Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#78:
Impact Investment Solutions for the $1 trillion Charitable Investment Market — Adam Rein Cofounder of CapShift
Chris Wedding:
Adam Rein, Co-founder of CapShift, how you doing?
Adam Rein:
I'm fantastic, Chris. I've been looking forward to this all week.
Chris Wedding:
I mean, what else could you look forward to, but talking to me with the record button on? I mean, seriously.
Adam Rein:
Well, most people got to subscribe to one of your courses to get time with you. I have the luxury of getting a whole hour here.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear. Yeah, masterminds, Maven courses, gosh, Duke courses, you name it. You see the little plug you just set me up for? Nice job. All right, so the way we do it is a couple of sentences on what CapShift does, then we're going to back up and talk about mistakes that you see CEOs making since all of us make mistakes. Then we'll go back deeper into CapShift. So, CapShift, what's the pitch, man?
Adam Rein:
CapShift is a platform that makes it easier to build impact investing portfolios. We've target the $1 trillion of assets that sit in charitable financial institutions, like foundations and donor-advised funds, which there's hundreds of thousands of people who have cancer assets and make it easier for them. Not just as sometimes it's called ESG portfolios in public markets, but to invest in the deepest impact investments out there, climate venture capital, affordable housing, microfinance, lending to low-income communities and things of that nature.
Chris Wedding:
You know, when I first learned about your work at CapShift, I saw the number, a trillion bucks in donor-advised funds or foundations, it is not told to deploy by any means towards some sort of impact strategy, despite the mission of said organization. I got really excited. Can you give us like a number? What percentage would you say of the trillion is invested in some impact ESG flavor? Is that a possible question?
Adam Rein:
Yeah, no one's done that full research. The best estimate that we've seen is about 3% of those dollars are invested in impact-themed public investment portfolios. When it comes to all the private investments, impact-focused startups, or venture funds, or lending funds, less than 1%, some fraction of 1% is invested in that area. So, there's a lot of focus, rightfully so.
These are all assets that will be granted to nonprofits in the future. So, a lot of focus on how best to grant those dollars out, but really the use of investment capital for not just alignment, but for changing the world, that's been a newer concept and has been harder to implement through these financial institutions. And so, we're very much around making it easier for people to access these products through the trusted partners that already manage their money.
04:31
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Okay. All right. Good. So, we've done a good job, I think. I think you've done a good job hooking the audience. You got a trillion bucks, one to 3% going towards things that folks like us care about. Now that they're hooked, they're going to stay listening to the podcast. Good job. Let's back up a little bit.
So, this is not your first rodeo as an entrepreneur, as an investor. Can you pick out a mistake that you see many CEOs making, maybe why or a solution to that? In parentheses, we've all done it and we continue to do it, so not pointing fingers except for at ourselves. What comes to mind there, Adam?
Adam Rein:
This is the third venture I've co-founded, but beyond that, I've sat in the venture capital investor seat and through Greentown Labs, I've seen a couple hundred climate startups come through the leading incubator in that space. I'd say what struck me is, there's probably a hundred or hundreds of posts saying, how do you do a really good pitch deck to raise capital? People have gotten better and better about starting with problems and things of that nature. The thing that I learned firsthand was, how much of the role is around negotiation, persuasion and trust building and I've seen very little about how to do that well.
For example, it's a very big difference when you are meeting someone for the first time to launch into a pitch about why your business is a good idea, an elevator pitch, versus trying to build some connection about why they should care about you as a person, why they should even trust that what you're saying is true or not. I think over time, I focus a lot more on trust building and relationship building, or in cases of hiring or customers, more negotiation type mindset versus let me start with just the logical case of why this is a good idea.
Chris Wedding:
I am so happy that you just pointed out this particular topic. I'm scribbling like crazy over here. I think about when I was back in private equity and I was this hungry analyst associate type, I'd go into meetings with the CEO, maybe it's an hour-long meeting. I knew we had an agenda written or unwritten and he would seem to spend the first 20 minutes in what I would call small talk, Southern small talk.
