Waldron Career Conversation with Rachel Pike '06 and April Wang '27

April:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World Podcast where we bring stories of interdisciplinary thinking in today's complex world. My name is April and I'm your student host of this special episode of the podcast. I'm a second year student studying physics and integrated science, and I'm looking forward to learning more about our guest's career.
Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Rachel Pike who graduated from Northwestern in 2006 and is now COO at Modern Treasury. Thank you, Rachel, for taking the time to speak with me today.

Rachel:
Nice to be here. Nice to meet you April.

April:
You too. To start us off today, I was wondering if you could tell us more about your time at Northwestern as an undergrad. What did you study? And how did you get to your current career path?

Rachel:
Oh, man, two different parts. The easy part is to say what I did at Northwestern, so I majored in chemistry, physical chemistry specifically. I had a minor in African studies through the center or program for African Studies. And I did my honors chemistry work with Franz Geiger, Professor Franz Geiger in the chemistry department. So that's sort of the what. My major extracurricular was Fusion Dance Company. That's where I spent a lot of my time.
How I went from there to here is such a circuitous, crazy path. It is not direct. I left Northwestern and did a Gates scholarship, I did a PhD in chemistry at Cambridge. Loved it, but I was not meant to be a professor. You could ask John Pyle or Franz Geiger, both of whom advised me. It's just it takes a very certain wonderful mindset, but it's not me, to be a lifelong academic.
So I left academics and got an amazing role in venture capital and got to learn all about startups from the investing side. Did that for just over four years. And in my last couple years, started getting really close to one of our companies and operating with them and ended up launching products for them and got the bug. Realized that that was a better calling, a better match for me, which we can talk more about what I mean by that. And moved into operating, so then I worked for a health tech healthcare software company and then I moved here into FinTech.
So it sort of couldn't be more random, but also each step made sense only as one step. It's just as a sum, they lead you very far from where you were. Not normal in any sense, but in the end I just don't think anything is normal. All paths turn out to be good as you make these accumulation of small decisions.

April:
Yeah, okay. What are the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your current job then?

Rachel:
There's a lot. The hardest thing in a startup, there's so many things that are hard about startups, growing startups, but prioritization and focus is one of the hardest things. And you have to actually prioritize not doing things you want to do, which is very antithetical to what it's like to be a driven, hungry person and be in a company of 200 driven, hungry people. You want to do everything that you see that seems like a big opportunity and a challenge that we need to fix, but you can't. There just literally is not enough time in the day and there's opportunity cost to lack of focus.
So I think the hardest thing is, the phrase I always use with my teams is you have to let that fire burn. You just have to pick things that you know are broken that you're not going to fix, that it's not the highest priority thing to fix or things you want to work on that you know we just can't go work on that thing right now, we have to work on this other thing. So it's very counterintuitive and I would say that's the hardest thing to learn when you enter startups, how to get through that kind of mindset.

April:
Yeah, prioritization is pretty hard when there's so many options.

Rachel:
Yeah. Yeah, when there's so many options and when you're hungry and you feel like a small startup is always up against big Goliaths, so there's a billion things you can do to go after companies that are bigger. So I would say that's the hardest in terms of not the content of what we do is the wrong word, but what Modern Treasury builds and how we bring it and sell it in the market and how we run the company. Letting fires burn and ruthless prioritization is the most unnatural part of working for a startup, I would say.
On the interpersonal part, so not what we do, but how we do it, like in every stage of life and everywhere I've been, the hardest part of anything is getting really good at giving and receiving feedback. And that is a lifelong, you have to dedicate your life to it and using that to make decisions with people.

April:
Could you talk a little bit more about what your company does and what your role is?

Rachel:
Yeah, sure. So I'm chief operating officer of Modern Treasury. Modern Treasury is a payment operations software platform. So we help companies of all sizes, from other startups to huge big public companies, manage their money movement. And it sort of sounds like a back office thing, but really, we actually mostly get bought by product and engineering teams. And those product and engineering teams that are our customers want to do payment stuff. They want to build a digital wallet or embed payments in their application. Or we also serve non-tech companies, so you're buying a house and you need to pay the real estate agent or you're buying a house and you have to go through the title and escrow process on that home purchase. A lot of money moves around in those businesses. In fact, it's core to all of those products to move and manage and track money.
So we build the software for that. Complex payment systems get built on top of us and complex payment products. We have an engineering database product called Ledgers, which is how you, with high performance and perfect fidelity, track balances, which is a really hard computer science problem, although it seems that it should be easy. It's a very hard computer science problem. And then you can imagine that as we grow and have more and more data and understanding, we're building more and more AI into our platform, so teams can run in a safe way with AI helping them. So anyway, yeah, it's a complicated thing that we do, but we help companies move and manage their money movement.

