Her Story
About Monika
I have been at Stripe for about 4 years, where my key role is to lead the payments business, which is the foundation business for Stripe. I have a team where we work on FP&A, which is Financial Planning and Analysis. My team and I are responsible for forecasting, both short-term and long-term, the future of how the business is going to do, and every month we review the financials to see how we did actually versus the forecast. Along with that, I work cross-functionally with product managers and engineers on any future feature development they are planning to do, and I am responsible for doing the ROI analysis, which is return on investment, to understand how many headcounts we need and what we expect those new features or product launches to do in the future. I also work closely with business leaders so they know the ebbs and flows of the business, what the opportunities and risks look like, so they can take the right decisions as they think about growing the business. I travel mostly to headquarters in San Francisco because a lot of our leads, co-founders, and our CFO are based there. Before Stripe, I was an investment professional for 4 years, covering fintech companies from the outside and writing reports on whether to buy or sell company stocks. Some of that work was published by news articles, and I co-authored a couple of books with my peers at my prior company for institutional investors. Currently, I am on the board of directors for CFA Seattle, where I serve as treasurer, looking at their financials, forecasting, budgeting, and managing their investment portfolio to ensure membership revenue and fees are rightly allocated and invested in the market.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Monika
01What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge, especially with the age of AI, is really knowing how the business will evolve in terms of which AI companies would explode and whether they will be on our platform. The really critical aspect is being able to precisely forecast what the future would look like. While we are not public, we hold the responsibility and duty to our board of directors to forecast how much business we are able to do. The key risk and biggest challenge is that most of the top companies, like Amazon and Shopify, that process volume at Stripe also use other payment processors. So how do we know how much volume they're going to do with us? Because that, in turn, determines our revenue and profitability. That whole forecasting angle is really, really challenging because you have to be very precise and interlocked in terms of how your existing users will do on your platform, along with how much business we are going to generate from new business and how go-to-market looks. The new business is also a critical part because, as I was mentioning, in the AI era, companies are forming so quickly and processing and doing revenue so quick. The timeline for a company to generate revenue, generally because of AI, has reduced from multi-years to just a few months, a few days. So how do you know how much of that opportunity we are able to capture and thereby help with Stripe profitability? That whole forecasting angle and being able to precisely know how we are going to do, because you then have to plan your headcount, you have to plan your AWS capacity. There are so many intertwined decisions that need to be done based on that forecasting. I'd say that's the most challenging part that I am facing right now.
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