S1EP06 - Find the Excitement with Mical Jeanlys-White

This is The Capital Flex. I'm Naseem Sayani. This show codifies the capital playbook because no founder should have to learn the hard way. We talk about what really happens behind closed doors, the bias, the breakthroughs, and the things no one says out loud. If you've ever walked into a room and felt the system wasn't built for you, you're in the right place. Hi, welcome to The Capital Flex. My guest today is McCall Johnlees-White. She is the CEO and founder of Wealthmore, an AI-native wealth tech company dedicated to making expert financial advice accessible to everyday investors. McCalla has more than 20 years of experience in financial services, including senior executive positions at JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Nestlé, and Accenture. At JPMC, she led a $22 billion credit card portfolio, built My Chase Plan, a buy now, pay later product introduced before the market trend behind BNPL. And played a key role in developing and launching several notable products, including Slate, Chase's small business card, Sapphire, and American Express co-branded cards. During her decade at JPMC, she was recognized as a general manager, changemaker, entrepreneur, and culture carrier. After her role as managing director at JPMorgan Chase, McCall launched WealthMar to bring innovation and inclusivity to wealth management. With wealth management services increasing wealth generation by 2 to 3 times for a single household. Nicole found it paramount to create access to these services for every family that wants them. Nicole and I met about 18 months ago, something around there, via another founder friend. And, and then I had the incredible opportunity to lead her pre-seed fundraising round when I was at my last fund. And we have been fast friends ever since. So I'm so excited that you're here. Thank you for joining me.

I'm so excited to be here.

So for everyone listening, tell us a little bit more about yourself and about Wethmore.

Yeah, definitely. My founder journey started a few years ago. I was very busy, happy in my days at JPM, but saw this gap for wealth management, felt like we had made significant progress in getting people smarter about their credit cards. You know, we'd sort of demystified things like the credit score, probably also destigmatized it as well. Made it more of a household thing, but we weren't seeing, at least I didn't feel like I was seeing enough progress on the wealth building side for everyday Americans. I saw rich people getting richer and I didn't see the number moving, the needle moving for everyday Americans. And as a person who had the benefit of access and information early on to start my own investing journey and saw the power of that, it was very much a light bulb moment for me. Like, go build it. I love that.

It's fantastic cuz that's when we can change things given what the experience we've had and what we've seen be gaps for certain audiences and we can bring something to it. That's when you, you have to get after it and you have to go say, wait, I can go fix that. Let me go fix that cuz somebody should. So, you know, the, the grounding of this podcast is to get into the fundraising stories of what it takes to then get the capital we need. To build the products and services that we believe the world needs. And in the seat that I sit in as an investor, I get lots of great stories from founders about what works and what doesn't work, and also the really hard stuff that unfortunately happens on the, the female founder side of the ecosystem. And so my mission with this is to surface all of that and talk about the hard stuff that's happening and, and how we overcome it and how we be ready for it and how we go to market better from when we're fundraising. And know just what's going on in the system and some of the system breaks, breakpoints and biases that, that do exist and that it's not us, it's the system. But I also know that you and I have talked a lot about how you've been able to turn some of those things into much more strategic opportunities to work your fundraise, uh, in ways that have worked really well for what you've been trying to achieve. So we'll talk about both of those things, but I would love to start off with, if you had to use 3 words to describe your fundraising experience, what would those be?

My catchphrase would be follow the excitement. I, I just strongly believe that you have to lean into the excitement in order to have a successful fundraise. And by that I mean follow investors that are excited about you, excited about the problem that you're solving. And excited about the solution that you're building. And if those 3 things line up, you are far more likely to get to a close versus if you cannot say yes to those 3 things.

I think it's great. How did you, how did you create a strategy around your raise given maybe some of the hurdles that you might've hit up front? How did that turn into a better way to approach it for you.

