Invest with Impact: Toussaint Bailey (ep.88)

You. So welcome to the Bolden your Money podcast. Today we have an amazing guest, Toussaint Bailey, the CEO of Uplifting Capital. Toussaint started his career as a lawyer and then moved into wealth management and then started Uplifting Capital, where he wanted to focus on impact investing. And so his journey is one of purpose, passion, and redefining what it means to invest. And so with that, Toussaint, welcome to our show. Thanks for making the time.

Oh, thanks for having me. Been looking forward to this for a while.

Yeah, I know. I think it's. It's been a couple years in the making. I remember you gave me a ride back, I think, from SFO one night, and we're like, yeah, you should come on the podcast. And then we kind of kicked it around for two years. And here we are for our audience, you know, which is mostly kind of 401k millionaires, people kind of thinking about how to transition to financial independence or retirement. It's always great for them to hear people's journey and kind of like how they got to where they are today. So we'd love to give us a few minutes on kind of what brought you here?

Yeah, no, I think as, you know, pretty jagged path, which I'm a big fan of. You know, I feel like people with unique paths to wherever their final landing place is seem to be apologists about it. But I think, you know, at least in my case, there's so much that I've pulled from each stop along the way. So started my career in law. Both of my parents are sort of unflashy Do Gooders, so my dad taught for a long time at the junior high school that he went to and in South Central Los Angeles and continues to teach junior high school, now into his late 60s. My mom ran a homelessness support program for most of my adult life and has done all sorts of stuff, including Teach DARE programs, but never talked about it. Right. Never gave any pressure to go into that stuff. And so for me, going into law, I went in after graduating law school, just started to look at what seemed to be aligned and so worked at the LA City Attorney's office for a while doing environmental stuff and worked at the LA Community Redevelopment Development Agency during law school and got interested in that. And I just found my way to give back was going into doing public law. So did a lot for cities and government agencies and learned a lot about how local politics and municipalities function. And I did it at a private firm. But, like, the idea was just to go into that because it was Interesting. And it felt good. And I ended up there for, you know, over 10 years and left that as a partner. I was doing litigation there and people asked me what I did as a litigator. And I always said I was a problem solver. But at some stage you start managing people and I just figured there was other contexts to be a manager of people and you get further away from some of the good you're doing sometimes. And so started to look for the next step. For me, building something unique in wealth management was really exciting. I sort of watched my brother in law's trajectory as I became more senior at my law firm. He was first an accountant, then went and worked at Ed Jones, kind of a big sort of wirehouse wealth management firm, and then went out on his own just as I was making partner. And he seemed to be living so much better and smiling so much more than I was in these silly battles with litigators on the other sides of cases. And so I always have one eye on him, just trying to check, kind of checking out what he was doing. And sometime in 2016 he started talking about bringing advisors together. So by this time he was out on his own. He's pretty social guy, so he's like, you know, have, have some advisors who are kind of coming to me and thinking about joining. And I had, by this time, I was a couple years into being a junior partner and had all sorts of ideas about, I thought a professional services business should run. Nobody wanted to hear those ideas in my law firm, but, but I had a, a willing audience in him. He's like, oh no, that sounds great. And I thought, you know, you should share equity like this. And you know, they don't properly incentivize growing professionals. Like, I'm good at growing and retaining business. Here's how it should be done. And so I ended up writing wealth management Firm, ended up calling Manifesto. So it was this whole idea of bringing an abundance mentality to, to ownership of a wealth management firm. Like having fulfillment be the driving factor not only of what you' trying to provide to clients, but also wealth management being a fulfilling experience for the advisors. And so that was an idea. It was sort of crazy. We put it down on, on paper and actually I started talking to him and the other people who were considering joining him. And I slowly transitioned out of law at that point. Like I was called chief strategist. Like no reason to be called chief strategist to start out with. And within a few months I took over as CEO and like we, it was Such a fun experience. We grew all centered around this whole idea of creating a fulfilling enterprise and something that brought fulfillment to clients. And I was content to do that until I thought that there was a different path for me.

How long did you do that for then?

So started that informally in late 2016 and did it all the way through. Like I think I finished at right at the top of 2022.

So that was you and your brother basically created a new wealth management firm from scratch.

Yes. Along with those first few people who were thinking about joining him. So there was about five of us to start out with and I was the. The non client servicing person who was tasked with kind of building out the enterprise and yeah, great.

And then that grew to what a couple billion dollars. And then what happened? Got sold or something. What happened?

Yeah. So the idea of that like not to. Not to bore too much with how the equity was structured. But the whole idea was to disaggregate ownership in the enterprise from ownership in the practice. And we thought an advisor who was successful enough to go out on their own but chose to join us should be left with the full benefits of ownership in their practice. And then we would all share ownership in the enterprise that serviced those practices according to who contributed to growth and who contributed to management of that enterprise. Right. And that would be freely shared with new people who are joining based on that merit. We grew and we made decisions together. Everyone had equal decision making rights. And so we got to a point in 2020 where we started to get overtures to join others and we found an attractive enough opportunity at that point. I had already had the seeds of uplifting capital in my mind. And so we knew I wasn't going to stay on for the long term with the firm. And I think everyone realized nobody wanted my job as CEO. Sounds great but it's a ton of work and it's probably much more fun to work with clients. And so yeah we found the right partner. And so all of my partners, that was Enzo we management are now at that new firm Corio happy there and. And I think made a good decision.

