On Being an 86 Year Old Founder, Beanies on Wall Street, and Learning to Learn
Fall 2022 Reflections 🎃
Highlights
Hanging out with April Koh, the youngest female unicorn CEO 🦄
Attending Future Women Leaders Conference @ Blackstone 🏙
Understanding the importance of studying history to become a more thoughtful 21st century innovator 💭
Koh-my-gosh 😊
April Koh is very cool. As the founder of Spring Health, a company that offers personalized, evidence-based mental health treatment plans, she’s the youngest female unicorn CEO! She actually works with my mentor, Cecina Babich-Morrow, whom I’ve fondly known since I first learned to code in high school.
When April visited Yale back in November, I explained my dilemma of being a generalist who’s insatiably curious about how everything works. Should I embrace the fact that I’m interested in so many fields, or should I pressure myself to stick to one, like for instance completely commit myself to one major? I told her I thought about entering venture capital where my optimistic nature and skill of learning very quickly could be useful in understanding a variety of pitches.
She surprised me, saying the most generalist I’m ever going to get is if I become a founder and juggle a million different hats and responsibilities every day.
Wait whaaaaat?
The very career I had been trying to avoid, the very field I thought required the utmost specialization, would most fit my skillset? I’ve been ruminating April’s advice for a bit and now see myself as a technical founder later on in life. I can be confident with product features, company finances, business strategy, and know how to responsibly delegate tasks. Even when I’m 86, I guarantee you that I will still be learning about new fields, working with people around the world, and building whenever I find an opportunity to make the world a better place.
Finance Sprint 🏃♀️
Growing up in Brooklyn, I’ve often seen the sparkling, skyscraper-studded skyline of Manhattan and wondered what goes on in all those offices. Finance always seemed like an out-of-reach world, reserved only for expert, quick-thinking people in suits. Would my brain, trained on startup frameworks and adorned with a Google Cloud beanie, ever learn to speak their language?
It most certainly would try to.
That’s why last month I took a risk, transferred my resume from Canva into Microsoft Word, and applied to Future Women Leaders Program at Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager. A few weeks later, I got the invitation to go to 345 Park Avenue.
Participating in the program was unlike anything I ever experienced before. I was surrounded by 70 wonderful women from colleges all over the US and together we learned about the intricacies of private equity. While I thought it made sense to buy companies in trouble, the folks at BX explained that often times it is worth financing marvelous companies to give them the push they need to be even more successful. This was a useful perspective to learn about what makes large companies successful, especially after my summer learning at Floodgate, a Menlo Park-based venture fund that focused on ideas that would eventually turn into companies.
This program was also the perfect end to my time learning about “Money, Wealth Accumulation and Societies in Asia” with Dr. Kevin Lu of Partners Group and Dr. Song Ma of the Yale School of Management. In the intensive, we discussed the future of sovereign wealth funds or state run investment funds. Some countries use SVFs in pursuit of stabilization, as a contingent pension fund, while others to attract foreign investment to domestic ventures. The former are often run by commodity-exporting countries in order to protect the economy from destabilizing consequences of variable commodity prices. For example, the Government Pension Fund of Norway owns 1.5% of all listed stocks; this is enabled by Norway being one of the world’s largest oil exporters.
Now, thanks to both of these opportunities, I’m even more interested in using finance as a tool to guide companies, if not countries, through changing times.
My next step is learning how to match women to capital to build their dream companies. As I learned from meeting Dianne Chipps Bailey who leads Philanthropic Solutions at Bank of America, women have a growing influence in philanthropy and investing, as a dual-source generational wealth transfer occurs from both parents and husbands. This is a trend I will undoubtedly keep an eye on in the future.
Slow down, cowboyyy! 🛑
As I approach the halfway point of my time at Yale, I’ve realized that learning is not all about new discoveries. This was a painful realization because of how obvious it now seems. It was also a reminder to slow down, or as my economics teacher told me, “Slow down, cowboyyy!” After all, without foundational knowledge, it will be really difficult to be able to come up with new insights about a field.
I truly understood this while writing an essay on why history matters. In it, I tried explaining the power of perspective and reflection, but everything felt cheesy. I mean, doesn’t everyone know that already? Stumped, I tried to overcome writer’s block through my high school trick of writing about my thought process up to that point. When I showed it to my teacher, he thought my “process piece” was the actual essay. Could it be that writing about how I reached the same conclusions as others answered the question of why studying history is useful?
Indeed - history is an essential part of the human experience because each generation has to understand what others before us discovered in order to build on it. It teaches us about storytelling and passing down information in a variety of forms, as well as the elegance of the complexity of it all.
Thanks for reading! These were a few highlights of a busy autumn semester. More to come 👀!
Ula
I sincerely hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Feel free reach out with suggestions for future topics, any questions, or if you ever want to chat!