I kept thinking, “We have an agenda. We have things to accomplish here.” Mr. Efficiency going crazy in my head, only in my head. Later I realized the wisdom of what you just said, which is no, wait a second, that was not accidental. It was not just small talk, that was rapport building. We wanted to do deals with people we know, like and trust and if shit goes south later, and it sometimes does, we have some foundation of trust so that we want to work it out versus that's them and this is me and we are different and go pounds in. Yeah, so that resonates a lot.
The other part where you're saying you can't just walk into the room and start pitching. One thing I talk to earlier stage companies about is, capital raising is not something to do like every 18 or 24 months. You're always getting to know investors, forming relationships. I mean, you probably have used this analogy. It's like, you wouldn't meet someone and say, it's not quite married, but if marriage were a seven-year commitment, do you want to get married on the first date versus let’s get to know each other before we hop into a multi-year relationship. I think it's spot on, Adam. Yeah.
08:27
Adam Rein:
You got it.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. That's a general comment on guidance for CEOs. How about a specific one for you? So, think back to your past three, maybe your two ventures, let's say, is there an example where you're like, “Oh man, looking backwards, hindsight, it's a beautiful thing. Here's what I did, but I probably could have done that instead, and it might have worked out better.” Is there a story that might come to mind?
Adam Rein:
I would say the story that jumps out most to me was my role on the venture capital side, actually, where it was one of my first few deals, I was leading, I was focused on the climate space. We were very excited about the company and spent a lot of time on the deal. 12 months later, after the deal, the company missed its revenue projections by over 80% in the first year after we did the deal. And I as the person leading diligence, was sorely in the wrong on this one.
I looked back and said, “How on earth? I spent all this time on it.” What I realized was, it was this aspect of trust, where ultimately, I think being a former strategic consultant, I had a level of naivety around well, if you're in the process and someone says it's going to happen, then you forget that you're innately trusting them, but they have uncertainty behind them. I think what I learned from that being in the entrepreneur's seat is that there's a million shades of truth when you're talking about your company, particularly when you're talking about your projection of the future of the company.
And so, that ties back to that level of trust around, one of the few ways of being a successful investor is being able to evaluate when a company is putting together their projection. Not just you can't really go under every nook and cranny and fully look at every risk. If they say, “These are the main risks,” how much do you trust that those are actually the main risks or they're hiding something? This was a case where there were risks that were hidden from the process and so it made me, I think, a little more realist going forward.
Chris Wedding:
I can resonate. I think back to when I was in private equity, we did the environmental real estate redevelopment. We also had an angel group of sorts and I laughed at it. If I believed every projection that a founder pitched, I should have left my job numerous times to go work for them, for sure. But it's like the model, trust, but verify. I want to be trusting, but let me talk to your former partners. Like how often do you do what you say you're going to do kind of thing? Cool, that's helpful.
All right, we started with the hook on CapShift. We backed up a little bit to go a little broader, looking backwards. Let's get back to CapShift. So, I think on your website, you walk through, is it four different solutions, let's say, maybe I got the number wrong. Do you need to just talk us through exactly what you all do? So, who's the problem, the customer, you all solution? You don't need to cover all four, but I'm setting you up for the pitch here, Adam.
11:48
Adam Rein:
No, it's fine. Having been in the world of advising families on how to invest their dollars for impact prior to starting CapShift, what we noted was that in the world of asset management and wealth management investing, there's a common problem, which is, there's a whole bunch of products in an area. The people with the money, they want to invest in that in a somewhat personalized or custom way. But it's hard because each person out there has their own flavor, and it's hard to match that interest of the investor with the product.
You see it in public markets with firms that do things like direct indexing or alternative fund platforms or even AngelList and angel investing or Kiva and crowd lending. These are all groups that have one thing in common, which is, they've scoured for a set of products in their focus area and have a technology platform that makes it much easier for investors to access that product.
What we noted was that the world of impact investing generally is used in some different contexts, but the biggest segment of which are private funds targeting the sustainable development goals, if you want to simplify it, there was no platform like this. And so, we saw all these family offices or financial advisors trying to in-house figure out this complex challenge. It was particularly complicated with those pools of charitable assets that I mentioned earlier, which seemed like the assets that should be most interested in investing for impact.
