Culture Uncovered

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Culture Uncovered

Savvy Wealth

April 01, 2026 • Recruit the Employer • Episode 42

0:00 | 32:08

The platform turning financial advisors into founders.

In this episode of Culture Uncovered, Jena Dunay sits down with Rasika Rajagopalan, VP of People, Talent & Places at Savvy Wealth, to talk about what it looks like to build a fast-moving, in-office culture at a fintech company reinventing how financial advisors operate.

Rasika shares how Savvy is empowering advisors to start and scale their own businesses, why the company prioritizes in-person collaboration four days a week, and how a team of around 130 people is building both cutting-edge technology and a deeply connected culture at the same time.

They also get into how Savvy makes decisions quickly through structured writing and weekly reviews, what it means to “invent the future” inside the company, and how they’re investing heavily in learning, from AI bootcamps to leadership summits.

What you’ll learn:

What Savvy Wealth does and how it’s transforming financial advising
Why they prioritize in-office collaboration and what it unlocks
How their writing culture and Weekly Decision Reviews drive speed
What “inventing the future” looks like in a fintech environment
How Savvy invests in employee growth and continuous learning

Savvy Wealth highlights:

Founded: 2021
Team Size: 130 employees
Headquarters: New York City
Work Model: In-office (4 days/week) with strong collaboration focus
Culture: Curious, ambitious, collaborative, fast-moving, learning-driven

Unique Perks & Programs:

Strong in-office culture designed for collaboration and connection
Weekly Decision Reviews (WDR) for fast, transparent decision-making
Writing-first culture to improve clarity and alignment
AI bootcamps and leadership development programs
Regular team events and community-building initiatives
High transparency, including visibility into company strategy

To learn more about Savvy Wealth:

Careers Page (They’re hiring!)
LinkedIn Page
Rasika’s LinkedIn Profile

Jena Dunay: Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of Culture Uncovered where we go behind the scenes each week at a different organization and figure out what the culture is actually like at that company. Whether they're a large company, a small company, a company you've heard of or a company you haven't, today is going to be a really exciting episode. So I am here today with Rasika, the VP of People, Talent and Places of Savvy Wealth. So Rasika, thank you so much for joining us.

Rasika Rajagopalan: Amazing! Thank you so much for having me.

Jena Dunay: Well, I'm excited to learn a little bit more about Savvy Wealth. So why don't you tell the listeners, what do you guys do? Let's start there.

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yes, Savvy exists to make great financial advice easier to deliver. So that's our official mission statement. And the way that we do that is actually through our technology platform. So we essentially help financial advisors start their own businesses and our platform helps them build and scale their practices.

Jena Dunay: Very interesting. Okay, why was this organization created? Like what was the impetus for Savvy's start?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, it's actually a cool story. So Ritik, our founder, he actually has been a serial entrepreneur. He's a Thiel Fellow. And so his first company that he built right out of college, he actually sold to Box. And then his second company that he built, he ended up selling to Brex. And he had some really great financial outcomes coming out of those acquisitions. And so he was on the search for a financial advisor at the time as he had this newfound wealth.

And he realized through that process that the systems that a lot of these financial advisors were using were really outdated and not really serving them. And so that's actually what created the inspiration to start Savvy Wealth, to enable these advisors to start their own businesses and then also have some really, really great technology to support them.

Jena Dunay: Very cool. I love the story behind it too and just a serial entrepreneur. I can respect that and appreciate that as well. Tell me where you guys are located and how many employees are you right now?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, so we're located right in New York City. We have about 130 employees. I would say about 75 percent of our employees are in New York City. Our sales and our support teams, as we call them, our client service teams, they are fully distributed. But yeah, most of the team is here in New York and we try to get everyone together at least once a year.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, awesome. Okay, so for those that are in the New York City area, tell me a little bit about, are you working remote? Are you hybrid? Are you all in office? People love to know the answer to that question in the day of the day of our Lord of 2026.

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, totally. We are hybrid in office. And so we're in the office four days a week. And this was a really intentional move when we started the company in 2021 coming out of COVID. There's this magic that a lot of cross functional teams are able to have when you're in person when you're collaborating.

Just those magical moments on the whiteboard where all of a sudden there's this light bulb moment, this conversation that sparks up that you weren't even planning for, but you just happen to have in the kitchen. So we've invested a lot in creating that magic in the office. We do a number of, I mean, just yesterday we had this fun game night where we brought in this pizza bagel company that came in. Funny story about that company, he was also a founder and entrepreneur, exited and now he makes pizza bagels for other startups that are in their growing phase.

