Nathalie Molina Niño is an entrepreneur, investor (at O³) and tech globalization veteran focused on high-growth businesses that benefit women and the planet. In this episode we speak about what investors can do to tackle the climate crisis and why investing in women is the most effective way to do so. Nathalie sets out the case for builder capital, a new (old) approach to investing that focuses on building not extracting. And we hear Nathalie's unique take on feminist finance (spoiler: it's all about timelines).
01:41 Why Nathalie founded O³ and her focus on outcomes over optics.
04:20 Nathalie's approach to investing to benefit women and the planet through "builder capital". What builder capital is and how it differs from the usual venture capital approach.
07:35 Why stereotypically "female" qualities are necessary to address the major problems we face today. (Nathalie mentions John Gerzema's book, The Athena Doctrine.)
11:43 What investors can do to tackle the climate crisis and why they need to shift their mindset to focus on the technologies we already have to mitigate climate change. Why investors should tackle social, equality and environmental issues in a holistic way.
19:18 Why the solutions that center women are the most effective in tackling the climate crisis. Nathalie discusses the research of Katharine Wilkinson and her book Drawdown, and talks about a company in the Niger Delta using distributed ledger technology to pay women directly to tackle plastic pollution.
25:28 Nathalie explains her thesis of investing in solutions that work at scale to lift up billions of women.
29:42 Why it's important not only to lift up women entrepreneurs and executives, but to focus on solutions that lift up the vast majority of women.
32:43 The actions we can take individually to address inequality.
40:56 Nathalie's perspective on a feminist financial system: patience on returns and impatience in tackling our social and environmental problems.
Get in touch and share your ideas on this episode on twitter or by email: feministfinancepodcast@gmail.com
You can find out more about Nathalie on her website or follow her on Twitter.
Alice Merry (00:04):
Welcome to the podcast that takes a feminist look at the world of money. My name is Alice Merry and this is the feminist finance podcast
Alice Merry (00:16):
Today I interviewed Natalie Molina Niño. Natalie is an entrepreneur and investor at O³. She launched her first tech startup at the age of 20 and is now a veteran in the worlds of technology, entrepreneurship and investment and she's committed to building high growth businesses that benefit women and the planet. So you can see why I was so happy to have her on the podcast. Natalie is the author of Leapfrog, the new revolution for women entrepreneurs. I recommend giving it a read. It's a practical, witty, and quite irreverent look at getting ahead as a woman entrepreneur. There's a lot more I could tell you about Natalie. She has a very impressive resume, but the interview itself is full of gems and I'd rather we get straight to hearing from Natalie herself.
Alice Merry (01:04):
Hi Natalie. Thank you very much for joining us today on the feminist finance podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Nathalie Molina Niño (01:11):
Hello, with a name like that I'm happy to be here.
Alice Merry (01:15):
Good to hear. I wanted to start by asking you about O³ and how you started it. So one of the lessons in your book Leapfrog that I thought was brilliant was that entrepreneurs, rather than starting with their passion, should find things that they want to punch. So I'd be really interested to know what was the thing that you wanted to punch that led you to founding O³?
Nathalie Molina Niño (01:41):
Sure. So O³ is really my family office. It's the entity through which I do my investing, my speaking, my advising. I don't really do consulting much these days, but when I do, it's through O³. It's kind of in the name, the thing that I wanted to punch. And that is that, especially, but not only, but especially in this space of gender, whether it's gender lens investing or, you know, gender advocacy around gender parity--everything from income disparities to everything else that keeps women from achieving real equity--here's a lot of pink washing, there's a lot of, kind of, let's slap a pink logo on the phone and let's put a beautiful sculpture of a fearless girl on wall street in front of a bull for marketing purposes. But when you kind of look under the hood, and you see that this thing, whether its a product or a program or a law, so many things, you know, what is it actually accomplishing?
Nathalie Molina Niño (02:56):
There's a whole lot of optics, and not a lot of outcomes. And we know, of course there are fewer women at the executive level in publicly traded companies worldwide than there were even 10 years ago. There are fewer women graduating as engineers and not every country, but in a lot of countries, certainly in the US and so, there are fewer women this year getting venture capital than last year. And so there's this sense of like everybody's talking about it and gender is thing that's out there top of mind. But there aren't really a lot of real outcomes of things where you can truly say that the dial is being moved in the right direction. And so outcomes over optics is, in a way, my response of saying I want to focus--be it in my investing or my advocacy or my writing or my advising--I want to focus on outcomes over optics. It's not to say that optics don't matter, it's not to say that representation doesn't matter, and that the stories that we tell don't matter. But if I'm choosing between outcomes or optics, I choose outcomes. I know that both have a place, but I'm really going to be focused on getting real outcomes so that we can start to see numbers, in some measurable way, actually shift.
