Jacqueline Novogratz – Investing in Dignity and Character

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode of Invest Like the Best is sponsored by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. I'd heard of Canalyst over the past few years and became more interested after meeting the founder and CEO last year to pick his brain about SaaS businesses. Founded by a former buy-side analyst who encountered friction in sourcing, building, and updating models, Canalyst is now used by over 300 institutions, including the largest money managers in North America and by a number of the guests on this show. With detailed company-specific models on virtually every investable public equity, Canalyst clients are able to react more quickly. If you've been scrambling to keep up with the deluge of IPOs these days, Canalyst has models on Snowflake, Unity, GoodRx, and everything in between. Their pre-IPO models are built as soon as the S1 hits and include all segments, KPIs, and non-GAP figures.
If you're a professional equity investor and haven't talked to Canalyst recently, you should give them a shout. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalist.com forward slash Patrick. That's canalyst.com/patrick.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:27)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:53)
My guest today is Jacqueline Novogratz. Jacqueline is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of poverty. Our conversation touches on how Jacqueline left Wall Street and ended up starting a microfinance bank in Rwanda, how she thinks about investing in character, how creating dignity plays such a major role in her investments, and how governments and businesses can work together to solve the world's toughest problems.
It is a bit of a departure from my normal investing conversation but contains powerful lessons for many investors and builders. I really enjoyed our conversation and hope you will too.
Jacqueline, I've been so excited to do this with you. What we're going to talk about today is a bit of a departure from my normal investing conversations but I suspect it will be one of the most interesting. I thought an interesting jump off point would be to have you tell the audience the story of The Blue Sweater, the name of your first book, and I just think such a neat way to frame our conversation.

**Jacqueline Novogratz** (2:47)
Thanks, Patrick. It is wonderful to be here with you.
So I was about 10 years old and my uncle Ed gave me a blue sweater that had zebras running across the front and Mount Kilimanjaro strategically placed across the chest and I wore it all the time including into my freshman year of high school when I was walking across the hall where all the football players hung out and one of the football players shared a particularly lewd comment about the mountains on my sweater now that my adolescent curves had kind of changed the contours of it and I believe that there's a humiliating moment in every adolescent child's life and that certainly was mine and so I ran home told my mother we had to get rid of this horrible sweater and we summarily threw it into the goodwill and I thought that was the end of the story. Fast forward more than a decade and I was 1986, I had left my career on Wall Street, I was starting the nation's first microfinance bank in Rwanda in Central Africa when while jogging through the hills I saw this little boy 10 feet away from me wearing my sweater.
I shocked, I ran up to the child, grabbed him by the collar, turned it and sure enough there was my name written on the tag of his sweater. And I've held that Patrick as metaphor for how interconnected we are as a world and how our action can impact people we might never know. And when you think about it, that was 35 years ago. If the world was interconnected then we are fully interdependent now.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:28)
I'm really interested in this phrase you used anticipated talking about this but you mentioned this idea that every child might have a humiliating experience. Can you say a bit more about that? It sounds like something you've thought carefully about.