Good morning.
She's a finance chief, a CPA, an attorney, an award-winning documentary film producer, and a director on several boards who names Debbie Allen as one of her greatest mentors. Meet Shannon Nash, CFO at the on-demand drone delivery company Wing.
The first time Nash received a package via a drone delivery, it was Blue Bell ice cream. “It was like seven-year-old Shannon's dream because I grew up a huge fan of ‘The Jetsons,’” she tells me. “I loved that cartoon. And I used to say, one day will that be real?”
Wing, operated by Google parent Alphabet Inc., recently announced that it's working with Walmart to launch drone delivery in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in the coming weeks. Wing will start delivering out of a Walmart Supercenter in Frisco, Texas, and by the end of the year expand to a second nearby store. The deliveries will be available to homes within approximately six miles of the stores.
“With the Walmart partnership, we’ll be able to reach more than 60,000 homes,” Nash says. “We've done over 350,000 commercial deliveries in three continents. Most of those were in Australia. And we are now expanding those deliveries in the United States.”
‘Debbie was somebody who believed in me’
Nash joined Wing in 2022 bringing with her more than 20 years of experience in finance, law, and global strategy. One of her many leadership positions was as senior counsel at Amgen, a biotechnology company. It taught her a lot about working for a big, publicly traded company, and global operations, which is applicable to Wing as it's part of Alphabet, Nash says. At Amgen, she gained better insight into the finance function, ultimately deciding that was an area that she wanted to pursue.
But Nash came to a pivotal point in her career where she needed a schedule that prioritized flexibility and family. And that’s where Debbie Allen, renowned producer, director, writer, actor, and choreographer, came in.
“Bill and I have an adult son who is autistic; he is now 25 years old,” says Nash, who is married to Bill Nash, CFO of Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company. In her son’s younger years, there were struggles in terms of therapies and finding adequate childcare, Nash explains. “And both Bill and I had careers at the time,” she says. “How do you juggle those types of things? I was having challenges figuring out how I could still have my career with multiple appointments in the middle of the day. It was very challenging, back in the mid-2000s for working parents.”
Nash continues, “I was very fortunate because I met Debbie Allen’s husband, Norm Nixon. Norm said, ‘Hey, my wife really needs some help running her organization and I would love to have you talk to her. He took a chance on me.” Allen wound up offering Nash the position of executive director of the Debbie Allen Dance Academy and a flexible schedule to be able to put the needs of her son first.
“What I had in Debbie was somebody who believed in me,” Nash says. “And she said it on so many occasions. She was supportive of my personal situation. I remember her saying, ‘I don't really care about sitting here from nine to five, just get the work done.’” Nash administered a budget of several million dollars, restructured cash management, and led compliance, among other functions.
Nash says that role created her interest in startups. “I was doing everything from operations, HR, legal, finance, everything that you can think of to run that organization,” she says. This would lead to Nash accumulating years of experience helping companies grow and scale rapidly.
After working with Allen, Nash started building connections in the media world, even becoming the CFO at Sunseeker Media, a production company. While there, she helped produce Colored My Mind, a documentary about autism with a focus on parents of color. It won the American Pavilion Film Award in Cannes.
Along with the operational side, Nash had to raise money for productions. She says it’s similar to working in finance at a tech startup where you need to raise money from investors, like private equity, and VCs.
When it comes to Nash’s CFO role at Wing, she aims to empower her team. “I want people who are critical thinkers, lifelong learners, who thrive in learning new stuff,” she says. In her spare time, she’s still producing. Nash is the executive producer of the documentary OnBoard, which chronicles the rise of Black women on America's boards, and had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. And, Nash also plans to resume leading Zumba classes one day, which she really enjoys.
“I tell Bill that in my retirement, I’m going to teach Zumba,” she quips.
Have a good weekend.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