But yeah, we had a fun game night and let off some steam. But I think there's just this, the relationships that you build at work can be so unique and so meaningful. So being able to cultivate that alongside the work that we do in New York, I think is really special.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, I think especially in a place like New York, personally, I feel like it is such a value add to be in office. And I know some people may hate me for saying this, but I think it's a necessity because you are so isolated. I lived in New York and I couldn't imagine being work from home in New York City. I might as well just leave. What's the point of being there? It's so expensive to be there. Like, let's be in the office. Let's be meeting people. Let's collaborate. The brightest minds are in New York City. And so I couldn't agree with you more on that.

And I also love that it's pizza and bagel, could I just say, because that's the most New York thing possible is like the best pizza and the best bagels in the country are also in New York. So that's just a fun activity. But I agree with you that the magic moments, they happen in the office. So I think that's great that you guys are doing that.

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah. One thing I'll add to that is, you know, when we were thinking about this office value, initially I was thinking about the majority of the value coming from being for those that are earlier on in their career in the sense that as I was trying to hire remotely before, I saw a lot of early in career employees take a little bit longer to ramp, understand the work culture, because it's also new, right? And you're not immersed in it day to day.

What I've actually found is while that's true, for someone like myself that has been working a little bit longer, I'm equally getting just as much value from all of these new hires coming in that are earlier in their career and have so much familiarity with technology that I'm less familiar with. Like we're all learning from each other. So just this ability to cross-pollinate across levels of experience on both ends. We're all learning from each other. And I think that's something that fully remote companies just maybe will have a harder time or you have to be much more intentional about building.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, I love that point too, because you often hear people saying to the younger generation, hey, you should be in office because it's important for your learning and development. I don't hear people talking a lot on the other way, which you make such a great point that, yes, we can learn from the younger generation as well. And we need learning from the younger generation. So I think that's an excellent point.

Tell me about some of the divisions within your organization. So you had mentioned the client service team and sales team. What are some other kind of verticals that you guys have at your org?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah. So Savvy is a very product and engineering driven company. And so our largest division is EPD, Engineering, Product and Design. We've actually recently further increased our hiring goals within this division. And yeah, I think the future is like we're going to be solving problems through technology.

So while it's super important to have a human in the process, especially on the operation side, on the sales side, on the internal finance and people side, there's just so much value in ensuring that you're able to scale and deliver for the customer more autonomously through these systems and tech that we build. So that I would say is the largest segment.

What's pretty cool about Savvy from our marketing standpoint is we have two segments of marketing. We have advisor marketing and client marketing. So advisor marketing is basically the segment of our marketing team which goes out and brings new financial advisors into the business.

Client marketing is the segment that actually helps our existing advisors grow their businesses. So this is unique to Savvy where in addition to managing your business as an advisor, you're also trying to figure out how to grow it. And so we have a whole group that is specialized in enabling them to do that. So it's a cool B2B2C model that then shows itself in the complexity of our org structure.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that's great. That's a great breakdown. I think it's helpful for people to hear, one, if you're a people leader, how do other companies structure their orgs and what's most important to them right now. But then also from the job seeker standpoint, for people that are listening that are in the market or interested in finding a new company to work for, understanding what opportunities might exist based off of their skill set and where the company is hiring.

Tell me how you came across the organization. You have an awesome career. I obviously did my research before and you and I had had a conversation and you've done a lot of really cool things in your career. What made you want to come work for Savvy Wealth yourself?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, it's interesting. I was coming out of the cusp of having joined a company at seed stage and seeing it through a ton of growth. And so I'd been there for five years. And so I was actually initially looking for a later stage company, not fintech.

And somehow I ended up at a Series B fintech company. And to be honest, it was that first conversation I had with Ritik, the founder. I knew immediately I needed to work for him. He seemed incredibly smart.

The mission of the company was incredibly interesting to me. As somebody that's worked in startups, empowering others to start their own businesses was really exciting. And if you think about it, our sales motion is very much similar to a recruiting function. We're going out there and getting advisors on board.

So there were just a lot of unique problems and challenges to solve that excited me. And then the Series B stage, where you have that lightning in a bottle feeling of having product market fit, having a lot of excitement around what you're building, but now you're going from building the product to building the company, that to me is the most exciting phase. And so yeah, I was immediately in.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, you make a great point too. As I'm thinking about people listening to this, in my career I always went to a company based off the leadership. I think sometimes people base it solely on the job function or maybe they've got a cool mission statement.