So, really, we tried to take the best of the other models we saw out there and build a technology driven research and advisory platform focused solely on solving the problem of helping the financial institutions and intermediaries that manage money access the impact investing market in an authentic way. In a personalized way that can do things that are very specific, targeting a specific issue area, a specific geography of interest and to help build out these portfolios.
Chris Wedding:
You mentioned one thing, I just want to make sure the audience understands the sustainable development goals. So, the UN SDGs, another thing that we hear out there, so 17, I believe, which often becomes apples-to-apples way of different investors assessing the impact of their investments, knowing that every investment has an impact, whether it’s good or bad. I'm not sure neutral is a thing.
You also are talking about impact. I know that climate is a part of that impact you consider. Can you just comment briefly on, what are the kinds of impacts that CapShift helps investors, well, invest in?
Adam Rein:
We try to help with anything that folks are interested in based on their philanthropic purpose. What we've found is that they tend to bucket in three big categories. One would be climate and environment. That's probably our largest area of client interest and under that are your major investible climate themes, sustainable and regenerative agriculture and food systems, water, energy systems, natural ecosystem services and natural capital. And so, that's bucket one.
15:23
Bucket two would be mainly services for poor or low-income communities and those would be access to education, access to healthcare, affordable housing, it would be three of the big ones. Then the last one is really around economic opportunity for the poor. Here you're thinking about new products to invest in small businesses, maybe minority-led small businesses that don't have access to capital, opportunities to upskill workers who may not be able to get loans to go to college and funds like that.
Chris Wedding:
Let's just say in the first bucket, which I think most of our listeners, I think care most about, clearly, we care about all three buckets, can you comment on like growth areas maybe? Which niches within climate and environment do you all see more investors or advisors saying, “Hey, Adam, find us a solution, find us an investment product we can invest in,”?
Adam Rein:
Yeah. Stepping back, when we look at climate investing, we have one big bucket, which is the whole market rate climate investment world. And so, we want to cover all those funds of which a ton of capital is flowing into. Then the other would be what we call impact first climate funds, which are actually targeting areas that may have a different risk return profile that conventional market capital is not flowing into that's geared particularly to foundation or donor-advised fund capital.
So, in the market rate buckets, obviously we've seen a huge flow of interest to climate venture. A lot of our clients have allocated DAF capital, as they call it, or philanthropic capital into climate venture portfolios. As well as some emerging areas for folks with maybe a different risk profile around project, finance, or infrastructure funds, which I'd say is another growth area, particularly ones that might be targeting more distributed or smaller projects.
The biggest projects in the world might be more likely to be backed by a pension fund or an insurance company. High net worth families might be looking for some of these niches like EV infrastructure or others that might have less big capital flowing into it. On the philanthropic capital, you see gaps within that, the impact first that might flow into.
So, you might find funds that are going earlier stage like Prime Coalition and Azolla being one of the most well-known, but they're saying, “We're going to take more risk than the traditional venture funds will on some of the biggest gigaton outcomes of CO2 equivalent reduction.”
You also see that on the project side with funds like CSEF out in Southeast Asia saying, “We want to take a geography that's underserved in terms of capital and put capital to work on an area with a huge, again, risk reward, impact leverage, as we sometimes say, where every dollar is going to take away more tons because the infrastructure in Southeast Asia, it has such a large CO2 footprint that it's replacing.
Chris Wedding:
Right. It’s really funny how, if I can say, great minds think alike. As you were mentioning Prime and Azolla, I was writing down Prime to raise as my next question. So yes, similar goals of moving philanthropic capital to these kinds of solutions. You mentioned DAF, donor-advised funds. I think many listeners don't know what we're talking about. Can you define DAF?
Adam Rein:
Yeah, sure. So, donor-advised funds are somewhat similar to private foundations in that they're a vehicle for someone who wants to do philanthropy. They want to maybe set aside some dollars today to get a tax deduction today, but they're not ready to give it all out this week. And so, they want to set it aside to be granting out over a period of months or years or even decades.
