Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated to small and emerging managers and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent while seeking to drive strong returns and impact. For more information, visit www.gcmgrosvenor.com.
Wendy: Give first. It’s a big part of how I have built meaningful non-transactional relationships. What that means is be helpful within reason without the expectation of something in return, and that will serve you well throughout your career.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I know today about Wendy Lee, who is co-founder and chief investment officer of Ivy Invest, which is focused on creating more wealth for the average American. She started her career as an investment analyst at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and worked in a series of endowment and foundation roles before joining Ivy Invest. Welcome, Wendy. Thanks for joining me today.
Wendy: Thank you, Aoifinn, for having me today. It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you, and I love the work you’re doing here at 50 Faces.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much. I’m looking forward to hearing about your career journey. So let’s start with talking about how your career started, and did it— your journey take any surprising turns along the way?
Wendy: Yeah, so I grew up in a small city in Pennsylvania. It’s where my family wound up after immigrating to the US. My dad came to the US to pursue his doctorate, and growing up, I had a very typical, you know, immigrant experience. My mom, who had been in accounting and was in management after she immigrated, her degree and her experience didn’t translate. She came to the US and had to learn the language and to start all over. My dad was a full-time grad student with a comically minimal stipend, and my mom waitressed and took on other hourly work. And that’s, that’s really what our family lived off of. So growing up, I went to our neighborhood public school and I had in my mind the same ambitions that I think a lot of immigrant children would relate to. The professional career paths that I knew about were lawyer or doctor or like my dad, engineer. And after finishing his PhD, my dad did go into industry and our family circumstances certainly changed eventually. But by this time, I was toward the end of middle school, entering high school. And my public high school was wonderful in many ways. My closest friends are still my childhood friends. But it was— how should I put this— not a Westchester or Connecticut-type public high school where families move into the zone to send their kids. So lucky for me, I was a strong student, a naturally good test taker, and I went to Columbia. And Columbia was a shock to the system for me. I was surrounded by students that were as ambitious as I was, but far more sophisticated than I was at that time. My college friends are the ones who introduced me to this industry called finance, which, by the way, pays really well. So it was, it was easy to get drawn in at Columbia, and all the usual suspects recruited there. This was pre-GFC, so really the heyday. Anyway, I’ve probably made two surprising choices along the way in my career. The first was actually right out of college. Instead of the usual finance or consulting job, which is where I was heading, I chose to join something called an endowment investment office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I got a lot of confused looks from friends at the time, and this was 2005, 2006, when professional internally run endowment and foundation investment offices were less common. And I candidly didn’t really even know what I was getting myself into, but I chose the role at the Met Museum because it sounded different and interesting. And that proved to be the case. It led me down this wonderful career path of being an institutional allocator. And so the second surprising turn happened really last year when I left that compelling allocator role at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. I took a sharp left turn and I started Ivy Invest, which is a fintech asset management firm. So that story is still being written.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, we’re definitely going to dive into that, and I’d love to just get back. That is fascinating. First of all, thinking about your experience in Colombia, I swear there was a lot of adaptation you had to do, and there’s the typical, I suppose, this inclusion factor, which is important when you do come from a different background. And then moving to be an allocator, Metropolitan Museum of Art sounds like it could have some other attractive aspects. Did you get to brush shoulders with the art world, or were there any other aspects besides their allocation? And maybe can you just give a few facts around the size of that endowment and its kind of positioning?
Wendy: So the endowment when I joined was about $3 billion. They were already very broadly allocated across alternatives. The Met Museum, when I joined, already had an established, long-running, high-performing investment program, one that was just consistently top quartile, if not top decile performance over multiple time periods. And then in terms of the other benefits that you might have alluded to, certainly I was not a particularly— I didn’t have strong expertise in art. For me, it was more of a nice to be in that environment. I will say this: when I was at the Met Museum, the museum was closed to visitors on Mondays, so we did have the museum all to ourselves, and that was really just an extraordinary experience to be able to walk through the halls when it was closed to everybody else and really just enjoy the artwork quietly. That obviously a little bit of a deviation from the other aspects of the role, which were unusual really starting out at institutional allocator role. And there’s definitely aspects of that piece of it outside of the art that was interesting.