Alice Merry (04:20):
So it would be great to know, how does O³ bring about the kind of outcomes that you're looking for?
Nathalie Molina Niño (04:27):
I mean primarily I would say it's innovations around investing, right? And I say innovations kind of in quotation marks because I don't know that focusing on companies that benefit women and the planet, which is ultimately my thesis, is all that innovative. I mean, women represent 51% of the population and we all live on the same planet and one would think we would all be united in this idea of trying to, not save the planet, because the planet is going to be fine, but to save our place in it, because it probably won't be able to sustain human life if we continue on the path that we're on. And so, that's one way: investing in companies that benefit women and the planet and doing it in a way, and this is the second strategy and the second thing that I do at O³, is doing it in a way that is most effective and most equitable.
Nathalie Molina Niño (05:28):
So last December, O³, my organization, as well as others like BlueIO and a number of other partners, we launched an alternative to venture capital that we're calling builder capital. And again, kind of innovation in quotations, because what builder capital is, ultimately, it's a good old fashioned way of investing the way that people did a long time ago, where they focus on making sure that the goal is to be all in with every company. So if you invest in 10 companies, you're all in on all 10 companies. If those companies require, and they always do, require support, you roll up your sleeves and you step in and really help the founders get it, not only up and off the ground, but then be successful and grow and achieve whatever the big goals are for that company. That's starkly different from what venture capitalists do, right?
Nathalie Molina Niño (06:25):
Venture capitalists do portfolio management, which is to say that if they invest in a hundred companies, they really just focus on a handful of them really being wildly successful and they understand that according to the latest statistics, about 75% of the companies they invest in are not going to survive. And they're okay with that. And that's the model. I think that at a time when you have wealth inequality and when women are getting 2.8% of all venture capital, I just think that that model, which is often called "spray and pray", it's not how we build societies. Like imagine if you flew an airline that had a 75% failure rate. It's just, maybe it's right for some people, but it's not right for most of us. So I would say O³ does mainly those two things: I invest in companies that benefit women and the planet and I'm trying to reimagine better ways and structures around investing that are less extractive and that are more about really building things that last.
Alice Merry (07:35):
When I looked at the website of the trade association Builder Capitalist that you set up, one of the things that really stood out to me actually was the language. Even this whole idea of builder capital. So, there was words like community, trust, health, partnerships, support, build rather than extract. And it just really jumped out to me as language that isn't typical to read in an investing context and language that we actually often consider quite female. And I wonder if you think there's something to that, something to that different language?
Nathalie Molina Niño (08:13):
I hope there is. There's a book by a researcher, a gentleman by the name of, I think John Gerzema, who came from one of the big massive ad agencies. He specifically ran the market research side of the business. He's a data guy and he called it the "Athena doctrine". And what they did is they took tens of thousands of people around the world, and they basically said, in solving the massive problems of today, not the ones of 10 years ago or 20 years ago but solving massive problems that we're facing today and the ones that we will face, what are the traits of leadership that are the most valuable and important in this new paradigm? And at the same time, what was interesting, is that prior to asking that question, he asked people to categorize leadership skills into the two buckets, which are binary, which are not real, they're stereotypical, right? They're subjective. But nonetheless, he asked them to say which of these leadership traits are stereotypically female and which of them are stereotypically male? And they fell in all of the buckets that I think you were alluding to, right? The things that are typically assigned to female versus male traits. And what was funny is that in, I don't know how many countries, it was over 16 countries I believe, the results were consistently the same. That unanimously, I mean it literally in like the 80 percentiles and above, so maybe not unanimously, but the vast majority of people assigned highest value in solving the problems of our time to the things that have been stereotypically considered female leadership traits. And I love that a guy did that study and that he's a total data geek. This is not like Gloria Steinem commissioned a study and shockingly, it all agrees with her, you know. This was someone who did not belong necessarily in this camp with us naturally. This is someone who doesn't have a lifetime of advocating for women's leadership. Right? He's just looking at the pure data. He's a bald white guy, and he's a secret weapon for me. We know each other and we brought him to things and had him speak and he's wonderful and I recommend his book.
