EVE HALIMI AND ANAM LAKHANI OF ALINEA

“ For starting anything and for building anything, I think you need a lot of empathy.”— Anam Lakhani

Anam Lakhani is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Alinea. Lakhani created Alinea after her investment banking internship where she quickly grasped how confusing and overwhelming investing her own money was. She went on to form a community around financial empowerment, using her own experiences coupled with those of her friends and classmates. Lakhani recognized the huge information barrier preventing Gen Z from confidently embarking on their investing journey, which inspired the creation of Alinea to solve these issues. Lakhani encouraged investors to express their individuality and create wealth congruent with their interests. Prior to creating Alinea, Lakhani was an Investment Banking Analyst at Castle Placement. She then went on to gain extensive financial experience working at Citigroup as an investment banker in the Equity Capital Markets division. 

Eve Halimi is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Alinea. Halimi gained extensive experience empowering brands to build better digital experiences working in strategy at Contentsquare, a growth stage data analytics startup, bringing that expertise to Alinea. Halimi expanded her involvement using analytic platforms to track and visualize billions of digital behaviors, delivering intelligent recommendations to grow revenue, increase loyalty, and fuel innovation. Prior to creating Alinea, Halimi held multiple positions at financial institutions and hedge funds such as Goldman Sachs, Boussard & Gavaudan, and Halister Partners. She founded her first community-based application at the age of 15 and after interning in finance on both the buy and sell-side. Halimi co-founded an event planning start-up that gathers young creators and ambitious individuals through upscale events that promote brands and products by young entrepreneurs. 

Can you talk about your journeys up until founding Alinea?

Anam: Eve and I were both classmates at Barnard majoring in economics and we would see each other around campus. We were both very familiar with finance. Eve and I were in different positions all over the financial industry. I was super excited about investment banking and we were both really into finance. And from the get-go, we knew this industry was extremely male-dominated. Over the summer of our junior year, we both went off and did internships, and when we came back, it really became obvious that the problem isn't just with the financial industry, it even comes down to personal finance. For example, our female friends were not investing their money. They were all going on to graduate, going into jobs, whereas our male friends were “gambling” on Robinhood. There really wasn't a modern platform to help you through your investing journey. And so the story really starts when we were in our fall semester of senior year. During the second week of class, I asked Eve to be my partner for this project. Eve and I sat down at one of the cafes in one of the Columbia libraries and just started writing down business ideas on a piece of paper. We really wrote down everything we could think of and we paused on finance. We knew that this is it– this is a real problem to us and we get it. And that's where the story starts.

Can you talk about your experience going through the YC accelerator?

Eve: So Anam started getting super into Y Combinator during the pandemic. What really happened and what opened doors is that we started working from home in 2020. So Anam, who was an investment banker, all of a sudden had more time to start looking at Y Combinator startup school videos and learn how to build up a company. We applied to Y Combinator as just kind of an idea, we didn’t think we could get in, and surprisingly we got it. At that point, we really had to quit our jobs overnight if we wanted to be a part of the program.

Anam: We learned some very core fundamentals through the program. They drilled that you should always be talking to your users and you should always be writing code. Those are the two things you really need to determine success, and at the end of the day, you have to build something people want. If you can't do that, then you haven't really succeeded. That sounds so intuitive, but it's really not. I think like anything in life, you can get distracted so easily, especially when you're running and founding a startup. And so the fact that we had three months where this was constantly drilled into our heads, almost every day, was just really important and crucial for us to learn. 

What advice do you have for college-aged women interested in entrepreneurship? What do you wish you had known?

Anam: I think for me it's that you still need a level of patience. You can still put in all the work, but the results take time to come. That's what most things in life are like. We spent 4 years in college, then could get a job at the end of it, or could go to a grad school program. So I think it is important to stay persistent and patient. 

Eve: I do wish there were some books recommended to us earlier on. One book that was really helpful for us to learn product management skills, for example, which we didn't have, was Hooked.

Anam: I've actually learned a lot from books, which is so old school, but it's great. I'm reading a very good book called Inspired. It is all about product management and how to efficiently build tech products.

What skills are vital to starting a business in finance & investment? 

Anam: For starting anything and for building anything, I think you need a lot of empathy. I think the reason we got into Y Combinator was because we had that insight. We understood what our audience wanted or what they struggled with. So you don't have to be the most tech-talented person or the smartest person, but you really need to have empathy and focus. 

