Sharron Battle’s mother knew her daughter would be an entrepreneur years before Battle did. The first glimpse might have been in kindergarten, when the teacher told Blanche Bragg her daughter was trying to charge children to fill pages in Sharron’s new coloring book. “At a very early age, children show who they are going to be,” said Battle, PMBA, ’05, who no longer colors pictures, but uses them to shake up the financial industry.
Battle is founder and CEO of selfiepay, her Atlanta-based startup that is testing an app for making purchases via a cellphone mobile wallet or at in-store kiosks by using a selfie to verify the customer. Battle plans to add retina verification to the app soon, which will offer customers 100 percent accuracy of identification. Merchants don’t get a copy of the photo. Facial recognition software only ensures that the buyer is authorized to make the purchase with the credit card information stored on the phone.
Battle’s road to launching this startup—and selfiepay isn’t her first—has wound through a half-dozen industries and half again as many jobs. The Florissant, Missouri native was a mechanical engineer for Boeing when she decided she wanted to put her career on the management path.
That led to her MBA at Olin, followed by a job at Procter & Gamble as a project manager, then as a quality manager overseeing a 60-person team in the diaper-making division. “That place prepared me for entrepreneurship,” Battle said. “They taught me how to do business, how to redesign organizations,” which eventually led to her certification as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt practitioner, adept at teaching and building collaborative, efficient business organizations.
“I had an awesome boss—I’ll never forget Mac McDowell,” she said. “He knew I was like a sponge. He made sure I would learn every facet of the business, from HR to logistics—everything.”
“My mom always felt I was an entrepreneur. I never knew. I wish I had known earlier. But all of these opportunities prepared me for where I am now.”
After gaining increasingly responsible posts at The Dial Corporation and Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc.—restructuring and building teams along the way—Battle joined Deloitte as a senior consultant, doing similar work for the consumer goods industry, medical, finance, gaming, and the federal government.
By 2012, Battle was ready to strike out on her own. She was close to finishing a program at the Portfolio Center, a prestigious design school in Atlanta, when she was driven to turn a concept she’d been contemplating into reality. Her goal was to figure out how creative people could share content on a social network and get paid for it. The concept led to her first startup, derbywire, where she’s still the CEO.
But it was a small piece of derbywire that really interested investors: the payment method, based on facial recognition. When she realized that was a potential business on its own, she stepped back and worked round the clock to develop a prototype in 2013. Now, she’s in private beta testing, working in partnership with Samsung, Best Buy, Optimal Payments PLC, and another company selfiepay hasn’t identified.
“My mom always felt I was an entrepreneur. I never knew. I wish I had known earlier,” Battle said. “But all of these opportunities prepared me for where I am now.”
