Daniela Binatti, Co-founder and CTO at Pismo, was a speaker at the MIT REAP international workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference, held by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), gathered entrepreneurs from Brazil, Colombia, the USA, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to discuss innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Shari Loessberg, Faculty at MIT Sloan School of Management, hosted the fireside chat with Daniela. The Pismo Co-Founder discussed her career in computing and entrepreneurship as well as her effort to bring more women to the technology sector.
A transformation journey
After working for 16 years at a financial services company, Daniela quit her job to study cloud computing and big data. She realised she could make a difference in the financial services industry by leveraging new technologies to create a processing platform for banks and fintech companies.
She reflected on how Pismo enabled these companies to innovate: “The transformation came not only from the technology but also from the business model. Pismo is a fully cloud-native SaaS company. We provide a toolkit for both incumbents and new entrants to build their financial products,” she explains.
The sales cycle is long but worth it
As a B2B company, Pismo provides back-end technology for customers, offering APIs to banks and other financial and non-financial institutions to build their solutions.
Due to regulations, Daniela says the sales cycle is different in each region we operate. Sometimes, it takes a long time close a deal or even convince clients to outsource their core processing to a cloud-based provider.
“It’s a very long sales cycle. We are about to announce the deployment of our platform in a big bank. The intelligence process took ten months. So it is not easy. I always say to investors that, if it were easy, there would be many competitors doing it,” Daniela says.
Women in tech
Another challenge Daniela faces is encouraging other women to pursue a career in technology. She says it was a long journey until she became a leader in male-dominated industries like technology and financial services. In her previous job, 98 of the 100 people on her team were men.
“We’re trying to change this landscape. Juliana (Daniela’s sister and Pismo CPO) and I play an important role as company founders. I am also part of mentoring groups aimed at women that want to switch careers and go to engineering or software development,” she says.
An Endeavor entrepreneur
Daniela also talked about her recent nomination as an Endeavor entrepreneur in Brazil. She said she chose acting as a mentor because a great network encouraged her to pursue an entrepreneurial career in the past.
“There are not many women who are entrepreneurs. I think if I can make a small difference in the life of someone, trying to encourage them to pursue this path, it is great for me to have the opportunity to give it back to the community,” she concludes.
