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OhHello - Sonia Nigam
32 Plays1 year ago
OhHello!!!
It's episode 67 and our featured "Hello" (an esteemed mentor on OhHello.io 🌞☕️), Sonia Nigam, is seriously impressive. Personally, and professionally, she's tackling a lot and making an impact across the board.
From the Bay, to Northwestern University, back to the Bay to join Braintree, and now CEO/co-founder of Change (https://www.linkedin.com/company/change-giving-experiences).
In this episode, we hit on #payingitforward #mentorship #givingback and rolling-up sleeves to GSD.
Sonia pays tribute to her top mentors- daphne carmeli (for being a bad ass) + Reshma Saujani (for bringing down the barriers for women to enter into engineering pipelines at an early age via Girls Who Code), along with humble shout-outs to her entrepreneurial family.
As a young founder, her advice reminds me of the book "Never Eat Alone" -- take yourself outside of your comfort zone, eat w/ new people, and meet with different people ---> it helps you learn and develop add'l empathy.
We're stoked to be partnering with Sonia, Amar Shah, and their team, at getchange.io.
Wanna learn more? Go book time w/ Sonia Nigam at https://ohhello.io/mentors/sonia
Recommended
Transcript
Opening Reflections and Introductions
00:00:07
Speaker
Oh, hello, Sonia. Hello. How are you? Doing well. How about yourself? I'm doing great. I loved our session that we just had right before we hit record. It was so great getting to know you better. I've enjoyed getting to know you over the past couple of weeks. Why don't you tell the audience the Oh, hello listeners the Oh, hello viewers. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with right now?
00:00:31
Speaker
Well, hello, everybody. I'm Sonia. I am the co-founder of Change. That's actually how Jeremy and I met. There's a lot behind me. So Jeremy, what do you want to know where I'm from, what I've done? Sonia, I want to know where you're from, where you went to college, what you've done, and tell us a little bit about Change.
Sonia's Background and Career Journey
00:00:50
Speaker
All righty. So grew up in the Bay Area, born and raised, went to school out in Northwestern. So shout out Chicago in the Midwest. I know you like that, Jeremy.
00:01:01
Speaker
That is a very meaningful time in my life. That's where I met my co-founder. That's where I met some of my most favorite friends out there. So after college, came back to San Francisco, was a software engineer at Braintree, which is a fintech company that lives under PayPal. Met a ton of amazing people there, including our head of engineering at Change.
00:01:20
Speaker
And at the onset of COVID-19, my co-founder and I were saying, hey, we love giving. We are looking at corporations who are struggling to get back, embrace their communities, but everyone is demanding it. Let's go ahead, take our chops, build a tech platform that streamlines all the complexities behind the hood and let these businesses go.
00:01:41
Speaker
And in the part of that, actually raise a lot of money for great nonprofits. So that's exactly what we did. In March of 2020, we quit our jobs. We went all in. And we started the seedling of what is today change.
The Vision and Function of Change
00:01:54
Speaker
So change is a tech platform that is API first. We handle compliance. We handle donation payments. We basically handle everything that a marketer of partnerships, an engineer doesn't want to think about when integrating giving into their software.
00:02:08
Speaker
and how fluid and perfect that description was. And I'm enjoying the partnership of what Change and Oh Hello is creating together. So thank you. Of course. What defines you, Sonya? Help us understand just who you are in the sense of a little bit more about as a person.
00:02:27
Speaker
What's important to you? That's a good question. As a person, I think I'm defined a lot by strong values and relationships. And I think a lot of that goes hand in hand. For me, I grew up in a very, very close-knit family. And some of my biggest role models are my parents, are my brother. And one of the things that I was taught so young was everyone around you can be your second family.
00:02:49
Speaker
And so when I go through life and I'm building these relationships, whether it is a mentor, colleague, co-founder, I very much aspire to be more than just transactional. I'm always trying to cultivate stronger relationships where we love being around each other. And a lot of that comes down to values. And you love being around people that share values with you. And so I'm always looking for that alignment and going a little bit deeper with folks.
00:03:11
Speaker
What a great answer with those values, with those relationships, with the partnerships that you're building, with your team, with your partners, so on and so forth. How do you characterize the skill set that you're going to be sharing with the Oh Hello community just as a mentor, as a young entrepreneur who's crushing it?
Business and Nonprofit Synergy
00:03:32
Speaker
Thank you.
00:03:33
Speaker
One of the things that we think about every single day at Change is how businesses can be doing more and to do two things, to engage their own customers, build loyalty, build a strong business, but to do more for the world, for the planet. And a lot of that does involve aligning with nonprofits and causes that their actual customers care about. It's not just the big household name for 20 years and you check that box.
00:04:00
Speaker
being dynamic you know like watching what your customers are talking about on social and bringing that into your own value system and so because that's what i am doing every single day the skill set that i want to bring here is if you are someone who is thinking about taking your own company or team
00:04:16
Speaker
and integrating values into that. Making a phenomenal product that actually does some good, that's where I'm here for. And it can be strategy, it can be tactical, it can be finding a nonprofit that resonates with a general cause set, I'm here for you.
Mentorship and Personal Growth
00:04:31
Speaker
So Anya, what excites you about mentorship?
00:04:34
Speaker
Oh my gosh. I think the big thing is I have had the best mentors in my life. I'm a first time founder. I am every single day waking up and learning something new from someone who has made mistakes and wants to make my life easier by teaching me about those mistakes so I don't repeat in their footsteps.
