Title:Alumni Spotlight: Alex Heintze (B’19), International Expansion at Numeric

Meet Alex Heintze (B’19), International Expansion at Numeric! 

Please introduce yourself.

I’m Alex Heintze, an McDonough School of Business 2019 graduate, where I studied Management and minored in Cultural Anthropology. Today, I work at an AI startup called Numeric, and last year moved to London to help open the company’s first office outside of the U.S. and lead our international expansion.

Was there any specific aspect of your time at Georgetown that influenced you to pursue entrepreneurship, and what did that look like?

I was originally drawn to Georgetown for reasons that resonate with a lot of Hoyas. In high school, I was interested in global affairs and public policy, so studying those subjects in Washington, D.C. felt like a no-brainer.

Then, during the fall of my freshman year, I surprised myself by pivoting and starting a company called Flynance. That led me to get involved on campus with StartupHoyas and the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative, where I worked throughout all four years at Georgetown.

By graduation, I knew I wanted to be where all the innovation was happening. In the same way that Washington, D.C. had felt like the natural place to explore global affairs and public policy, San Francisco felt like the place to be. So that’s where I headed off to.

Can you share a little bit more about the company you started freshman year?

I started a company called Flynance, essentially a digital media startup.

The idea stemmed from something relatively simple: a lot of Georgetown students were applying for Wall Street jobs, and I felt like there was an opportunity to make financial news more approachable to help them prepare for their interviews.

At its peak, we had a team of about 15 people, and we entered several pitch competitions on campus where I got to pitch Flynance to investors.

It definitely wasn’t a hugely successful company. But it was my first experience taking an idea, turning it into something real, convincing other people to work on it with me, and putting it out into the world. It was so much fun and ended up changing the direction of my career.

What do you find unique about the Generation Z entrepreneur?

I think the biggest difference is that the barrier to starting a company continues to get lower.

Social media has made people and information more accessible than ever. If you’re curious about an industry or someone’s career, there’s a pretty good chance you can find them and reach out directly. You don’t need to already know the right people to start building a network.

And AI is accelerating that even further. You can prototype a product, research a market, create content, or test an idea dramatically faster than you could even a few years ago, often without the same level of technical experience that once would have been required.

Of course, that doesn’t mean building a successful company is easy. If anything, when it becomes easier for everyone to build, figuring out what actually makes your company different becomes even more important.

What does a day in your life look like?

One of the best things about working at a startup is that there really isn’t a typical day.

I joined Numeric when we had fewer than 20 employees and had just raised our Series A. At that stage, everyone had to wear a lot of hats. In my first year, I worked across customer success, business operations, and go-to-market.

After moving to London to help launch our international business, the questions got even broader. On any given day, I might be interviewing someone we want to hire, talking to a customer about how they use the product, working with our sales team to enter a new market, or giving feedback to our product team.

A lot of the job is basically asking, “What needs to be true for Numeric to be successful internationally?” and then figuring out how to make those things happen.

What has your experience combining international affairs with entrepreneurship looked like?

My career has been a little nonlinear, but in hindsight, the different pieces connect pretty clearly.

After Georgetown, I joined The Voleon Group, an AI-driven quantitative investment firm. At the time, I still had to explain to some people what AI even was!

About a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and I started thinking more seriously about what I wanted my career to look like. I loved working at Voleon, but I realized that I missed engaging more directly with the world around me and wanted to be closer to the startup ecosystem.

So I applied to become a Schwarzman Scholar, which took me to Beijing to pursue a Master of Global Affairs at Tsinghua University. I moved there in the middle of the pandemic, at a time when most expats were leaving China. It was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life and a really unique moment to study U.S.-China relations. Much of my academic work focused on emerging technology, innovation, and competition between the two countries.

Afterward, I joined J.P. Morgan on its Venture & Growth Capital Markets team, where I was able to quickly grow my professional network in the startup ecosystem while also learning how the capital markets that support it work. It also gave me a front-row seat to how quickly AI was beginning to reshape the technology landscape.

Eventually though, I wanted to move from advising these companies to actually helping build one, which led me to Numeric.

What’s been really exciting is that a lot of my interests have unexpectedly come together there. I’m working at a startup, but I also spend a lot of my time thinking about different countries, cultures, and markets, which takes me back to many of my original interests at Georgetown.

International expansion is fundamentally a cross-cultural exercise. You have to understand how people in different markets make decisions, what they value, how they buy technology, and how your company might need to adapt.

For a while, I think I assumed I had to pick one lane. Was I going to be a technology and startup person, or someone interested in global affairs and public policy? But it turns out I didn’t have to choose.

For Georgetown students who have a lot of different interests, I think that’s something worth remembering. Your career doesn’t necessarily have to fit neatly into one bucket.

When I was a freshman, I never would have predicted that I would be working at an AI startup and living in London at age 29. But when I connect the dots backward, it makes a lot of sense. I’ve mostly tried to stay close to the things I’m genuinely curious about and raise my hand when interesting opportunities come along.

That has probably been more useful for me than trying to map out exactly what my career would look like three, five, or ten years in advance.

What is the hardest part of your job?

Probably the talent piece. At a startup, the first hundred or so employees have an enormous influence on what the company becomes. That’s especially true when you’re opening a new office thousands of miles away from headquarters.

When I moved to London, Numeric had no international employees and no international office. We weren’t just trying to hire talented people. We were also figuring out how to maintain what was working about the company in the U.S. while building a team that made sense abroad.

Those early hires can completely change the trajectory of a team. A really great person doesn’t just do their own job well. They make everyone around them better. Getting those decisions right is hard.

What would you say is the most fulfilling part of your job?

Definitely the people I meet and the relationships I’ve built.

Working internationally means constantly engaging with people from very different backgrounds. My work has taken me to places across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, where I’ve had to learn how business is done differently, what matters to customers there, and how we need to adapt the way Numeric operates.

I really enjoy that process of getting to know people, understanding how they think, and building trust. In a lot of ways, it brings together the things I was interested in at Georgetown.

How does Georgetown continue to support you as an alumnus?

I loved my time at Georgetown, and one of the things I’ve appreciated most is that my relationship with the university didn’t end when I graduated.

I was involved on campus and benefited from so many professors, administrators, and alumni. Since graduating, I’ve tried to pay some of that forward.

While living in San Francisco, I became involved with the Georgetown Club of Northern California and helped organize events and engage the alumni community there. More recently, I’ve served on the board of the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Alliance, where I’ve been able to help create more opportunities and build community for alumni interested in the startup ecosystem.

The thing I’ve consistently found about Georgetown is that it attracts people who are genuinely interested in the world and passionate about what they do. I’ve continued to meet interesting people and build meaningful relationships through the Georgetown community long after graduating.

Finally, what is one piece of advice you would give to any Georgetown student who might be interested in entrepreneurship?

Don’t wait for permission to start participating. If there’s an industry that fascinates you, find people doing interesting work in it and reach out to them. Georgetown’s alumni network is an incredible place to start. Send the cold email. Ask the alum whose career makes you curious if they’ll spend 20 minutes talking with you. Some people won’t respond, but you’d be surprised how many will.

And build things, even if they’re small. Create a prototype. Start a newsletter. Organize an event. Try something, see what happens, and keep going.

Your first idea doesn’t need to work. Sometimes the most important thing is just experimenting with turning an idea into something real.

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