That's pretty cool. That's interesting. And it sounds like you had a pretty innovative ownership structure and way of granting equity. I know that there's been some huge. Farther is like a savvy wealth or these. I think farther is like an example. But they're and fast was trying this too. But they're trying to buy or you know bring together various advisors and send them bring their practices together, group that cash flow together and those assets together and then, you know.

Yeah, and not to get too far into it yet, but there's this whole. There's this idea that you have to be on the polar ends of a spectrum between being a silo if you're going to collect practices and kind of share resources, or being an ensemble and sort of, you have to be the navy and do everything the same. We call ourselves an on silo where we thought there's a band that I think all of us want to practice in that, you know, a smart approach to managing money. But there are benefits to doing things in concert at the enterprise level and being a unified brand. Everyone we brought in we were proud to be associated with. And so we wanted to be branded with. And so, yeah, that's cool. It was innovative. I think they're more doing similar things now.

Yeah, well, I mean there's these giant. I mean, I think farther just raised like $70 million on a close to half a billion dollar valuation. So there's definitely like lots of money going into this, this kind of model right now as a venture back thing. So, okay, so you're like, parents are kind of do gooders, quiet do gooders. You're like, all right, picking up on some of that, get your law degree, practice public service law, then kind of see your brother and be like, all right, let's get into wealth management, do some cool, innovative stuff there and do some good.

Like, so, so I have the, I think I have a pattern of finding do gooder opportunities where I am and then I get to a place where, you know, I feel like I can do more. And so that, that was the case with going from a law firm to going to Enzo. Enzo for me was about not only kind of seeing this way of living where you're not in contention like a litigator all the time, but also we talked about this waterfall of fulfillment, which was a little woo woo. We're in California, but it was a little woo woo for, for most people in the industry. But really the foundation of what we did, that first stage in the waterfall was about loving and trusting relationships. And we talked to clients about that, we talked to advisors about that. And so we came to work for loving and trusting relationships. And then the second stage in that waterfall is about self actualization. So if we have those relationships, we create a great container. Self awareness and also self mastery. And then beyond that, once we get there, we talked about collective impact. And so like coming together, doing something special. And the contention was if we get those first three things Right. Personal rewards will fall out naturally for everyone who's associated with the firm and all of our clients. And so bringing that mindset to the firm and being in charge of driving that culture was part of my responsibility. And it felt great. But for me, the impact that I wanted to have, like, you know, starting in 2020, the world got quiet. We realized a lot about, you know, it was funny, people talk about the social unrest and this social awakening in 2020, but environmentally, when the world shut down and we stopped, we got off the roads, we saw things flourish that we'd never seen flourish. And so there was all this perspective that came from being quiet in 2020. And at that time, ESG was all the rage. Everyone who has an asset managed firm firm had an ESG product to push. I thought that there was probably a more authentic way to do that and a more accretive, financially way to do that for clients in the private markets. And so in 2020, it was when I started down that path first, after just looking at my reflecting on my own impact journey and doing some things around that that had nothing to do with wealth, really started to look at building something better to bring individual investors proximate to the impact that they were having and also do that in a way that made. I just saw advisors as kind of wanting to do this and seeing all these problems that they wanted to affect, but it wasn't done in a way that made sense for their professional lives and not. And it didn't make sense for their clients personal lives.

Got it. It's super interesting. I really like this idea of kind of first having a great environment that you work in with people that you like, this kind of loving and trusting environment, and then focusing on people's individual self fulfillment, I think that's the word you use. And then collective impact. I think that's a powerful way to cascade, right. Create a great environment, let people lean into their strengths and then together have a great team that does some really good stuff.

We talked about the waterfall in those three levels and then personal rewards being that last level. We always talked about businesses going wrong or being less than satisfying when people put number four, number one. So they start with personal gain and they're like, oh, you know how we can accomplish these goals? Let's go build relationship. You know, how I can make more money if I make myself better. And we found that like having those things not be a means to an end, but actually be ends in themselves with A, it felt better and B, it was actually a more effective way to do business.

Did you just come up with this on your own or do. Is this from a book or something?

It's like, it has little bits of maslow in it. And then I do a lot in mindfulness, emotional intelligence, space. And so thought a lot about kind of self awareness as the building block for a lot of good things that happen in business. Like, you know, self awareness is really the foundation for empathy. And empathy is. Is foundation for good relationship. And so like a lot of ingredients and a of good ideas from a lot of other people came together in a mix by me. I did the remix.

Yeah, no, no, it's great. I mean, totally. We talk about self awareness here. Like, it's kind of the. That's the first part of this, right? Can people reflect and kind of understand and listen well, right. And through that they can make gains.

And it's interesting, we had a lot of people grapple with that being the first thing. Right. So you talk about this self actualization, like self awareness and self mastery actually come first. But we said, and I contend, like, it's really tough to do that in a place where you don't feel psychologically safe and like, you don't have this. It's not quite unconditional because we're in business, but you don't have trust. It's really easy to show up and look at yourself and own stuff when you have a trusting environment. And so we talked about these loving and trusting relationships being the right environment to curate self awareness.

