Billie Simmons on the tools for solving queer finance problems

Billie Simmons, Co-Founder at Daylight | In conversation with Maggie Lee

When we met, you were Head of Community at Be Money, and now you’re the Co-Founder at Daylight. Congrats on both the rebrand and title upgrade!

Yes, thank you! Big changes, we’re moving fast. When Rob first approached me about getting involved with Be Money, it was really about figuring out where I could immediately provide value. And then, in true Billie form I stuck my nose into every area of the business and started having these long, strategic vision calls with Rob every few days. Eventually it became clear that I was better situated as the Co-Founder and we used the rebrand and relaunch to make it official! Our alpha users, potential customers, product and software engineering knowledge, and engagement with the VC world informed our rebrand from Be Money to Daylight. Many long days later, we’ve launched, and I’m the co-founder of my second queer company.

Tell us about Daylight. What is it and how did it come to be?

Daylight is the first digital banking platform in the U.S. for LGBT+ people. We’re solving the problem of the financial wealth gap for LGBT+ people, who historically have lower levels of financial literacy, are approved for mortgages less, and pay more to have a family. Trans people also often need to access surgeries and other affirming resources, which are expensive. Basically, this all boils down to the fact that it costs a lot more to be LGBT+, and that means we end up retiring about seven years later on average.

So our team is addressing that disparity and helping LGBT+ people take control of their finances and build wealth. It’s a super fun challenge and there’s a lot of philosophical thinking and figuring out how we're actually going to tangibly solve these problems, because there’s no playbook for solving these issues. For me, as a trans person whose whole life has basically been controlled by money, so many of my decisions have been affected — in terms of my career path, but also in terms of my own transition.

You’re working from a really authentic combination of personal and industry experience.

This role was sort of a natural fit for me. My background is in fintech and I've worked at incubators, venture capital firms, and startups doing a range of marketing, product, software engineering — all over the place. I like having my fingers in lots of different pies.

Don't Give Up Your Gay Job is not specifically about queer business or being a queer person. It’s about taking your job or your skillset and queering it. What's your interpretation of queering a job?

To me, queering a job is being an advocate for everyone that isn't at your company already, as well as everyone already there. It's about representing viewpoints and voices that aren't currently represented, and making sure you’re doing your best as a member of this community to support everyone in the community. This is the second queer-focused company I’ve been at, but in previous jobs I've been the only LGBT+ person at the company. And I think that is an experience a lot more of us know. In those settings, that's where it's really important to be an advocate. There might not be other LGBT+ people at the company, but there are certainly going to be LGBT+ customers if you're at a B2B or B2C.

I once had a conversation with the head of HR at a company I previously worked at, and she said something that really stuck with me as a trans person, but I think applies with most in the LGBT+ community: we have to work through a lot about our own internal identities, so we grow to be very introspective people. We have to understand ourselves on a level that non-LGBT+ people don't really have to, just for our survival. She was saying that’s an asset to me at my job, because being introspective and being self-aware is vital for the health of any team. To me, utilizing that unique ability is part of queering a job.

Beyond impacting the health of your team, that introspection is also directly impacting Daylight as a product and service. A bit different than, for example, someone working within a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion team at a company whose core mission has nothing to do with bettering the LGBTQ+ community outside of its walls.

Although, we have to work with a bunch of partners who aren’t working day in and out on our specific mission — we have a banking partner, we have a card provider, all of these financial structures. So it's also super exciting that we've been able to go into these companies and partner with them and then be like, so what are you actually doing for our community? We get to push boundaries for trans people having their names on cards, even if it doesn't match their legal identity. We've been able to go to our card provider, Visa, and talk to them about the KYC process, and they’ve been super receptive and keen to build products in-house to help solve some of these problems. We're able to have an impact in a bunch of other companies that we're partnering with because something that we care a lot about is holding them accountable. We don't want to work with companies that change their icon to a rainbow for one month and then never talk about the community again, so it’s been fun to see this unexpected network effect of doing business with non-LGBT+ businesses.

How did you go about connecting your background in fintech and software engineering to making an impact in a realm you care about? Did you aim to use this skillset for the LGBTQ community from the start, or was there a pivot?

There was definitely a pivot. After working in fintech and web design, I then got an Out In Tech Scholarship for Flatiron School, where I went to level up my skills as a software engineer. That was where I started realizing I now had the tools to build things that I wanted to see in the world. I started to see how these skills can directly affect our community in really positive ways. That was the turning point.

