Jumping into the tumultuous tech startup world from a regulatory role at the SEC may not seem like the most straightforward of career transitions, but for Alison Staloch, becoming CFO of Fundrise is another opportunity to learn. “Building something, having a big impact, taking a risk and doing something late stage versus joining an institution where you can have smaller impacts on already successful and mature businesses. I was much more interested in doing that,” she says.
In this episode of Secrets of Rockstar CFOs podcast, Jack McCullough sits down with Staloch to discuss her career journey and Fundrise’s growth as a direct to investor, alternative asset management company. She shares her insights on the evolving CFO role, the importance of transparency and why curiosity is one of the most critical skills a finance leader can hone.
Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly edited and trimmed for clarity, follows.
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Listen to the podcast here
Introduction
I’m excited to welcome our guest. Her name is Alison Staloch. She is the CFO at Fundrise. Alison, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Jack. You have an amazing reputation within the finance community. I’m so thrilled to talk with you.
That’s very kind. Before we joked that there’s a lot of controversy on the internet about pronouncing your last name. I hope I was reasonably close.
You got it right.
How about that? Anyway, Fundrise. I have to admit, I wasn’t familiar with it until you and I started talking. I thought, “This would be a fascinating company.” For the benefit of our readers, most of whom I’m guessing aren’t familiar, can you give us the 10,000-foot view?
Fundrise is an alternative asset manager, a fintech platform. We are direct to investor. We offer access to diversified portfolios, primarily of real estate, private credit and venture capital investments. We offer those to individual investors through our platform at accessible investment. Minimums are generally as low as $10.
We’re going to have to send a link to everybody. There’s no real excuse not to invest when there’s a $10 minimum. That’s fantastic. I’d love to chat with you for a moment about some of the challenges that you’re facing, the opportunities and how you’re helping the company grow. I want to have a little bit about your background, which is a little bit on the unconventional side for CFO. Although, you started off on the right track. Your dad was a tax partner.
That’s correct. He spent many years in public accounting.
Perhaps you were destined to be in finance and accounting for a profession. Although, you grew up on a farm.
I did not grow up on a farm. My dad did. That significantly influenced our upbringing. Work ethic was always a trait that was important in my family because of my dad. Probably both growing up on a farm, the physical labor aspect, then spending his entire career in public accounting, which I’d call more like intellectual labor but work ethic was always important.
Those are two of the hardest ways to make a living but in very different manners. Anyway, you weren’t immediately going into business. You started psychology in undergrad or you started off that way anyway.
I went to undergrad at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I was pre-med, and we didn’t have a med school, so my major became psychology. I avoided accounting. I avoided even any business classes. I ultimately ended up coming and getting my master’s in accounting in grad school. That psychology degree has helped inform my work and throughout my career.
It’s probably obvious to your audience that human psychology is critical in any leadership or management role. Empathy, emotional intelligence and both self and social awareness are fundamental to being a manager of humans. It’s not that what I learned in college was so useful but it set a foundation for an interest. In order to be good at those things, empathy and emotional intelligence, you have to be working on it all the time. That’s, again, been critical to both working with people and managing and leading teams.
Continuously honing empathy and emotional intelligence is essential for success in working with people, managing teams and leading them effectively. Click To Tweet
It’s interesting because, for some of my presentations, I’ve spoken to investors, CEOs and board members about what they value in a CFO. None of them mentioned technical skills or even finance skills. The empathy is up there, resiliency and the ability to inspire people, both by trust and inspire confidence. Probably a background in psychology or psychiatry or anything of that type of science is probably extremely helpful. You have a better understanding of human nature.
You have to start with understanding yourself. Learning to recognize your own biases, narratives and why you think about things the way that you do. That can help you put yourself in the shoes of your colleagues or direct report or any stakeholder like a board member. What do I know about this person that could help me to understand why they’re reacting this way or thinking about the problem in this way or how can I best work with them?
Laying the Groundwork
That’s the difference between being a manager and being a leader in many ways. You and I were briefly colleagues. You started your career at KPMG. What was that like for you in terms of setting the ground for [being a] future CFO?