April:
Okay, cool. So how well did college prepare you for this career, do you think? Or what was the most important skill that you learned from college?

Rachel:
There's so many things that you learn in college as you sort of separate from home life and become your own person. I think there's soft skills and hard skills. I obviously don't use the traditional academic knowledge that I got in my undergrad and graduate experiences in chemistry, not a chemist anymore. But I don't think there's anything that can replace scientific training in how to think and pursue questions and how to separate how to go through a research process and understand and also understand the limits of your knowledge. That is a very profound experience the more advanced you get in science. I didn't even get that advanced. But in understanding the boundaries of what the community of scientists knows and what personally and how to ask questions, build a hypothesis, and go again.
And I know that the hypothesis process is something you learn in like second grade or fourth grade or whatever, you go to school, but truly, that process is very hard, like holding yourself to a standard of making a rigorous, very thought out hypothesis and understanding what would prove or disprove that. In a scientific setting in a lab, sometimes it's a little easier to go through that process. Hey, if this experiment works, I'll see X.
In a business environment, that's actually very hard. How do you measure? Is that metric actually counting that? What else is getting conflated into these signals and systems? And then almost everything, unless it's something like website clicks or latency or something that's directly measurable, almost all the signal that you get is mediated through people. So not only do you have to go through this process of trying to constantly get to truth, everything that you're trying to pursue is going through people.
So I would say academically, that's the longest lasting impression for me. My team gets annoyed because I say things like rate-limiting step all the time, which is a chemistry phrase. So it taught me how to think.
I think another very impactful part of my college, two other very impactful parts of my college experience, Fusion was just getting started, I was one of the people that helped get it started. And starting a club that is, very proud to say it's long-standing and I could never audition and get accepted today, is a lot like starting any organization. How do you run things? What is governance like? How do you navigate people? What are the expectations? How do you communicate that? How do you do things excellently? Starting and building a club is very similar to starting and building an organization, it's just we get a lot more complicated with time. So I learned a lot in that process and running rehearsals and putting on a show and what it's like to run an audition process. I have very fond memories of that.
And lastly, I would say is I studied abroad for all of junior year. And I don't know if this is true, but someone along the way of me, because chemistry has so many sequential requirements, and it was very hard for me to figure out how to do those requirements and still be away for a year, someone along the way told me I was the only chemistry major who was ever away for a year then. It's probably not true now. I also don't know if that's true, speaking of rigorous hypotheses, so that's an aside.
But the experience of being abroad, I was in Tanzania, was obviously profoundly eye-opening. And being in multiple cultural contexts, not just for travel, but for a long period of time with real life, day-to-day life, it just changed my whole perspective on the world. And then same thing, I lived abroad again for my PhD, so I was abroad on and off again for about like five out of six years. It really changed my perspective on the world, my perspective on people, and I only got that opportunity because of college.

April:
Yeah, college is a great time to study abroad and do those things.

Rachel:
Yeah. Yeah.

April:
[inaudible 00:09:31] possibilities, yeah. Also, it's so interesting to hear that you found Fusion or helped found it because it's such a big thing on campus now.

Rachel:
It's such a huge thing now.

April:
[inaudible 00:09:39].

Rachel:
Yeah, no. We really grew it, but it was small when we started. We were just in parades and doing small shows, and then we finally started putting shows on in Tech my last two years there. It was very fun, really meaningful experience.

April:
That's great. Yeah.

Rachel:
Yeah.

April:
Then you kind of touched a little bit on this, but could you elaborate more on the biggest adjustment you had to make going from undergrad to industry?

Rachel:
I actually got this piece of advice when I went from my PhD to venture. I went and had coffee. One of the coolest things about Silicon Valley and the technology community is that it's very open and if you ask people for advice, they're really open to giving it and having conversations like this, but times 10. So one of the coffees I had was with someone who had also had a PhD and moved into venture. And he said something to me that has always stuck with me, which is the biggest adjustment you're going to have to make is the complete lack of rigor in business decisions, which is hysterical, and I don't think fully true, which I'll explain, but it is true, the standards of rigor in academic science are completely different than the standards of rigor in making a business decision. So I always think about that moment of you got to get used to the fact that they make decisions with less information.
I think that's only partially true. I think one of the reasons is true is what we talked about, that data is often mediated through people, and so it doesn't feel as rigorous. But actually, the decisions you're making about and with people are just as important. It's just different, and that is a very big adjustment. There is not always right. It's not a test or a thesis or whatever, and that's a big change. There's just making a decision and then owning the consequences of the decision and upside of the decision. But that, it's a huge change. So that's what I would say one of the biggest adjustments that I had to make.
On a more practical basis, specifically like Silicon Valley and startups, they're just opportunities, they are roles, sorry, environments with very little management structure. That's the whole point, you're doing something from scratch. There's not someone telling you what to do. That's not true if you go into industry and go to a very big technology company or a bunch of industries I've never been in that are managed in totally different ways. That obviously is like two hops from undergrad. I had a PhD and then I had time in investing. But yeah, working without a lot of oversight, also a big change.