And those things are obviously important, as we talked about. But I think the most important thing to your own personal career success is actually finding really great leaders to work for because you're going to learn from them and you're going to grow with them. So I could not agree with you more on that. That's exactly how I made decisions.

Rasika Rajagopalan: 100 percent!

Jena Dunay: And it always proved successful when I did it that way. Yeah, that's good. How did you come across it to begin with though?

Rasika Rajagopalan: LinkedIn. Yeah, just applied. Had a conversation with the recruiter, then spoke to Ritik and yeah, the rest is history.

Jena Dunay: Love it. So good. So good. How would you describe the culture at Savvy?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yes, I would say very ambitious, very curious. One of our core values is dig deeper. And I think we're always trying to seek truth in the problems that we are trying to unpack. And then extremely collaborative. Across all functions, across all segments of the business, just a very collaborative group of people.

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Tell me how the curiosity plays out. That's a word that I really enjoy when hearing from a culture standpoint. How does that play out day to day in the work environment? How do you see people utilize curiosity?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, I guess I have two ways I've seen this show up. The first is kind of what we were talking about earlier of the younger generation learning from the more experienced generation and vice versa.

Yesterday, for example, I was having a conversation with one of our new hires. He's been out of school for a couple years, has a lot of experience in AI. And I was working with him to build an AI bootcamp where we can teach employees across the business how to build their own agents and up level their work.

And just the excitement around that, wanting so deeply to learn from someone newer, the lack of ego and wanting to be that sponge. I just see a lot of that. Really looking to others to try to learn from them is core to the culture that I've observed.

And then the second is we have a strong writing culture at Savvy. So every time you propose a new idea or you want to propose a new initiative, the way that we go about it is you kind of write a short document.

What is the problem? Why is it a problem? Why do we need to solve it now? What is the relevant context? What are some ways you could solve it? What is the way that you're looking to solve it? How do you measure success?

So you go through this whole thing, you invite stakeholders to the document in advance to review, add comments, and then we have these kind of speedy discussions around it.

And what I've found is it really forces both the driver as well as the other collaborators to deeply understand the problem. So it drives efficiency, but I think again it also supports that lens of curiosity, seeking to understand at the deepest level.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that's such an interesting practice too. I think for other people to listen and take back to their own organization. Tell me what you like about that whole process. It sounds like it's doing a lot.

You had mentioned that on our intro call and I'm so glad you brought it up because I thought it was such a unique way to problem solve. I don't hear a lot of companies do it. I think it's a really brilliant idea. So can you just share a little bit about why you like it?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Oh my gosh, yes, I love it. I will say for a number of reasons. One, there is documentation around every major decision that has been made at Savvy. So anytime I am like, yeah, why did we do this, not only do I have the document, but I can even see the comments of how different people weighed in and how we kind of resolved some of the open questions. So that is very helpful, just having the record.

Two, it is super efficient. So three times during the week, we have what we call WDR, weekly decision review. They are about an hour and a half blocks. And so you submit your document at least 24 to 48 hours in advance of the block. And then a day in advance, you get your 15 minute segment for the day.

So in a given day on WDR, you could go through six to eight quick major decisions in an hour and a half that would have otherwise taken half a day or more. And there is a ton of clarity coming out of that meeting because everyone’s action items are input in this document.

So I think just the historical record, the speed and efficiency, the depth of problem solving, and the clarity coming out of it has been great. And frankly, there are some days I wake up, I know I have weekly decision review, and I am like what does that say about me, I am super excited to go in. But it is nice. You just have this hour and a half of these big decisions that are made and you come out feeling really productive.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, I love the product. I am literally going to take that, put it in my back pocket, and use it in my own company because I think it is such a brilliant idea. I think even just being able to process out what you are thinking and what you want to do is just a helpful problem solving tool in general. So wonderful.

Tell me some other interesting benefits or perks for employees. Tell me why do people love coming to work there?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yes, I would say there is a very strong community at Savvy for sure. We have these big picnic tables, we offer lunch, we offer dinner, we do events at least every other week, things like pottery or flower arranging or game nights.

So I think a lot of people, whether you bond socially or whether you bond over exchanging ideas or whether you bond over experiences, I think we do a good job of hitting all of those different angles.