But I think that that's where I'm coming from. And I think that for me it's more about: what are the most effective strategies for investing in building things, the ones that yield real lasting returns and the ones that are most aligned with the kind of outcomes that we want to see in the world? And I think, you know, it happens that those are things that have been considered stereotypically female, but they're obviously traits that men and women can embrace and embody. And I would say it happens to be, because I'm an engineer and I like to make sure that there's good solid data behind everything that I do. But, you know, I'm not going to lie that I'm not satisfied with that and I don't embrace it wholeheartedly.
Alice Merry (11:43):
I wanted to talk to you about the climate crisis because I think that scenario where this approach that you're talking about is particularly relevant and perhaps we do need a different approach or a different set of values to tackle this, you know, truly colossal challenge that faces humankind, as you've mentioned. And, and also one where the idea you mentioned of outcomes over optics is very important, because we've seen really excessive focus on optics and fighting climate change, and really disappointing progress on outcomes. So, I'd be really interested to hear your perspective on what the role that investors have in achieving real outcomes in mitigating the climate crisis.
Nathalie Molina Niño (12:31):
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting time to be having that conversation because just last week, or the week before, Jeff Bezos announced that he's putting $10 billion into climate. Right. The fine print of that, of course, is that it's philanthropy, and the fine print even below that is, in the US, philanthropy is a way of avoiding paying taxes. The truth is, if Jeff Bezos simply paid taxes at the rate that, I don't know, a blue collar worker in the United States pays taxes and at the same tax bracket, it would be a lot more than $10 billion.
Nathalie Molina Niño (13:11):
And then, we could all democratically decide what to do with that money, to collectively do what's best for us, you know, as democracies do. But instead, he's going to choose what that $10 million does. And that's, it remains to be seen what actually happens with that money. But, the fact is, if you collect every philanthropic dollar on earth, it's still not nearly as much money as what goes into the capital markets through investing. Which is why the answer to your question about what can investors do in the climate crisis, the answer's everything. The answer is, way more than philanthropy because of the sheer math. How much money is being traded as investments versus how much money is being given away in philanthropy makes it very clear that the world moves because of investment activity. And I think that what investors can do, it's multi-tiered.
Nathalie Molina Niño (14:14):
I would say my top top thing is kind of a mindset shift. One of them is that, a lot of investments are focused, especially when it comes to climate, they're focused on new innovative things. They're very aligned with like the startup ethos, right? If the cover of a magazine is talking about some interesting new thing in the climate world in business, it's going to be some new technology, right? Somebody designed some, I don't know, kelp based, you know, replacement for plastic, or something that's brand spanking new and it's sexy. And that's why it got you on the cover of this magazine.
Nathalie Molina Niño (14:58):
And I think what people forget is that, two things: new technology takes a long time to commercialize. In 2009, Google X kicked off the autonomous vehicle project and most of us are not coming to work every day being driven by our autonomous vehicles in 2020. It's been 11 years and it's not to criticize Google X for being slow. That's how long new technology and new innovation takes to commercialize. It takes a lot of time.
Nathalie Molina Niño (15:31):
And I would say that the number one thing that we have to focus on in investing is to remember that we have less than 12 years before civilization as we know it shifts. Because even today, nevermind 12 years from now, even today, the air that we breathe today is at a stage where there is no evidence of any human life existing and breathing this air. The way that you and I are breathing air today, there is literally no data to show what happens with air like this. So we're kind of already, you know, at this incredibly critical point, that we don't have time for new technology. And the good news is that we don't need to have time for new technology because it's all there. All the research has been done, all of the other tech that's going to save us is in front of us. But what happens is that those existing technologies, those mid-size companies that are already extracting, you know, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and maybe turning it into energy, all of those technologies that are in the shape of something that already exists, they're not sexy. And a lot of the times we as investors, we're looking for that sexy new thing, not that middle of the road midsize company that needs a little bit of financing in order to grow. For some reason that's not as sexy as a brand new invention that somebody came up with in a lab somewhere. You know? Again, that gets you on the cover of a magazine. So, I would say the number one thing that we as investors have to do is stop focusing on the next new shiny object. Stop prioritizing that new invention, when we know that the technology that already exists, and many of it that has existed for a long time, is what is ultimately going to get us to at least mitigate some of what's coming. Right. And so that's number one. And that has to do with the culture around investing and the obsession with shiny new objects and all of the media apparatus that's around it.
