Journey of a Female Fintech Entrepreneur

This episode of D’Podcast is very special for us. We have Rushali Parikh, MD Products and Operations MeasureOne Inc, as our first female guest.

Rushali is a dear friend, client and one of the smartest and determined entrepreneurs we know of. She is a seasoned financial engineer with investment banking and software development experience. Before joining Measureone Inc, she was an investment banker at Deutsche Bank.

In this podcast, she explains her journey from USA to India, what business MeasureOne is in and how did she end up running a Software Startup after graduating as an Electronics Engineer?

MeasureOne’s latest innovation “Academic Data Platform” helps lenders finance the students based on their academic data. This never existed before in USA. Can you believe it? So now getting good grades can be helpful in getting the loan for higher studies.

Listen to the episode and let us know your feedback. We are sure you will find her story and grit extremely motivating.

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Abhishek: One thing I know for sure that you work very very hard and we always respected you for that. So it is still the case? Do you see yourself slowing down a little bit in near future? Or it is going to increase?

Rushali: I always hope that I will have a few nights off where I won’t be taking calls 12 o’clock at night but it still continues. Hopefully, I will be a better manager of my own time and will able to plan my life slightly better and have some more time for myself but so far given all the different things we are doing it still continues. We are a tiny company but doing many things and we continue to add new things to our portfolio so it takes lot of time and effort.

Kuntal: If I read through your journey you have probably started as a programmer and now you are managing the company. So, what differences do you see and how do you see the journey overall?

Rushali: I was never a programmer actually. I did programming somehow and I know it was horrible. But when I started I did data entry, little bit of weird programming, built dashboard in off the shelf tools so I was always very very hands on and I still am so the transition of being a single person company to building all your tools to becoming a manager of a team itself was extremely difficult for me. And then from there on there was another level which is from managing a team to becoming strategic leader in the company which currently is my biggest challenge. That is the transition I am going through now and hopefully I will hang off it sooner or later.

Abhishek: How much part do you think luck played in your journey so far?

Rushali: You can call it luck, you can call it fate or destiny but obviously it has a huge part of where I am. After I graduated with my masters in Electrical Engineering at Michigan and I got a job in medical device company. They applied for my H1 visa but it was late by a day so I didn’t get H1 and I had to either come back to India or take up another degree and be in USA. So I decided to study further and got a second masters in Financial Engineering. That one day made me take up financial engineering, which is why I got into Deutsche Bank and which is why MeasureOne happened. So, that’s completely luck or fate or destiny whatever you call it.

Another thing which contributed to it is my meeting Dan. I didn’t know him at all, I hadn’t look him up specifically. It was through my ex-boss, who told me to go and meet someone and then gave me Dan’s contact. I had to take a 5-hour flight to San Francisco to meet him for a day, which changed my life so it’s completely destiny.

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