Aoifinn Devitt: And just before moving on to discuss Ivy Investee, starting your career as an allocator, as you said, it was an unusual route. It wasn’t something that, you know, was traditional, but how would you recommend that as a learning ground for other graduates who have this potential, because there often are quite interesting entry-level roles there.
Wendy: Yes, it is. It’s definitely unusual. And actually, I’m not sure that too many investment offices really hire right out of school. And I think part of it speaks to sort of the experience that I had, which is I was the first analyst at the Met Museum when I joined. There wasn’t a formalized training program or group of peers, and I think there’s a lot of value to both of those things. I needed to figure a lot of things out on my own. I had to sit in front of spreadsheets and models and just figure it out. And I did. The trade-off was that I was exposed to some incredible investment managers across hedge funds, private equity, natural resources, and so on, right out of the gates. A really steep learning curve. But I did become grounded in this particular way of thinking about portfolio construction, manager evaluation, decision-making processes, risk management. And so it is, as you know, this is an apprenticeship business, so it matters who you train with. Lauren Mazur, she is the museum’s current CIO. She actually hired me back then, and she’s an excellent, very astute investor. Lauren trained at the Yale Investment Office, and I trained with Lauren, and I learned so much from the way that she and Suzanne Brunner, the CIO during my time there, I learned so much from how they navigated the museum’s portfolio through the global financial crisis. The decisions they made, the ones they didn’t make. Those are lessons that really have stuck with me. But back to your question, while there are all these aspects of starting out at an institutional allocator office that are really extraordinarily interesting, I don’t know that starting as an allocator is really for everyone. It is, just speaking from my own experience, it can be a really highly unstructured environment. But that said, if you can do well with that and you have the good fortune to train at a great investment office. To your point, there’s really nothing like it.
Aoifinn Devitt: So can you talk a little bit about your experience of founding your own firm? How has that gone so far?
Wendy: It has been the most challenging and the most rewarding experience. I think the cliché that you often hear is spot on. The highs are high and the lows can be low. One of the hardest things about building a thing that doesn’t currently exist is that there isn’t a blueprint. You make a lot of decisions with partial information. And I think anyone that has been an entrepreneur can relate to the challenges of making decisions in what can feel like a vacuum, for lack of a better term. That is until you actually put your product in front of people, and that’s when the real feedback loop begins. So my co-founders and I, we felt this immense urgency to start the feedback loop, to get that going, to get out of the vacuum. And fortunately, that’s, that’s where we are now. We are putting our product and our company in front of people, which feels very vulnerable, but it also feels very real. Our work is tangible, and that’s very exciting. The other thing I’ll say is that I can’t imagine building IB Invest with better co-founders. I feel super fortunate. There’s a bit of conventional wisdom around what qualities make for successful founders. And I now viscerally understand why, and I have to agree. My co-founders, Matt Palkar and Arash Khodose, they embody a lot of those qualities. Matt and Arash, they are focused, they’re optimistic, they are relentless problem solvers, and together we just keep moving the ball forward. We laugh a lot. We really do enjoy working with each other. So a lot of ups and downs, but Fortunately, mostly a lot to be grateful for. And one more thing I’ll say, one of the unexpected upsides has been I’ve had friends in our business who are or have been entrepreneurs or who have entrepreneurs in their family. And I wouldn’t have known about that otherwise, but now they share those experiences with me and it’s been this whole new way to relate to people, which is fantastic.
Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. I didn’t think of that actually as opening up a new channel of communication when you add that to your bank of experiences. But of course, it takes one to know one. And I think you have to have lived it to understand the kind of stomach-churning nature of the beginning, and probably more than the beginning of being an entrepreneur. Well, let’s dig into the focus because, you know, fintech is your focus. You have an app. Tell us what exactly Ivy Invest, what problem it’s designed to solve.
