Founder and Author Shares the Advantages of Robo Investing and How it has Evolved

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Full Interview:

Transcription:

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Elizabeth MacBride Teaser 00:00

We wrote it very rapidly to draw attention to the real world of entrepreneurs, which is not high-tech Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs, but in fact, is like business owners, right?

And I really respect their entrepreneurial spirit and think we should broaden the definition of entrepreneur to include them, to be an inclusive definition.

Intro 00:22

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:49

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today, Abby Elizabeth MacBride. Elizabeth, excited to have you on the show.

Elizabeth MacBride 00:57

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here too.

Gresham Harkless 01:01

Yes, absolutely. And I love all the awesome things Elizabeth is doing. And, of course, before we jumped into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Elizabeth so you can hear about some of those awesome things.

And Elizabeth is a journalist, founder, and investment expert. She crafted the language that launched the Robo-Advisor Movement. And as a founding team member of Wealthfront, She is also author of the upcoming book, The Little Book of Robo Investing: How to Make Money In Your Sleep.

She founded New Builders Dispatch, a newsletter and publication that covers entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley. And her work has been published over the years in the Atlantic HBR.com, ports, CNBC, and many, many others.

And absolutely was doing a little bit of homework before I jumped into this interview and hearing a little bit more about Elizabeth's study, her story, I actually feel a little bit more like kindred spirits. I also too was a military brat.

And, I was listening that she actually had English in her application for college before her dad convinced her to switch that to journalism. And as an English major, I absolutely love everything that she's doing. She's a wealth of knowledge and information. She gets to talk to with some really phenomenal people.

So, Elizabeth, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

Elizabeth MacBride 02:13

I am. I'm excited to be here too. And, yeah, I'm interested to know whether English was a good choice for you.

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Gresham Harkless 02:19

Yeah. Funny enough, when I was reading a little bit more about you or listening I graduated during the journalism. There's a lot of crisis going on. So I wanted to do journalism. I decided to do English. So that's why when I was reading your story, I was like, we're like, spoiltings there.

Elizabeth MacBride 02:42

That's funny, right? It just speaks to the fact that the world really changes very quickly. And I think the key to success is actually being very adaptable, right? Fast on your feet, moving with the flow of the events without losing your feeling of being grounded.

Gresham Harkless 03:00

Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like you've definitely been able to so many different aspects of your life, I imagine. So what I guess to kick everything off, let's rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Elizabeth MacBride 03:11

With my CEO story. Okay. Gosh. It's so funny, right? I think of myself as an entrepreneur and not necessarily as a CEO. Although my, you learn more about yourself the longer you're on the planet. And somebody some I'm taking classes right now at Johns Hopkins University.

In addition to all the other things I'm doing, I'd like I really think intellectually engaged. So I'm taking classes at Johns Hopkins, learning about AI and, cybersecurity and emerging technologies. And somebody in a one of my classes said to me, oh, you're a leader, like, in the new definition of a leader.

That is you have the emotional intelligence to draw people into teams, not necessarily into companies, but into teams. And then the teams can function in this world that is now a lot more decentralized and not as focused, right, on big companies. So I thought that was really interesting.

It gave me a new perspective on, how, people are seeing the evolving model of leadership. So I would say my story of being a CEO is about following that evolving model. I've founded four I think it's something like four different companies. I've worked as a co-founder of two. I founded my own startup, which I'm now working to turn into a coop.

And then I've been on the founding team of two or three Silicon Valley startups. So one of the first ten employees. Yeah. So I've had I've been, I think, an entrepreneur less than a CEO. It's a big operation.

Gresham Harkless 04:55

Yeah. I absolutely love that. Is that something that I know that you I was listening to every you love to tell stories, love to write.

Elizabeth MacBride 05:02

I have I've often thought I should write a piece that would be, like, the five most important things I learned from my interviews because I've interviewed some of the world's greatest business people who have built billion dollar companies, bigger than billion dollar companies. And there are some people that just, have offered me incredible pieces of wisdom.

Gresham Harkless 05:24

So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about your book and everything awesome that you're writing there and anything else that you're doing to help support the clients you work with.

