Serial Innovation in FinTech with Purpose Unlimited CEO Som Seif

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:08)
This week on the podcast, yet another banger, Som Seif is founder and CEO of Purpose Unlimited. One of their holdings is Purpose Investments, about 40 billion Canadian.
He is a serial entrepreneur and financial innovator. He created the world's first Bitcoin ETF in Canada long before the US came up with one. He built one of the larger ETF firms in Canada, sold it to BlackRock. On and on the conversation goes about all these fascinating things. I thought the conversation was really, really intriguing. And I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Purpose Investments, Som Seif.
Som Seif, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Som Seif** (1:04)
Barry, it's great to be here and thank you for that kind introduction.

**Barry Ritholtz** (1:08)
So I'm kind of fascinated by your background, your career, the whole multiple innovation, serial entrepreneurship. But let's roll back to the early days. You wanted to be an architect, and then you went for a bachelor's in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Toronto.
What was the original career plan?

**Som Seif** (1:30)
Yeah, I mean, as long as I can remember, architecture was my kind of goal, and that fundamentally was something that just inspired me. I loved the mix of the creative side of my brain and call it systems and structural mathematical side of my brain and bring them together. And just design was always something exciting. The interesting thing was that, so now you're faced with this decision, you apply to school for architecture and for engineering. And then I went and spoke to a couple of architects and every single one of them said, this is a stupid career choice. You won't be doing anything that you think you'll be doing. It'll be grunt work, you won't enjoy it, and there's no money in it. And I, of course, said, whoa, what am I signing up for? So I said, okay, I'm gonna go do engineering with the idea that maybe I'll switch. And fundamentally, that was not gonna happen.
And I was in first year of engineering and said, okay, what is my second choice? What else? And I really loved the concept of strategy and finance. I didn't know anything about finance and hadn't been learning anything about it, but I got excited about investment banking and things like that. And so ultimately, I decided that was the path I was gonna pursue. And coming out of an engineering degree, I ended up, luckily, just a timing really uniquely at the end of 1998, got an opportunity to join the biggest bank in Canada, RBC, in their investment banking division. And so engineering was a really interesting path towards it.
And, you know, at the time, the tech bubble was happening, and I guess someone in investment banking said, hey, we need more engineers in here to tell us, you know, how to think. And the learning curve was pretty amazing in terms of starting with nothing and basically learning on the go.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:24)
So you spend six years at RBC, helping them build out their structured products group. Tell us about that experience. What did you learn?

**Som Seif** (3:32)
So investment banking is one of the amazing early learning experiences. And I've always been in sort of pursuit of learning and call it pushing myself to certain limits. And, you know, investment banking today is very hard. Investment banking 25 years ago was even harder. And, you know, young analysts, young individual, you're ultimately working on, you know, amazing things. But at the same time, you are, you know, being, you know, you're working like a dog, like 80 to 100 hour weeks. That said, there is no better place as a 22 year old, 23 year old, 25 year old, to ultimately have immersive learning, like. And so it was amazing for me.
When I went into it, it's funny. I had, as a young individual, always, you know, I was an immigrant to Canada. You know, I didn't, you know, my family was good middle class family, but we didn't, you know, have stuff. So I always dreamed about this idea of all the riches and gold and things of that. And, you know, investment banking, kind of one of the things that kind of excited me was this idea of, you know, you're going to make lots of money.
And, you know, the interesting thing was, during the tenure, you know, first few years, you know, you start making good money for a young individual. And then you kind of realize, wait a minute, this isn't actually motivating me. I remember succinctly, I came home, I was 25 years old, it was three in the morning or two in the morning. And I just sat down and kind of wept because I said, you know, I'm working like a dog and I'm pursuing this goal, but I'm not happy. And I had to actually go through a deep rooted perspective of like, what is the thing that actually drives me? What is the thing that actually motivates me to wake up on Monday morning and skip to work? Because I'm still enjoying what I'm doing. And what I realized was that the thing that actually I was in pursuit of was the idea of seeing my ideas progress, seeing the things that I was doing have real tangible outcome. And I go back to that principle of what was it that excited me about architecture or design? It was this very simple principle of when you build something or you design something, you can actually see it in front of you afterwards. And so I actually correlate that really specifically around what was the thing that was my intrinsic motivation. So at that point, I just said, look, I'm still learning. I'm having an amazing time, but am I going to ultimately achieve what I want here? And I said, I won't. So I kind of gave myself a put, I call it. I was 25 years old and I said, okay, I'm still here learning. I'm going to build my network. I'm going to do all this stuff. But if I am in seat on my 30th birthday, I'm going to resign on that day.