Wendy: Yeah, our focus at Ivy Invest is to give every individual investor the type of portfolio that billion-dollar institutions and family offices use for their wealth. At our core, our message is ultra-wealthy institutions manage their long-term investments differently, way differently from the average investor. Let’s take that knowledge, that investment approach, that access, and distill it down to one decision point. Do you want that for your long-term wealth? And if you do, here it is. Ivy Invest provides it in the form of a single product that is easy to use, easy to access with no accreditation requirement and $1,000 investment minimum, right? We provide one product and we provide it through a modern fintech web and app-based experience. Now, in terms of the problem that we’re solving, it’s a pretty well-known problem. We’re looking to level the playing field between your average consumer investor and large-scale wealthy institutions and family offices. There are certainly other platforms that have preceded Ivy Invest, and these platforms almost exclusively focus on access, which is great. I’m a fan of creating access points, but we think that leveling the playing field requires more than simply providing access. For your typical individual investor, what do you do with that access? How do you make sense of being offered a private loan or a real estate investment? And forget for a moment, just forget for a moment about the negative selection bias piece of it, which is definitely an issue. And just think about the burden that’s putting on someone to make decisions that we as professional institutional investors don’t make. I’m not out here trying to cherry-pick individual loans or commercial buildings to underwrite. It’s wild when you think about it. So we provide access, but we also take on accountability. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that for our average customers, I’m in a much better position to build a sophisticated portfolio than they are. That added layer improves the experience for our end customer. And so as I said before, our customer just experiences a single finished product. Now, someone might say for themselves they’re not interested, and that’s okay. We’re providing one option, one solution to the problem. Where I do take umbrage though, is that There is a subset of professional investors that feels really strongly that individuals don’t need or shouldn’t even have access to alternative investments or more sophisticated portfolios. And my reaction is sort of, are we really in this day and age still having this debate? The argument is that retail investors are fine with the existing options. They say, yes, the retail options are lesser, but they’re fine. And that strikes me as fundamentally insincere. If the existing public market options are good enough for individuals, then they should be good enough for institutions. But we know that wealthy institutions and family offices have long since moved on from stock bond portfolios, and they’ve reaped the benefits of their more sophisticated portfolios, and they’re not going back.
Aoifinn Devitt: Really interesting. And I’d just like to take that, so, because I agree with you completely around the need to add value, providing access. The sophisticated experience you’re bringing in terms of asset allocation, and about why should this be an exclusive club? It provides essential diversification, essential access to talent and skill that is not available elsewhere. And I think it is an essential way to mute volatility. Well, in terms of though, some might say that there is the evolution of the investment management industry to be not just a product industry, but a service industry, and that many of these relationships are really sealed with the service provided by, say, an asset manager. And the fintech piece is fascinating because I think we all thought we’d be disintermediated in private wealth by robo-advisors that fintech would govern. How do you find your clients embrace the app, say the fintech component, but also need the service from you?
Wendy: I do think there’s different types of investors, and I do think there is a subset of investors that is well served by high-touch, high-service wealth advisors. I do think that there are folks who either from a level of wealth standpoint or for younger generations, just a personal preference standpoint, don’t necessarily want a high-touch experience or they don’t have the wealth to be eligible for a higher-touch service experience. And so I think there is a certainly large enough subset of folks who deserve to have that sophistication in terms of investment management, who deserve to have the type of access to a portfolio that we know is capable of generating better risk-adjusted returns and better returns overall. And there is an element of, again, sort of leveling the playing field, providing access to those investors. Who, for whatever reason, personal preference, level of wealth, don’t have access to higher-touch service providers, who can still access a really high-quality experience from a fintech standpoint, from a platform standpoint. And I do think that robo-advisors certainly have generated a lot of interest, and they’ve brought in new investors who previously weren’t investing and have provided them an option and a pathway to taking advantage of the returns in the public markets. And I think these are all trends in the right direction.