Yeah, I think most of us have this CRM spreadsheet you're tracking, right? And then you sort of start to realize, at least for me, as I was tracking my own like CRM spreadsheet of who I was meeting, and then I would sort of move folks to like top, middle, bottom, it became obvious to me that the ones that were moving to the top sort of hit those 3 markers. So it was like, okay. There's a trend here. The people that are committing to us, the people that we're getting a second or third meeting with, the people that are truly in our data room doing real due diligence and follow-up hit those three markers. There is excitement. And where we were finding that it was like, you know, think of it as like a heat map where things were just kind of like, eh, you know, was at the bottom, right? And so you start to realize that, okay, it is really hard to turn someone who is not excited into excited versus someone who's already excited. And now you're sort of building on that momentum.

How did you, what were the indicators of excitement? How did you figure out that someone got it versus if they didn't get it?

I know this is probably not the, you know, people don't love to go into like the psychology of things, but You know, most people form an opinion about you within 7 seconds, and I think most of us will jump on a Zoom or walk into a coffee shop with the person, and I don't think it takes long for you to be like, is there a chemistry match? Yay or nay? And I think the same thing applies to that fundraising. You know, is there a chemistry match? Oftentimes, if you've been introduced to someone through someone who also knows both of you, there's a higher likelihood of a chemistry match because that middle person has brokered it. Like you mentioned the friend who introduced us.

Yeah.

You know, that was a brokered interaction, right? Versus when it's, you know, it's flat out cold. Maybe you don't have as much in common. So I think that that's a big one. Leverage as many people in your network to help broker some of these introductions. They are more likely to broker a good chemistry match to start things off. Make sure you understand if that investor, if you even fit the thesis. I think for what's confusing, I think for a lot of women founders and diverse founders is, you know, someone will see a, a female investor and they will say, oh great, this is a viable person. But not every female investor has a thesis around investing in other women or a thesis around fintech. So you may have met a great person, they're a great person in your network, but they're not likely to write a check.

Right, right. I get a lot, that's a really good point 'cause I get a lot of inbound from other people of, oh, it's a great female founder, but it's not anything at all that's within thesis. And I go, I don't, I don't just writ large invest in female founders. I do have specific categories I care about, but I will get every female founder out there sent to me just because they know that's core to my thesis. And then the, the brokered introduction that brought us together was also a founder that I've written a check to. So you have that like double benefit of someone I knew and someone that I've also invested in. And those introductions are, they're powerful because you have such a good working relationship with one person. And when they broker an introduction to somebody that they know, it's, it's so qualified that then the investor also leans in more as well because you know them so well.

I like to sort of put myself in the investor seat, right? I'm a first-time founder, an investor, so I'm new to the ecosystem. So just think about the trust that it takes for the person on the other side of the equation to get comfortable enough to write you a meaningful check. Right? Mm-hmm. It's still a very large stakes interaction, transaction that's happening. So if you have someone who can broker an introduction, extend their own social capital, their own proof to vouch for you as a business person, as an ethical person, as a person who will build a great company and stick it through, that has for the investor de-risk the investment considerably.

Mm-hmm. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And then when it, as when you talk to investors about the product itself that you were building or the technology you're building, what kind of questions did you navigate around that? What it is, how it delivers, what it's solving for, like what were those conversations like?

Yeah, I think this goes to the enthusiasm around the problem. The industry that you're in. We had investors that I felt like they were enthusiastic about the industry and the problem, but they had been burned by fintechs. So even understanding like some of your investors have PTSD about the space that you're in.

I'm sure.

I remember going to have a one-on-one. I felt like this investor The other people in the firm had a lot of excitement around what we were building, and I could just sense that this one partner was the holdout. So I was just like, let me go meet with this partner, have a face-to-face meeting, explain what we're, you know, what we're building. And literally within 15 minutes of the conversation, I knew there was no way we were getting a check from that VC. I knew it with like down to my core because every time I was explaining fintech and the space, this person was executing what I call the self-strangulation body language. Self-soothing, self-strangulation, which is generally, oh, I am trying to bring her into a space that she is highly stressed about.