April:
[inaudible 00:11:58]. The training you get from undergrad to grad school and then going to industry, it's a bit of an adjustment, but yeah.

Rachel:
Yeah.

April:
It's an interesting problem, how you would apply your scientific training to the business world.

Rachel:
Yeah. What do we know and what do we not know, is a question I often try and ask myself. In fact, I was thinking about it late last night about something we're trying to figure out in our business. And it's hard because you sometimes feel like you know things that you don't. It's a trick of the brain.

April:
Then sort of related, but what are some current trends that you're seeing in the industry or in the area that you work or some of the modern day challenges?

Rachel:
I would be remiss if I didn't say the most enormous trend in technology right now is AI. So there's sort of no other answer you can give them that, this unbelievable explosion in technical capability and then it's application into all kinds of industries.
So I don't know, Modern Treasury has been such an interesting ride. One of the things that is interesting about startups is you really cannot predict the world around you. So this tiny company, we're not tiny anymore, but this company that was tiny, I was the first employee, it was just the four of us, just us chickens in a co-working space, trying to build this payment operations company. And in the interim, COVID happened and we could never work together again until many years later.
And then Silicon Valley Bank crashed and there were multiple bank failures all over the country. If that had happened two years earlier, it would've taken our business down. As it happened, it accelerated our business like, oh my god, better lucky than good. Now we're going through an AI transformation. Crypto has gone up and down three times in those six and a half years. It's just wild what happens around you and how that affects the work you do day to day.
So I don't know. One thing I would say is things are unpredictable. I have never learned that more than in this particular job I'm in now.

April:
For sure. Would you say that kind of unpredictability is characteristic of working at a startup versus a larger company or even in academia, for example?

Rachel:
It's a good question. I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer because I've never worked in a huge company. I've always worked in... Investing is also in the business of startups, so I don't think I'm the right person to answer.
I think I have a hypothesis that it affects you less. If you're in a big established company where things don't go, the amplitude of the curve isn't quite the same level, I don't think you necessarily feel it as much. AI is happening to everyone no matter where you work, right? I assume you're all using it every day in your undergraduate environment. So that's universal.
I think how it affects your job or what you're using it for is probably different. If you're a computer science undergrad, it's really affecting what your experience is like compared to five years ago. If you're a physical chemistry undergrad like I was, doing some frequency generations two floors below in the basement of Tech, I'm sure it's helping on the research side, but nothing changes the lasers but hands yet, until the AI robots come. So I just think it depends how much the volatility affects your certain area of pursuit.

April:
That makes sense, yeah. So with all this volatility, how do you approach work-life balance?

Rachel:
I don't think there is any, in all honesty. My mornings are totally insane between the 27 things I'm trying to do, and I'm always later than I want to be to my first meeting, and that just is what it is. I actually have a four-page document called Working with Rachel and for people to get to know what it's like to work with me when I hire and bring on new teams or new managers, et cetera. And one of the things that's in here is my mornings are insane and I'm always late and I'm totally frazzled and whatever, but I can almost always talk in the afternoons and nights almost any day. You just have to know your rhythm.
Exercise is a huge part of my management of work-life balance. So probably started before Fusion, but definitely long, hard dance practices helped me get through undergrad. And at every phase of life I've sort of had a different exercise, deep exercise pursuit and crutch, I would say, to get through the craziness of life. So that's really important for me personally to focus and, I don't know, just get to a different level than the overly intellectual all the time, brainwave level into the body and into the breath. So that's huge.
And then more tactically, I'm terrible about always having my phone around, but I do always have my laptop on do not disturb. So when I'm working in my environment, Slack and email are going constantly nonstop, especially Slack. So if I actually want to write or actually want to read or actually want to listen, the pings don't help. But to do my job, I need to be ever present with my teams. So just practically, it's always on do not disturb, and then I pick when I check. So I don't know, that goes from small to big of how I manage and cope with work-life balance, but it's the truth.

