What It Really Takes to Become a Fintech CEO | Mike Saraswat

I sat down with Mike Saraswat, Co-Founder and CEO of Stoa, an entrepreneur who went from building a marketing agency to taking on one of the hardest challenges in fintech.

His latest chapter took almost 30 months of fundraising, around 2,000 investor approaches and 300 meetings before Stoa closed its $2.4M pre-seed round.

But that resilience was built much earlier.

Mike tells the story of spending nine days at Cannes being rejected while trying to finance a film, nearly losing his life in a motorway accident, then getting back into the car, driving to his meeting and winning the project.

We also explore what years of chasing difficult problems taught him about failure, momentum, founder obsession and coming back faster when things go wrong.

Today, he is building Stoa, a fintech challenging the way people think about idle cash and giving customers a different way to get value from money sitting in their accounts.

00:00 Introduction
00:38 Raising $2.4M after 30 months of fundraising
01:09 2,000 investors, 300 calls and mostly rejection
03:33 Who Mike was before becoming an entrepreneur
06:15 Why he has always chased difficult problems
08:39 Starting his first agency in his early 20s
09:23 Why raising money for a movie nearly broke him
12:33 What he learned from successful fintech founders
14:58 Why founder obsession matters
17:21 Why success is not only about money
21:02 The difficult moments that shaped Mike
23:01 Facing serious illness in his early 20s
24:03 Nine days of rejection at Cannes
26:00 How to shorten the window of despair
28:10 Resilience, momentum and coming back faster
31:19 The motorway crash he walked away from
34:10 He survived the crash and still won the project
34:29 Why defeat only becomes defeat when you stop
35:00 From agency owner to building Stoa
36:00 The enormous problem of idle cash
39:22 How Stoa actually works
41:13 More than 200 benefits and the future of the platform
42:44 Closing

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Co-Founder and CEO of Stoa
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