And so through that, some really great relationships have formed. So I think a lot of people stay at Savvy for the people. So we have invested a lot in that.

I think the other thing is again that culture of learning. So we have various bootcamps that we have designed for the company. The next one that we are building is this AI one I am really excited about.

But yeah, all of leadership shows up for this stuff. And I think there is always value in these frameworks, of course, but it is truly in how you take that and put it in the context of the problems we are solving at Savvy and who you are solving it at Savvy with.

So I think these workshops and these programs that we have built, that we execute through our quarterly manager summits or annual leadership summits, have been really helpful. So yeah, strong culture of learning.

Jena Dunay: Tell me about these quarterly manager summits. What are those?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, so we bring our people managers together once a quarter. And the goal is really to enable them to get a deep dive into the business. We are fairly transparent about our business metrics and our strategy. We share our board deck with employees every quarter. So there is a lot of transparency, but even more specifically around how the cross functional pieces come to play is something we focus on in these.

And then we always pick a focus. So for the next one, we are going to be doing a deep AI brainstorm. I am going to be running a workshop around effective delegation and situational leadership, which is this idea that when you are delegating and supporting your team, the way that you provide support is going to differ based on how much skill and experience an individual has with that specific thing.

So if you go in really deep and provide someone with a ton of support in an area that they have a lot of experience in, they are going to feel micromanaged. If you step back in an area that they actually do not have a lot of experience in, they are going to feel abandoned. And there are all these dials you have to turn up and down to provide supportive and more directive behaviors based on the task.

So for that, we will do workshops. We did one last quarter actually with the whole company called Real Colors. It is an effective communication workshop.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, I am very familiar with that.

Rasika Rajagopalan: It is always a ton of fun. Everyone gets to learn a little bit about each other, feel seen, and all of a sudden you have all these light bulb moments.

Jena Dunay: Yes. Those are always my favorites. Those ones that are like personality based. What are you, what is your color?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Exactly. And then you are like, oh my God, I understand my spouse or my partner so much more. So yeah, I think through those types of frameworks and workshops, there is just a lot of both getting to know each other and then some pretty direct applications to the work.

Jena Dunay: Yeah. And I would also say that I find it rare for organizations to focus on their managers so intentionally like that. That is why I asked about it because it is, I think, a big struggle for a lot of organizations.

People that have been on our podcast have mentioned this is the thing that we do not do well and we need to do better, which is taking care of our middle managers. There might be executive level support and onboarding support, but when people start getting promoted, it becomes, okay, now what.

The fact that you intentionally have those quarterly meetings where you do training and offer opportunities for people to collaborate, I think that is a really great practice to keep up. It should be something that a people leader who is listening double clicks on and considers implementing in their own organization.

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, I think learning and development is probably one of the best things I took from my time working in the Boston startup tech scene. Boston has a lot of entry level talent because you have a ton of universities.

And so I think across the board, a lot of companies invest strongly in learning and development for a couple reasons. One, because talent is often entry level. But also because when you are at that stage, a lot of employees start in one function and move into another.

Someone might start in sales and move into marketing or start in marketing and move into product. So there is a lot of movement. Having been in that environment and being able to run a lot of these trainings on my own, I found a unique value in that.

When you are a people leader, a lot of times you are engaging with employees one on one about challenges that are very specific to them and their team. When you can open up a forum where you are facilitating a broader group, it is a very different interaction.

It becomes much more proactive. So having the ability to offer that kind of forum as a people leader enables you to build a different kind of relationship with your managers.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that is a great point. It is a different kind of interaction when you are facilitating a group instead of just handling individual challenges.

Jena Dunay: So we touched on growth and professional development. I know that is always a question for people leaders asking other people leaders, how do I do this really well. And also for job seekers who are thinking Savvy looks like an interesting place. This is how they handle professional development.

Who would you say succeeds at a company like yours or who succeeds specifically at Savvy? What type of person?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, I would say two to three things come to mind specifically at Savvy. And I think this probably goes for a lot of Series B companies in general.

The first is someone who is really mission driven. We are an earlier stage company. The problems that everyone is working on day to day cover a really wide scope, which is part of what makes it really exciting.

And in order to succeed, you want to have a curiosity of why is the problem that we are solving such a problem. What is most important to our customers. How are some of the other teams tackling this. How does the work that I do fit in with that.

You want folks that are really driven by building these solutions for our advisors because you are living in it.

