In3Talks #19: In3DC Talking Tech and the Intersection with Financial Services Industry and Venture Capital

Aaron Saunders
2 min readJul 15, 2020

This will be a two part episode with a guest Denise Saunders COO/CFO Inclusive Innovation Incubator and Clearly Innovative Inc. We are also discussing a new venture Community Innovation Initiative which is focused on FinTech and FinEducation in Black and under resourced communities

  • 1:05 — Denise Saunders Intro how she got in to financial world, including being an investment banker
  • 3:10 — Talking about how investment banking work translates to work she is doing today with entrepreneurs + her experience in management consulting
  • 4:20 — How did you, Denise, get involved with Clearly Innovative and In3DC
  • 5:17 — Importance of Denise in In3DC and Clearly Innovative growth, it is critical know you numbers to make the business work
  • 8:20 — Denise’s Thoughts on venture capital in underserved and underrepresented community — the value of social capital / the network makes it all happen
  • 11:20 — Aaron’s Thoughts on venture capital in underserved and underrepresented community — the value of social capital / the network makes it all happen — what’s a small business and what is a scalable business
  • 13:10 — Aaron’s thoughts on Venture Capital Industry — creating the pipeline versus leveraging experienced intelligent people to make lateral moves into the industry
  • 15:40 — Denise talking about it from her perspective from working on Wall Street and seeing the associates working there way through the system
  • 17:30 — Being a VC / Accredited Investor what are the requirements and is that another constraint for People of Color, thoughts on Crowdfunding
  • 19:40 — Community Innovation Initiative — Tech Education with focus on Financial Literacy to mirror what we are doing with #TheFutureIsWrittenInCode, but in Financial Industry, making careers on Wall Street
  • 22:00 — Denise discussing her feelings of “Imposter Syndrome” when she started her internship on Wall Street with her peers from Stanford and Harvard
  • 23:15 — Why are will still count the “First”, we need this to be more normalized in Finance and Technology as the two main pillars of the future. Why a heavy push in Tech, but Finance industry still has a legacy of racism and inequality
  • 26:30 — Blacks have had to create their own businesses on Wall Street to reach executive level and have impact

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