we have designed our key features with women in mind, but we are confident that designing a platform for women will be a more accessible space for everyone regardless of their gender identity.
What does the future look like?
We are currently in the development phase and working with a team of designers, developers, behavioral psychologists, and robo-advising experts to design an empathetic and holistic platform. We are also in the process of compiling with the appropriate regulatory bodies to ensure our product is safe, trustworthy, and secure. We have also joined an accelerator program which we will be announcing in the next few weeks!
How Can I Sign Up?
If you would like to join the waitlist, you can sign up here!
All my best,
Kelsey Willock — CEO + Co-Founder of Aura
