Supreet Kaur is the co-founder and COO of xalts. xalts is building digital treasury, trade and supply chain finance infrastructure to enable seamless flow of credit by connecting financial institutions and businesses.

xalts raised USD 6M in a seed round from Accel and Citi Ventures, and has recently acquired Contour Network.

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👋🏼  How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

As the COO, my job is to translate my cofounder's vision into reality by being the operational firewall who ensures operations run and scale with maximum efficiency. This encompasses everything from GTM to operations to fundraising to finance to legal to people to compliance!

Build. Playbook-ize. Scale.

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🧐  What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

‍The COO's role is ever changing—no two days are the same and there is high ambiguity every day.

One day I could be focused on accounting audits, the next day sharpening our GTM strategy, the following day people & processes, and the day after handling investor relations. You don't get to dislike any of it because all of this and more is what it takes to build a company.

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🏆  What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Taking the leap to start xalts with my co-founder. Every single day is a rollercoaster of learnings, wins, and firefighting!

Learning to be a better founder every single day—it's a process

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🔍  What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?

I am very keen to see digitization in real world industries.

Our thesis from the very start has been that as velocity of money accelerates with real time payments and stable coins or CBDCs, the biggest challenge in its wholesale adoption by financial services is disjoint operational processes and systems.

Some of the biggest markets, with trillions of dollars in transactions, still use paper. Real time money is not very useful if the operational process of the other leg of the traction is manual.

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💼  What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

1. Surround yourself with people who can keep you grounded.

2. Be ready to context switch like never before.

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🗣  What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Training, recovery, and nutrition.

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🍨  What's your go-to ice cream flavor?

Black sesame or Pandan