It a lot depends on the context. Like, people hear folks talk about psychological safety. When I first heard that, I was like, ah, you know, this sounds goofy, right? But I have kids that play football, right. You know, it's about the team and the team as a family and like trusting each other and doing well. And if you're like, oh yeah, you know, listen, we have a great football team. And the football team starts with trust and trusting your teammates. Because that's like a sport where they're like, it's not like an individual thing. It's very much like you have to work as a unit. That is the exact same concept of like, you've got to have core trust, the team, psychological safety, you know, it.

Doesn'T mean making everything okay, right? Like, or accepting. Accepting everything that someone does. Part of trust is trusting that people are going to speak truth to you. We talked a lot about sandpaper and having these tough conversations that actually smoothed out business edges. You have to trust that you're also getting candor from people and you're getting straight facts from people. So trust also includes telling people what needs to be done, when it needs to be done.

Yeah, it's interesting as you grow just in our company, we hired our first head of people last year and you know, we have started writing things down, you know, in terms like, you know, how we talk to each other, you know, like how we treat each other, standards for leadership, you know, we don't over document it. I mean, people should kind of, hopefully instinctively know a lot of this stuff, but it's sometimes good to reflect on it. And it is tough. Right. In any growing environment, you know, making it like, okay, yeah, we gotta trust each other, but it's also business. But we have to be able to communicate really clearly and, and hold each other accountable.

It's hard to scale culture, how those values are reflected at each stage in the business. Like, trust means something different when the layers of management are two or three people deep, rather than one person deep. And like, what you have to do to have those values reflected in a business are drastically different. And so scaling culture is really hard. I think it's an underappreciated business skill 100%.

I just like, the more we do, the farther we go in our business. And we're kind of like 50 people now. It's like totally different than when you're five people, 10 people. Everyone kind of knows each other, I mean, really well. And like, all you do is like, just do stuff. Now. You're trying to like be organized and get a couple, couple different things done. And I remember talking to like a CEO and he had like 300 people on. He's like, yeah, the big difference between like 30 people and 300 is now instead of like one thing, I can do like two things.

Yep. Like, there's new benefits, new dangers.

Right.

Because when you, when you're five people, like, osmosis works for you. Right. Just being in the same room and the stuff that happens on accident is fantastic because people kind of intuitively know each other, know what's going on. But the stuff that happens on accident at 50 people and things just happening because people are around each other can actually be really dangerous to business and can have a lot of misunderstanding built into them. And so there's a lot of intention that has to be brought to bear as you start to grow past that. You know, 10 people at a table, business 100.

Well, so now you, so you've gone through this, you know, law, then you had this successful kind of traditional, well, not fully traditional, but like also doing Good, but with money. And then you're like, okay, so what led you decide to I'm gonna go do uplifting capital.

I was inspired that, that I could do more like I had this seat and I was sort of excited by the idea of private markets becoming more mainst wealth management, particularly for kind of higher net worth clients and what was going to happen there. I was excited by people starting to talk about their values and money together more regularly, but just found that these two exciting things hadn't been brought together in wealth management in a way I thought they should be. And so started to have those conversations with the advisors who I worked with and talk about what could be of value. Started to have those conversations with clients that we had appropriate level clients and just thought if we could accomplish three things, then I thought we could really scale the number of people who are thinking about doing good for people planet and economy alongside of thinking about growing their finances. And those were like if we could build something unquestionably institutional from day one, if we could be really good stewards of capital from the start, if we could build something uncompromisingly scalable for advisors and wealth management firms, kind of not trading anything for scale and then if it could feel profoundly personal to the individual client even while scalable for advisors and even while kind of institutional in nature, one, I thought we could do those, we could kind of thread that needle and do those three things at the same time. And I thought, you know, we could, we could have a genuine impact on the world and on the way that people think about managing money and investing money. And so like boldly kind of set out with, with that crazy idea and found some people along the way who, who agreed with me and, and brilliant folks who came along to work with me on that and fill different pieces of those attributes. And so we're been at it now for, for a few years. Started in earnest in late 21 but, but in really in 2022. Really started at it when I gave up the role at Enzo completely got it.

And, and so does uplifting work directly with consumers or it works with RIAs or other wealth managers?

No, we, we serve wealth managers. So it's like if individuals came to us, we, we, we are, you know, we're just not built for this space and building something that's useful to advisors, primarily ria, some family offices. And that also means, I think it's underappreciated how many foundations are advised through wealth management firms, not just kind of the big consultants. So we work with foundations we work with individual clients, but all of it goes through fiduciaries.

That's interesting. And, and so for the wealth managers, like what, like what do you do for them? You, you enable them to kind of like how do you bring, you know, impact investing to their clients essentially? And then do they, then they give a sleeve like assets to you or how does it work?

Yeah, they give a sleeve of assets to us. We manage vehicles. So we have a vehicle each year that has assets across a number of different asset classes and a number of different impact themes. First, believing that economic drivers and impact drivers can work together synergistically. And so we're unabashedly investors first. So again on that theme of sort of meeting financial firms where they are, meeting advisors where they are. And then when advisors invest with us, we put together institutional vehicles that include venture capital investments, private equity investments, and also real assets investments across about nine themes that touch on people, planet and economy. Things like financial inclusion, which would certainly be, I think in the wheelhouse of bolden affordable housing. It could be like climate change solutions, food and agriculture. Agriculture, health. So all of these things, we invest those in a portfolio that makes sense and then we personalize impact. And so thinking about how people experience that portfolio, how individual investors experience that portfolio, they might be in a common portfolio and one would be interested in climate change and another would be interested in health and wellness. How they experience that portfolio is different. What we report on the learning that they get alongside of that, the content that they get alongside of that and they can even lean in, in.