Aoifinn Devitt: And speaking of trends, tell us how much you think fintech will start to be present in the investment management industry. Do you see that we will do more, and even broadening beyond fintech, the use of AI, etc.? How do you see the investment management industry as evolving?
Wendy: I think it’s interesting to think about it from a tech and AI standpoint, and I think I see a lot of companies being built right now in what’s considered the wealth tech space, folks who are providing technology to help service wealth advisors and independent advisors. There’s a lot of both companies being built in this space and experimentation and the types of services that can be provided from a purely technology standpoint. I do think that it’s going to be a long time before, to your point, any of this technology or AI really supplants human judgment, whether that’s human judgment in terms of what I’m providing from an investment judgment standpoint or human judgment that’s being provided by a financial advisor in the way that they engage with their clients. So I think what we’re seeing, or at least what I’m seeing, is that there are a lot of companies being built to further supplement and provide additional resources and efficiencies to the existing folks who are in this space. But I think it’s going to be some time. And honestly, one of the things— this is purely anecdotal— I think this is going to be an area where, because of the consequence of getting things wrong with your personal wealth, I think this is an area where a lot of individual investors will still want to know there’s a person at the end of the day behind a lot of the decisions that are being made here.
Aoifinn Devitt: And let’s get into then some of the other aspects of the investment industry, given that the person is at the center, whether that’s on the advisor side or on the client side. How well do you think the industry has adapted to reflect its client base in terms of the diversity of the industry? Does fintech make that irrelevant because it’s an app and it doesn’t matter if it’s who, who the client is on the other side? How do you think, I mean, having been a woman in the industry yourself, the industry embraces inclusion?
Wendy: I do think there’s certainly a lot of, there’s a lot of room for improvement on this front. And what I mean by that is I think investing is fundamentally a more nuanced exercise and there’s complexity both in the strategies that are being executed and complexity in the underlying investments themselves. And so I think breaking down that complexity for investors is important. And what I mean by that is there’s a piece of the challenge that is like a pure communication standpoint. A lot of the investment world is publishing information that’s intended to speak to other parts of the investment management world. And so a lot of how we communicate is really industry shorthand, mutually understood frames of reference. And so that’s one piece of the puzzle is just really figuring out how to speak to everyday investors. But back to the diversity point that you made, I think another part of it is that the individual investor base is broad, it is diverse. And part of communicating effectively has to include meeting investors where they are, metaphorically speaking. I think having shared frames of reference and shared backgrounds, that’s really where I think when you have greater diversity in the investment management space, you will be able to communicate more effectively with investors. And I do think, you know, there’s an element to your point to what you alluded to, that as a woman in this industry, it’s wonderful that I do think there are a lot of young women who are entering finance or entering investments who are rising through the ranks, but it is still more limited at the senior levels. And I do think it’s important to have different voices that can speak to different experiences, especially when you’re talking about communicating with a broader investor base like the individual investor base.
Aoifinn Devitt: Just moving on to some reflections. So having— now that you’ve embarked upon this entrepreneur’s journey, One of my favorite podcasts is How I Built This by Guy Raz that takes many entrepreneurs now successful through their ups and downs and, and just reflections. Have there been any key setbacks or challenges that you can talk about now where you maybe learned lessons?
Wendy: I do think that part of being an entrepreneur is experiencing a lot of challenges that are very unexpected challenges. And what I mean by that is you anticipate that certain things will be difficult. And so we anticipated that starting and launching an SEC-registered fund would take time and would be difficult because now we’re operating in a regulated environment. What we didn’t anticipate is that our onboarding process, for instance, for our customers, when we were building out our initial onboarding process for our customers, we had a series of questions where we were asking customers to put in their own information. And then part of that is, as a financial product, all of our customers, if they’re opening a financial account, they need to go through what’s known as know your customer, anti-money laundering processes. And so with that, when we were collecting information that was being entered directly and manually from our users, what we found is that the rate of user data entry error was really high, which created a lot of, let’s just call it, unscalable issues on our end. And so we had to refresh that account opening process and that data collection process. And it’s, you know, it was one of those learnings where, as we’re talking about it, it seems so obvious, like, of course, folks make mistakes when they enter their data. And it’s important that the data is accurate. That can have consequences. And so it’s one of those areas that I laugh when I talk about it because it’s both so obvious in hindsight, but it was also one of those things that it was very unexpected as we were dealing with it at the time. And there’s just so many, there’s so many of those examples as you build the company.