You learn so many fundamental skills when you start out in public accounting. I started out in the audit practice. I worked across a variety of industries. I hit manufacturing, retail, real estate, investment management, insurance and banking. I touched all kinds of different industries and built that fundamental skill set in learning about accounting, financial reporting and even audit and compliance.
That’s been critical to have built a skill set in one of the many disciplines underlying finance. I was at KPMG for a decade. I spent a lot of time in the audit practice. I was thinking back on my experience as we thought about having this conversation. An anecdote that I recall, I worked on an engagement where the partner used to tell the team that the work we’re doing is ensuring that the capital markets function.
What we’re doing, we know we make the capital markets go round. I took away two things from that. It’s a good lesson in how to motivate young staff. Tell them how important the work they’re doing is, and it is important to work. I have a deep respect for the auditing profession. That was a good lesson in how to inspire teams. Maybe now that I’m looking back on that comment, your audience, who has worked in other aspects of the capital markets might find that statement a little narrow.
It’s emblematic to me of the narrowness that we’re all susceptible to. We get so caught up in the narrative of the importance of our own job, why our chosen profession is so critical or even why our department or function outcomes are of the highest priority. If you let yourself go down that path too far, you end up lacking the curiosity to see the world or the work or whatever it is realistically.
The lesson that I took away the most from my time at KPMG was how critical curiosity is. You have loads of opportunities to explore curiosity when you’re in the audit profession. You’re getting the backend view of a business. Looking back on some of my favorite experiences, we were doing inventory counts or the plant tours or attending board meetings or even a walkthrough. It was an opportunity to learn how people do their work and how these businesses operate.
The lesson for me has been that getting broad experience to manage against that bias can come from 10 years, 15 years, 20 years or 30 years doing the same thing. It’s critical to a finance role, especially appropriately evaluating risks, connecting with other people, communicating well and reaching conclusions that result in the best outcome for your business.
That’s an interesting observation. I remember thinking early in my career and then looking back on it. Auditing is a lot of responsibility for a 22-year-old. There aren’t a lot of other jobs that are assigned to 22-year-olds that have that type of consequence. The ones like nursing would be in a very different way, but there’s a lot of responsibility there. In terms of office-type jobs, there’s a lot of pressure on doing your job and being part of a team that executes well.
That’s what’s so engaging about the public accounting profession and what makes people stay as long as they do. It’s hard work, but you have a lot of responsibility very quickly. You get promoted very quickly through the chain. There’s always that next promotion and new hats to wear. I didn’t plan on staying long in public accounting. I went in thinking I’d do a couple of years and move on. I ended up staying 10 years because there was constantly a new challenge and new responsibilities to take on.
I worked in public accounting in the ‘80s right out of college then I came back to the same firm. It was Peat Marwick and Mitchell the first time at KPMG’s firm. I worked there in business development in 2010 and 2015. It was remarkable how different the game was. Its core mission was still the same.
The way they did the work changed over that time period.
You lasted longer than I did. I did three years the first go-round and I got my MBA. This is too hard, so I moved on to other things. That’s great. You put in ten years at KPMG then you took a position at the SEC. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
I joined the SEC in 2015 on a fellowship role as an assistant chief accountant in the Division of Investment Management. That’s the division that regulates registered investment companies and registered investment advisors. In late 2017, I took on the role of chief accountant for that division. In that role, my office was twofold—one side of the team focused on disclosure review, Sarbanes-Oxley. There’s a statutory mandate that the SEC staff review the financial statements of every issuer every three years.
There are about 15,000 registrants in the space. That team was doing about 5,000 financial statement reviews a year. They were excellent at it. Many of them had been there since the beginning, since Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, and that mandate was issued to the staff. Their work resulted in a lot of consistency within the registered investment company space in terms of financial reporting. Important work but they were excellent at doing that well.
The other side where I spent more of my time was probably on the policymaking side. That included working with our colleagues in enforcement and exams to give them technical auditing or accounting guidance as it related to registered investment companies. We worked through the office of the chief accountant with the PCOAB and the FASB on their standard-setting process.
Probably the thing that we did the most was assist in rulemaking. Helping to set policy, very big picture, very strategic work, thinking about how will this regulation impact industry and investors, learning from different industry stakeholders and their points of view. Coming up with your own point of view then trying to get that accomplished in a rulemaking process. One of the most important things I took away from my time at the SEC is t’s a government institution, so there is some bureaucracy there.