That's awesome. So, and you do this, you're saying like you're creating like vintages by a year. There's like a 20, 25 like portfolio that gets assembled essentially.

Yeah. So we, we closed the first vintage in, in late 23 and, and that was sort of our, our, our proof of concept. Starting vintage. And we partner with wealth management firms at times in multi year commitments. And so you know, we can have a firm come in and say we'll commit to your first three vintages. Sometimes they'll come into one. And so we close one out with the second one now. And the idea is to have something always available. And so the second we'll close this one, we'll have another one open.

And, and so then there are the RIA is like saying, hey, I'm gonna bring in money from various families or whatever they're gonna contribute to this thing. Do you know opto, do you know Opto investments?

I do, yeah.

Yeah.

Ryan, Matt Malone And I were both part of this organization, Adisa and. And got to know him when he was. When Opto was more of a thought than. Than what it is now. I think. Yeah, they stuff.

It just comes to. I mean, I just happen to see Ryan Van Gorder has been on the podcast and you know, they're doing alternatives, but also they have this kind of vintage approach which is like, hey, we're creating these vehicles. Similar motion. I mean, I'm sure you guys compare notes about how to go to market and stuff like that. It's kind of interesting stuff though.

Yeah, no, I think I don't know as much about what they do from a structure standpoint, but I could certainly see like this whole idea of building a model that makes sense and having the ability to kind of customize that within Rails and adjust that. But for what an advisor's portfolio needs are, how they see those portfolio needs, I think very aligned in that thinking. I think private markets have been and continue to be probably 10 years behind public markets in terms of thinking about product rather than thinking about investor need. And so as those solutions have come together in ETFs and different SMA and portfolio management solutions in the public markets, I think we'll continue to see portfolio construction innovation in the private markets.

That's cool. I like this a lot. I like this idea a lot. It's pretty interesting. Like, what do you want this to become? Like, what does success look like in five or 10 years?

To me, People start the conversation around investments with values and the possibility of values alignment as just a normal thing. It's not thought of as something that's concessionary. It's not thought of as something that's sort of a corner of the portfolio that can't be financially reconciled. It's just a normal thing. So hopefully we have tons of competitors who are doing all sorts of great things for the world. Maybe with different opinions on what's great for the world, but our savvy investors and are thinking about this from an investment standpoint. And for us that means scale. Right. So we see ourselves as having infinite scalability and hopefully this whole space continues to scale.

Yeah, no, I could totally see how this. You deal with a bunch of RIAs on one side of the network. They're out there gathering assets and building distribution. But you're saying, hey, I can help you deliver scalable impact investing. You make it easy for them by creating vehicles that let them invest in but also report on. I think the personalized reporting is a really good idea of like hey, you can tell Steve you care about the climate and maybe solar panels or whatever. It's like here's what's happening in the portfolio for what you care about and Toussaint cares about.

You know, it's like when we were first starting there was a lot of thought that this was a nice to have even on our own parts. But as we talk to invest, like much has been made of the generational wealth transfer, right? Or not even generational also the horizontal wealth transfer from one spouse to another. There's wealth transfer that's going to happen in charity. All of that adds up to the numbers often around 70, 80 trillion that you hear that transfer isn't sort of one principal gone and another principle appear as a one event occurrence. It happens slowly and it happens messy. And like new seats at the table are being brought. And so the idea of aligning values, while often thought of as individual, like to keep a, to keep a family together at a certain level of means requires values alignment. And so the opportunity to have this discussion, vehicles for having this discussion and then the ability to do that in ways that, that keep a portfolio sort of aligned with the integrity of the financial goals but also satisfy some of these values and allow people to be reflected in their investments. It's a need to have. For families with a certain level of complexity, at least the discussion is a need to have and a tool for offering something on the other side of that discussion we have found has been well received.

Yeah, that makes sense. I definitely am curious what the wealth breakpoints are. So there's a couple points on this. So like, you know, one counterpoint is, well, like, you know, I'm a member of Bogleheads. I went to their conference and they kind of like are generally like esg. We don't like esg. ESG has crummy returns and like it's a mistake. I think also many of those folks are kind of like, like, like our users are kind of like 401k millionaires, right? So like, hey, I've worked to save my whole life. Gay. I've got a couple million bucks. I don't have 10, I don't have 20. But I've got like enough to be, you know, like, like I got to take care of this and do a good job of like managing the withdrawals and taxes and all that stuff. I think for a lot of the, well, at least some of the bulkheads are like, I don't know if I, this, this is a good economic return. But I also think that for Many people, they would like to align if they could, if it wasn't too expensive or if it like was. If it was great, I could invest according to my values, like vote my dollars, you know, and get a good return. Great. So I guess my question is, how do you react to that? And also so as people kind of like hit different strata of wealth, like, does this become more important? And like, how do you see that one?