She's never going to get there. She'll never get there.

Never going to get there. Yeah. There had been enough like losses, other investments that had failed for any variety of reasons. So I realized, and that would not have happened over Zoom, but once you're sort of sitting there at a table having coffee and you can see body language, you can see like, you know, people cringe, you know, again, not enough excitement over this. There's too much history. And that's something founders, you know, the, as I've spoken to other founders, you know, when you start to unpack, you realize like, oh yeah, well, if you look at their previous investments that were somewhere similar, you would understand why there's no, the comfort is not there, the willingness is not there yet.

And even with an opportunity space as large as wealth tech, and there's a lot of different corners of wealth tech, but Even within that, there's, it's surprising that somebody wouldn't get there because it seems like such a vast opportunity space.

As a, as a person who's building in money, money is so emotional. We see it on the client side. You know, you can tell people any, you know, this is how volatility is part of the market, but money is just so emotional. And I'm sure many VCs would not agree to that, but money is emotional.

Did you get any just wild reactions to what you were, to what you're after?

You know, I, I think most of us get, particularly in the fintech space, you know, the space is crowded. How will you be different? You know, we got a lot of questions about customer acquisition costs. How will you overcome CAC concerns? And all of those things are valid. I would not say this space is not crowded. I would not say CAC is not a concern. I grew up in financial services. I came from a place that had champagne pockets. So, I very much understand, you know, champagne budgets versus what I call sparkling water budgets. But helping somebody understand the shift that's happening in the industry, being so surgical about the white space opportunity that you see, coming in with, you know, the fact pack around it. You know, we wrote our own investment memo. That's how much conviction I had about what we were doing. That's how much knowledge I have about the space to be able to answer questions around like, why hasn't somebody else built this? You know, why won't they come into this space with the same energy and creativity that we will? Or even helping people understand, the conflicting revenue streams that already exist in certain organizations, which is why they would not, never disrupt that. But we can. Yeah.

Because there are big differences in revenue models between what private wealth does today versus what you are offering. Right. And, and how audiences react to that.

Completely. And I also think there's just a lot of, in the fintech space, there are a lot of people who don't understand the industry or how You know, just as much as users, customers don't understand how a bank works, on this journey, I found a lot of people don't understand how big banks make money.

Mm-hmm.

And so part of, part of why they may have had some of the issues with previous investments were some of the things that, you know, I on the other side can tell you having been in large banks where we would assess fintechs and decide which ones we thought were a real threat or not, discounted certain models because we were like, ah, it was just, it's not gonna happen.

It's too far away. Well, it's too far from the core business model of the bank, and it's targeting an audience that you're fundamentally not speaking to.

Or it's just, you know, you know where the margins are thin and as a Tech, like I would not recommend building in spaces where the margins are prohibitively thin. There's just not much space to go. And I think as you're thinking about building enterprise value and telling a story to investors, investors are looking for software investments that can have high margins. So just as a founder, you know, you've gotta balance the passion for the problem that you're solving for, is this a viable, profitable business model?

Right, right. And has your fundraising experience changed pre-product to now post-product?

Definitely. And, and I do wanna touch a little about the sort of bias when it comes to—

Yeah, yeah, please.

Solving problems that you're passionate about. You know, I think at times when we started our storytelling, people would immediately sort of think that because there is a, you're solving for groups and spaces that have been overlooked, that you're somehow building a nonprofit versus a for-profit model, or that, you know, they should expect concessionary returns, right? So I found myself even having to maniacally wordsmith our documents because people would just make an assumption that literally was nowhere on the page. But because of who I am, I don't know how many times I got asked, you know, is this LVES for Black women? Oh, geez. Or, you know, I, it's like, or hey, is this for the unbanked or unbankable? And you have to say like, No, they, they're not ready to invest. Like if you are unable to meet your basic needs, you surely don't have excess capital to be an investor. So people just, there are so many assumptions that get made about women and diverse founders, particularly if you're working or building in certain spaces that you then have to go the extra mile to tell your story so that your story is not being told for you in a way that is wildly inaccurate.

