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Let's Redefine the American Dream
I cuddle up in bed beside my son, Brady, as I start to read to him from one of my favorite childhood books. Next to him lies his trusty companion, Barkey. “Barkey is hungry, mommy” he confides as he picks up Barkey and shakes him. For Barkey isn’t a dog, he is a piggybank - identical to the one on the cover of the book we’re reading: “The Value of Saving: The Story of Benjamin Franklin”.
I read aloud to Brady “Thank you, sir,” said Ben. “I’ll keep it and save it, so that I’ll have it when I need a penny for something important.” Although he just turned four, I am hoping to start to inspire in him the same values of thriftiness, delayed gratification, and financial independence my parents instilled in me. When I was growing up, I wasn’t even aware of the existence of brand name clothes, we seldom ate out at restaurants, and we used to frequent garage sales rather than the mall. Although I did succumb to the temptations of materialistic consumption once I went to work on Wall Street, meeting my husband and starting a family made me re-define success and returned me to my Scottish roots. And so far Brady and his 1 1/2 year old brother, Adam, haven’t seemed to suffer from not having closets full of toys as their favorite things to play with are cardboard boxes, the salad spinner, and my old teddy bears and stuffed animals. And unlike when I was growing up, Brady hasn’t been exposed to the barrage of TV advertising as he watches cartoons on Netflix on the IPad.
After I tuck Brady into bed and kiss him goodnight, I curl up under my covers with a copy of the book “The Orange Code: How ING Direct Succeeded By Being a Rebel With a Cause” that was just left on the desks of all sixty employees at the start-up I just joined. I can’t help but think of Barkey as I read: “Rather than getting people to spend more, the idea would be to get people to save more – to return to the values of thrift, self-reliance, and building a nest egg.” I find myself totally engrossed as Arkadi Kulhmann, the founder of ING Direct, shares how he built a thriving financial services empire in less than a decade after founding his company back in 1996 as a rebel brand focused on his greater purpose to start a customer advocacy revolution in banking to “to lead Americans back to saving”. It is amazing how so much of what he espouses is totally aligned with the work I have been doing the past four years developing my social capital investment thesis and researching companies with a greater purpose. And what’s even more exciting is that I will likely get the opportunity to meet him in the near future as last week we announced that Mr. Kulhmann has just joined our Board of Directors.
In his book, Mr. Kuhlmann, advises: “Build a team of individuals, give them a collective cause, and then make them care about each other, and you get an organization that organically does the right things.” It seems like our founder, Scott Saunders, has taken this advice to heart as he has carefully handpicked most of his key hires and everyone in the company is truly devoted to our social mission of financially empowering consumers and bringing humanity back to financial services. And although I only joined the company two weeks ago, Scott actually reached out to connect with me back in early June after coming across my LinkedIn article titled 'Social Capital: The Secret Behind Airbnb and Uber'. But as that article went viral on LinkedIn and Twitter, I was flooded with invitations from people wanting to connect with me and Scott’s email invite request was buried. I first heard of Payoff itself in late October when I came across a CNBC article talking about how Mohamed El-Erian, the former head of PIMCO, had just invested and joined the Board of Directors of this new P2P lending company that was looking to disrupt the credit card debt market. I found this news quite fascinating as I had just published an in-depth research report titled “The Abundance Economy: Where the Long Tail Meets the Blue Ocean” and was starting to look at Lending Club, a P2P lending company that was preparing to go public. So in early November, when the Chief Marketing Officer of Payoff, Carey Ransom, reached out to connect with me on LinkedIn, I noticed his invite and replied to him.
What began as a brief email exchange led to a series of conference calls in which we discussed my research and how Payoff actually epitomizes my concept of the Social Economy Pyramid in terms of having a:
Social Mission - to financially empower consumers Social Marketplace – the company started out as a peer-to-peer financial community that helped its 170,000 members pay off $70 million in credit card debt Social Sharing – the company strategically pivoted in mid-2013 and is now looking to raise debt capital from institutional players to then lend to qualified consumers looking to pay off their credit cards and remain debt-free
Even more importantly, I was really impressed with the high caliber of their management team and their Board of Directors and they seemed to have a great corporate culture (I had never come across a company with a 5.0 out of 5.0 score on Glassdoor!) Ironically, at that exact time, I had come to the hard decision that I needed to get back to earning a real income and had just started to search for a platform that fit with my analytical talents and passion for researching disruptive and innovative growth companies.
So while I was ahead of my time in trying to be a rebel with a cause to bring heart and soul to the world of investing, I have realized it is the 99% (not the 1% that I was focusing on before) that needs the most help with their money - and that starts with redefining the American Dream. As Arianna Huffington, who joined our Board of Directors three weeks ago, advises in her book “Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder”:
'…the American dream, which has been exported all over the world, is currently defined as the acquisition of things: houses, cars, boats, jets, and other grown-up toys…the second decade of this new century is already very different. And growing numbers of women—and men—are refusing to join the list of casualties. Instead, they are re-evaluating their lives, looking to thrive rather than merely succeed based on how the world measures success.'
It is exciting to now be a part of the Sharing Economy movement that is looking to redefine the American Dream. The Sharing Economy universe is rich with founders, like Scott, that epitomize what Jonah Sachs calls “The Rebel” in his book “Winning the Story Wars”: “You seek a creative destruction of the status quo. You are driven by the idealistic vision of a better way. You value freedom of action and expression and are fearless, uncompromising, and creative.” When I did a deep dive last summer into the top fifty companies in the Sharing Economy, I counted twenty “rebels with a cause” that have built their companies on social missions revolving around the following three themes: accessibility, sustainability, and community. And like Payoff, these companies are not just online marketplaces, but movements, which are attracting people as Scott Goodson observes in “Uprising” that are “hungry for meaning, authenticity, sense of belonging, and purpose ...beginning to engage with and shape culture around them as opposed to being passive consumers of culture created for them by others.”
So let's join together to redefine the American Dream and financially empower the 99%.
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