We have to have better conversations because I think one of the themes that we continue to hit on this year as a firm is this whole idea of real world impact versus labels, even in our space. Right. Like, because people want to run off with DI is a hot button issue. ESG is a hot button issue. And people are reacting to their perception of what that is rather than reacting to what that is in a lot of respects. And that's a whole kind of diatribe I could go off on. But, but esg, which is not, not what we are. And I can kind of take you through a spectrum of values seeking capital or sustainable capital. But ESG I will defend for a second as I think we need to think through what the E actually stands for with the S actually stands for and what the G actually stands for. Right. It's a, it's a risk management tool. ESG is not an investment strategy. It's a, it's a strategy for managing risk. And everyone deploys it to some extent. There's only some people out there marketing it. Right after California wildfires, every insurer in the world and everyone who is insurance adjacent is an ESG investor because they are thinking about the environmental impacts of what they do. No one's ever stopped thinking about governance. Right. The G and esg. And yes, you can find some tussling around the social issues and what people think is appropriate risk management in that social bucket. But there's something that everyone sees appropriate to sort of look at him. We just talked about culture for, for five minutes. That, that's the S. And so if at its essence, ESG is just paying attention to factors that people didn't necessarily think about as financial factors traditionally, that.

That, like, that's super helpful, actually. That's, that's great. Okay.

Yeah, but, but that aside for us, we are a basket of investments or, or a portfolio that makes sense for a set of investors at a certain wealth level, whether you put values alignment on it or not, that set of investments makes sense for investors at a certain wealth level. For us right now, we're a qualified purchaser fund and we'll get down, which is $5 million of investable assets in them.

Right.

So we work with very wealthy families and advisors who serve those families or foundations with a significant amount of assets. We will in future get down to the accredited investor level, which is million dollars of investable assets or a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in income. Still, that's a, that's a significant amount of money. No investor should be invested. They should be looking at our portfolio from an asset class and a portfolio construction standpoint and thinking about whether or not that's appropriate for their clients. I, I will say at the level of work wealth that we typically work at, which is kind of the lower end of that qualified purchase spectrum, that 5 to $50 million of investable assets us like Opto, are probably a better solution than most of the private markets product that's being hooked at people. Right. Like some. So private credit's being thrown at everyone because that's hot. Or real estate's being thrown at everyone because that's familiar. Like a portfolio construction approach should be taken. And so I think we're appropriate there. For other investors, there's ways to align your values and your investments in the public markets.

Right.

So one of the firms that I love and we've been close to from our very beginning is Ethic Investments. I don't know if you know Ethic, but they're sort of a values alignment tool where you can choose a tracking error budget and you can choose themes that you care about and you can see how much you're deviating and you can see what the likely financial outcomes of that. Of that is. There's others that do that same thing. Like I think used to be a Perio, now acquired by BlackRock. And there's others that do similar stuff. I think there are ways to align your investments and your values and have this conversation at different wealth levels. I don't think we are the solution for everybody.

That's awesome. We actually had the Imperial guys on here. It was pretty interesting. But it's interesting how seeing these stories weave together and this ecosystem, it's not that huge, you know, and they, that's super cool.

But they're doing similar stuff on like finding tax efficiency and, and, and, and finding really good financial reasons to come into something that could be also aligned with one's values. Right.

And so yeah, awesome. I want to dive a little bit more into uplifting, but I actually am curious, you know, when you were starting this thing, how'd you finance it?

Went out and scrapped and raised friends and family money, my own like money and, and salary sacrifices and those like just believe. So it was just early believers that.

So it's all angel. No venture.

No, no, no venture. No.

You think lever raised venture institutional money?

It would be, it would be tough to convince. If we could keep the integrity of what we do and continue to drive at impact as sort of the, the core component of what we want to scale then then there's a possibility. Not. Not in the foreseeable future.

Yeah. Maybe strategic money I could see coming in and saying hey we like this idea much more likely. Likely. Yeah. People inside the industry like this makes sense.

Yeah.

I mean I was, I was as prepping for this. I was kind of pulling the data on you know, just for our audience. Look, they know we're a venture backed company. Right. But the data on women and minorities getting venture which I mean obviously you didn't seek it but it's so shockingly low. Like women, female founded companies get 2% of VC dollars and African American black founders get 1%. It's like that. It's tough.

You know and we deal with that part we part of the answer to that reality. And one of the reasons like you know, didn't raise venture partially because I wanted to see this company stay what it was, but it is also really difficult. And both of my partners are women. Right. And so one's a female immigrant. And so we have all sorts of statistics that you would think work against us, but it also makes resiliency a native language. Right. Like it's like you, you find a way. One the of of the real inspirations for investing in this space is creating more opportunity where not only should it be because it's good for the world, but also it's just overlooked. And gaps are great for investing. That's one of the ways we find alphas these underserved markets alongside those same statistics are a compelling set of statistics about how women with that venture capital money actually perform against their peers. Or at least companies found with at least one female founder perform against their peers. There's all sorts of great stuff about women investors and how they perform against their peers. And so like the overlooked are an opportunity.

I think there, there's a ton of data that like having a diverse workforce, you know, having diverse investors. Right. Leads to better thinking, more dynamic thinking and, and better outcomes. So I totally agree with that.

Yeah. No, it's one of the ways we talk about finding we have this whole concept of impact Alpha. Obviously alpha comes from manager selection and it for us Illiquidity. But when thinking thematically about alpha, we have three main sources and one of those is underserved markets. Like looking for these overlooked founders and fund managers.

Right.

We invest in funds but looking for these underserved markets, looking for under resourced problems, things like affordable housing, things like health care and then looking for kind of these underutilized value creation levers and like ways that you can both create impact value. But the problem that you're talking about we see as significant opportunity when properly invested.