Right. And I, you must have gotten the, well, do they even wanna be rich question?

Oh, I—

Or versions of that.

Do they even have money?

Do they have money?

That's— You know, our ICP is a college-educated, upwardly mobile person. Who is building wealth, who has an $80,000, $100,000+ salary, who is overlooked because most wealth management firms will request $250,000+ to just open an account to give you access to a wealth advisor.

Right. So you're not— they, they are doing just fine. They have salary. They could, but they are in the 70% of Americans who have less than $1 million in net worth. And so they just don't qualify, which is unreasonable.

They are people that were just like me, got a college degree, got a nice first job, grew up in a household where people were not investing in the market, had no idea. You know, most people would have no idea that they should be investing, how to properly do their 401s. How to have a diversified portfolio, and they wouldn't get access to a wealth advisor until they would be probably in their late 40s, early 50s. And we're bringing that sort of service to someone 20, 30 years sooner so they can actually build far more wealth.

Yeah, 'cause you're losing 20 years of time if you have to wait till you're 45 or 50.

That simple. And that was the message we had to get across to investors. And we just had to be surgical in the storytelling of the white space opportunity, surgical in the word choice, and even surgical in terms of who should you compare Wealthmore to. And that was a big part of writing our own investment memo. In our data room, our investment memo is probably the most utilized document.

That's the first— is that the first thing everyone goes to?

It's not even top of the list, but they find their way to it. I think people are intrigued. I have had people reach out and say, who wrote this investment memo? I've had people ask if you wrote it.

Oh, that's funny. That's great.

Oh, is this the investment memo from your lead investor that they have, you know, shared with you to put in your data room? And I'm like, no, this is one we wrote because we are telling our own story.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. How groundbreaking has this story been for investors? How about, I mean, did they, was the territory new? Was this audience and opportunity new? Did they, I know, I know you have a good table of investors, but did they get it? Like what was that experience like when you finally, when you're explaining it?

I, I go back to the excitement, you know, as you're fundraising, you use other current events in the market. To reinforce your position on this space. We were fortunate that as we were fundraising, I feel like we were sort of like the canary in the coal mine. We were saying hybrid is the future, hybrid is the future, and no one initially would believe us. But then as things were happening where large firms were turning off their robo-advisories, other firms that had bought certain companies were doing away with their personal finance budgeting tools, as other players were making public that they were hiring more advisors and that, you know, they couldn't find enough advisors, we were pulling those stories, those headlines into our storytelling as, hey, here are the receipts. Believe us.

No, it makes a lot of sense. And so it, hopefully they got there with enough of that evidence, right?

It's a, but it's a bit of like the consensus, right? People need to feel like, can they get conviction around an idea? And to the extent that you can provide them with more data points as to why this is right, you know, sort of even if another company similar gets investment, it's a good news story for you.

Well, the whole category has to move forward, right? And if the whole category moves forward, then there's further validation that the, the category's real. So it, it works for everybody. How has fundraising changed as you came out of beta? 'Cause you came outta beta in June, last June.

Yeah. I think, you know, from my perspective, your pre-seed raise is probably the most, I don't wanna say simple because fundraising is not simple. I, I definitely don't wanna say simple, but maybe it is the one that has the most clarity around it. Because you have an idea and you are raising capital to build the thing, right? It is a seed and you have an idea, you believe you have an insight into a market, maybe you have a few early customers as validation, but in my space, an entire tech platform had to be built, compliance measures, we are in a highly regulated space, so we needed to raise capital to build the thing in the proper way that a fintech needs to be built with all of the things, compliance, regulatory, custodian, clearing, SEC registration, all of those things. So the raise was very straightforward. We needed to have an investor believe that with me, you were getting that founder product market fit, that we had the right team in place, and we knew we had certain gaps that we needed to fill to make sure we could tell the team story. That we had sized the opportunity in the white space that we would fill, and that this solution would be the right mousetrap, if you will. So that was, that was our story. Do you believe we are the right people to get it done? So you are out there and investors understand that, you know, you are buying a set of assumptions, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