April:
There's some pretty good tips though. Sympathize.

Rachel:
Do people in Northwestern use Slack? Is that part of an undergrad life or no?

April:
Some of the clubs use it. I have a couple-

Rachel:
More texting?

April:
Yeah, they use GroupMe. Yeah. And then I know a lot of the research labs use Slack.

Rachel:
Oh, that makes sense.

April:
Yeah.

Rachel:
Yeah. But less of the all in every day, all encompassing, et cetera.

April:
Yeah.

Rachel:
Yeah.

April:
Do you think those work-life balance habits were developed during your graduate school years or in college or as you go into industry?

Rachel:
I don't know about do not disturb because technology has, not technology, but the physical hardware of communication has advanced so much. I'm so old compared to you guys. And when I was an undergrad, Facebook came out when I was a sophomore. So just think about how different of a world it was then. We had really kludgy Hermes email, Hermes email server at Northwestern. So the never ending notification encroach on our life, it existed then. And of course, we texted, but we texted T9. So it's just a different world.
So we had it and obviously we all needed to learn how to focus, but not to the extent that it is a challenge for people in college and PhD programs now, I don't think. That's my guess as an outsider. But some things, like exercise, 100%. I think those things get developed earlier on. But once you're in university, it's your decision to continue to pursue them and how much you pursue them and how much they're a part of the rhythm of your life. So that, I would say for sure, I established for myself at Northwestern.

April:
Was there anything at Northwestern that you wish you had participated in that you didn't? Or the other way around, that you did but you wish you had opted out?

Rachel:
I wish I'd done dance marathon earlier. I only did it senior year and it was like what an incredible experience. Once you had the experience, then you realize, oh, I should have been doing this the whole time because it's like, I don't know, it's just something you could only do in an all encompassing environment like that.
My major regret at Northwestern is actually academic, which is a silly small choice, but I studied French in elementary and high school and I really wanted to learn Spanish as a California person. So I took it in college, but that ate up a lot of quarters of getting my language credit because I was going from scratch. So my regret, and I'm not very good at languages anyway, so it's not like it stuck around, my regret is actually not that I took it, it came from good intentions, but that I used up six possibilities of taking classes in non-chemistry, non-African studies.
Just you're spoiled for opportunity in undergrad of going to learn about everything. And it's one of the amazing parts about Northwestern and the way they do the core curriculum, that everyone has to learn a little bit of everything somehow. And that's my biggest regret. I regret not taking a philosophy class or a whatever. I took one world religion class, but should I have taken two. That breadth is the thing that I crave and miss.
And by the time you get to PhD, and certainly in the British education system, you specialize earlier, so that opportunity's gone. You can obviously go to lectures and stuff, which I did, but it's not the same as being in a class. So yeah, my biggest I wish I had is I wish I hadn't taken Spanish in that environment and done it some other way and had six quarters to go just do dealer's choice of interesting things in departments I never would've gotten to know.

April:
Did you have the Weinberg language requirement?

Rachel:
Yes.

April:
But you got out of it with French?

Rachel:
I could have taken I think only one quarter or no, I can't remember how my testing was, sorry. But I could have taken either one quarter or zero quarters of French. But I instead put myself from scratch with Spanish because I've never taken it before. So I don't know, I just think that was good intentions, wrong decision.

April:
It happens.

Rachel:
Anyway, yeah, that's my biggest, I don't know, regret is too strong a word, but if I had a magic wand and could do it all over again, I would've taken more general humanities or other types of classes.

April:
Speaking of classes, what were some of your favorite classes at Northwestern? If you were to-

Rachel:
Oh my God, do I even remember?

April:
Yeah.

Rachel:
The physical chemistry. I don't remember if it's physical chemistry honors class or physical chemistry practicum. It's the last thing you take senior year with real world lab problems. And that class, there were six of us and we were in lab, I don't know, four or five hours twice a week. We were there all the time. It was so hard and so intellectually stimulating. I remember that class extremely well.
I remember my world religions class. I don't remember who taught it, but it was the only time I ever studied anything like that. That was interesting. And I remember some of the seminar debates I had with other people. I don't know, those are the two that come to mind.

April:
Very cool. Now that we're getting towards the end of our time, the last question is if you were to look back on your undergrad, which I suppose we already did a little bit, but what advice would you give, I suppose, other people in your position?