That's awesome. That's cool. I mean when you're out there seeking and when you're so you're getting this capital then you're out there deploying it. So basically you have two sides of this thing that you're running. What's the time split between raising money and deploying it? And I understand the raising money side of it. I think that's how we cross paths at these RA conferences and stuff like that. Run around with these wealth managers who are sitting on giant pools of capital. How about like sounds like the other side of your job is like venture or whatever, private equity. I mean you're out there like looking for deals, right?

In our investment team is like we call them the Lindas. We have two brilliant women named Linda who both, both with names Linda who lead Linda McGar Horner and Linda Asante who lead our investment team. Our chief Investment Officer Linda Asante is really tasked with leading our firm around not only how we find those deals where which for us the first place those deals come from is investment managers who are thematically focused but also kind of diligencing those deals. So we have, we're paying attention to 15 plus, 1500 plus managers at any given time looking for who's open, who's closed across private equity, venture, real assets and then constructing that in this portfolio that includes the right balance of things that have a shorter duration like real assets or include including affordable housing is a shockingly good investment. Renewable energy is discussed a lot now and it's a great investment. And then you have venture on the other side. So what makes sense for your average investor and how can that be tweaked for investor specific needs is what Linda Assante is charged with kind of leading force.

So she's not investing in individual deals. Like I live in venture land where these VCs show up at these companies, they're like hey, we'll invest in you Bolden and here's a chunk of capital. It's a direct investment investment. Sounds like you guys are Investing in fund managers that might be like a.

Venture fund, essentially opportunistically invest in individual deals alongside those fund managers, but we won't source something in its infancy and we're not, we're not built to do that. And that level of risk without a manager who we trust coming in alongside just doesn't make sense for the people who we're investing for.

It's super interesting how, I mean it feels a lot like, like.

They're all private. Like so. So in a larger bucket you would count them as alts. But I. Alts is an amorphous term because it includes all sorts of stuff that's, you know, somewhat public. Hedge funds are, are alts and gold is alts for us. It's all private and it's all private equity. Like it's broadly speaking private equity. You know, the capital pe private is much later stage investments in private companies. For us, broadly speaking, private equity is just private ownership that starts that venture and some of that goes pretty early stage and some of that goes into later kind of growthy venture. And then real assets are private ownership of projects which include things like infrastructure and housing. But we are broadly a private equity company and we benchmark ourselves against traditional cover up the impact label, private equity. And we, yeah, right now we do pretty good against it.

So how, how do you, like, how do you feel like you guys are doing in terms of growth and like, I mean, what do, are you achieving the goals you want to achieve in terms of getting capital together, deploying it and all that stuff?

Yeah, so I, I think the goals we want to achieve from a growth perspective, from company growth perspective is by good partners. We had some folks who, who, who jumped on very early. We, you know, it's funny, we, we started out, joining us on the journey was a phrase that we felt like we said to death. Not only to, to our RA partners who were, who were joining us on the journ that you know, they're coming into something that was sound and institutional if very, very early. We turned to fund managers who we were asking to decrease their investment minimums and work with us and join us on the journey. Join us on the journey. And so from very, from the start I've been pleased with our growth because we've been growing with the right set of partners. We have, we've been fortunate to have some really mega firms join us from, from very early on even into Fund One and some smaller firms join us on that journey. But they brought great clients with them. The second vehicle that we've I am overwhelmed with the quality of partners who chose to entrust us with their capital and how they're thinking about utilizing us. Right. So there's places where we are starting to build out sort of whole impact programs and think about how they drive that impact and sit alongside some pretty sophisticated philanthropic practices. And there are others who just see us as sort of a deficient product to bring alongside other more sophisticated impact products or more kind of idiosyncratic impact products that their firms are utilizing. But we're growing with the right partners. Never fast enough for me. I'm a founder. So if you ask me if we could grow with those right partners faster, absolutely. We could add, we could add more daily. But I have to say, bottom line, I'm super pleased with our growth because it's healthy.

Yeah. I mean it's. And do you ever. Like, one thing we've thought about for our business is like we have like 40,000 paying subscribers now on the DTC side. They have $100 billion in their financial plans that. But they're invested probably mostly public markets and equities, fixed income and stuff like that.

That is amazing.

But we don't manage the money.

But you're affecting that amount of sort of financial security and financial well being, which is phenomenal.

Yeah, thanks. No, it's interesting. I mean it's so interesting when you're doing a new model. We're doing a new model, this very aligned, transparent way of doing business. And I've always thought, oh, as we grow, oh, could we make it easy for people to do stuff like this? Could they say hey, you know, actually I like this idea. But we're not, I mean we do have an RIA inside of this thing. But like it's almost like crowdfunding. Like, oh, would people like to do this kind of thing? And we all like this idea. We're all going to jump on and invest this way, that way. Like I do think that some of that could happen in the future. And also, you know, like conversations like this, you know, there'll be thousands of people that listen to this, which is kind of crazy. Right? Like we'd be nervous and sometimes it could be 10,000 people. But yeah, the, the world is changing where the trans, like the distance. It's kind, it's so interesting listening to you describe how you do work. Because that's like how venture and private equity, you know, out there looking for deals, thinking about all this stuff you're in the inner mechanics. It's not like I'm just buying Some ticker symbol and trading it. You're dealing with the companies and what they're doing. And then on the other side, it's like the people that have been saving and, and they want to do good with their money. Right. And have a protective. And some of them are like, I want to have it aligned with my values. And I'd love to also, also touch and feel and, like, know where my money's going and, like, what it's doing for me and. Or what it's doing for the world.