Nathalie Molina Niño (17:31):
And I would say that the second thing is to remember that the social dimension cannot be divorced. I have had many investors kind of say, look, you know, climate is an existential threat. So, this business of gender lens investing and looking at reproductive health and all of the different things that you know are top of mind when you're looking at investing in things that benefit women, that's nice. But you know, I'm focused on climate because I feel like that's the most, you know, that's the highest priority right now. It's the most critical thing. And there's that binary thinking of like it's either climate or it's gender or it's social justice or civil rights, or it's, you know, diversity and inclusion. Those are false paradigms.
Nathalie Molina Niño (18:21):
I think that we as investors have to start embracing that, the idea that, women being subjugated, women not being on an equal footing, is part of what's contributing to climate. Not having women on boards, not having women making decisions at the global level in positions of power, is part of what got us here and it's part of what's going to get us out, if we fix it. And so, these false dichotomies of like we either do one or the other, are problematic. And I think that we as investors have to start realizing that they're all interconnected. And if we start doing that and our money starts to go in the direction of that more holistic, integrated view of things, I think we'll start to see that we really start to put our money where it's most going to make an impact.
Alice Merry (19:18):
It's really interesting this topic that you bring up about the connection between social and climate issues. And I was reading a really interesting article the other day which had evidence showing that climate breakdown is increasing violence against women and girls. So they were documenting increases in violence against women environment activists, to increase in violence faced by women who are being displaced by climate change, as well as domestic violence during times of resource scarcity. I think it's, it's really interesting, what you mentioned, because women are both at the forefront of being impacted by climate change and they're also being held back from being part of the solution to that problem.
Nathalie Molina Niño (20:07):
You know, what's interesting about that framing is that it's both true, but it's also missing a critical part, and that is that, I think oftentimes of late, we hear women, and especially people of color in the world, as being at the forefront of the first and the worst to be impacted by climate. The thing that often gets lost in that, because that's true, but the thing that often gets lost in that is that when you look at solutions and you look at the most effective ways to make an impact in reversing climate change, it also happens to be women. So, I always try to balance. We can talk about women as being the victims of climate and how unjust that is. But we also have to talk about the fact that investing in women is actually probably one of the most effective ways to make an impact on climate.
Nathalie Molina Niño (21:03):
And I'll give you just one example. People often think that it's a proxy for reproductive health and yes, it's true that the more educated women are and the more access they have to birth control--easy, affordable access--the more they willingly choose to have smaller families. That is a fact, but it's more than that. There was a study and there's research that was compiled by Katherine Wilkinson, who is one of the primary writers of an amazing book called Project Drawdown. And she has written two important sections and they're like the top 10 things that you can do for climate change and they center around women. And one of them that I'll always remember is about smallholder farming, right? If we look at small farmers all around the world and we look at the amount of resources available to the male owned land versus the female owned land, what we see is that because of sexism and because of maybe traditional gender roles, even in the same social strata, where the economic situation is the same, the male owned plot of land still has access to more resources and, therefore, those plots of land, yield more and they're more effective and they're more efficient and they're just more productive.
Nathalie Molina Niño (22:25):
And so, if all we did was to take small holder farmers that are women and we just leveled the playing field and we gave them as many resources as their neighbor who's male and leveled the playing field there, we would see at a global scale a massive uptake in the amount of productivity that we have in productive agricultural land. And that alone right there would make a massive impact on climate, on our abilities to sustain ourselves. And that's a perfect example of, sure, we can focus on women being victims of a problem, but I love the idea of balancing that and making it really clear, with the data and the studies that exist already, that...I don't want to have women to shoulder the burden of "guess what, women are now responsible for saving, you know, us from climate change", but I will say that it's very clear that the levers that are most effective center women, and that's when we talk about solutions, not just victims.
Alice Merry (23:34):
That's really interesting and it's something I've seen as I've been doing a piece of work on plastic pollution, on how we can reduce marine plastic pollution, and something really interesting about the kinds of investments and the, you know, international donors focus, is that it's very much on the big scale things, regional initiatives, big infrastructure projects and there are real concerns that there's very, very little money going into grassroots and women's initiatives to tackle plastic pollution on the front line. There's some really interesting examples of how some businesses established by women are having an impact on plastic pollution.