19:26
Traditionally, that required you to set up your own private foundation, which has a whole bunch of work around it. And over the past few decades, it's been democratized to do this through donor-advised funds, which are essentially nonprofits that allow you to donate to them. You set up a charitable savings account and you outsource all of the paperwork and the hassle and the legal and the accounting to them to help you grant out those funds and to invest those funds in the meantime while it's waiting to be granted out.
Typically, you log on to the online platform, you select your charity, and you type in the dollars and they take care of the rest. Increasingly, traditionally, the investment options were very limited. They were just sitting in mutual funds or money market accounts and over time, there's been increased flexibility. We're trying to build upon some of the earlier pioneers about not just flexibility, but also impact alignment with those investment funds.
Chris Wedding:
I'm new to DAF as well. So, when the donor places the capital with a DAF, are they immediately recognizing a tax donation that year? Then later, they can decide how to dole it out to impact-focused opportunities, organizations, et cetera?
Adam Rein:
Yeah. That's how it works. I think the interesting thing is that the minimums are very low. So, depending on the provider, you can start from $5,000 to $25,000 or some even lower than that. Then we work with about half of the major providers in the market and so they tend to be large national firms, some affiliated with large financial institutions. Some of our clients who are public about our relationship include Vanguard Charitable or National Philanthropic Trust. Others are community foundations, but you find in most major cities, one of our clients is Chicago Community Trust, for example.
Then even some of the big nonprofits like Nature Conservancy will have a donor-advised fund program for their donors who may want, not just to give a grant to Nature Conservancy, but use them as their charitable vehicle to help them do their other long-term philanthropy as well.
Chris Wedding:
All right. Okay, so one more step on the DAF here. I think I follow this. So, a donor commits 50 grand or much larger or as low as five grand, let's say, to the DAF. You all then help the DAF offer more products that are highly vetted through you-all’s expertise, research, et cetera. And an example of one of those products might be the Azolla Fund, where that capital's going in to say, “Hey, I'm fine just getting capital back, or I'm fine not getting capital back,” is that an example or no?
Adam Rein:
Yep, that's right. And so, we cover the range of products. For many people they want to keep the capital liquid. So, we help them look at public investment portfolios or cash equivalent products that have impact. For others, we're looking at private funds and for others, we're even looking at recoverable grant vehicles to nonprofits, which is being creative about how we even fund nonprofits, the grants with the potential to recover the capital back.
22:42
We've tried to take the approach of, can we cover all the tools in the toolkit? Even some people have done startup investments through their donor-advised fund, through capital. What we want to do is really embrace that flexibility and the ability to match, hey, each philanthropic individual or donors, what is their goals? Then we help them find opportunities, build that investment portfolio to both meet their financial goals, but also drive as much impact out of these assets.
Chris Wedding:
All right, super helpful. One more rabbit hole question.
Adam Rein:
We can go as deep as you want, Chris.
Chris Wedding:
I know. Yeah. I'm not very deep in DAF, so I'm learning in public here. You mentioned that the capital in a DAF can go to a startup. Is that assuming, “Hey, I'm fine not getting the capital back,”? What if the capital comes back and there's like a 3X return or something, does that capital have to stay in the DAF and therefore it's given out later to nonprofits or? Help me out with that, the donation versus for-profit aspect.
Adam Rein:
Yeah. Again, the analogy to a foundation is helpful. A foundation can invest in a company or a venture capital fund. They then make profits from that, but all those profits have to one day go back into the investment pool that then has to be granted out one day.
So, donor-advised funds are similar. Once you've granted money to a donor-advised fund provider, you never get the money back into your bank account or to spend for personal interest. All of those profits have to be given away, but certainly, there's been examples of people who can generate strong returns.
One of the pioneering groups that did this is called ImpactAssets and they put out a good article around one of their donors who did an early investment in Beyond Meat. Beyond Meat IPO'd, I think the number was something like $1 million in and $39 million out or something like that. All that money went back into the donor-advised fund. It is going to either be reinvested or a hundred percent of it is going to be granted out to nonprofits over the timeline.