Rachel:
I have one very specific piece of advice that I give to a lot of undergrads or people early in career, which I can share. And then the other is one that I give all the time now, but I don't know if it's relevant, but I'll share that one too. I'll start with the second one first because it might be less relevant.
The one I give now, that is also can be very counterintuitive to people who are working on giving and getting feedback and what it takes to truly manage and motivate teens, is that clarity is more compassionate than kindness. And I don't mean don't be kind because the goal is, of course, to deliver clarity with extreme compassion and care. But it's nerve wracking to tell someone, "You're not meeting expectations for this role," or, "We did not hit our goal as a company and we have to make this really hard decision," or whatever the hard thing is that you have to say. It's harder to say it clearer than to say, "Well, I know you this and what about that, and I'm so sorry and this is hard, blah, blah, blah. But I think maybe the role," and then the person walks away and is like, "I don't know what I heard," and they don't know that they're not meeting expectations.
So I would say that took me, it's a lifelong pursuit, I don't think I'm perfect at it yet. No one anywhere in my academic career, undergrad or grad, really taught me that. So that's one. I'm not sure if that's relevant for a sophomore undergrad, but maybe.

April:
I think so.

Rachel:
Could be. The advice that I often give to undergrads or very early in career folks, who are either looking for startups or end up whatever. I actually have a call with one this afternoon who's a woman who's a family friend who's thinking about a job change and she's like just wants my advice. I think that one of the unrealistic things that somehow culturally gets imbued in very driven and successful students, like all of the people who get accepted to Northwestern, is that you can have it all in your first job. And that is fucking bullshit. And I think it leads to a huge amount of heartache and angst because it's not true.
Now, what you can have is one or two awesome things. So when you're, like you graduated at 21 or 22 or whatever age you are, you have usually no strings attached. You can make incredible broad decisions that you can't make later on and that affords you the opportunity to go do amazing things. But what you can't do is do it all at once in that one first job.
So the specific example that I often give is you could pick where you work or what industry you work in or that you make a lot of money, but it is basically impossible to pick all of those things. So if you're a econ undergrad at Northwestern, of which there are many, it's probably pretty hard to work in a mission-driven company, make a 300,000 a year banker undergrad job, and move abroad for that first job as an American, blah, blah. That doesn't exist. If you want to make a lot of money, there are incredible programs with established firms where they really reward you for hard work really early on and that's the trade that that job encompasses. And if that's valuable to you, awesome. But you're probably going to be in one of their major locations and they're unlikely to ship you to Sydney for being 22. If you have the opportunity to go do something extremely mission driven that speaks to you, that's amazing, go do that. But you're probably not necessarily going to pick where or you're not going to be highly compensated.
So I often talk to people who are in their early 20s who are like, "But I really want to be in New York, but I really want to work, I want to be in the arts and I want to do this, but I need a lot of money to support this thing." You're like, "You can't have it all." And that's not bad, it's just true. And it's much more compassionate for me to tell you, April, if you want to pursue physics, that's awesome. I was a PhD student. You're not going to make any money in your 20s.

April:
That's true.

Rachel:
But you might work at the cutting edge of science in something incredible that super motivates you. That's awesome. So if I could wave a magic wand for undergrads, I would get rid of that angst of that decision making. And the decision can have angst because it can be hard to choose a path, but the you can have it all, I think is a great lie. That's not fair to people in their late teens and early 20s in undergrad.
I thought of another one, so I'm going to give you a third, even though you didn't solicit another one. Which is you at the beginning of this you asked about my career, which is kind of all over the place from a traditional perspective. I was in academics and then I went to investing, and then I went to startups. And then in startups, I was in healthcare and I went into payments in FinTech. It's all over the place.
Every time I made the jump, everyone around me told me I shouldn't because I was leaving their path. And to be an amazing professor, you stay in academics. So people leaving academics is like, they don't want to give you the advice to do that. Or when you're in investing, the way you stay in it, and particularly in private investing, it's long feedback cycles. You got to stay and practice the craft.
So I said, "Hey, I'm an operator at heart. I'm going to go do this thing." Some people encouraged me, but many people said, "Why would you ever do that? Why would you ever leave the job you have? Stay in practice." And then same when I left healthcare and picked a totally new thing. So that's more mid-career advice, which is like it's okay to leave that perfect tracked path and trust your gut.

April:
Yeah, that's actually really valuable advice, so thank you.

Rachel:
I hope so.

April:
Yeah. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to talk with me and to give all this advice to whoever's listening.

Rachel:
Yeah. It's awesome. Nice to meet you, April.

April:
Mm-hmm. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Weinberg in the World Podcast. We hope you have a great day and go Cats.