Regardless of bureaucracy or not, relationships are critical to getting anything done in your work. Especially in policymaking, I would argue that a huge part of that is about relationships, building trust and getting someone to believe in the change that you believe in. When I reflect back on my time at the SEC, it solidified that investing in relationships is so critical.
Joining Fundrise
I’ve noticed new people at the SEC and you sound like you had one of the most interesting experiences of the people I know. A lot of strategic type of stuff within that environment. It’s fairly obvious. I won’t ask why Fundrise would find you intriguing as a potential CFO. The other way around, how’d you come across the company? What about the opportunity was exciting for you?
That’s kind, and I feel very fortunate to have found Fundrise. I initially had a call with our CEO, Ben Miller. He’s also one of our founders. The company has been in existence for about 12 years. It’s in my industry. We’re in alternative asset management. I have worked in the investment management industry throughout my career but what struck me in my first meeting with him, as I was thinking about it as a regulator and as an auditor, you hear a lot of institutions talk about why they do what they do.
In all of my career, I’d never heard of a more authentic passion for serving individuals. As someone who had spent my entire career in investor protection-type roles, whether as a regulator or as an auditor, that hit me. That drew me in. The mission is the first reason that I was interested in joining Fundrise. Again, it comes down to relationships for me then it was the people.
You don’t talk about cultures where they do the same things that other companies do. Great cultures are distinct. By nature of that, they’re not for everybody. What I experienced in meeting a group of people over several months while we discussed the possibility was how much the people and the team resonated with me—very high humility and high talent. I think everybody says that, they’re smart and low ego.
Great cultures are distinct, and by nature of that, they’re not for everybody. Click To Tweet
We would say the third prong in what we look for in hiring is this high curiosity, critical thinking, judgment skill set. That culture resonated with me. I was excited about joining this team. Finally, from a personal perspective, it was an entrepreneurial opportunity. Building something, having a big impact, taking a risk and doing something late stage versus joining an institution where you can have smaller impacts on already successful and mature businesses. I was much more interested in doing that.
Culturally, it’s quite different from either of the two prior roles, but I can certainly see why it excited you and why you took the opportunity. I’d love to get an understanding of the team you have at Fundrise. Can you tell us a little bit about how many people are in the finance and accounting functions?
There are probably about 50 people who serve in a finance role. It was about 25 when I started. We’ve grown that pretty considerably. Although, we’ve been looking at resourcing models and some of that is changing, but because the environment in which we operate is heavily regulated, there’s a lot of compliance. A lot of accounting work.
We have a real estate accounting team, a fund accounting team and a corporate accounting team. It’s a lot of accountants. We do outsource some of that. We’ve moved to outsource some of the daily fund-routinized administration and accounting work. It’s heavily an accounting operation. The company has always invested in this regulatory discipline from the beginning. When I came in, I knew that that was already the standard.
The way our company and our funds are structured, we end up doing probably close to 20 audits a year in financial reporting on both an annual and semi-annual basis. Most of them are structures but some of them are under a real estate accounting model and more of a fund model, then we have the corporate entity and the parent entity as well. Lots of spotting work that we do.
It sounds like it. One of the things that is, I won’t say unique but relatively rare with a team of slashes, you’re all remote, aren’t you?
We are. That’s a different approach. Post-pandemic, lots of people have gone remote, gone back into the office, and many are hybrid. There’s no right answer, and it has to work for your company. What happened for us was that during the pandemic, and including before my time, we started to be able to find a lot of talent outside of the DC area that we weren’t able to find pre-pandemic.
If you think about engineering talent as an example, there are not a ton of engineers in DC. You can find great engineering talent across the country. That helped us in our growth, helped us to find the talent that we wanted. We made a decision that we didn’t want to go back from there. About 60 percent of our team resides outside of the DC area, including myself. We do still maintain a headquarters in DC.
The thing about being an entirely remote company, which we’re in the process of figuring out, is you have to adopt new practices and processes to support that approach. One of the things we’ve started to do is think about more regular on-site and bringing people in. Mostly there are a lot of reasons you do it, but the biggest reason is to build relationships among the team, both cross-functionally and within a department.+
We like to talk about this concept. Our CEO talks about this concept called MGI. It’s the Most Generous Interpretation. I’m pretty sure that he got it from a parenting book, but it applies to teams as well. The way about it is that the better you know someone, the more rapport and trust and relationship that go with them. The easier it is to get to the most generous interpretation of their behavior. That’s hard to do through a screen.