This episode is brought to you by the All the Wealth Podcast. Check out All the Wealth hosted by McCall and Wealthmore's wealth advisors. They bring Wall Street to Main Street so the everyday American can do well too. Listen to All the Wealth wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to follow so you can catch all the newest episodes as soon as they drop. They are fantastic and you'll enjoy it so much.

Now you have a product in market and you have a whole nother stakeholder.

You have the customer.

Your beloved customer, which is yet another stream of capital, right? Because paying customers present capital. Mm-hmm. Right. And now you also have investors. And now I call this sort of like every raise thereafter is just a different kind of raise because you are raising and you are bringing in capital to meet a customer need. But then there's also an investor expectation, which may be different. And then you have your own vision as the founder in terms of this is the moonshot I see for my company.

Right. And you're now, you're starting to learn based on feedback. Now you're starting to, the original vision of what you were building, you're now getting feedback on it and you're starting to tune right now. You're in product market fit territory.

You got it. And our product is night and day different than the beta that we went to market with.

Yeah. And you've only been out for 6 months now.

A year or so.

A year or so. Yeah. Last June. Right.

It is. Night and day different. Beta users reveal certain things and it also sort of goes into your capital, right? In an ideal world, you raise the capital that gets you through even the beta feedback of development, right? I think Naseem Sayani, most decks that you see are like, here's the capital we need to get in market.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah.

And so that assumes that you built the right product. With the right features for the customer you believe you're serving. But then you go into market and you start testing into that and you find maybe a different ICP and the product that you built needs different features than the ones you started off with, or the features need to be tweaked. Ideally, you raised enough money to do step A and B, but given the capital issues that we as female founders, as Black founders come across, You barely get enough capital to do part A. And that's where I think you see a lot of the challenge in terms of, as a female founder, having enough capital to get yourself to the right product to even get to product market fit, because that assumes you got the product right. And I think that's where you see sort of a lot of the challenges in terms of raising money and getting your flywheel going.

Right, because we don't have enough capital to begin with to get far enough, let alone then having to navigate customer expectations, investor questions and expectations, and then continuing to raise because inevitably, and especially given the market right now, there's going to be a bridge of some kind, right? We have to expect this much to then get to enough traction to raise the next big round. Yeah.

And I'll give you some great examples of this. When we, our beta, we did not have certain, I would say, best-in-class services like Plaid for ID verification, Stripe for payments, Plaid also for linking the bank account and bringing in like the third-party data, right? We knew we wanted them. We met with these teams, and when we started looking at like the cost for the platform fee, ongoing usage, the engineering cost to even build the integrations, we were like, you know what, maybe we do this a little later. And it's just literally like champagne budget versus like sparkling water budget, right? And if you don't have the budget, you're making these hard trade-off decisions. And that's why I think it's so important for investors to understand there are certain places you just cannot, you can't make do without the capital necessary. So it was within weeks of having the beta in market that customers were coming to us and saying, we're like, great, you know, you had been on our waitlist, sign up. And they would get to the page and they're like, well, I don't feel comfortable putting my information.

Yeah, why can't I just use Plaid?

You know, like, I don't know where my Social Security is going. So this is where I mean, like, you know, there's certain things that you just have to believe and invest in the companies so that they can get it right and do it right out the gates because some of these things will not go away, the customer expectation. Does not get lowered. They, the customer doesn't care or know that, hey, this is a startup founded by a female and they get, you know, 2% of the capital. They're—

No, the customer expectation stays the same, right? It doesn't change.