Nathalie Molina Niño (24:17):
Yeah, I mean, I know of a project, a Nigerian named Nnadi who is, and I don't even want to try to butcher his last name because I know I will get it wrong, but he has enlisted women in the Niger Delta using distributed ledger technology to be able to cut the banks out of the picture and any corruption that might come from that, and pay them directly for taking a plot of land in the Niger Delta and giving them a kit to be able to clean the Delta at scale. And now you have thousands and thousands of women that are being gainfully employed and that are being actively included in an effort for the environment in that particular place. Right. And it's really effective. And it's also just an amazing way economically, nevermind climate related, of giving directly to the people who are going to be the most productive a way to sustain themselves, while also obviously doing something amazing for their home.
Alice Merry (25:28):
And I'm curious to know as an investor, from the perspective of O³, is this the kind of business--the one that you've just mentioned in Nigeria--is that the kind of business you think is attractive to you as an investor?
Nathalie Molina Niño (25:54):
Hmm. It depends, right? I do a certain kind of investing where I really focus on scale. But that's not necessarily the only way, right, there are people who focus on debt vehicles, there are people who do revenue sharing, royalty base, you know, there are definitely many different ways to invest that are separate and different from venture capital, that require different types of growth metrics. For me, what would be interesting about the model that I described, if it was profitable and it was the kind of thing that could be replicated in many, many places around the world, then that would be interesting to me, because my thesis from the beginning has always been that I don't care about taking one founder and turning her into a billionaire. Like I think a lot of people are focused on that kind of investing.
Nathalie Molina Niño (26:57):
I prefer to focus on companies and businesses that will have the potential to take a billion women and raise them up. And that might be to raise them up from abject poverty into surviving with basics they didn't have before, or it might be taking a whole group of people... like in the United States, for example, elder care professionals, people who take care of the elderly in your home or in hospitals and other places, hospices. They tend to make less than a living wage. And they tend to be contractors. And I remember looking at a company that was proposing to pay almost double the pay of elder care workers and make it for people who were looking to employ elder care workers, making it so that there is a great easy turnkey way to go online, find amazing people, who'll come to your home and take care of the elders in your family. And so from a business standpoint, it was a great company that made it very easy for the consumer to interact with them and to give them clear guidance about how to go through the process and pick great people to take care of their family members. But on the backend, it treated workers far better than most elder care organizations in that it paid them a living wage and it gave them health insurance. That's all of the elder care workers that will be a part of that company. They're not going to become billionaires. This is not like, you know, let's make a bunch of these people millionaires, even. Let's take them from making less than a living wage and having no health insurance to making a living wage and having basic things like health insurance. If we can replicate that model in every city in the United States and then go outside of the US and put it in any place that it's needed and that it will thrive, that's the sort of company that excites me.
Nathalie Molina Niño (29:02):
And so for me, it's very much about impact at scale. If it's something where it's like only in the Niger Delta and it's unique to that one place, then that's probably not an investment for me. But that's just because this is my thesis. My thesis is about impacting women at scale and making sure that the ideas that exist in the world that can do that will flourish. And usually impact at scale, if done successfully and if done profitably, also translates into really great returns for investors. So there shouldn't have to be a sacrifice on the return on investment.
Alice Merry (29:42):
It's interesting to me that your thesis includes the fact that you're not specifically interested in investing in women entrepreneurs, rather in companies that, the founder could be of any gender, but have a real impact on women, or on people, on achieving equality. And that kind of stood out to me as being different from other approaches that I've seen where very much the focus is about getting women into the boardroom or getting women entrepreneurs access to more funding, for example.
Nathalie Molina Niño (30:14):
Here's my thought about that. It's not to say that representation doesn't matter. And it's not to say that the lack of women at the executive level, the lack of women on boards, it's not to say that those things don't matter. They do. And those things are getting a lot of play. And I think as a, as a true entrepreneur, what I tend to see is... I kind of take a look at any market and I see where are the holes? What are the things that nobody's focusing on that need to be focused on that have the ability to make real impact?