You only know someone on a screen and you don’t know them in 3D live. You’ve never met them. You’ve never heard about their family or their pets or their hobbies. It’s a lot easier to default away from the most generous interpretation. I look at those on-sites as a way to build up that initial inclination to go to MGI versus making some other assumption.
I somehow managed to live six decades without hearing that one before. I’m stealing it. A little off-topic. You happen to be a fan of the TV show Game of Thrones.
I am a fan. Although, I haven’t finished the series and I know that’s terrible.
There was a character, Littlefinger. He was the exact opposite. He said, “Why don’t you assume that everybody has the worst possible motives and see if that explains why they’re acting like they do?” He may not fit in well at Fundrise at all.
Maybe that’s a good way. Pessimistic approach when you’re assuming things about the behaviors of your competitors, but do the opposite when you’re thinking about your team.
I’m like you, it sounds like. I’m a natural optimist. If you’re a pessimist, you’re limiting opportunities and outcomes. I want to talk to you a little about the executive team. If I have my facts straight, you have an executive team of eight. You happen to be the only woman on the executive team. I’m wondering how that factors into anything, if at all, and perhaps it’s a non-issue.
It’s a non-issue. A lot of companies find themselves in some type of lacking diversity when you think about the founders of a company. Most of the remaining seven are founders or have been at Fundrise for a very long time. I often joke with them like, “Remember, I missed the first 10 chapters of the story.”
The most interesting part of that dynamic is that they’ve been around a long time. They’ve learned all the lessons in real time that the company has built its foundation on. It’s been important to me to build my relationships with those team members. We meet monthly in person as an executive team for a long afternoon. Often, turned into evening hours. It’s been critical.
For me, they have a foundation of having worked together in the office prior to the pandemic, but it’s been critical to us as an organization to be able to spend that time together. Number one, as I said, investing in relationships, building the rapport necessary for trust and collaboration, but then helping us to align on our differing perspectives. Reaching conclusions that optimize outcomes for the business as a whole rather than one of our departments or functions individually.
For example, I will often come at a problem or decision from a financial ROI perspective. Let’s say, our chief product officer is going to be laser-focused on the investor experience. Ultimately, all of our decisions at Fundrise come down to what is best for the investor. There’s obviously a lot of different ways to think about that. Having that outlet to work together, and having the rapport to trust, collaborate and share perspectives has been critical to us.
That’s what I always enjoyed. Everybody felt certain that their own function was the critical one. It’s like the people who make the products. If we make great products, everything else will fall into place. The marketing people are like, “No, you need to understand the markets and everything else.” Sales are like, “No, it’s all about the customers. You don’t have a business without them.” They all have a valid point. That’s the whole value of diversity of thought in this instance.
I would say that our CEO actively fights against that. He’s very biased that no one department or function is the most critical. He sets the tone for, “We have to work together. We have to reach the best outcome.” The best idea and the best decision for the business always wins.
It’s funny because in my life, I’ve been a CFO and I’ve run business development. I worked at companies and people watched me have a debate with myself, “Arguing with yourself? Are you taking both positions? Yes, I am.” In a lot of companies, the CEO/CFO dynamic is the critical one, the person, the trusted advisor or the person that they trust the most.
In your company, you also have a COO who plays a prominent role. I want to talk a little bit about what that relationship is like with the three of you because you have different perspectives and whatnot. How does that work at the company? The CEO and COO of both founders, is that correct? They did read the first 10 chapters.
Yes, they were there for the building of the first10 chapters. Both Ben and Brandon are founders. Our CTO is also a founder. I would say we have a very active executive team broadly. Everyone’s very involved in decision-making. The way I view my relationship with Ben and Brandon specifically, they’re the vision. They’re both very visionary, very brilliant and very passionate about this mission.
