When Caring is Currency | Lisha Bell, PayPal

Aug 17

PlayFull Podcast - Kristine Michie - Lisha Bell

When Caring is Currency | Lisha Bell, PayPal

Orange boots and gumbo vie with activism in capital markets when the PlayFull Podcast welcomes its inaugural guest, PayPal’s Lisha Bell.

On the episode, you’ll hear how a cartwheel turned Lisha’s personal and professional lives upside down during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, and ultimately led to a $100M corporate commitment from PayPal to entrepreneurs of color – that Lisha now oversees.

In addition to her day job investing and leveraging the PayPal Equity Fund, Lisha is also an active angel investor, VC, and advocate for creating opportunities and career pathways for fund managers and other investors of color nationwide.

Lisha shares stories about growing up in LA, working alongside her father and uncle at the family’s gas station, and explores the through-line between making change (coins) at the counter and making change (systemic) in how dollars flow to diverse founders.

From her time forming and performing with a USC dance troupe to the orange boots that she dons for big events, and how to gain a coveted ticket to her annual gumbo feast, Lisha’s take on play reveals it’s as much a counter-balance to weighty matters at work as it is her secret sauce to getting that very work done.

Listen in as Lisha speaks with humor, candor, and enthusiasm about serious work and serious play, and in our signature What’s the Scoop feature find out what she thinks about the dairy-free ice cream we’ve secured from – guess what? – a woman-founded, woman-led ice cream brand.

How you can connect with Lisha:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lishabell/

Lisha brings over 20 years of demonstrated technology innovation focused on digital money movement solutions. Her career has focused on building and investing in products that serve community needs to bridge the capital divide. Lisha is currently at PayPal Ventures, where she leads the Economic Opportunity Fund, the 100M investment into diverse emerging fund managers. In prior roles with PayPal, she led Product for the Financially Underserved Segment and Pay with Venmo product. Prior to Paypal, she worked at Wells Fargo, Kohl’s, Feedzai in various payments-related roles, where she built the earliest digital financial products like online banking, bill pay, and digital wallets.

Lisha Bell is cofounder of BLXVC, an angel syndicate of moms funding Black and Brown founders. She is the host of the Sisters with Ventures Podcast, which aims to tell the stories of women in VC. Bell is also the prior deal flow lead for Pipeline Angels, an angel group of impact investors focused on women and femmes to build over 7M portfolio. Lisha also serves as board chair for Black Girl Ventures. She is a recognized employee resource group leader with over 20 years of experience a Fortune 500 companies. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, cooking, and dancing, all while balancing motherhood duties with her daughter. Lisha holds a BSc in Business Administration, Information Systems from USC ,as well as MBAs from UC Berkeley and Columbia Business Schools where she was recognized as the USC Widney Outstanding Alumna and 2013 Berkeley Columbia Distinguished Service Award recipient, respectively. She has been featured in Forbes, Huffpost, Bloomberg, Cheddar TV, and Black Enterprise.