Aoifinn Devitt: I can certainly relate to that. And I think, you know, you can handle the challenges that you foresee. It’s these unforeseen things that trip you up that I think are what cause that kind of entrepreneur’s dilemma as they embark. And thinking about people, so you mentioned having two co-founders as well as other mentors throughout your career. Were there any key people who had a particular influence on you throughout your career and in what way?
Wendy: I mentioned Lauren and Suzanne at the Met Museum earlier. They were and are excellent investors with incredibly high standards across every aspect of running an investment program. And I was at the Met Museum for 4.5 years, so it was a formative experience. I then worked with Colin Ambrose across two institutions over the course of 13-plus years, including most recently when we started the investment office at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. So I would consider Colin my most significant mentor and easily the person that has had the most influence on my career. Colin is an exceptional leader and chief investment officer. He has strong investment judgment, clear foundational principles, all the usual things you would expect from a great CIO. But I think the thing that sets Colin apart is his ability to bring out the best in every member of the team. He knows how to develop talent. He encourages professional growth, and it’s easy to tout the benefits of open discussions and intellectually honest team debates, but it’s actually really hard to foster the kind of environment that allows for those things. It requires a leader that is open-minded and transparent and humble and really trusted by the team. And so, when I think about key people who have influenced me throughout my career, I think of Colin as a great example because that’s really now how I aspire to lead. And he’s had such an influence on me as both an investor and just a professional and now a leader.
Aoifinn Devitt: Before we get to closing question, I always like to ask if people have any other interests that we don’t capture here in the career journey. Anything for you outside the office, say, that is an important cause that you hold dear?
Wendy: Yes, I love this question. I would highlight two smaller nonprofits that both in different ways look to level the playing field in their respective areas. And there’s clearly a theme here in terms of the types of missions that speak to me. The first nonprofit is called EWAB, which is spelled E-W-A-A-B and stands for Encouraging Women Across All Borders. It’s a college mentorship program primarily supporting women in STEM majors. EWAB provides academic mentorship and professional development opportunities for young women who would otherwise not have access to that kind of guidance. And I’ve seen it be a very impactful program for these young women many of whom come from less advantaged backgrounds as they prepare to navigate male-dominated industries in STEM. The second organization is a little bit different. It’s called Flightpath Dance Project, and Flightpath is incredible. It is a fully tuition-free dance company and preparatory program for high school dancers in New York. Flightpath provides training and workshops and experiences, and they prepare these high schoolers for college and a career in the performing arts. These are, to be clear, young men and women who otherwise wouldn’t have the option to train and reach for these opportunities. It’s hard to describe the level of talent that is clearly nurtured and captured by Flightpath through this program, and several alumni of this program are now professional dancers, which is really remarkable. So I’ll point to both EWAB and Flightpath as great organizations that mean a lot to me. They both address this common challenge of talent might be equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t, and widening access to opportunities is so important.
Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. And one of our previous guests, Sonali Patel-Wilson, also mentioned EWOP. I’m not sure if you know her, but she’s now at Wellington and a very, very important— it’s lovely to have the same connection. And on the dance front, we’ve had a number of guests who actually were former dancers who now have ended up in the investment world and that the poise and the choreography and the learning to work within a team and learning to perform, all of these are such critical skills. So I think it’s really important to just sort of circle back to the arts as training grounds for what we may do later because it’s rare to be able to be a dancer your entire career. But I love that, that this flight path has given rise to opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist. And my final question is around advice, whether there’s any key word of wisdom or creed or motto that you live by or advice for your younger self that you can share?
