Zoë Barry is the definition of a dynamite go-getter. From Wall Street to racetracks, the CEO and founder of Zingeroo continues to make an impact in more traditionally male-dominated industries. Here, Barry sits down to chat about the inspiration behind Zingeroo and acquired company ZappRx, thoughts on cryptocurrency and advice toward women looking to dominate the business world.

What is your Nantucket connection?

I grew up coming here. My parents and I and my other siblings would come in the summers. We would rent a house here usually at the end of August in the first two weeks of September.

Let’s talk about your entrepreneurial start. I assume you had this in you from childhood.

I always had a mischievous bounce in my step. One of my earliest entrepreneurship endeavors was when I really wanted a pet hamster. I didn’t understand how money worked, and so I asked my mom if I could clean the house like the cleaning lady did. And she said, “Absolutely not.” So I said, “Well, how am I supposed to make money and buy a hamster, then?” And so she came up with this idea for balloon animals, and my babysitter and I learned how to make balloon animals. For a week, she gave us $20 for seed money.

I learned about having a co-founder and business relationships. I learned about quality and different balloons and ones that popped versus [those that] didn’t. I learned about margin, which ones are more expensive versus less expensive. I learned about branding, because I was a seven-year-old kid selling balloon animals to other kids.

Zoë Barry represents part of the small percentage of women in car racing.

You then sold ZappRx and started another company called Zingeroo.

I had a very heated dinner table conversation with my brothers. We were debating movement in the stock market. They were economics majors at Stanford, but I actually worked on Wall Street. And I said, “Well, how do you think the stocks are going to play out?” I thought XYZ stock was going to do better; they thought ABC stock was going to do better. So I said, “Alright, I’m happy to take your money. Let’s open up some brokerage accounts and trade against each other. Let’s see who is the best investor.” I thought the retail investing experience was going to be like when I worked at the hedge fund. You were going to have benchmarking, you were all going to understand your performance relative to each other and you’re competing for a year-end bonus.

Turns out, investing on the retail side is like playing solitaire. It is you by yourself, you have no insights, no data. … I’m an athlete obsessed with data from a competitive standpoint. I was so frustrated by the experience that I decided to found a whole company around the idea of building a community, building real portfolios— not paper trading—and creating shared data. Share data on your portfolio—if you’re at the top of the leaderboard, you should get a bonus. And you can compete for a chance to win. This is geared at retail, and we went out and got a broker-dealer license, we built an app, we launched it, and then what we started to realize, particularly in the last couple of months as the Fed raised interest rates, is the market has changed and moved. Where this is really taking flight, where people are really, really interested, is not the sort of smaller account retail investor, but the much more sophisticated retail investor.

How many other women are at the same level as you?

I was the only woman running in the Porsche sprint challenge last year. They have an East Coast and a West Coast. There’s one woman on the West Coast, and I was the only woman on the track in that. We’ve been getting podiums. So for IGT [International GT racing], I was on the podium, which means I got the hat with the laurels. … And they were very surprised by that. IGT was really happy to have a woman on the podium. At the sprint challenge, I won the Apex Award, which for every race they say who has the most passes, so I won that at COTA [Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas].