We had the good fortune of connecting with Sid Pailla and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Sid, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
James Baldwin once said, “It’s expensive to be poor,” which highlights the complexity and complications surrounding money in America for most people. I experienced this reality firsthand as an immigrant to the US, how that trauma still resonates in my family today.
My parents and I moved from Hyderabad, India, to the United States when I was about 10 years old, and we arrived in debt. Access to financial services was not easy for us – from basic bank accounts to loans. Our family in total was earning $38K per year, and we remained frugal and disciplined while trying to take advantage of all the income the employer provided us – including the 401(k) match.
When the crash came in the late 90s, my parents were laid off and forced to take out their 401(k) at the bottom of the market. As the family member that spoke English best, I still remember how we tried to navigate that crisis. We only received 20 cents on the dollar that was put in due to loss of value, taxes, and fees.
Not only was that experience traumatic and educational about how important separate cash / emergency savings were, but it also became the first of many incidents that made me realize how many financially vulnerable Americans there were. I actually wouldn’t know the true extent until almost 15 years later when I went to business school (on loans).
I became obsessed with step function changes that raised the waterline for “the majority of us” – across all essential human services. But for whatever reason, financial well-being seemed even more personal – especially with the juxtaposition of the richest country in the world having over half of its population unable to handle a $500 financial emergency.
After years of research, over a thousand one-on-one interviews, and a lot of product design, I arrived at the three pillars that would be critical to Sunny Day Fund – the solution needed to be simple and easy, accessible or unrestricted, and truly rewarding both emotionally and economically. That was the foundation of a pitch I made to my wife, Sarah. A pitch that remains on our refrigerator almost four years later.
And it needed to start at the spigot of money for most people – the employer.
This wasn’t a handout by the employer either. By helping their employees achieve financial well-being, the employer was winning trust and loyalty, attracting folks to join their organization and retaining them for a longer period, and reducing overhead from emergency and 401(k) loans to safety incidents or absenteeism.
In essence, because of my personal experience with seeing how the 401(k) went wrong for my family at the beginning of our life in America, I had the personal drive and empathy to solve this problem for tens of millions of other hardworking Americans.
What should our readers know about your business?
Sunny Day Fund is a new employee benefit that people have always wanted and needed – we make saving for emergencies and personal goals easy, accessible, and rewarding. Employers leverage our automation technology and our human-first marketing to empower and incentivize better savings behavior, and they’re willing to do that because they believe it will pay off with better affinity and well-being. Unlike a 401(k), there are no restrictions or penalties – and it’s not invested in the market. Instead, it’s sitting in a safe and secure FDIC-insured savings account with a high interest – and into which employers also chip in up to a couple hundred dollars of extra cash incentives.
You may have heard of financial wellness and may be even emergency savings accounts (ESAs), but what really sets us apart is that we’re built by and with people who have had to scrape together dollars to make ends meet – and eventually saved up enough to tackle our next goal. That manifests through a technology that’s both digitally (doesn’t need to be downloaded as an app) and financially (no credit checks) inclusive. As a service with true human support. As a program that meets employees where they are with plan design. As a technology that respects the privacy of employees while clearly delivering ROI data back to the employer. And as a business that’s minority owned, with 55% women ownership and 79% BIPOC team members.
This was definitely not easy. The initial pains of coming to America and the ensuing trials and tribulations were… painful! Not only that, from the moment of idea to the moment when the business was actually founded were separated by 5 years, over a thousand interviews with different people, and personally saving $60K – an incredible sum for me and any average American.
From there, it was convincing a world that this solution not only needed to exist, but it was actually wanted by employees as a benefit. To think that we’ve gone from that level of dissonance from employers to federal policy enabling workplace emergency savings is mind-boggling. Especially to think that we played a tiny, yet important role in making that policy happen as change agents. In some regards, I feel my personal legacy will include enabling a more inclusive financial benefits ecosystem – and we have much farther to go to truly call it that!
Promoting equal opportunities for BIPOC, immigrants, residents of disadvantaged rural and urban communities is a matter of personal and professional urgency for me. As someone who has often felt like an underdog, I have always wanted to create something that was built for “the rest of us,” and I truly feel that’s the hunger behind Sunny Day Fund.
