From the man-made rooms he was told not dozens of times, to the founding of Orlando’s first $ 1 billion fintech unicorn, Suneera Madhani was never given a seat at the table. so he built his.
Madhani says she can’t start telling her story without talking about her background. Stax co-founder and CEO says her parents played a colossal role in her business to achieve unicorn status after a $ 245 million D-Series round and a company valuation of more than a billion dollars.
“My parents emigrated here from Karachi, Pakistan,” Madhani said. “They were entrepreneurs out of necessity. Neither of them ended up going to college. They had to work from a very young age. They had occasional jobs and had to make it to the end of the month.”
After graduating from college, Madhani held various business positions and ended up working for a payments company in the small business unit. “I was selling credit card processing, so I was in sales. I literally had to go door to door, meet people and be told no, face to face. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had and he taught me so much about myself. “
While working in the credit card processing industry, he saw a lack of transparency.
“There were all these rates,” he says. “Everyone was trying to see how companies were doing their transactions. Everyone just wanted to get their hands on the pot and that’s why it cost so much money for small businesses to accept credit cards. I knew there had to be a better way.” .
The major financial and self-proclaimed “data nerd” began to wonder why there was no subscription model for payments, so she and her brother set up a subscription-based payment processor that charges merchants. a flat subscription fee. The company currently serves 30,000 customers and processes $ 23 billion in payments through its network.
Madhani also released a podcast designed to educate and empower women entrepreneurs called CEO School.
“We interview the underrepresented founders every Monday, then learn tactically from the women who have been there, who have come to what we call the 2% club because less than 2% of the founding women never break a million revenue.” She says . “I was absolutely obsessed during the pandemic with this statistic.”
Today, CEO School has a community of over 300,000 women on its social platforms.
“It’s just a powerful community of women entrepreneurs helping each other,” Madhani adds. “And we bring in amazing, amazing mentor women with amazing master classes and really tactical stuff. And we’re going to learn from real women in the real world who are real CEOs because we’re all CEOs.”