Chris Wedding:
Wow. Okay.
Adam Rein:
So, we call this catalytic philanthropy. Doing impact with your investment and hopefully generating even more returns that you can then put to work for future ground. I'm going to go on a tangent, but I'm going to come back.
This weekend, we had our first retreat for the Climate CEO peer group at Duke and I needed a helper on Saturday. And so, I was like, “I'm going to have my 16-year-old son come be a helper, take notes, do a few other things,” but secretly what I was doing was I was exposing him to all these cool folks building world changing companies. When we finished, I was like, “All right, dude, give me some sound bites.” He’s like, “Holy cow, I've never been in a room full of such smart people. I was a sponge.” I was like, “Mission accomplished.”
25:48
Adam Rein:
What do you mean? He spends every day with you.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, but listening to someone else is different than listening to your dad I think, I'm pretty sure. Okay. Now coming back to you, I am learning so much about DAFs. Catalytic philanthropy is not a combination of words I'm familiar with. Catalytic capital, sure. Catalytic philanthropy, I'm rethinking what we do with our capital for concessionary impact or whatnot. So, boom, super selfish reason to have you on. I'm just kidding.
Let me ask one more clarifying question for the audience. You-all's primary customer is like the wealth management professional, the advisor, or it's the LP, it's the foundation of the family office or is it both?
Adam Rein:
It's both. What we don't do is we don't go to you, Chris, and say, “Hey, let me just meet you on the street and manage your money.” We've tried to integrate with the financial institutions and advisors where people already have those trusted relationships. So, we serve donor-advised fund providers, financial advisors, family offices foundations that tend to manage this complex asset management infrastructure.
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. We at the Wedding household are not quite to a family office status. Wink, wink.
Adam Rein:
I've realized that there is no definition of a family office. If you ever want to go out there and get into a meeting, I've learned if you say, “I represent a family office,” people will be much nicer to you. They'll buy you drinks. It has a certain gleam that word, so I wouldn't shy away from it.
Chris Wedding:
Dude. I mean, look, I'm sitting in the office in the place behind our house, it's at my family's house, that's a family office, I think, right?
Adam Rein:
The home office and my bedroom is a family office.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, totally. Okay. Another serious one. Some of the investments you recommend or facilitate are market rate. Some are concessionary so below market. Can you talk about maybe what percentage of the capital that you-all help allocate is more market rate versus more concessionary? Is that a fair question?
Adam Rein:
Yeah. We're majority market rate, maybe say two thirds or 75%, but I'd say we're one of the only teams out there that really focuses on that impact first capital. So, the foundation PRIs, recoverable grants or deep impact funds because I think our team particularly is proud of the -- We recently had a hundred million dollars of capital moved across and we've been out of beta for a little over two years. And so, I think we're trying to keep scaling up.
We’re a long way to reaching the full trillion, but I'd say, we want to be moving billions and billions of dollars of capital into some of these deepest impact funds that may only have one fundraising person. It is very hard when you run the regenerative agriculture fund or the Bay Area income inequality fund to find okay, I have thousands of family offices and hundreds of thousands of families, like how do I find who is going to most like my fund? So, we're very excited about how much of that catalytic capital we've been able to mobilize.
29:17
Chris Wedding:
Hey, look, a hundred million dollars is not chump change. Yeah, that's pretty exciting stuff.
Adam Rein:
Ways to go, but yeah, it's been a good start.
Chris Wedding:
Let's switch from the business to Adam. Looking backwards, might there be a bit of advice or two you'd give your younger self on finding ways to make an impact, build a career?
Adam Rein:
Yeah, I will say I've been very fortunate. I started my job as a strategy consultant, which has been very good to me in giving me certain skills or tools, but what I would say, the advice I would give when I was 22 is that I was surrounding myself in a peer group that was driven by a lot of cost benefit thinking and a fair amount of risk aversion. So, that environment wasn't setting me up in a great path to be an entrepreneur and even my friends who might've been in a hedge fund or PE, private equity type job, I think you don't realize that how much of your peers day to day in your 20s shape your worldview.