As an outside CFO, someone coming in, not founding the company, I view my job as operationalizing that and executing on their vision. Building rapport with them has been critical. Building and understanding their vision is critical. I would tell any aspiring or current CFO that investing in those relationships, you can never invest too much. It’s critical for a CFO to be close to the CEO or other founders and those with the vision of the company.
The importance of collaboration and building a relationship with those people can’t be understated. The longer we’ve worked together, the easier it has become to have difficult conversations about what we think is going right and wrong. Again, that’s about investing in the relationship and spending time getting to know each other.
Oftent, the CFO may be the only person there to challenge the CEO. No good CEO surrounds himself or herself with yes people. Sometimes it’s hard to do, particularly when the CEO is the one who started the company. It’s almost like criticizing someone’s child to a certain extent. Probably [it’s] upon you when the CEO is going in a direction that may not be the best or maybe they need to talk it through. I’m guessing that falls upon you quite often.
It falls upon anyone on the executive team to bring that up again because of the way we’re structured. Ben and I have had lots of difficult conversations over the years. I’m very lucky that he’s a very emotionally intelligent CEO. He’s also someone who cares a lot about getting to the right answer regardless of who came up with the idea. He takes no pride in being the only one to know the answer to a question. He’s very open to hearing if there is a better idea and why it’s a better idea. He expects you to have done very deep critical thinking in order to reach that conclusion.
The Evolving Role Of The CFO
I’d like to talk a little about how the CFO role, not only in your company but maybe in the entire industry, is likely to change in some of the strategic initiatives that you’re taking on to drive growth.
It’s such an interesting question broadly and for our industry. Both as a tech company and an alternative asset manager. I’ll try to hit all of those as it relates to alternative asset managers. There’s an increasing focus on retail or individual investors. More individual investors wanting to access the private markets. How you reach and communicate with those investors is going to be critical going forward.
As a tech company, there’s certainly a drive toward earlier profitability versus just a growth trajectory. As a finance professional, that’s clearly something you have to focus on. In the broader context, the evolving CFO role, there’s more use of technology and data availability. Both the timing and frequency are increasing. The use of AI is going to continue to increase over time.
As a result of all that tech being embedded in companies, the complexity of business models continues to change. The need to deeply understand the operations of your company is increasingly important. Strategic initiatives that I’m focused on that relate to that evolution [are] threefold. One, focus on regulatory discipline. As we’re seeing individual investors get into the alt space compliance is important. My team is responsible for the daily fund administration of our investment vehicles. In the alt space, that work is unique and complex. We spend a lot of time focused on improving efficiency while also maintaining a high level of discipline.
Secondly,[I’m] very focused on the efficiency of our spend, so reduction in burn rate and path to profitability. As an organization, we’re spending a ton of time building scalable processes and resource models. Lastly, business insights. We are a public filer in the complex regulatory environment with which we operate under regulation A, it’s kind of a baby 10-K that we issue. We have a pretty robust accounting and close process. We’ve been working hard to improve the timing of our internally reported cash and gap information, even other corporate relevant metrics, like HR data resulting in more frequent and timely information available to the executive team to manage the business.
Working for a consumer investment platform, the name of the game is probably financial stability and investor confidence. You see a whole. You’re probably more responsible than just about anybody in those two areas. What’s your strategy and approach to that?
In a direct-to-investor model where the capital inflows and outflows are coming directly to and from retail investors to us, there are no financial intermediaries. The biggest challenge unique to our platform is just knowing that we’re executing on behalf of individuals directly. Two keys there are technology and transparent communication. From a technology perspective, we have a foundation of incredible software that we built internally to handle all of the individual investor-facing side of the work.
Nearly all of our fundraising comes through our website or mobile applications. It’s critical that we have an excellent engineering and product team. …The second piece is transparent communication. We’re 12 years into building Fundrise. There’s a lot of experience in working direct-to-consumer.
One of the biggest takeaways I’ve had from joining Fundrise is how important transparent communication is to our investor base. We can reach them directly. We know who they are. We have their email addresses. We’re not working through some intermediary like you typically do when you’re purchasing into a mutual fund. We use that channel to tell them what’s going on and let them hear directly from us, including when we make mistakes, versus putting all that information in a regulatory filing and expecting them to find it at some point.