Wendy: I have one really simple piece of advice that I was lucky to receive early in my career, and I continue to find it invaluable. And it’s the one piece of advice I give to younger folks coming up in this business. Give first. Give first. It’s a big part of how I have built meaningful non-transactional relationships. And I tell younger investors as they look to grow their networks, When you meet folks, give first. What that means is be helpful within reason without the expectation of something in return. And that will serve you well throughout your career. And then the second, if I can offer to, there is something I do remind my kids of a lot. And this is more of a personal motto, which is that you don’t always get what you want, but you appreciate what you have. And so I always think about how I’m very grateful for all that I have from my family to my friends. To my co-founders.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I’m nodding here because that advice around networking is something that I have also started to internalize and pass on because everybody has something to give. And I think it’s and very— just in summing up here, your story is one in which humility runs through it. But I do think that certainly you noted at the beginning that you didn’t come from the same privileged, perhaps high school background that some of your Columbia peers did, but you knew even then that you had something to give. And it was actually through some giving of advice on LinkedIn that I was drawn to you. So I’m, I’m so happy to see that you’re continuing to give back to our industry. And thank you on this podcast, you’ve shared a lot about the fintech and the new frontier that that brings. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us.
Wendy: Thank you, Aoifinn, for having me. This was a pleasure.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
Aoifinn Devitt: This series is kindly supported by GCM Grosvenor. GCM Grosvenor is a global alternative asset management firm with a longstanding commitment to supporting small, emerging, and diverse investment managers. For over 30 years, the firm has developed expertise in funding and guiding these managers as part of its broader activity across alternative investments. With over $20 billion in AUM dedicated to small and emerging managers and $16 billion in AUM dedicated to diverse managers, GCM Grosvenor leverages its experienced team, broad network, and proprietary sourcing capabilities to support their success. Through the Small, Emerging, and Diverse Manager Program, the firm creates opportunities for investors to access a wide range of talent while seeking to drive strong returns and impact. For more information, visit www.gcmgrosvenor.com.
Wendy: Give first. It’s a big part of how I have built meaningful non-transactional relationships. What that means is be helpful within reason without the expectation of something in return, and that will serve you well throughout your career.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt, and welcome to the 50 Faces Podcast, a podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories. I know today about Wendy Lee, who is co-founder and chief investment officer of Ivy Invest, which is focused on creating more wealth for the average American. She started her career as an investment analyst at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and worked in a series of endowment and foundation roles before joining Ivy Invest. Welcome, Wendy. Thanks for joining me today.
Wendy: Thank you, Aoifinn, for having me today. It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you, and I love the work you’re doing here at 50 Faces.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, thank you so much. I’m looking forward to hearing about your career journey. So let’s start with talking about how your career started, and did it— your journey take any surprising turns along the way?