Eve: You should try to gain product management skills earlier on– this can mean reading media blogs about how to become a product manager and so on. This was a field that we weren't exposed to in school and something that's so important and such a crucial skill in whatever you do. Design is also a skill I wish I had acquired earlier on. 

How did you raise funding? Do you have any advice on fundraising?

Eve: I think what really helped us with funding was getting into Y Combinator. When you're raising funds, the first thing, first and foremost that helps is when you have an accelerator like Techstars or Y Combinator backing you. It really helps bring credibility to your startup and helps bring other investors. When we were going out to raise our seed round and were in Y Combinator, we didn't have to reach out to any investors. We were basically just getting inbound– a lot of people were coming to us and wanting to speak to us. It is a very difficult process for sure. We raised our seed round in a month– we were lining up 15 calls a day and didn't have time to eat or to do anything. It was just back to back to back pitching. It's exhausting but it was a great experience overall. It really helped us get to the next step of the process.

Can you tell us more about Alinea? 

Eve: Alinea means something new, and it means a new chapter in French and Latin, and that's where the meaning of it all comes from. It's about creating a new chapter in investing.

Anam: I think Alinea is the star of this retail investing 3.0. We're really trying to make it not feel like an investing app. In fact, the feedback we get is that it feels like anything but an investing app. We make investing very easy. You can invest in different ideas you align with, different industries, the future of clean energy, woman-led companies, and different regions. And it also reduces your risk so that you're not putting all your money into Tesla. Tesla may go up. It might go down. At the end of the day, we don't know. So you should start diversifying your portfolio. The second thing we're really excited about is the social aspect. We've just started building these social features, but you can go onto Alinea and create your own social profile. You can follow your friends and see what the community around you is investing in. 

Eve:  We also have this really unique feature called creating your own playlist– where you can create a playlist of investments. It's no longer about investing in the fidelities of the world, but it's about investing in people like you and me and each other's ideas. It's about letting people be their own fund managers as well. 

What have you enjoyed the most about starting your own company?

Eve: It's so rewarding when we speak to a customer and they say that we broke down investing for them–  investing now is something that's easy and something that they feel confident about. 

Anam: One of my sister's friends was terrified to invest her money. She actually came to a point where she downloaded the app herself, put it in money, and she was like, “This is amazing.” She felt like she could invest and was no longer afraid– that is really what makes my day and is so rewarding. 

What is your vision for Alinea 5 years from now?

Anam: Our vision is to really become this modern financial company. The financial companies and institutions we have are more or less outdated. They don't really take into account how the next generation is evolving and what their preferences are. The next generation is incredibly smart. It's not going to be this traditional reliance on an investment manager or institution. I think we have so much information available and it's going to become about sifting through that information and making our own decisions. We really see Alinea catering to the next generation's needs. 

Quick Take One: What was your favorite part of your Barnard experience?

Eve: The Athena program and the class that we took that allowed us to found Alinea. It was just our first exposure to the world of entrepreneurship. It taught us how to make a business plan– we finished the class with a hundred-page business plan. It taught us how to create user journeys. It taught us how to create the first version of a product. So that was really the best experience I had personally. 

Anam: I am going to say starting Alinea. Right after the class ended, Eve and I went off and hosted this conference. That's really where we started networking. I remember that I was so exhausted that night, but it was such a different type of exhaustion. I actually felt like it was such a “good” exhausted. I remember that feeling and I hold on to that every day. 

Quick Take Two: Who is a woman you look up to? 

Eve: Alexa von Tobel who created LearnVest, a financial product. I  just remembered listening to her podcasts on “How I Built This” and just being so inspired by her. She is one of the first women to create a financial product, and I really admire her for that.

Anam: Whitney from Bumble.  I think she's built such an incredible brand. She's really a trailblazer who has led the way for so many incredible female CEOs in this space. I also have always admired Sally Krawcheck. 

Quick Take Three: What is one opportunity in New York City that you think everyone should know about? 

Anam: For me, it's the Whitney Museum of American Art. I love the Whitney. I also love taking a walk on the high line or along the West Side Highway.

Eve: I would say applying to our growth internship position. I really think what helped me was doing internships throughout college. I did some marketing internships. I did some working under the CEO internships. I did very different things, but it helped me identify as I was leaving college what I really wanted to do. So I cut out years of work experience and crammed it all into college. And so interning at Alinea is a great way to have very low effort work and have exposure to a fast-growing FinTech startup.