Nathalie Molina Niño (30:46):
And to me it's not that women on boards and women founders and you know, women being represented at very high levels isn't important. It's just that when I look at the landscape of women and where there are equity issues, I see that we have focused and almost obsessed with women on the corner office. And 99% of women are never going to be C level employees of a fortune 500. They're never going to be founders of companies. They're never going to seek out venture capital. And that's okay. Right. And I think that in the conversation about enabling women to thrive and in defending the rights of women and seeking equality for women, somehow the women in the corner office have taken all of the oxygen and I want to focus, in addition to that, on everyone else. I want to make sure that it isn't just about that founder getting venture capital, but it's about that factory worker being treated like a human being and that receptionist, making sure that she has a long and productive career and can retire and can live, you know, and after she's retired, that she can afford to pay for her kids' schooling and have health insurance and all of the sort of basic things that so many women in the world do not have. And that's not about women in the corner office. It's not about founders or executives. Right. And so, it's for me really about centering most women right in the middle of where I want to be solving problems and not simply focusing on those presidents and board members and executives.
Alice Merry (32:43):
A lot of the people who listen to the Feminist Finance Podcast are people who are working within the financial sectors. They might be working within banks, insurance companies and so on. And I was interested to hear what, what role you think they can play in what you're discussing about impacting most women, about impacting the broader world? And there was something that, I listened to a talk you gave, that I thought was really good, and it turned the common refrain of getting to yes on its head and talks about the need to exercise our "no muscle". And that concept really stuck with me and I was wondering what you think those of us who may be working within the financial sector, working within financial institutions, where do we need to be exercising our "no muscle"?
Nathalie Molina Niño (33:46):
Yeah, yeah. That came from, it was a play on the Harvard famous, classic book on negotiation, that frankly is used in probably every business school called "Getting to yes". And, as with most things in business, they have been framed through the lens of men. And this idea that like you start off with an assumption of no being the answer and how do we take that "no", and turn it into a "yes". And I think about women in the workplace and I think, first of all, that feels like a really glass half empty way of seeing the world. Everything is a "no" until you can convert it to a "yes". It also feels like a bit of a zero sum game. Like, I'm going to win. You're going to lose. Even though the book talks about, you know, trying to find win-win solutions. But the framing is it's binary, right? And, I think that if women have any skill that they have consistently shown throughout the ages to be really, really good at it's that we can make do with the, sort of, lemons that are being thrown in our general direction. And in fact, we made lemonade out of lemons. And I think that a lot of that has to do with focusing on accepting, accepting that in the case of my community, Latinas in the United States, accepting that we get 55 cents for every dollar that a white man gets. Right. Accepting all of the sort of little injustices that we see in the workplace every single day and somehow surviving despite them. And I think that the point of my talk that day was what we need to exercise isn't our "yes" muscle--our "yes" muscle is very well exercised and has been for a very long time--and, if anything, what we need to do is exercise our "no" muscle. And to practice saying no to the daily injustices, whether they be in the workplace at a micro level or in the world at large, at a macro level.
Nathalie Molina Niño (35:59):
And I think that one of the things, to answer your question, that a professional in the finance world can do, something that I wrote about in a Fast Company article last year, called "Why is finance so white?"--and it's also, why is finance so male, in addition. And whether you are male or female, whether you are white or you're a person of color, I think it must disturb any rational human being, even if you're only focused on financial returns, it must be problematic for any thinking human being to know that in the total count of all markets in the world--we're not talking about just the developed world, we're not talking about just hedge funds--in the entire finance world globally, less than 2% of the people managing that money are women or people of color. It makes absolutely no sense, even just purely from a finance standpoint, that's incredibly undiversified. Why would you put all your eggs in the bucket of white men? Think about the ideas and the innovation and all the things that we are essentially not putting on the table.
Nathalie Molina Niño (37:24):
And so if I'm a professional in the finance world and I want to think about what I can personally do to move the dial on everything--from climate, to pay equity, to all of the different injustices that different people might have an affinity towards focusing on--I would focus first on that one thing, which is: what would the finance world be if I called my university and I asked who manages our endowment. I graduated from this college, I know that at Columbia university, for example, they have over $10 billion in the endowment, I would like to know as somebody who has contributed to that endowment, who are the managers that are managing that endowment, and do any of them look like me? Are there any of them who are women? Are there any of them who are people of color, et cetera? Or if I am putting my retirement into a 401k or some sort of a pension or retirement fund, who are the organizations that manage that fund and how many of them have hired or allocated portions of that pension or retirement fund into managers who are women, managers who look like me? And I think that if we as individuals make those phone calls, ask those questions, it will start a groundswell of what we already see happening, right?