The second is future forward individuals. You are starting to see this across industries. I am looking for a technical recruiter on my team, and I was reviewing job descriptions at other companies. A lot of them are now asking tech recruiters to have coding experience.

The way that the industry is moving is changing very quickly. We have a core value of inventing the future. I think people who are not just adapting to change but actively creating it will do really well at Savvy. That mindset enables you to maintain the pace and velocity required.

The third is a strong desire to learn and collaborate. Startup environments mean you are working on big problems with a team. Being invested in that team and the work you are doing together makes a huge difference.

Jena Dunay: Tell me more about this inventing the future thing. How do you even think about that in your role as the VP of People and Talent and Places?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Totally. The way that we are working is changing so quickly. Last two years ago, what could be done in a year can now be done in four months. Pretty soon, the thing that can be done in four months can be done in four minutes.

And so companies are moving faster and faster and faster and faster. There are pros and cons obviously to that. But I think you have to really think about, you have to balance sort of long term and short term investments in the business.

So for me, a big thing that we are working on within our team and every other team is what are some of the things that you are doing day to day that we could leverage AI for. How do we build those solutions. And then what are some of the guardrails that we want to put where it does not make sense for us to leverage technology for that.

I think a lot of companies have probably done the latter of where are our guardrails. It does take much more time to build out some of these solutions.

So yeah, when we are hiring aggressively, having every recruiter go through every single resume, does that make sense. Does it make sense for our sales enablement, for example. We have a complete AI driven sales enablement which has been really helpful because as part of the enablement, we have our sales team actually go through virtual role plays with an AI agent.

That has been pretty helpful. So things that you would build these trainings from scratch, you are now leveraging AI for and it adds a whole more value added element to it. So these are some things that every team is thinking about. And for me, as we think about the future of work, it is very relevant.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that is such an interesting topic. I might offline ask you more questions about what is going to be in that AI bootcamp because I think that is a question.

We get that question a lot, even just members that have been on the podcast, other chief people officers, people leaders. How do we teach AI to people that do not want to be taught AI, right.

If they are maybe a company that is not a Series B startup. How do we teach it. And then also what do we teach. I do not even know what I do not know. So I think that is a really interesting topic and I might pick your brain.

We talked about all the wonderful things about Savvy. I want you to tell me where is an area that you guys have either failed at or you are hoping to improve as it relates to the culture.

Rasika Rajagopalan: Yeah, I would say as somebody that came in about six months ago, one of my observations was maybe an underinvestment in mission driven talent. And I think that is really important at Series B.

And I think a couple of things probably led to that. One was not having a defined mission statement, which is something that we worked on over the last six months.

And then I think the second is just the nature of our business is to help other individuals grow their wealth, which is great. But I think you want to be really thoughtful at early stages of the balance of missionary versus mercenary talent that you are bringing in.

Because as an earlier stage company, you are going to have your ups and downs and you want to make sure that the team that you have is really committed and excited and prepared to go through those ups and downs with you because they are here for the long term. They are driven by fulfilling this mission of making financial advice easier to deliver, right. That is very meaningful to them.

So I think articulating our mission statement, even having Ritik share the story around why this mission was so meaningful to him, we did that at our last summit, it really unlocked this element of missionaries that was not that it was not there, but I think was not fully visible yet or fully something that everyone was so aware of.

And it is so powerful when you are working on something and you realize how connected you are to not just the financial outcomes of the business but the practical outcomes of what it is that your problem is solving.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, the meaningful impact that you are talking about. So you guys are obviously growing. Tell us what areas of the business you are growing in as it relates to jobs and opportunities so that people who are listening can be like wow, I really enjoyed this podcast episode, I enjoyed learning about the problems that they are solving for, I think I could be a missionary in this area. Where are areas that I could actually contribute?

Rasika Rajagopalan: Like I said, engineering, product and design are our biggest areas. I think what makes roles in EPD really exciting is because of the way that we are running our business, folks on this team are not just building solutions for our customers but they are also building solutions for our employees. So for example, I am working very closely with one of our engineers to build a talent solution.

Jena Dunay: That is really helpful. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I think people listening will have a much better understanding of what it is like to work at Savvy.

And I think a couple of things probably led to that. One was not having a defined mission statement, which is something that we worked on over the last six months.

They are driven by fulfilling this mission of making financial advice easier to deliver, right. That is very meaningful to them.

Jena Dunay: That is really helpful. Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I think people listening will have a much better understanding of what it is like to work at Savvy.

Rasika Rajagopalan: Thank you so much for having me.