If we succeed in our mission, a younger version of myself and my family would not have experienced the same financial volatility that impacted us so negatively. Many of today’s systems tend to primarily benefit those who already have resources, including how people get paid and the various benefits they can access. On a daily basis, I’m standing for folks who have had fewer resources historically, like immigrants, women, and Black and Hispanic Americans.
To overcome all of this, in one word, took resilience, hunger, and delusion. Some may think it’s because I have a PhD from a top school, that it was my intelligence that enabled me. While I appreciate all of which education has given me, including exposure to the very principles we preach at Sunny Day Fund, for us to overcome all the challenges we’ve faced thus far, it was resilience, hunger, and delusion. Resilience in the sense that I and the team needed to fight back whenever we lost. Hunger to win – even if not now, next time. And delusion – I jokingly call our team “mission-delusional” – because what we believe in, the vision in our minds is a society whose financial well-being looks far different than it does today. I’ve had folks say that that vision was crazy, it will never happen, that it was delusional – and I said, so be it! We must make the change we want to see, after all. I think these are lessons I’ve learned as well.
Two other lessons are really regarding people. First, engage your people as if they’re the only people on the only ship in a far-wide sea. On a journey like that, communication becomes the lifeblood of surviving and thriving. You can either become a ghost ship of soul-less individuals, or a spirited one filled with joy and music. In other words, create a culture that’s internally strong – especially in this remote environment. Second, remember that the clients you’re talking with are a product of potentially years of indoctrination in broken systems – change won’t happen in mass, but rather slowly. That’s why it’s so important to elevate and embrace those early adopters.
I hope the world knows that we’re pretty wild about making everyone wealthier. It’s not because we love money, but because we love the sense of freedom that comes with security and despise the sense of drowning that comes with scarcity. We may not be doing something that impacts the future of the planet, but because of the pervasive inequality that divides us, our team feels strongly that we’re truly impacting the future of humanity, in one tiny, sunny way.
If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
LA has such great food, culture, and scenery, it’s hard to miss.
I’ve got wonderful family in LA, so they’d definitely top the list of folks to catch up with and explore while there.
Katie Bingol, my sister-in-law, performs at The Hollywood Comedy and the Ha Ha Comedy Club, so we’d definitely meet up with her for a show after a drink or two at Employees Only or The Rodger Room. She’ll probably loop us around to the other comedy spots like The Comedy Story or Hollywood Improv.
For quick bites, my hands down go to has got to be Hart House – their food will blow your mind. Delicious, spicy for those that love it, umami for everyone else, and shakes that make you guess twice — all because it’s meat free. Definitely worth checking out, especially because they know how to treat their employees well! Yes, their employees do have Sunny Day Fund as a benefit 😀
I am a big fan of exploring different neighborhoods and trying different restaurants, so Chinatown and Koreatown, and probably will let my cousin Niharika of ReddySetEat guide me there and anywhere in LA.
I am sure your readers are already aware of the other spots that are blowing up like Tacos 1986 and Prince St Pizza (yes, yes – get that it’s a NY transplant, but we’re all transplants!).
For a good, scenic hike, there’s the BBT – my other friends in LA are outdoorsy, so this will likely be a BYO + enjoy the world type situation. Or a chill day at South Bay.
For the shopper friends, you can’t go wrong with the farmers and flea markets basically everywhere – easy to build into the Sunday schedule before they depart!
Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Without my parents bringing me to America or having the faith in me to take charge in a financial crisis, I would have not had the passion or life experience to even think about this problem.
And it was my inspiring life partner, Sarah Bingol, who propelled me to take the leap. She knew I was restless, she felt my “delusion” in fixing a broken financial system. Sarah is as much a founder of Sunny Day Fund as I am. If I could only give a single shoutout, it would thus be to my family that made me who I am and the family that sustains and empowers the dream within me to become reality.
Our team at Sunny Day Fund are just as “mission delusional” as I am, and I owe them many thanks for taking on this challenge and supporting me and each other.
There’ve been countless mentors and advisors, our Savers themselves who believed in our vision and themselves just as much as our team. I am deeply humbled by the community that supports us.
Website: https://www.sunnydayfund.com/
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mysunnydayfund
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sunnydayfund
Image Credits
All images were taken by Sunny Day Fund team members.