Those are the strategies that I would say are critical to the direct investor platform. More broadly, there are unique challenges for managing finances across multiple portfolios including an alts business or an alternative asset management business. The two keys that I think a lot about are cash management and regulatory excellence. Cash management for this type of portfolio and again, across multiple portfolios, requires intense precision in the work conducted by the treasury and portfolio management teams.
That goes back to talent, too. Make sure you’ve hired high integrity, high humility and high curiosity people who won’t ignore a problem. Who’ll ask the stupid silly questions and who will be interested in iterating on their processes over time. The second piece is regulatory excellence. Again, very fundamental to our business model and to the alternative asset management space. One of the reasons I felt comfortable joining a startup from the SEC was because of Fundrise’s intense dedication from the beginning that they’ve applied to compliance. It’s something we think about. It’s not sexy but it’s necessary and something that we spend a lot of time thinking about.
No, it’s not sexy but it’s probably one of the most critical things one can do in a company like yours. I want to get back a little bit about technology and how it affects the internal functioning of Fundrise, finance, and otherwise. Also, how are you using it for the customer experience? I think that the person with the best technology wins in a lot of cases in your industry.
That’s right. Especially as more asset managers are going after the individual investor and having technology is critical. I would say, it’s hard to quantify how big of an impact it’s had on us because its impact is beyond huge. It’s the whole reason we’re able to do what we do, which is to offer alternatives and a diversified portfolio for a $10 minimum investment.
Without that, we wouldn’t be in the business of serving individual investors. We would not be able to accept capital, redeem or send out distributions to 400,000 individual investors and at a $10 minimum. It’s going to be cost-efficient without technology. It’s been critical to building our business. That extends into the finance operations.
A great example of that is the tax software component of that capital raising software. We are able to accurately prepare and distribute over a million 1099s a year to our 400,000 investors. That’s using a couple of engineers and tax accountants because of our internally developed software. That’s one example of an impact; we’d be paying millions of dollars to have that done if we outsourced it more broadly as we continue to build tech, including with AI.
Another example to your question about the investor experience. This is probably a common AI integration at this stage of its development. We’ve focused on several AI-based investor support initiatives and customer service builds. Those have reduced our support cases by more than half. Getting answers a lot quicker to investors and sufficiently such that they close their inquiry.
You said you do a million 1099s. I’m going to let people know approximately how old I am. I used to work for a company where we printed them ourselves like on a dot matrix printer. We did like 50 1099s and a couple of hundred W-2s. It was like a day for multiple people.
I can’t even imagine doing it without our software at this point. Even when we deliver to the IRS, I’ve heard horror stories of when they did have to print them out in the early days but now, we can electronically submit them. A huge undertaking and without the software, there’s no way we’d be able to accomplish it.
My nieces and nephews get annoyed with me when I say stuff about how hard it was when I was young. I’ve officially become my mother and father. On my first computer, we filled it out. There were small cards. You had to fill out oval circles with a number two pencil and send it to the card reader. They think I’m making this stuff up. That’s what we did. What your company is doing was unthinkable to the young version of me.
Getting back to the company and something that the readers might care about. You’re in an industry that is inherently risky. What is your strategy to mitigate the risk? As a CFO, how do you balance the risk-reward ratio for your investors?
Our model does two things that [bear] on this question. It allows access to alternatives for individual investors at a low investment minimum. Not requiring them to over-allocate to alternatives if they weren’t able to access it otherwise. Again, that $10 minimum is very different than even a B-read or something you might find for a $25,000 minimum or $100,000 minimum. That’s a big shift that’s allowed people to get into alternatives in a way that mitigates risk.
It does so in a way that disrupts the old models for alternatives that we think result in lower volatility in return. I’ll give you an example of that. With real estate, we’ve effectively eliminated the middlemen that are so rampant in the REIT space. We have a vertically integrated business model, so we have a real estate operating platform that does all of the asset management, capital markets, lease servicing, debt servicing and development work.
We don’t charge the promotion or carry that real estate operators have historically charged. That gives back so much of the investment return back to the investor but it aligns incentives so that we aren’t incentivized to take these huge risks to achieve that promotion. Therefore, it results in lower volatility. As it relates to my work specifically, in my role at Fundrise, my team and my work is primarily focused on, again, operationalizing that model through an investor servicing platform. That’s a lot of fun and property accounting work and compliance. Back to that glamorous topic.