00:04:50
Speaker
I believe it's paying it forward. I have gotten the best advice throughout my life from a young age to today, and so I want to do the same. I tutor high school students. I'm always here for any Northwestern person that hits my inbox, and trust me, they do. I respect that.
00:05:09
Speaker
Um, I absolutely love the ability to kind of give back to people and letting and empowering them to kind of build out their career journey and honestly take away a lot of the nerves. I think a lot of it is just helping people understand like, no, I didn't know what I was doing when I made that step either. But someone told me that 20 years ago, they didn't know what they were doing. And I was able to see how brilliant and amazing they'd become. Two things are going through my head. First and foremost,
00:05:35
Speaker
the beauty of your connections to Northwestern University and so many people within the Bay Area as well. You're a founder, you are busy. So being able to just put your time, your calendar of when you do have avails and the rate that you charge and then being able to donate as much as you choose to different charities through your platform, that works out very well for those that wanna seek advice and guidance. In addition to that,
00:06:02
Speaker
would love to have a better understanding of who some of those professional mentors are. Like, give some shout outs, give some names of people that have made that impact on you.
00:06:12
Speaker
I'm going to start from the top, Daphne Carmelli. She is like my number one text away any minute of the day. And she always pulls up. I do not know how she does it. I swear. I'm like, you are so busy. It is your birthday. It is your anniversary. You were at a football game, but she's always there and she's happy to be, she's excited to be. She herself, to give a little context, is a serial entrepreneur.
00:06:36
Speaker
she has her most recent company sold to target it was a delivery last mile company and so she has just seen everything on the battlefield to put it you know just how it is and she's ready to share that wisdom she herself is a female
00:06:51
Speaker
CEO, you know entrepreneur founder and so she's also able to less tactically speaking just talk to me about my career my journey how to feel comfortable at tables that maybe historically that hasn't been the case and so I Respect and love all the advice that she's given me and once again, I go deeper. So she's just like a friend I absolutely love it. I sent her a shirt like this. I was like, hey you bet on me Like I think you need this shirt. I love it
00:07:18
Speaker
from someone who I don't know as well, but I've respected for a very long time, is Reshma. She's actually the co-founder of Girls Who Code. And their approach at that nonprofit is so novel. And when they pioneered it, it was basically bringing down the barriers for women
00:07:37
Speaker
to actually enter into that engineering pipeline, right? It's at early age, we are teaching youth to kind of chase their curiosities, and that's exactly what they're doing. They are letting people play with games, you know, build games, get that satisfaction of the first building block actually becoming something you get to use. And so for me, I actually didn't do that until college. And it's something that I went into college thinking, I grew up in the Bay Area, everyone does this, but for some reason, it's not for me.
00:08:05
Speaker
And I don't know why that was, but I got to college and I tried it out and I was like, wait a second, this actually might be for me too. And I absolutely love that like she built an on-profit just born to
Advocating for Women in Tech
00:08:17
Speaker
do that. And so I have met her a couple of times, but for me, that's more of like a, I follow her on Twitter and I respect everything she does. So those are the two folks that come to mind for me. Nice, nice.
00:08:27
Speaker
Knowing that you have so many relationships and friendships within the philanthropic ecosystem, are there any specific charities that are very near and dear to your heart or causes that are important to you?
00:08:41
Speaker
So Girls Who Code, I jumped the gun on that one, but I'd probably say that one first. And then another one is Mission Graduates. The reason I love that one is actually it's very local. So it's based here in San Francisco and their number one goal is really to help to be first time generation college attendees get to that point. And so they are basically identifying really, really incredible promising youth across the city and the Bay Area and getting them
00:09:08
Speaker
the one-on-one help that you know maybe out in the suburbs you kind of get by default through your school system or through maybe even your parents buying those tutors they don't have that and so they're giving them those resources and i absolutely love that i think you know leveling the playing field when it comes to education is.
00:09:23
Speaker
Such an important step to take as a country and so I tutored there in math for a while And I met such an incredible woman. She ended up going to Berkeley. I stay in touch with her today I'm like Nora you should mentor me like I love everything you've done and so that's the nonprofit I would go to I
Professional Advice and Session Conclusion
00:09:42
Speaker
love it. I love it Sonya any other parting words of wisdom that you have for the oh hello community
00:09:47
Speaker
So for me, I think kind of reflecting back to my first job and kind of what I wish I maybe did a little bit more of is it's really easy to get comfortable in your company and go eat lunch or maybe in this remote world, right? Having a nice breakout session, virtual happy hour with your team and with your department. And so for me, honestly, I ate lunch. I was in person every day.
00:10:12
Speaker
Probably with another engineer and every so often I would venture out and maybe I would talk to someone on sales Maybe I would talk to someone who is doing account management and those conversations you learn so much you have more empathy and to be honest as your career grows and
00:10:28
Speaker
You don't really know where you'll end up. I started out coding for Change, but today, a lot of what I'm doing is sales, partnerships. It's a completely different side of it. The best champions I've had so far are some of those old co-workers. Some of them were engineers, going to be my first customers. Some of them ended up being investors that were at the executive level. I wish I ate lunch with people that were a little bit more out of my comfort zone more often. That's what I would advise people to do.
00:10:57
Speaker
that are early on in their careers as well. Never eat alone. That's the words of it. That's so true. Never eat alone and eat what someone knew. I love it. Sonia, thank you so much. We appreciate you. Thank you. This was so much fun. Everybody, check out getchanged.io. Thank you, Sonia. Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening. Until the next one.