Women in fintech — Klavdija Janc
Who are you?
Geek with a dash of girly — the casual gamer in a startup world. I am Klavdija, I am 22 years old and I come from Slovenia. My hobbies include video games and innovations & I am currently attending Multimedia Communication at the College of Electrical Engineering. Right now, I am disturbing the fintech world by being the CPO at an invoicing API, Space Invoices.
How did you get involved with fintechs?
Space Invoices is the first opportunity I have with Fintech — we saw the market potential and the need of our customers, so we decided to come to their rescue.
Did you experience any difficulties because of your age or gender?
Age can be a huge problem startup wise. Statistics show that investors trust companies the most when their team is around 40 years old — being only 22, that might show as a big disadvantage. However, this is just another opportunity where I can show that if you work hard enough, anything is possible. Another experience was the Investor dinner we attended — the attendees were 80–90% male, which was quite shocking for me to be honest.
Do you ever feel you have to prove yourself more because you are a woman?
It often feels that we as women don’t receive the same respect and are not heard as well on meetings — often enough, it feels like we are talking to a wall.
How do you overcome it?
I solved that with speaking very, very loudly.
Would you recommend this career to others?
I would most definitely recommend this career to others — you get to work on something you truly believe in, you meet amazing people and the amount of new things you learn is astonishing.
Who or what inspired you?
Fintech wise, Hazel Moore is a great role model — she’s so good at innovating, she even received the OBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2017 New Year’s Honours list for services to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Prince Charles himself.
Life wise, the answer would be Leia Organa. That girl was a fighter and she knew she needed to take matters into her own hands.
I believe my journey in the Fintech world has been strongly “guided” by both.
What advice would you give to girls interested in fintechs and/or startups
Go for it! There is literally nothing and no one stopping you. It can either be day one or one day, you choose.
Anything else you want to add
This could be a silly advice, but it helped me out a lot — don’t be afraid of the workload. It’s going to look huge and it’s going to take a while, but the trip will be worth it. Make sure your team has good communication, stays focused & transparent, and get your project well organised — create smaller tasks and don’t be afraid to ask for help when needed. You are also never too old to surround yourself with mentors, so do that asap.