Elizabeth MacBride 05:32

Yeah. So the book I'm really excited about. So this is my second book. The first book I wrote, was called New Builders, The New Builders, and I wrote it with, Seth Levine. And that had a huge impact on, policy during the pandemic.

So we wrote it very rapidly to draw attention to the real world of entrepreneurs, which is not high-tech Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs, by the fact, is like business owners, right? Small business owners. And I really respect their entrepreneurial spirit and think we should broaden the definition of entrepreneur to include them, to be an inclusive definition.

So we wrote that book together. It had a really big impact on the pandemic aid to small businesses. Tim Kaine's chief of staff very kindly reached out to tell me that they used some of the research in the book when they were passing the revisions of that $250B aid package. So that was pretty cool.

And that book sold well enough that Wiley, the publisher, came back to and asked me to write a book about investing, a Little Book of Robo Investing: How to Make Money While You Sleep, which is I was excited to write it for two reasons.

First, I was very honored. Most of the time, it's hard to get a book published, so it's a big honor that Wiley has to be asked me to write this. And it's also in a series of books that's acclaimed from them, the little book series. So they're easy to read, digestible, simplify big investing concepts.

And the second reason that I was excited to write it is I think it is the perfect kind of investing for entrepreneurs and for the people, I think, that are listening to your podcast. Because the Little Book of Robo Investing is describing how you use new platforms that have evolved in the past ten, or twelve years and become very popular.

Front is one. Others are Betterment. Vanguard has one. These are platforms that make it very easy to invest at a very high quality, right? This is investment advice that previous to these platforms being in the world was really only available to wealthy people, and it's very time saving.

That's the reason I think it's great. It's a great way to invest for people who are busy and who aren't professional investors. So I'm hopeful the book really reaches a lot of people with this low cost, easy approach to investing.

Gresham Harkless 07:58

Yeah. I absolutely love that. So let me ask you this. What would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself, the the business, the combination of things that you've been working on and involved in. What do you think is the thing that sets you apart and makes you unique?

Elizabeth MacBride 08:12

Wow. I think it's so hard to view yourself accurately in the world. So that's a hard question to answer. I think what some people would say is one thing that makes me different is how nice I am. I really I think that's just been a choice of mine, right?

In the kind of very aggressive cutthroat business worlds where I work, one way that I stand out is I don't do that. I just don't. And I really try hard to be kind. I really try hard to apologize when I make a mistake, to be open about it, to open doors for other people, to put time into common courtesies. I'm, like, a big believer in thank you notes in, responding to people.

I'm really upset about this epidemic of ghosting people or not even responding to somebody you've been engaging with. I just don't think that is okay. And I call me old fashioned, but I just don't think it's okay. So I that cost me a lot of time, right?

That approach to living cost me time. And it also in cutthroat business worlds, if you are that way, people think you're stupid. So it, I'm not right. I'm clearly not. I've written books. I've been to all these. Yeah. I feel like I'm still constantly trying to prove to people that, hey, I'm smart at the same time. I'm nice, right? You can be both. It, you can be both.

And just because do not discount me because I've chosen to be kind because I see bigger things in the world and the end of the day, I don't think I'm going to be on my desk bed thinking about my bank account or how many people I cut off at the knees.

I'm going to be thinking about, well, how many relationships that I have? Am I proud of the fact that I brought people behind me? You have to every day stay focused, I think, on where you want to be at the end of your dates.

Gresham Harkless 10:07

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or even a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Elizabeth MacBride 10:18

Because I've been lately, let's see. I'll get let's see. I'll give you one from my mindset world, which I think is the most powerful thing. But I pay a lot of attention to mindfulness, to centering myself. I do a ton of yoga. And every day, I spend about five minutes, at my back window. I'd look out on my backyard, and I have a daily reading, a daily meditation.

I'm part of a prayer group for a friend who has cancer. So I spend some of the most cherished moments of my day, and it really helps me feel centered to do that. So that's one. And then I'm trying to think of something I do just efficiency wise. I'm I feel like I'm sounding very old school, but I'm also telling you what's really working for me right now. Oh, I went grayscale on my phone.