Wendy: Yeah, so I grew up in a small city in Pennsylvania. It’s where my family wound up after immigrating to the US. My dad came to the US to pursue his doctorate, and growing up, I had a very typical, you know, immigrant experience. My mom, who had been in accounting and was in management after she immigrated, her degree and her experience didn’t translate. She came to the US and had to learn the language and to start all over. My dad was a full-time grad student with a comically minimal stipend, and my mom waitressed and took on other hourly work. And that’s, that’s really what our family lived off of. So growing up, I went to our neighborhood public school and I had in my mind the same ambitions that I think a lot of immigrant children would relate to. The professional career paths that I knew about were lawyer or doctor or like my dad, engineer. And after finishing his PhD, my dad did go into industry and our family circumstances certainly changed eventually. But by this time, I was toward the end of middle school, entering high school. And my public high school was wonderful in many ways. My closest friends are still my childhood friends. But it was— how should I put this— not a Westchester or Connecticut-type public high school where families move into the zone to send their kids. So lucky for me, I was a strong student, a naturally good test taker, and I went to Columbia. And Columbia was a shock to the system for me. I was surrounded by students that were as ambitious as I was, but far more sophisticated than I was at that time. My college friends are the ones who introduced me to this industry called finance, which, by the way, pays really well. So it was, it was easy to get drawn in at Columbia, and all the usual suspects recruited there. This was pre-GFC, so really the heyday. Anyway, I’ve probably made two surprising choices along the way in my career. The first was actually right out of college. Instead of the usual finance or consulting job, which is where I was heading, I chose to join something called an endowment investment office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I got a lot of confused looks from friends at the time, and this was 2005, 2006, when professional internally run endowment and foundation investment offices were less common. And I candidly didn’t really even know what I was getting myself into, but I chose the role at the Met Museum because it sounded different and interesting. And that proved to be the case. It led me down this wonderful career path of being an institutional allocator. And so the second surprising turn happened really last year when I left that compelling allocator role at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. I took a sharp left turn and I started Ivy Invest, which is a fintech asset management firm. So that story is still being written.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, we’re definitely going to dive into that, and I’d love to just get back. That is fascinating. First of all, thinking about your experience in Colombia, I swear there was a lot of adaptation you had to do, and there’s the typical, I suppose, this inclusion factor, which is important when you do come from a different background. And then moving to be an allocator, Metropolitan Museum of Art sounds like it could have some other attractive aspects. Did you get to brush shoulders with the art world, or were there any other aspects besides their allocation? And maybe can you just give a few facts around the size of that endowment and its kind of positioning?
Wendy: So the endowment when I joined was about $3 billion. They were already very broadly allocated across alternatives. The Met Museum, when I joined, already had an established, long-running, high-performing investment program, one that was just consistently top quartile, if not top decile performance over multiple time periods. And then in terms of the other benefits that you might have alluded to, certainly I was not a particularly— I didn’t have strong expertise in art. For me, it was more of a nice to be in that environment. I will say this: when I was at the Met Museum, the museum was closed to visitors on Mondays, so we did have the museum all to ourselves, and that was really just an extraordinary experience to be able to walk through the halls when it was closed to everybody else and really just enjoy the artwork quietly. That obviously a little bit of a deviation from the other aspects of the role, which were unusual really starting out at institutional allocator role. And there’s definitely aspects of that piece of it outside of the art that was interesting.
Aoifinn Devitt: And just before moving on to discuss Ivy Investee, starting your career as an allocator, as you said, it was an unusual route. It wasn’t something that, you know, was traditional, but how would you recommend that as a learning ground for other graduates who have this potential, because there often are quite interesting entry-level roles there.
Wendy: Yes, it is. It’s definitely unusual. And actually, I’m not sure that too many investment offices really hire right out of school. And I think part of it speaks to sort of the experience that I had, which is I was the first analyst at the Met Museum when I joined. There wasn’t a formalized training program or group of peers, and I think there’s a lot of value to both of those things. I needed to figure a lot of things out on my own. I had to sit in front of spreadsheets and models and just figure it out. And I did. The trade-off was that I was exposed to some incredible investment managers across hedge funds, private equity, natural resources, and so on, right out of the gates. A really steep learning curve. But I did become grounded in this particular way of thinking about portfolio construction, manager evaluation, decision-making processes, risk management. And so it is, as you know, this is an apprenticeship business, so it matters who you train with. Lauren Mazur, she is the museum’s current CIO. She actually hired me back then, and she’s an excellent, very astute investor. Lauren trained at the Yale Investment Office, and I trained with Lauren, and I learned so much from the way that she and Suzanne Brunner, the CIO during my time there, I learned so much from how they navigated the museum’s portfolio through the global financial crisis. The decisions they made, the ones they didn’t make. Those are lessons that really have stuck with me. But back to your question, while there are all these aspects of starting out at an institutional allocator office that are really extraordinarily interesting, I don’t know that starting as an allocator is really for everyone. It is, just speaking from my own experience, it can be a really highly unstructured environment. But that said, if you can do well with that and you have the good fortune to train at a great investment office. To your point, there’s really nothing like it.