After that I worked for a couple of non-LGBT+ companies, but eventually I founded my own company that was building an app that helped trans and nonbinary people access safe services and businesses through a peer review system. That was a really tough year of my life, trying to do that by myself, but I learned so much and loved getting to impact my community’s lives and help make the world a safer place. Through my outreach for the app, I met Rob. I was on a panel with him for Out in Tech, and that's how we got to talking and eventually ended up working together on Daylight — originally called Be Money.

Before I retrained, I cared a lot about supporting our community, but I didn’t have the tools to do anything concrete. Learning engineering was what transformed things for me, and it's been a really rewarding experience. Being able to help my community and have my community help me in return has been really wonderful.

That give and take feels like an important aspect. Daylight needs to succeed financially to exist, and as your job it’s your source of financial wellbeing. And your work at Daylight helps the wider community be financially successful. That whole combination, to me, seems like the ultimate motivation for wanting to do a good job. Could this overlap be the secret to a successful business?

I think we're starting to see more of a trend toward purpose driven companies popping up due in part to that. I’ve never worked a job before that I've been this passionate about, and part of it is because it's just a super fun job. I love my coworkers. I love the difficult, meaty problem we're trying to solve. But the other part is that it's so attached to me as a person. It checks every box of my identities. I have an emotional attachment to the problem that we're solving. Which, you know, can be a good and bad thing. Sometimes it’s hard to switch off. I was at the river this weekend and I was planning a whole section of the product that we're building in my head.

Are there more challenges here you hadn’t faced prior to your job being in a queer space?

Most of the difficulties aren’t specific to working in a queer space, they’re just inherent to it being an early stage company. But specific to the queer element, I do feel a lot of pressure to get it right. It feels very high stakes because no one has really tried to fix this problem before, and it's hard to get right. Our community is very broad and has a lot of different needs and a lot of different opinions and viewpoints. You want to include everyone and nail it. But as an early stage business you're told that exclusion is the way forward. A strategy to bootstrap startups is to essentially turn away people that want to use your product until you have a very specific customer, and then expand. The negotiation between those two sentiments is difficult, because we obviously don't want to exclude anyone, but we want the startup to be successful.

That's a perspective I think most people who haven't tried to start a business don't have. A company makes decisions in its early stages, and as a consumer, you're like, why did they do this, why are they doing that?

Yeah, we're trying really hard to be transparent about a lot of that stuff. If you try to build something for literally everyone, it's never going to solve a problem. Simultaneously, we care a lot about community feedback. So there's this push and pull that we’re going to experience for some time.

The way the LGBTQ+ community debates and functions within itself to determine how to represent and talk about the community to straight and cis folks is an interesting comparison to how you need to work to find that inclusivity versus exclusivity balance for a startup. There’s also the negotiation around how folks think about for-profit businesses. There can be this assumption that a for-profit business, which we are, is inherently evil, but you’re always going to have to search for balance to achieve goals. We’re trying our best to do some good by getting the resources to address major problems and build solutions that people want to see in the world.

Are you pitching queer-specific investors? Do queer VCs exist? If they do, does that open doors or pigeonhole you regarding funding?

We’ve come to learn that there just aren't very many LGBT+ VCs actually. There aren't that many LGBT+ partners at VCs even. We’re super underrepresented there — VC is very white, very male, very straight.

Do you see them trying to overcompensate for that, or does it present a challenge?

It depends. We've pitched and had really wonderful responses from a full range of VCs. There's Pride VC, which is queer run, and Gaingels, a syndicate of LGBT+ angel investors. Pitching to people like that — they just get it, so a lot of the work is already done. They understand the problem and the community. I think in general, pitching to the more traditional VCs — with no one in the room from any underrepresented communities, that is — we've gotten really good responses and we've also gotten really bad responses. There is this prevalent idea that there are not that many LGBT+ people in the U.S., because maybe they don’t know many or any LGBT+ people personally. But we actually have the spending power of Australia. We're a big market that is a very viable business model. Yet it’s sometimes hard to convince people that we even exist.

And you’re standing in the room with them going: hello, it’s us.

Yep. But if your entire social circle is exactly like you, anyone that you meet outside of that demographic is treated as an outlier, even if it happens relatively regularly. Having diversity of demographic is a great starting point to having diversity of thought. If there were an LGBT person at a VC that we were pitching to, they would probably understand what we’re saying, and then they would bring the opportunity into the VC and would make them a lot of money.

A lot of it comes from really rigid ideas about what makes a good VC hire. It’s based on things like what MBA program you went to, or internships that are maybe not accessible to queer people who don’t live in the city. And this comes back to financial success. How people are set up financially has impact from every end. So we’re rebuilding the system from the inside out.