Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 1)

In the past year, 330 out of 1200 Unicorns have lost status. You read a lot about Unicorns that raise lots of VC money and then fail to scale. Cynthia Chen tells a very different story. She has raised about $43M and built a highly profitable $100M+ ARR company called Kikoff. Read on to learn how.

Sramana Mitra: Cynthia, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Cynthia Chen: Sure. I was born and raised in Beijing by a family of low to moderate income. I came to the US when I was 17 years old on a full-pay scholarship to study at Columbia University in the city of New York.

Sramana Mitra: And what did you study in Columbia?

Cynthia Chen: I studied economics and operations research, which was a branch of applied mathematics.

Sramana Mitra: And what year are we talking?

Cynthia Chen: I came to the US in year 2000.

Sramana Mitra: So, you finished in 2004. 2004 in the history of the internet is when Silicon Valley is going through its nuclear winter, and it just started to come out with some new trends, including social media.

Cynthia Chen: Right. I remember when I graduated, Facebook wasn’t even that big of a thing. I did not even choose a career in tech back then. Instead, I worked at a traditional financial services company called Capital One, because I was always intrigued by consumer finance and especially the credit card product.

So, I decided to work with Capital One in this credit card business.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do that?

Cynthia Chen: I was at Capital One for a bit over a year in Richmond, Virginia. Then I got a little bit bored because it was Richmond, Virginia, and I went to college in New York City. It was a very big change, and I wanted to live in the city, and I also wanted to travel. So, I started to look for a job in major cities and went back to New York to become a consultant with Deloitte. At Deloitte, I spent almost seven years advising different financial service companies.

Sramana Mitra: Was that also in the credit area?

Cynthia Chen: Yes. I was always in the credit area because from a very young age, I was intrigued by financial services, especially consumer credit. When I first came to the US as a 17-year-old, I was really, really surprised and fascinated by the fact that lots of my classmates in Columbia who were 18-year-olds had credit cards. They could just buy things on their credit cards and then pay off later.

I’d never seen that before – neither a credit card nor a personal check in China because they were not prevalent at all at that time.

At that time, when my parents had to finance a major purchase, the only way they could was to borrow from friends and family. I didn’t know that there was something called a credit card. I had no idea there was a credit system. I got fascinated. I did a lot of research on that when I was 17 years old. I figured out that there’s a credit system, and you could use your spend.

I got fascinated by that. That’s why I spent the night of my 18th birthday applying for my first credit card, got approved, and then over four years in college, I worked on my credit very, very diligently.

I was able to get a credit score well above 700 when I graduated. So, I could lease my own apartment and buy my own car, and I passed the employment background check for my first job because of good credit. That’s why I got into consumer finance because I was just fascinated by the system.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff
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