SoFi Blog

We are excited to announce the 2018 class of SoFi Entrepreneurs! These ten companies stood out amongst the hundreds of incredible applications we received, representing a diverse set of industries, backgrounds, and big problems they’re trying to solve. We are excited to ride shotgun and help them all navigate their entrepreneurial journeys. Over the next ten months, we’ll devote our coaching and resources to helping each of these ten companies get off the ground, culminating in our Demo Day in October:

First of all, congratulations to recent MBA graduates! Many members of the SoFi team have been in your shoes and we know the sense of accomplishment you feel when you finally earn your MBA. While the journey of higher education has come to an end, the journey outside of graduate school is just beginning. For many, the top priority is now to find or a job and to pay off any student loans that you may have accrued.

by Jing Liao, Chief Human Resources Officer

This year’s events at SoFi have served as a stark reminder about the importance of company culture. Since September, our board and leadership team have been taking a hard look at SoFi’s culture—and we have identified several areas for improvement. To address those areas, we have launched an initiative called “One SoFi” to work together to define the culture and values we want to embrace as a community across our nearly 1,300 people and seven offices.

We began the initiative with a company-wide survey to assess the present state of our culture, recognize our strengths, and identify opportunities for improvement. We had extremely strong participation across the company, with 81 percent of employees taking the survey. Once the results were compiled, we held discussions on the issues raised amongst leadership, across teams, and together as a company.

by Joanne Bradford

‘Fifty percent off’. ‘Buy one get one free’. ‘Twenty four hour sales’. Yes, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all about the deals, as well as the associated frenzy that comes with them every year.

But while we’re rushing stores and frantically going online to fill our carts, we often don’t think about the hidden prices that can come with those discounted items. If we took a moment to consider that swiping a credit card on all those bargain purchases comes with the added cost of APR fees, we’d probably be less excited to camp outside a store for the evening, or actually fight over a TV. Point blank: With credit card interest bills over time, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale items actually cost more than those crazy deals suggest.

Anyone who pursues the medical field knows that the path to becoming a doctor is laden with student debt. In fact, 76% of 2016 medical school graduates have student loans, with a median student debt load of $190,000 at graduation. And future doctors aren’t just sitting on a pile of debt throughout medical school; even upon starting residency, they’re still accruing interest on that debt while only earning, typically, about $60,000 a year.