No. Absolutely. They don't know and they could care less.

Right, right.

They're like, I'm expecting a premium product to deliver a premium experience. Period, point, done.

Yeah. What's your, so when you, when you do your next company, what's your, what's your approach to it next time? How do you navigate a fundraise differently so that you don't have these kind of hurdles again?

I don't think we have a solve for these things, right? Because I never wanna tell women dream smaller.

Right.

Right. Because that is in essence what the industry is telling us, right? We won't give you the capital. So then are we to say dream smaller, build smaller businesses? Because then we get shamed for, well, you don't build big investible VC-backable businesses.

That's, that's not the world you and I live in at all.

So I definitely don't want it to be about dream smaller, build smaller businesses, you know, don't go for the big thing, but I myself have found that lean in heavily more so on the customer. Go out there, particularly if you are direct-to-consumer, go to the customer. Let them be a bigger part of the story sooner versus later. If I had to go do it all over again, Well, before we had a product, I would've just been heavily marketing, talking to consumers, activating our social channels just to have built more of the consumer brand love. Even though we were told like, oh, you know, waitlist age and, you know, people will forget, they move on. I don't know if that's entirely true, especially as female founders. We have to just play this game differently. You're not gonna have the same level of resources. The numbers last year and this year have dropped even below the 2%. So I, I don't— telling me the playbook that the people with all the money use doesn't really help me. It's useless.

It just doesn't work, right?

Unless you're going to give me the same amount of capital to go with that playbook.

No, it doesn't work. It doesn't work.

You know, telling me how to build a Maserati when I have the budget for a Prius is useless to me.

How related, related, how have you found, 'cause we've talked about this, how have you found the role of marketing play for your business, uh, differently than maybe the perception of it from the investors you're working with? Yeah.

I mean, I grew up in marketing. I understand the power of building a brand. I think tech skews more product than it does brand building, and I think the PR and brand building get conflated. But when you're building a brand, a consumer-facing brand, you have to go and tell a brand story. You have to get users to believe in the brand, feel a sense of ownership for the brand, and they don't get there based on widgets and features. And in this era of AI, brand will beat product. Hands down. Yeah. Because it becomes so easy to throw up product, way harder to build brand.

Right. Brand and storytelling, right?

And storytelling.

The messaging is so critical now because that's what people remember.

I would've started our podcast on day one. I would have like been putting content out there, telling the brand story. Just a lot sooner, just given you will not have the same amount of capital to invest in marketing as, you know, when I think of Wealthmore and some of our competitors out there, or people within this similar space, you know, who have raised like 25, 50 times more than we have, we have to play differently.

Absolutely right. So looking forward for Wealthmore now, what's coming? What are the things on your mind and how are you strategically setting yourself up for the next thing?

Yeah, I'm so excited for us on many different dimensions. One, this new product, this new enhanced product with no account minimum, having a flat fee only model, marrying this hybrid of an AI financial coach and a human advisor, I think is a massive differentiator. Bringing in advisors under the Wellkmore brand so that we can amplify and augment the number of advisors that are out there bringing in clients under the Wellkmore brand, doing things the Wellkmore way is a force multiplier for us. So I think that is huge. The content to commerce massive strategy play for us. We are leaning in so heavily. What started as an accidental little podcast now has over 15,000 subscribers.

That's brilliant. That's exciting.

Over a million views.

That's brilliant. That's so exciting.

Over a million views. And we use the content to, one, introduce ourselves to our design target. Bring our wealth advisors on so people get to experience them, hear from them, and then people go from listening to actually having a platform to execute. And that is the difference from— you can spend all day long listening to whomever is the talking head of the day on CNBC, TikTok, other platforms where people are giving you wealth advice, but they don't have a product for you to go ahead and execute on. And we are closing that gap in a way that has not been done before. And then we brought the content into the platform. So back to product, the first design of the product did not play our videos. We were leaning more heavily in like, okay, the advisors will post content, you know, articles, things that But we live in a world where people consume video. So whereas our competitors are still giving you a market update that is like 30 pages for you to read, we're not.

