Betsy Cohen has built financial businesses for her whole career. She is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Cohen Circle, a growth stage investment firm focused on the fintech and impact spaces.  She was previously CEO at The Bancorp Bank, which she founded in 2000 and previously worked at Jefferson Bank for 26 years. She sits on numerous boards and has received several awards being named a Forbes 2022 Most Powerful Self-Made Woman, 25 outstanding women bankers and many more.

David Semmens is Chief Investment Officer at Cadro and an External Investment Committee Member at Wealthify where he was previously CIO. He holds additional Investment Committee and advisory roles and is an adjunct lecturer at Heriot-Watt University. 

Adam Demuyakor is the founder and managing partner at Wilshire Lane Capital, a venture capital and private equity firm that focuses on PropTech solutions based in Los Angeles California. Born in the US to a family originally from Ghana, Adam started out on Wall Street in investment banking and held a number of private equity and venture capital roles before found in Wilshire Lane. He also holds a number of Board roles and is a Board of Trustee of the education nonprofit 9 Dots.Our conversation starts with his family roots, and the expectations that accompanied his schooling and career choices. We hear how he came to be interested in real estate and how he gained experience in both the private and public side of the business, and ultimately the vision with which he launched his own firm. This is an opportunity for our discussion to dive into PropTech and discuss what the technology that is transforming real estate looks like, and how these theses are playing out. Among some of the concepts discussed are Ghost Kitchens and the new look Self Storage outfits, and we discuss some of the business models that are exciting him most at this juncture.As an early stage venture capital firm, Wilshire Lane Capital, is highly focused on the entrepreneurs and their vision that they support, and many of them are diverse founders themselves. In fact in an industry in which female and black and brown founders are poorly represented, Wilshire Lane is breaking the mould – 36% of their companies are led by women outright, 29% of their companies have a black founder on them, and 79% of their companies have an underrepresented minority or a female in the C suite. Wilshire Lane Capital recently entered into a strategic partnership with Nile Capital which sponsored our original diverse founders and VCs series, and we speak about how these ideas came together. We speak about 9 Dots, a nonprofit, based in Los Angeles, that focuses on providing subsidized computer science courses for the poorest students in the city. Adam shares why this is one of the most fulfilling of all of his roles. Finally, we discuss some highs and lows of his career so far, what Adam looks for in a founder and what it means to pass the “Shower Test”. This podcast will feature in our mini-series featuring professionals from the Ghanaian diaspora as well as our second diverse founders and venture capitalist series.

Pippa Gawley invests in what she describes as deep science hard tech innovations to accelerate the zero-carbon transition. She is the founder and director of Zero Carbon Capital, a fund she founded in April 2019, and holds various non-executive director and mentor roles. She has extensive experience in tech, and, latterly, in climate-tech in particular.

An angel investor opens the kimono as to some of the huge potential of climate tech and how starting her own venture capital fund has come with its own adventures.

Randy Cohen, is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business school.  His main research focus is the interface between the actions of institutional investors and price levels in the stock market and has helped to start and grow a number of investment management firms.  He is a partner at Exsight Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage impact investments in innovative ophthalmic diagnostic and treatment solutions. This has particular resonance for Randy, who is blind from retinitis pigmentosa.

Asha Mehta is Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Global Delta Capital, where she has a thematic focus on Emerging and Frontier Markets as well as Sustainability Investing. She was previously Lead Portfolio Manager and Director of Responsible Investing at Acadian Asset Management and prior to that an investment banker.  She has traveled to over 80 countries and lived in six, and recently released a book, The Power of Capital: An Adventure Capitalist’s Journey to a Sustainable Future.