Yeah. And I think people are increasingly thinking that more is possible and, like, no longer accepting that, like, they can't have it all. We find that with, like, some of the. We have a lot of MBA students who come through and work with us. And like, for me, I was thinking about my career as I need a job and I need to feed myself and I need to do great. And at some point I'm going to turn and I'm going to try to do some good. And I ended up accidentally doing good along the way, and that was great. But the main thing I was thinking about was feeding myself. And I think people now, even from a work context, are really thinking about aligning those values, doing things that reflect who they want to be, how they want to show up in the world with how they live from right now, from day one, and not necessarily waiting. And I think the same thing is happening with finances. And so, yeah, I do think people will continue to kind of see what we're doing, see what you're doing, and find ways to have that good invited into their life, whether that's through us or whether that's through doing it creatively and uniquely themselves or, or some other means.

Yeah. I could see eventually, if you scale this thing, like, it becoming available maybe. I mean, you ever thought about going to the workplace? I mean, workplace might not, I guess they, you know, but there's. That's where big pulls. I mean, that's where most people have most of their savings.

Absolutely. No, no, we, we think about, you know, we, we can't get ahead of ourselves, but we think these are good investments.

Double.

Double good. Right. Like double, bottom line, good investments. But, but first of all, we think these are good investments. And so we feel very comfortable as stewards of people, feel very comfortable that they're going to see their financial goals met through what we do. And so from that frame, it makes sense to be as many places as possible. And we just need to find the right avenue and the right timing to, like, get down Market is such a bad way to say it, but become available to a lot more people for sure.

I mean, it is crazy when you look at, I have to keep looking it up. But like, you look at the wealth concentration in this country and it's like half this country has no money. Like literally zero savings. And then it's like 25 or 30% have a little bit. And then the top 20% has pretty much most of it. But really it's the top five, you know, three 1.1 points. You know, I think you get to.001. You're kind of out at like, you know, there's a thousand billionaires in this country. You know, a lot of the money, you know. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean like, it just, the concentration just keeps lifting up, up.

So I can see why you fix that. I said fix that.

I don't know. I mean, like, yeah, obviously I do think financial. Well, I do think financial literacy makes a huge difference. Right. That's where it starts. But then, yeah, people taking risk with their human capital. I mean, the good thing about this country is that most people don't inherit their money. Like they actually make it. And so that there is the opportunity. But if you come from money or you come from education and you're, and you're, and, and you're financial, financially literate and, and you have access and social capital. You know, I mean, like we live in Marin, right. It's like. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of opportunities that we have and our children have that.

Well, yes, but while wealth asymmetry is, I, I think like arguably and maybe not even arguably being exacerbated, information asymmetry is, is coming down. And that includes information about effective entrepreneurship, information about what sound investing is, and if we find relationships and networks sort of being evened out alongside of that, that information. Evening. There's hope.

I think that's right. Well, and it's, it's interesting looking at generationally. Yeah, I was just talking, you know, the boomers had pensions, you know, like I'm Gen X. We had like early 401ks but didn't know what we were doing. And many people suffered. Millennials kind of got the short end of the stick because they, you know, 2008 and like various financial crisis hurt them. But the Gen Z Z's seem like they are getting, they've gotten the message like saving money, you know, they're investing in, they're, they're richer at the age, you know, they're relative to the earlier generations. So they are, they have way more access to information. They have stronger networks, they have more access. You know, they're, they're, they've, they've taken some of those lessons and so they give me hope.

And, and we've seen Gen Z's driving family conversations in a way that like we personally like uplifting capital in myself in a way that I don't think happened with millennials or Gen Xers at this stage in the family. And so Gen Z gives me hope.

Yeah, for sure. I also think that people are more open to talking about money now and it's, which is a good thing. Like you know, like when I grew up, like people didn't talk about money. It's just like it was impolites talking about money. And now people talk about how much money they make and like what they're doing with it and there's more intergenerational discussions anyway, all that money is going to flow that, that age 80 trillions coming getting to younger people. And that's where this whole, the world really could change in a huge way. So if it goes to people that are like, hey, I want to invest in a values line way, you're right. It's like if someone controlled 10 million bucks and then their spouse gets it and they think differently, or their kids got it and they think differently, that's a big change all at once. Yeah.

And I think they have a refreshing level of impatience about what they want to see in the world. The philanthropic inclination of women is far exceeding that of men and how much they give and what drives their financial decisions and how they pick financial advisors based on values. And so I think between women coming into much more wealth and increasingly becoming heads of household and gen zers and even millennials having a seat at the table, we're betting on them driving change. And I'm excited about it.

I would definitely like to look at, I'll look it up after fact but like this cascade of like money from kind of the more traditional, you know, head of male head of household to like I know elvest and like the whole thesis is, you know, women are going to inherit or get their, you know, control a huge number amount of the assets. And it's already starting to happen.

They flip to the majority at least whatever. There's a great book called I think 2030. But they, but they're, they are slated to flip to the majority by 2030.