And so, I would say, I wish earlier, I don't think it was till I was 25 or 26 that I had the aha moment that I belong in the innovation and risk world. I wish I had realized that earlier around not being afraid of failing, embracing risk and embracing big ideas and wanting to earlier surround myself by those thinkers.
And so, back then, if I saw an interesting article of an interesting person, the last thing I would have ever done is just reach out to that person. I would be afraid they wouldn't answer me or it would have felt weird. After being in the founder seat, you have to learn the skill of hustle and hunger. And so, now every day, there'll be two or three people that seem interesting or I'm just like, “Oh, I'll just reach out,” or maybe just ping them and who knows something could happen, you’ve just got to embrace that uncertainty and risk. If it only works one or two times out of 10, that's fine. Like that's success and reframe that.
Chris Wedding:
I love that. How about on a more daily or weekly basis, are there routines, habits, however interesting or boring it might be to keep you healthy, sane, and focused?
Adam Rein:
Yeah, I'd say one thing I do that has become more common everywhere, which is simply fighting against the short-term, fighting against firefighting and stepping back and trying to focus my time on the highest value role. I think many people speak about it's very important and it's very risky to spend too much of your time on things that are not value add enough for your organization and empowering others is the way to go.
Probably the more personal thing for me is there's only so many hours in the day and so I've tried to be thoughtful about carving out more time for my family, carving out more time for personal interests. And so, I become one of those smushing things together.
32:31
Some people do walking meetings. I tend to be a walking phone call person to combine exercise together or do running meetings with people. Anytime I'm commuting, I try to do a phone call in parallel with that commute and just thinking around, hey, the more I can squeeze things together, carve off time for my family, at the same time, I want to meet a lot of people and there's only so many ways to do that. So, instead of one-on-one meetings, doing small group meetings is another effective way where I just meet a couple of people together at one quarter of the time.
As things get busier, I've been trying hard to switch my mindset, saying no more and squeezing things in together more because there's a hard litmus test of -- In my view, what I've realized is that the same type of people who work 50 hours a week or 80 hours a week will tend to do so in lots of different situations or environment. And it's almost more habit-driven than it is needs-driven. Not day-to-day. There are days where we all have to work late or work weekends. So, I'd say some of my closest friends, every week will always work more hours than me, just because it's just their personality.
I think for me to bring the energy and bring the intensity, other people, again, have written about this, try to think about work in deep spurts and not think about just as many hours, but how much you're accomplishing for each hour you work.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think we touched on the deep work concept before pressing record. You'll have a deep work Thursday. Love, love, love that. You mentioned a running meeting just after you mentioned a walking meeting. I thought, “I can totally do a walking meeting.” I just finished one of those sweaty before this podcast, but a running meeting, that's all the level. Good for you for being able to do that.
Adam Rein:
Usually that's less about work, but as you have a team, you need mentorship. Think about talking about professional development mentorship, those shouldn't be done in an office. Those types of meetings are best done out in nature, free thinking, relaxed, or over a drink, or over a meal. That's the other thing, I rarely will do a long meal alone. I'm either working at my desk, eating and working, or I'm eating with other people in order to connect and build those connections.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, all these little small efficiency hacks you're recommending, I hope folks are listening because those are the kinds of examples that allow us to work normal hours, not crazy hours and burnout. Obsessing with efficiency so that you can have balance.
Adam Rein:
The other one is, sometimes the work you have to do is to think. For example, I have to think about my elevator pitch for my company, you can try to pitch it to your -- You have a 16-year-old, I have a seven- and four-year-old, I try to be pretty open about the work to the kids. I don't think about it that way, but this is getting me better and better about talking about the company. It's not so calculated, but I think there's lots of ways where you can make prog just like people have their best ideas in the shower. I think we are a little too bounded about thinking work happens only when I'm at the keyboard versus some goals it's, okay, I'm going to need to take a week of ruminating on this in various settings or talking to various people to try to give myself some deadline about having a new product strategy or things like that.