You have video.

We have video, and you're seeing our CFA talk about inflation and what's happening with the tariffs and what rate cuts are doing. And you're seeing our advisors take on topics like, you know, the first-time homebuyer is now a 40-year-old. What does that mean for wealth building? What does that mean to you? That is how we are just moving differently.

Right. And it's mobile and it's in the app and it's with you wherever you are.

And you can listen to it at your leisure. And as we bring our AI financial coach in, Mora is embedded in our wealth plan tool, which is the equivalent of FICO but shows your entire, like, financial picture. It's embedded into your annual goal. And it's embedded in the activities, challenges we built in the app to keep you on track.

Mm-hmm.

So now you have your human advisor for the more strategic things, but you have your AI financial coach to keep you hitting those day-to-day milestones.

Right.

So that you're far more likely to be successful.

Right. No, it's incredible. It works. It's a different way to deliver on a service and an offering that hasn't been available to so many people until now, which is, which works so far. You know, you're getting the right feedback and tuning and adjusting and, and so far it's working. Early stages, right? For pre-seed, early stage company, it's the right kind of outcomes.

And I think what's uniquely different for us, you know, I have to tell people, I came to this from the lens of the investor, not the wealth advisor. And when I look at a lot of platforms out there that folks are building, they're building it from the lens of the wealth advisor versus the lens of the client who is very much not interested in the sausage making.

Right.

I don't go, I don't take my car to get service so I know every inner workings of the engine. No, no, ma'am.

That's not my interest.

That's not my interest. So we see too many solutions that are more geared towards the person providing the service versus the recipient of it. And that may be too much information, too technical, overkill with the visuals, or, you know, you deliver to a client a 30-page plan. They're never reading that. You create a more interactive tool, you embed an AI financial coach to it. And now we're talking, because now we're moving in like baby steps. We're doing it in bite-size increments, and I'm getting that daily nudge around what to do, but you're not telling me, sit here for the weekend, take this in, and then go do.

Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. So 2 more questions before we wrap. One, 2 or 3 pieces of advice for female founders, uh, coming outta your experience so far, what would you tell everyone they have to think about, have to do, must plan for?

Yeah, I told you guys to follow the excitement, but I think it's important for you to have that same level of excitement about the folks you welcome to your cap table. And I'm using these words very deliberately. Who are you welcoming to your cap table? Which means you are welcoming them to this journey and you are welcoming them to the energy, momentum, all the things that you are trying to accomplish. And I would tell you, welcome wisely. Make sure you are bringing the right people on, particularly at this like pre-seed, seed stage where this is still very much a big experiment. And when you're experimenting, you need cheerleaders. You need the right energy to get the job done. So be very mindful of, are they really excited about you, the company? Are they understanding of the journey of getting to product-market fit? And are they understanding of the unique journey that comes with investing in a female founder in a space where your founder is not working from a place of abundance.

Mm-hmm.

Capital abundance. Plenty of creativity, plenty of grit, plenty of like great ideas, but capital abundance, not so much. Right.

Yeah. And then what can everyone do to help you? What can, what can our listeners, what can all of us do to help Wealthmore?

Sign up. Sign up and invest. Those are the two big proof points. You want revenue. So if you're listening and you're not an investor, you can support us by signing up, joining Wealthmore. If you are an investor, we're currently raising a pre-seed extension. You can support us by joining.

Perfect. Perfect. Nicole, thank you so much for joining. This has been tremendous. I think the insights are so great and everyone hopefully took a ton away from everything that you shared and have and have been through on this journey of yours so far. So thank you.

Yes, thank you. This was a pleasure to share.

Thanks for listening to The Capital Flex. If today's episode hit home, share it with the founder you love and follow me on LinkedIn for more.