As a previous C-Suite at Harvard Student Agencies and now an investor at Xfund, Jadyn is helping YOU get better with your finances!
Jadyn’s original plan had nothing to do with business or finance, she actually wanted to go into the medical field. She started out studying pre med, but after shadowing some surgeons Jadyn realized that the field wasn’t for her. She wanted dynamic and exciting work, but the medical field is just a whole lot of careful repetition. Around that time she started working at Harvard Student Agencies, which is the largest student run company in the world, it employs over 600 students and pulls in 10M+ in revenue each year.
This organization is where Jadyn found her love for business and startups, since she was working with a large number of smaller companies that were under the Harvard Student Agencies umbrella. She ran partnerships for tutoring students in China, and eventually moved into the role of CPO- Chief People Officer where she was in charge of everything HR-related. This ranged from the human side where Jadyn managed bonuses incentives to the software side, where she upgraded their old people management systems to new services like Gusto. From there, Jadyn moved into a brand new position: Chief Strategy Officer. As CSO, Jadyn was responsible for helping board members build a strategic plan from the organization’s six main priorities, and then implement that plan in real life.
After graduating from Harvard, Jadyn moved on to work at Xfund as their east coast VP. The venture capital firm has over $200M in assets under management and focuses on founders who are coming out of the university context. They partner with schools likeHarvard, Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley, and generalize in tech.
During her time at college, Jadyn realized that a lot of her friends didn’t understand personal finance, which was surprising at a school like Harvard. After asking around, she found that all the people who did know about personal finance learned it independent of school, just like she did. Jadyn’s mother had great financial skills and encouraged her to learn more from online resources. Over time, she became the go-to person for financial knowledge in her circle, and one day a friend of hers with 100k on TikTok recommended that she start a finance page, so Jadyn did!
In the past year, Jadyn has grown her page to 9k followers, and on the way she’s found a massive gap in understanding between Gen Z/Millennials and the companies that are trying to reach them. If someone is a 25 year old who is living paycheck to paycheck with a bunch of student loans and no credit card, you might think that’s totally fine and normal because no one ever explained personal finance to you. That path leads to a rut, where they can’t buy larger assets down the line because they don’t have a credit score, or don’t even have any money saved in the first place. There are services that help, like one that can give $1,000 cash back based on the spending the person is already doing. The problem is that companies don’t yet understand how to communicate with their younger target audience, and don’t have the trust required to do so anyway. This is where Jadyn comes in, as she personally understands Gen Z/Millennials and has built up trust through her content, so she’s able to use her platform to promote products that can legitimately help people out of their financial rut!
Handling all of this responsibility on social media on top of her full-time job inevitably led to the one thing we all fear: creator burnout. About halfway through the year, Jadyn ran into this, but it was more of a slow fade than an immediate falling off the earth. She’d slowly go from posting 3-5 times a day to once a day to skipping a day or two to not posting much at all. One of the contributors Jadyn had to this burnout was actually consuming too much content, since it immediately makes her mind go into work mode and start trying to think of how that could fit into her niche and page. The best time of day to film is when the sun is high in the sky, but that can be demoralizing since it’s also the time when you’re stuck in the office. Even so, Jadyn got her second wind at the start of this year, thanks to continued financial questions and encouragement coming from her friends in-person!
2022 was Jadyn’s first year as a creator, and now she has big plans coming up for 2023. In the near-term, she’s planning to start up a podcast in February, since she’s been getting repeated requests for longer-form content. In the longer term, Jadyn’s plan is to have her creator income eclipse her full-time income as an investor! If you want to join Jadyn on this journey and improve your own finances on the way, you can find her @jadynfinance on TikTok!
