Strategic Finance Leader | Former Founder & CEO
Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Finance Officer at Flare (acquired 2023).
I lead with finance as the lens for building a business’s operating plans and investing in its priorities.
As a founder, I raised capital, managed a board, launched, scaled, and sold a company. I built the product, marketing, and operating plans that finance had to invest the right resources in, not just report on. That combination is what lets me connect the numbers to the decisions that actually move a company forward.
I am a lifelong learner about new industries, how and why things work, and what gets people excited. I use business and technology as a tool for addressing big problems and market opportunities. And I love working with my mind and my hands (‘mens et manus’) to build beautiful things that people love.
Awards
Flare was selected for the Best Inventions of 2020. The 2020 list includes innovations that are making the world better, smarter, more enjoyable, and of course safer.
“Personal safety solutions, like rape whistles and pepper spray, were designed by men years ago; they were designed by people who haven’t experienced personal safety concerns in the way that women and minorities have,” critiques de Zarraga. “They’ve all been solution-first, rather than starting with the individual, understanding their safety concerns and then designing a solution to meet their needs.”
“We don’t see ourselves as a jewelry company or even necessarily a product company,” says de Zarraga. “We create technology that allows people to feel more confident and safe as they go about their lives. But ultimately, we realize our product shouldn’t exist: We want to live in a world where people don’t experience violence and harassment as part of their everyday life. We hope that we’re just a stopgap solution until that time comes.”
“Since launching in early 2020, Flare has seen rapid growth. The company says it has already sold out of inventory three times over, and according to SimilarWeb, a digital intelligence firm for website traffic, it is the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer brand with a 313.7% increase in website traffic quarter-over-quarter.”
"We want to lead a movement in personal security and to help share the way that we see safety," de Zarraga says. "It's not just about being physically safe in the most dire situations, it's also about feeling safe, and all the microaggressions and smaller signals that we get where we often feel stuck. You feel like there's not much that you can do, and you feel a little out of control. We aim to take that power back, to take that agency back, and to lead a movement of people sharing their experiences about that so that we can broaden the definition of what safety really is."
“To solve safety you need societal, institutional, cultural, legal, medical change,” Fitzgerald said. Moving forward, the goal is to “make safety accessible to as many people as we can,” de Zarraga said. “We know safety is different for everyone, but we’re taking it one step at a time.”