Lisa Stone | Hustle Con 2018

Lisa Stone

Hey oh hey everybody hey welcome to oakland welcome to hustlecon I am not sally krawcheck I am lisa stone I'm a serial entrepreneur probably best known for blogher as they shared but I am also very happy to be the chief strategy officer at ellevest let me tell you a little bit about how I came to be speaking with you this morning sally sat in traffic for 3 hours last night missed her plane by this much and called me and said you know what you know better than anybody how we hire from outside our network you go tell them and I said okay thanks boss I'll do that so elavest is a financial planning and investment platform created by for and with women we offer a full series of financial services from private wealth management through premium planning that includes certified financial planning and career coaching since most of us earn our nest eggs paycheck to paycheck and we also have a digital platform with a $0 minimum the single most important thing you should know about investing in women whether you are a woman or just have them in your life is that if you save for retirement using guy math you will never save enough wall street uses guy math that's the default why is this a problem because women live longer we make less for the same jobs we tend to take career breaks to take care of children and loved ones and those hit us in the wallet hard from salary and opportunity so we decided to form this company and it is a big business the women control 51% of private wealth in the united states it's a $14,000,000,000,000 business the majority of women under 40 do not have a financial adviser and the majority of women of all ages fire their financial advisers as soon as they have a divorce or their husband dies so big business big opportunity and this is all happening because we were we were the biggest financial technology platform out of the gate because sally hired outside of her network our chief product officer who is on the founding team alexandra street is from weight watchers specialists in changing behavior our chief design officer built vogue.com and I've spent the past 25 years building huge communities of women who talk about everything from parenting to politics so let's talk about what this means for you as entrepreneurs when we think about the ultimate meritocracy for a long time people have thought about the united states right mom apple pie capitalism sky's the limit horatio alger and let's unpack that a little bit particularly let's look at 2 industries that affect us as entrepreneurs let's look at wall street and adventure capital you would expect given that these industries are tracked by roi very carefully calibrated that they would be watching how people were performing and hiring only the best right well let's look at the fact that these interestingly tend to be the least inclusive of all the industries 90% of traders are male 90% of hedge fund managers are male 95% of mutual fund managers are male 86% of financial advisers are male and 95% of vcs are male and by the way white white white white white and most of the people who get into these businesses as women also tend to look a lot like me so how are they performing according to my boss sally krawcheck the typical female investment adviser outperforms men less likely to panic in a rush less likely to think like a lemming in addition the in addition when you look at the performance of wall street over the past 10 years remember the financial crisis pretty terrible what we learned about the way business was done vc is doing a little bit better although it's important to note that they're not outperforming the public markets and the risk is astronomical so actually not so great whereas if you look at all the studies that have come out from mckinsey and company's y diversity matters to babson college's women in bc you see that if you want to increase returns lower risk improve employee engagement really improve customer engagement and get overall better returns you'll have diverse and women involved leadership groups I'll be specific according to babson college if you're an entrepreneur and you have women on your leadership team your valuation in your first round will be 64% higher and your valuation at your exit will be 49% higher the challenge is finding a vc who will invest in you if you do have a woman on your team but the returns are there and the truth is same for publicly traded companies so let's talk about what to do about that how can you actually impact your own company in a way that will improve performance like that here's what I recommend and I'm going to talk a little bit about ellevest experience and also blogherse number 1 I think it makes a lot of sense for you to own whoever you are whatever your background is that you have unconscious bias and you're gonna hurt your company unless you unpack it let's just acknowledge it we've all got it so what I recommend that people do is think hard about how to put in place a couple of things number 1 if your ceo cares about inclusivity and I mean serious inclusivity of course race of course gender but also gender preference and age and neurodiversity how about socioeconomic background the people we survey about our digital platform who have student debt think a lot differently about how they want to invest their money than people who are in our private wealth business right the very best thing you can do is to have your ceo write about it and or consider doing a q and a between if your ceo happens to be a great white guy put him in conversation with people in front of the company who to demonstrate what his values are and what he wants the company's values to be there are also a ton of people online that you can follow friend and recommend I'm really impressed by the work that blake irving did to change godaddy's brand and make sure that the women in his company were paid what men are before he left that that job I'm really impressed by rick clough at Google ventures who has unpacked his network on linkedin and unpacked his network on twitter and made a very conscious decision to follow many more women but there are plenty of women doing this too look at what aileen lee and crew are doing with all raise and founders for change jess lee was really instrumental in that you know there are any number of people you can follow but the bottom line is what you need is kpis at blogher when I was ceo we made a decision that we wanted to create a duocracy not a hypocrisy and we didn't want 3 mostly white chicks to just recreate a conference in our own image so what we did was decide that we were gonna have 85% turnover in speakers every single year that was a commitment but wait there's more we decided that when we did turn them over we were gonna make sure that we had 30% or greater representation of underrepresented groups on a given topic and interestingly what that meant was that in our food network we worked really hard to involve men because we felt and the community voted that cooks who are guys just don't get the same fair shake that the paladins and the reed drummonds of the world do it was a big success I think that the other thing that I just have to emphasize a ton is that we networked like honey badgers k we worked like the dickens we were at on the founding teams and sponsors of blogalicious and blogging while brown there are so many conferences you can attend to recruit from the national black mba association to blavity and afro tech to we all grow latina I mean the list is truly endless and if you really wanna recruit excellent talent you'll go there because if you then put into place a rooney rule which the philadelphia eagles coach got started fantastic initiative if you follow that and you work to be inclusive every time you hire or every time you pull together a working group it will have a fundamental change and if your team doesn't do it I will tell you as a former ceo just tell them no when they bring the next candidate that looks exactly like them whoever they are you just say no it's very effective so I think that the last thing I wanted to share is how well this has worked for ellevest when I sat down for breakfast with sallie krawcheck the first time you know I expected to meet one of the 1% of the 1% right she ran 2 of the 5 largest investment banks on wall street I did not expect a scholarship student from charleston south carolina who's absolutely passionate about saving the financial futures of women to show up at that breakfast like she did and I think that's one of the reasons that at ellevest 50% of our engineering and product teams are women and 40% of my colleagues are people of color it can be done you can do it and I will personally help you if you cannot find technologists or product developers or engineers who are women or people of color just reach out to me on twitter at lisa stone or linkedin I swear I know a ton I've been in the valley for a 100000 years the last thing I would just offer up is this when I think about what's gonna happen next and where we need to go in the era where we are as a I'm a 3rd generation american and I'm really concerned about what's happening in this in this country and the way people are treating themselves and each others I want you to think hard as entrepreneurs about the leadership you're showing I really salute it and you need to take care of yourselves financially I want you to go on to the Google and Google elavest and sep ira sep ira entrepreneurs typically do a pretty terrible job of taking care of their own financial futures yes I want every woman here in the audience to figure out a way either through elavest or another robo advisor to put some dollars on auto deposit every single month and invest in your futures because women are 80% more likely to be impoverished in our senior years you don't wanna be in that apartment with 6 of your best friends fighting over the goldfish crackers ladies that's ridiculous but guys you need us too because it turns out while you're pouring money into your companies and your time and your love and your effort into your employees you really need to be saving for yourselves as well so at the very least go on to nerdwallet search best robos of 2018 yes elavest is on that list and take care of yourselves even as you're working to change the culture and innovate in ours thank you so much