Nathalie Molina Niño (38:55):
You have Larry Fink at BlackRock saying that people care about impact and we need to be thinking about ESG and all these different ways of investing that account for the negative externalities of climate. And obviously there are concerns, right now in the case of BlackRock, we see a whole lot of shareholder letters and not necessarily a whole lot of moving of the dial, but hopefully that language will turn into action sometime soon. And I think that the way to make it turn into action and to focus on those outcomes is for those of us that are in the industry to start to speak up and to start to ask those questions. How many of the people managing this amount of money, my retirement, my school's endowment, you know, my nonprofit whose board I sit on that has maybe its own endowment, who is managing this money and how many of them look like me? And if the answer, and we already know what the answer is, is disappointing, the taking it a step further and saying, great, are we going to fix this?
Alice Merry (40:01):
That's really powerful and you've definitely prompted me to realize that I actually don't know who manages my pension and this is definitely something that I should be looking into. And I think it's a really inspiring way that everybody listening can take a first step in addressing this problem and this really shocking statistic that managing the world's money, 98% of the world's money, is concentrated among white men, and the huge power concentration that that also represents.
Alice Merry (40:32):
I wanted to finish by asking you a question that I've been asking every guest on the podcast. So, most of the time we're working to create change within a financial institution that's not designed to work for women, that's not designed to get results for women. If you could reinvent the financial system, what would a feminist financial system look like to you?
Nathalie Molina Niño (40:56):
The first thing that I think I would do is I would think about the time horizons critically. I would, you know, the way that people often say that the best way to build an organization is to be slow at hiring and fast to fire. And you can argue whether that's true or not, but that pace, right, of what is ideal... I think that we have mixed up the timelines, and we want returns as quickly as possible, which, actually, a lot of the time, robs us of potential upside because there is absolutely no doubt that longterm investing makes more money. I mean, if you have any argument with that, you should take it up with Warren Buffett. I mean the data is there, and yet so many of our financial systems are driven by short term returns and short term cycles for those returns. I would question that and I would revisit longer term investment cycles and measuring and thinking in that way, more so.
Nathalie Molina Niño (42:09):
And then when it comes to the existential problems that we face, like climate, I would argue that we are too slow on those. We're really impatient when it comes to investment returns and we want everything to be fast. And you know, I don't know a venture capitalist who has never said, "ah, if I, if it had been up to me, I would have held onto that because I would've made so much more money, but because my fund was a five year long fund and it was the fifth year, so, you know, we had to force them to be acquired or IPO or whatever the thing was." But we all know that if we were more patient and if our structures were more patient on returns, we would do better financially. And yet when it comes to climate, we're perfectly happy putting our money into something that's going to take 10 to 20 years to be commercial. And the environment doesn't have 10 or 20 years. And so I feel almost as though we have to sort of turn it upside down, and be impatient with the solutions that are in front of us. Which I think is very feminist, right?
Nathalie Molina Niño (43:22):
I mean, with civil rights activists, they're often told, you know, go slow. You know, it's not all going to happen overnight. Right. Be patient. And a lot of activists, you know, when women took to the streets in 2017 all around the world, it was because they were done being patient. And I think that impatience is definitely a feminist virtue and I hope it continues to be a feminist virtue. And impatience with the solutions that we have right in front of us, is something that I think would be a great quality for a feminist financial system to have.
Nathalie Molina Niño (43:59):
And then patience with building things and getting returns and building things that really have a chance of sticking and of being solid and sustainable. That's also I think a feminist virtue. Nobody is trying to send their kids to college when they're five years old. You know that the child takes time to develop and to learn and to grow and to be ready to leave the nest and do their thing, right? That's something that we know to be true. And that's something that is also true, not just when you're building humans, but when you're building up institutions that will feed us. And I think that that's another thing that a feminist financial world would understand and appreciate.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
I love Natalie's take on feminist finance: patience on returns and impatience in tackling our social and environmental problems. I never thought of feminist finance before in terms of timelines and it's just a fabulous way of seeing it.
Nathalie Molina Niño (45:06):
Thank you for joining us on this episode. Please do share the episode. Please do leave us a review and rate, and I look forward to speaking to you next time.