An example, my team and I spend a lot of time focused on our valuation process for the investments in our investors’ portfolios. Both the compliance of that process and the accuracy. As an accountant, you probably know the range of reasonable pricing for an alternative asset is wide.
They’re much harder to value than a public stock that’s traded on a daily basis and has an observable market price. We work diligently to ensure we have as much available data and information as possible to strike a price that feels like it’s most reflective of the fair value so that investors, both redeeming and subscribing to the funds, have a fair price.
It’s interesting because you clearly are a very high-performing strategic thinker. I can get that from this conversation. Yet, much of what you’re responsible for is the old-school blocking and tackling of being a finance and accounting professional. Do you find that challenging to reconcile both of those things?
It’s the stage that we’re at as a company. Unlike most startups, we dove headfirst into the regulatory environment. I always say that we’ve somehow figured out a way to operate under all of the securities laws. I didn’t miss any of them. As a result, the finance function has been built on accounting compliance, this regulatory excellence.
Some of the finance functions, the narrative, the story about the company, because of the way we fundraise as a parent company, haven’t been as necessary yet. That’s the next stage is building that out. Once we’ve solidified the scalability of the compliance processes so that when we get back to an economy where we’re having this huge growth, where we don’t have to just hire to keep that running regardless of size and volume, then I’ll get to spend more time on some of the strategic work.
I have two final questions I want to ask of you. First, what’s some advice you can give to the next generation of chief financial officers? Either people who are on a path to be coming on or maybe somebody just started their first-ever CFO-type role. What are the areas they should be focusing on?
I’ll keep it short and sweet because I’ve touched on both these topics throughout the conversation. The things that are most critical in my mind are, investing in relationships and being curious beyond the scope of your own work.
Invest in relationships and be curious beyond the scope of your work. Click To Tweet
That’s fantastic. I also like to ask people, to forgive me. I’m trying to change the reputation of finance and accounting people. Do you have like an interesting hobby or a fun fact about you that people might find funny or maybe even do you have like a favorite joke?
I have one of both. I’ll start with the fun facts and you can decide what is best for the finance profession. I’m very interested in both health and wealth building. My fun fact is that I’m convinced I’m going to live to be 150. I’m convinced many of us are. A little background on that, I spend a lot of time with my own data, whether it’s sleep, resting heart rate, blood work, impact of different activities and read a lot of books and listen to a lot of podcasts.
By no means, I’m not an expert. I certainly haven’t perfected anything for myself. You have to be a scientist or someone with a lot of extra time on your hands to have a deep understanding of longevity and health. Especially, as we undo decades or centuries of damaging information, I have a lot of faith in the ingenuity of humanity. The advances that we’ll see as a result of technology and this increased focus and learning in the next 10 years or 20 years will blow our minds. As long as you preserve sufficient health and sufficient wealth, you’ll be able to take advantage of those advances and we’ll have a longer lifeline ahead of us.
Do you know Ray Kurzweil? Does that mean anything to you?
No.
You’d like his book. The name of his book is Live Long Enough to Live Forever. He has a reputation. He’s made outrageous predictions. A lot of them come true. Ask him. He’ll tell you that they come to. A lot of them haven’t, but one of them is eventually people will be living to be like a thousand based upon improvements in life expectancy. In the 1800s, you’d be considered old. I certainly would be. I’m considered old almost. We’re nearing the point now where life expectancy like it’s growing and each year life, expectancy increases by three months now. That number is increasing, so pretty soon we’re going to be at the point where life expectancy is increasing by more than a year every year.
It’s not going to be linear growth. We’ll probably see an exponential tail at some point.
I love outrageous predictions. I’m going to read that book. I don’t know him or anything but I’ve met him a number of times. He doesn’t eat food the way we do. At least when I was around him. Everything is in pill form and taking it all the time. There’s some science to if you eat too much that’s too strange for as you get older or something.
I’ve heard that. I’ve had a hard time implementing that one.
Anyway, you’ve got a lot going on. I know you’re busy, so I appreciate your time. I want to give you the final word if you have anything to say.
This has been fantastic. A great future out there for finance professionals, including in the age of AI. I’m excited to see what’s next. Thanks for having me.