36:14
Chris Wedding:
I would just second this idea of having time to think, ideally out of the office. For me, this morning, it was my folding chair among the ferns next to a small creek by the house. It may look like I wasn't working, but I got the little notebook and the pen and quiet time and that's where a lot of good ideas happen, right?
Adam Rein:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
How about recommendations? Tell us a couple of books or podcasts or whatnot that you think the audience may find useful.
Adam Rein:
I will say as a plug, CapShift actually did this as a team and said, what's your favorite climate book or piece of work as a Medium post, I believe. So, if you look up CapShift Medium climate beyond the primer we have on the ABCs of Climate Investing, you'll see some fun tips. I was a little late to Ministry of the Future, but certainly that was my most recent climate related book.
I'd say I'm a little old school in some ways, but it's really important for me to get diverse perspectives and I'm a big fan. A lot of people are Twitter focused. I still use Feedly, the blogger RSS aggregator and there's just so many good, good sources of information like that. I still have some of that client science blog feeds to try to stay up to date there.
Obviously, there's much better climate tech, venture capital, Substack and newsletters nowadays that when I was doing investing five years ago, it was harder to get that information out there. But yeah, I really love the more esoteric thinkers, the Tyler Cowen podcast, blogs who's aggregating or people writing about effective altruism or people who are writing about digital minds, I try to stay, a lot of people who are trying to find a bunch of different topics to write about.
Chris Wedding:
It's interesting. We certainly have had some guests who say, “Well, I'm not going to give you any recommendations on business or climate books. I'm going to give you recommendations specifically outside of quote unquote, our sector.” I think there is power to that kind of divergent thinking to expand the possibilities of what your business or investment strategy looks like. Cool.
I was going to say, I'll post a note, but probably better for listeners to chase down this CapShift Medium article on top books, podcasts, et cetera, to take a gander. Okay. Let's round it out. Adam, is there a message, a call to action, something you would want to leave listeners with today?
Adam Rein:
I’d say the pool of passive capital is large and what we've found is that, you mentioned earlier, you don't know about donor-advised funds, even people who have donor-advised funds don't know about donor-advised funds. I think what we've found is that, just like in the past two years, we've seen a huge shift in the world of climate funding in terms of carbon removal.
39:26
The world can change quickly when you have a whole lot of people acting together. We are seeing that in how people view philanthropic capital and what you do with that capital before you grant it out. And so, we're a little bit along with others, part of a movement here. And so, the more people can spread the words to other philanthropic families, whether it's through CapShift or any of the other great partners or providers out there -- We believe that the global problems outstrip the ability of grants and nonprofits to solve alone. And so, the more we can mobilize more capital in creative ways is the best way we have chance to making a dent, and particularly risk seeking capital that can help scale up all the great innovations people are working on.
Adam Rein:
Cool, two more things for folks to listen to or to follow up on. You referenced this ABCs of Climate Investing, I think is the title. So, a free PDF on the CapShift website, which is great. The other, on the donor-advised funds, I don't know how this works. Is there a list of donor-advised funds that you all are helping to create more product diversity in the impact space that folks could follow up with? Or how does it work without drowning your inbox on all requests?
Adam Rein:
No, it’s fine. So, capshift.com/climateinvesting is the URL. You can find more on how we try to help folks think of building that kind of hundred percent climate online portfolio. Then in terms of our partners, some are public, some we white label. The easiest way is to go on capshift.com and just ping us through the website and we're happy to follow up with whether someone has a DAF or has a foundation or what they're interested in, the right person on our team will follow up with them directly.
Chris Wedding:
Cool. Adam, I'm pumped about you-all’s mission. 100 million is a great, great start. A trillion dollars is a big market to go after to move almost forgotten capital towards these solutions in climate and other impact sectors. Anyway, we're rooting for you-all’s success, man.
Adam Rein:
I appreciate it and I know you work with a lot of climate tech entrepreneurs like I have over the years. My view is, the more of their funding that comes from aligned people who care about their mission, the better, the more aligned capital is really a helpful thing. And so, we'd love to see more of it out there in the climate tech world.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear. Talk to you soon, buddy.
Adam Rein:
Great, thank you.
Chris Wedding:
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