Highly recommend going grayscale on your phone. I felt like I was spending too much time just getting revolved in it, but getting sucked into, like, animal videos on Instagram or whatever. And going gray scale has really helped me cut back.

Gresham Harkless 11:22

Yeah. I absolutely love those. I'm so absolutely appreciate that. What would you consider to be what I call a CEO nugget? Little bit more word of wisdom or piece of advice.

You might have touched on this, but it was be something you would tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine or maybe one of those nuggets that you might tell from the interviews that you've done.

Elizabeth MacBride 11:41

It's a good question. Let's see. A nugget. Friend Charlie Ellis gave me the best piece of investment advice, but it's also life advice, which is underscoring yeah. I think this is a key thing. I think what he told me is to recognize the value of time and to really, this is what I would probably say to my younger self is that small investments over time really pay off.

And that can be investments in dollars. It can be an investment in yourself, right? It could be an investment in maybe this mindfulness practice every day. It can be in the world of business. It could be like investing in ten relationships that are people who might help you get where you wanna go.

But all those things are just time, right, recognizing the value of time. And he really taught me that by being very it's he taught he's a financial advisor, and he taught me that to take a step back and look more specifically at the value of time because I was in the middle of my divorce.

And my ex-husband was like, just buy me out of the house right now. But he had written a agreement in such a way as to give me the option of leaving him in the house, leaving his share in the house until my younger daughter graduated. I'm not making a very short nugget, but-

Gresham Harkless 13:11

No. You're fine. That's a good nugget. It's a mouth. So I love you.

Elizabeth MacBride 13:15

So, anyway, so I was talking to Charlie about this. I was like, I just wanna buy my ex-husband out. I'm just gonna gather the money, pay him, and then we'll be done. I'll be clean. I'll have my him off the mortgage, right? And Charlie said to me, slow down.

Again, he's one of these people that's a little more rational, than I am, but I tend to want my emotions to leak because I wanna be that person who I am. And he was slow down because it's fifteen years from now. This is about fifteen years from now. He said the amount of money we would pay him now is gonna be worth a lot less in fifteen years.

And I was just like, inflation was not a big problem then, but as we've had this big spate of inflation the past few years and even over time, even our two, three percent inflation over years was really significant built up. So I'm like, wow. That is such a smart way to approach life and the way you're managing your money, the way you're managing your companies, right?

It's just just to remember that where you are today is not where you're gonna be fifteen years from now. And if you don't have to do something at that moment, it often pays more to wait.

Gresham Harkless 14:27

Yeah. That makes so much sense. So I wanna ask you now my absolute favorite question. I know we touched on this a little bit. It's the definition of what it means to be a CEO, and our goal is to have different quote, unquote CEOs on the show.

So, Elizabeth, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Elizabeth MacBride 14:40

Being a CEO means being in charge of my own life.

Gresham Harkless 14:44

I love it. Elizabeth, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more.

So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best people can get a hold of you, get a copy of your books, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

Elizabeth MacBride 14:59

First, I wanna say, I think you're a great interviewer, Gresham. You did a really good job. And, let's see. So my book launched where I think this is scheduled around April. So it launched March 12^th. You can find it on Amazon. You can also find it at any probably any independent bookstore.

And I really appreciate and applaud people for supporting independent businesses. So it's called Little Book of Robo Investing: How to Make Money While You Sleep. It's an easy read, and we built in a bunch of shortcuts through the book to make it even easier.

And I'm happy to answer people's questions if they wanna shoot me an email or reach out at emacbride@nbdispatch.com. You can also find me online at various places. I have a blog on Forbes, and then you can go to New Builders Dispatch, which is my other website. And then I have a speaker website as well, and I do speaking engagements around the book. I may eventually develop a course that runs along with it too.

Gresham Harkless 16:05

Nice. Absolutely love that. And, of course, to make it even easier, we're gonna have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can click through, get a copy of the book, connect with you, ask any questions, and do all the things, that you're you're able to provide.

So thank you so much, Elizabeth. I truly appreciate you for obviously taking time out, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of your day.

Elizabeth MacBride 16:22

Thanks, Gresh.

Outro 16:23

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media.

Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase. It's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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