Get Inside the Mind of TANDA Co-Founder Mike Emery

From rocking nineties fashion to founding a startup that smooths out your finances, Mike spills the beans on everything, including his personal savings hacks and what life’s like in a fintech startup. Dive into this candid chat and get inspired to save money and take control of your financial health with Tanda!

Allyson: All right. Hi, Mike. So can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do here at Tanda?

Mike: Hi, I'm Mike Emery. I am a distinguished engineer here at Tanda. I'm responsible for the broad vision for the overall tech stack. And I built a lot of our backend infrastructure and finance payments integration.

Allyson: And I've got a bit of a warm up question here for you. So what high school trend or fad were you a part of?

Mike: So when I was in high school, I wore a lot of baggy clothes. So I don't know if you remember any of this, but like JNCO, big baggy hoodies, and for a while even had frosted tip hair, sort of like your quintessential nineties teenager.

Allyson: Well, we'll have to get some pictures up of that if we can find them or if you'll give them to us. Diving into some of the Tanda stuff now: so your personal origin story, why did you decide to co-found Tanda and what sort of personal experiences led you towards caring about the core issues that Tanda tries to address?

Mike:  So financial literacy was something that I really struggled with when I first got out of school and I got my first job. I found it really overwhelming. And then basically as time goes on, I found out that for friends and family, that's something they struggle with a lot too. So Tanda trying to help people establish themselves, save money and do it in a fun community way, really appeals to me. And if we can do anything as a company to help people get their financial footing, then I'm happy.

Allyson: And what's something particularly interesting that you've worked on lately without sharing too many details?

Mike: So right now we're working on a way basically to help get people their money faster and in a way that smooths out how they receive the money. And also smooth out the fees associated with the product. And it's inspired by how some cultures around the world handle Tandas, and that should be hopefully rolling out soon.

Allyson: And how do you use Tanda in your day to day?

Mike:  A lot of the time it's forcing me to save for something. If you're left to your own devices and you have to save for something, you can just procrastinate, right? It's so easy to buy that coffee or indulge in that little thing that on its own doesn't really matter, but when you take in an aggregate, it can actually be a significant chunk of money. So by using Tanda to force me to save money towards something, it's already accounted for and then anything left over is usually not wasted. That's important.

Allyson: And sort of flipping that question on you, how do you hope to see people using Tanda in the future?

Mike: I think there's a lot of different ways you can use Tandas, right? You can use it to cover unexpected expenses today. You can also use it as a generic way to save money for the future. You know, I would love it if we were a one stop shop for all of people's financial needs, regardless of their financial goal - they look to us and say, of course I'll use Tanda to get there. And it's just a matter of what part of our product they're using.

Allyson: And finally, what is your absolute favorite personal savings tip?

Mike: My favorite savings tip has to do with the power of compound interest. So basically the idea with compound interest is that over time, as your interest gets calculated, money you've already saved and earned interest on earns interest again. And so how that manifests is the longer you have money in an account that's accruing interest, the more money you make. It manifests in this idea that time in the market beats timing the market. So the longer the period of time you can save, the more money you have.

Allyson: Thanks for the time, Mike. And also thanks for the great tips. We appreciate it.

Mike: Thank you.