So 2030 women are going to troll. Most assets are in this country. Yep, that's like very interesting. Right? I mean think about that.

Yeah.

And then, and then and like what's the data about your. So do you have any similar kind of like data points around like okay, how they values invest? Like how they invest differently.

Yeah, we do. So. So I think we have gosh, I should have it at my fingertips. But there's over 50% of women said that well Morgan Stanley has a study and I'll send it to you after the podcast. But over 50% said they would choose a financial advisor on whether or not they could serve their values, alignment needs or match their values. And there's that same data by the way on diverse investors. Very, very, very values aligned and philanthropically inclined.

Yeah. And then I'd be curious like how many female investors, how many female advisors are there and how many minority advisors are there not.

I mean way too few to serve, to serve that, that tsunami of wealth transfer that's going to happen. And so I didn't intentionally have a female investment team and have a female co founder and co managing partner but I think we are aligned with what the future of wealth looks like.

Yeah, well so the move is you should be. If you're a wealth manager you should be hiring women and minority younger people to like serve this audience.

And at the very least they're starting to signal you see like a lot of the major firms are starting to have these women in wealth initiatives now. Now actually hiring the talent and making sure that you're putting the resources behind those things that folks say they're doing is a different story. But at the very least the industry is awake to the future of which is female.

Yeah, well they also have to. There's just a generational I think the average what wealth advisors like a 50 year old male and gonna like it's a huge percentage. You know they gotta just train people up and get them out, get em away work.

So a lot, a lot of good stuff and a lot of change afoot in, in this industry. Like I'm here for it.

Yeah, no it's awesome. I would love to touch on real quick as we're kind of wrapping up here. Like what's one like if you're you know a retail investor, like what's something if they want to kind of get more aware of like impact investing, how can they. They can go to Uplifting Capital, learn about it there but like other things they can do to kind of like start learning about this.

Yeah, no, I, I will, I will plug. Yeah Uplifting Capital. We put out a lot of one on one content because of what we, what we do and who we serve and we go deeper on, on particular things. But that's a great resource. The Global Impact Investing Network is a great, is a great place to look gin. They are tasked with training the world on impact investing and thinking about impact. SOCAP is a huge conference that kind of big impact investing conference that puts on a lot of good stuff. So for retail investors, those are great places to start.

I think that's awesome. That's super helpful. All right, well look, any questions for me or any thoughts as you look forward for the future of wealth and investing that you see coming down the next five, 10 years?

I would love to know about how you think about. I think Bolden is a very mission driven or at least good for the world company. How do you think about sort of the values of, of your company and, and what beyond financial success you want to accomplish in the market you want to make as you grow?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. Yeah, you know, like our big, our big idea is can we help 100 million people achieve financial confidence? Right? So, but when you get financially confident, it's like you, you're kind of getting literate, right? Like we like this idea of people getting financially literate, people having plans, like kind of framing and using a plan as a way of kind of like framing up like what's possible, like, where am I today? What's possible? How did my money work? And also think about this idea that like financial wellness as a practice is like a lifelong thing that you have to engage in. Because like what's interesting is like we see with our current users who are kind of like 50 plus these 401k millionaires, like they've done the right things over the course of their life. They have a fair amount of money and that money gives them agents, agency, and that agency lets them do things with their human capital like retire early or pursue things that they want to pursue that they might not have done. Like if you're like, I just got to feed myself, right. And then we want to get more people under that tent and get them on that journey and seeing that it's possible earlier, I, and I think what's interesting about money is that it's also like a generational unlock. Like if you're smart about money and you've done well, you're of kind. Kids are way more likely to like see that and that affects their lives over their course, their whole lives, and hopefully cascades through multiple generations. So broadly, that's how we think about it, you know.

It is such a great bar to look at hitting. I love that. Financially confident.

Yeah. So, yeah, we call it, you know, bolden your financial confidence platform. So we, like, we rebranded from new retirement to bolden because want to reach. We want to be more accessible. Right. Like, I think someone who's like 25 and they see bold and they might be like, I'll check it out. But if there's new retirement, they might be like, I don't know if that's quite the right thing for me. And then, you know, this idea, I mean, it's still like. Like, you were on this journey. Right. By the way, I love this. Join us on the journey. Like, so many things that you're doing in the culture side, you should be a culture consultant and just go around a company like, here's how to think about what you're doing and here's how to, like, build culture. I mean, it's cool what you're doing.

I feel like, yeah, that's. That's what, you know, I did a good chunk of my career is like, you know, no matter what, the title is pretty much just culture defender.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's super important. All right, cool. Well, anything else you want to. You want to share with our audience before I kind of wrap it up?

No, this is a gift. Impact investment is not concessionary. Like, if they don't walk away with anything else, walk away with the. With the belief in the. In the confidence that impact and financial goals can be synergistic.

All right, awesome. Well, Tusan, thanks for. Thanks for coming on here. And it's been. This was really great. Kind of like learning about your work and why you do it and how you've gone about it. And hopefully it inspires other people who are thinking about their own entrepreneurial journey and thinking about an impact investing. Definitely. We'll link to uplifting capital so people can check it out. You know, it is great hearing about how, you know, you can make your money kind of align with your values. For anyone listening, thanks for listening. All reviews and feedback are totally welcome. Welcome. Thanks. Thanks for your time and we'll chat with you next time.

Thanks.

Dear.