Shannon Nash, CFO at Alphabet’s drone delivery subsidiary Wing, is leveraging her tech and finance background to revolutionize package delivery. With over 350,000 deliveries across three continents, Wing aims to become the preferred mode for small package delivery, offering a faster, more sustainable alternative to traditional methods.
Nash opened up to rolling out about what journey led to her career path.
What gravitated you toward the tech industry?
I’ve always been a curious person, particularly in terms of what makes our life more efficient, better, etc. I find myself gravitating towards companies that solve problems on a global scale. As a young kid, I was fascinated by a cartoon show called “The Jetsons.” I remember daydreaming about some of the things from “The Jetsons” and wishing that they would be real. Many years later, if you go back and look at that cartoon, there are a lot of people who have written articles. There’s so much from that cartoon that is relevant to what we’re doing now.
What is Wing, and how is it making a difference?
Wing is a drone delivery company. In particular, Wing focuses on delivering the multitude of small packages that go around the world today. I think the difference is drone delivery is meant to be fast and more efficient. As opposed to other forms of deliveries for small packages, think like your bottle of aspirin or your coffee, having that delivered by a 3000-pound vehicle is not sustainable. It’s not sustainable in terms of the cost of doing so, the speed of doing so, and what it’s doing to our environment. Wing has set out to become what we’re calling the preferred mode of delivery for the millions of small packages that are delivered around the world each day. We’ve done over 350,000 deliveries on three continents, including Europe, Australia, and the United States.
As the CFO, can you tell us what experiences led you to this leadership role?
Based on my background and what I went to school for, I wanted to major in business. I wound up majoring in accounting. After college, I went to law school. Even the type of law that I was practicing was more corporate and business law. I was practicing law, and how I even kind of made the pivot to go back into finance and accounting was simply because I found myself being excited about the business part of the deal. I would notice that the corporate lawyers and general counsels of the world were focused on a lot of the legal terms. I could do that, but I wasn’t excited about it. I was more excited about what the CFO was talking about and what the finance people were talking about. They were running the models; they were coming back with data to help make the decision. I worked in Switzerland for a big company and it just opened my eyes to global business and how it works. When I came back to the United States, that’s when I decided to make a pivot.