Aoifinn Devitt: So can you talk a little bit about your experience of founding your own firm? How has that gone so far?
Wendy: It has been the most challenging and the most rewarding experience. I think the cliché that you often hear is spot on. The highs are high and the lows can be low. One of the hardest things about building a thing that doesn’t currently exist is that there isn’t a blueprint. You make a lot of decisions with partial information. And I think anyone that has been an entrepreneur can relate to the challenges of making decisions in what can feel like a vacuum, for lack of a better term. That is until you actually put your product in front of people, and that’s when the real feedback loop begins. So my co-founders and I, we felt this immense urgency to start the feedback loop, to get that going, to get out of the vacuum. And fortunately, that’s, that’s where we are now. We are putting our product and our company in front of people, which feels very vulnerable, but it also feels very real. Our work is tangible, and that’s very exciting. The other thing I’ll say is that I can’t imagine building IB Invest with better co-founders. I feel super fortunate. There’s a bit of conventional wisdom around what qualities make for successful founders. And I now viscerally understand why, and I have to agree. My co-founders, Matt Palkar and Arash Khodose, they embody a lot of those qualities. Matt and Arash, they are focused, they’re optimistic, they are relentless problem solvers, and together we just keep moving the ball forward. We laugh a lot. We really do enjoy working with each other. So a lot of ups and downs, but Fortunately, mostly a lot to be grateful for. And one more thing I’ll say, one of the unexpected upsides has been I’ve had friends in our business who are or have been entrepreneurs or who have entrepreneurs in their family. And I wouldn’t have known about that otherwise, but now they share those experiences with me and it’s been this whole new way to relate to people, which is fantastic.
Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. I didn’t think of that actually as opening up a new channel of communication when you add that to your bank of experiences. But of course, it takes one to know one. And I think you have to have lived it to understand the kind of stomach-churning nature of the beginning, and probably more than the beginning of being an entrepreneur. Well, let’s dig into the focus because, you know, fintech is your focus. You have an app. Tell us what exactly Ivy Invest, what problem it’s designed to solve.
Wendy: Yeah, our focus at Ivy Invest is to give every individual investor the type of portfolio that billion-dollar institutions and family offices use for their wealth. At our core, our message is ultra-wealthy institutions manage their long-term investments differently, way differently from the average investor. Let’s take that knowledge, that investment approach, that access, and distill it down to one decision point. Do you want that for your long-term wealth? And if you do, here it is. Ivy Invest provides it in the form of a single product that is easy to use, easy to access with no accreditation requirement and $1,000 investment minimum, right? We provide one product and we provide it through a modern fintech web and app-based experience. Now, in terms of the problem that we’re solving, it’s a pretty well-known problem. We’re looking to level the playing field between your average consumer investor and large-scale wealthy institutions and family offices. There are certainly other platforms that have preceded Ivy Invest, and these platforms almost exclusively focus on access, which is great. I’m a fan of creating access points, but we think that leveling the playing field requires more than simply providing access. For your typical individual investor, what do you do with that access? How do you make sense of being offered a private loan or a real estate investment? And forget for a moment, just forget for a moment about the negative selection bias piece of it, which is definitely an issue. And just think about the burden that’s putting on someone to make decisions that we as professional institutional investors don’t make. I’m not out here trying to cherry-pick individual loans or commercial buildings to underwrite. It’s wild when you think about it. So we provide access, but we also take on accountability. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that for our average customers, I’m in a much better position to build a sophisticated portfolio than they are. That added layer improves the experience for our end customer. And so as I said before, our customer just experiences a single finished product. Now, someone might say for themselves they’re not interested, and that’s okay. We’re providing one option, one solution to the problem. Where I do take umbrage though, is that There is a subset of professional investors that feels really strongly that individuals don’t need or shouldn’t even have access to alternative investments or more sophisticated portfolios. And my reaction is sort of, are we really in this day and age still having this debate? The argument is that retail investors are fine with the existing options. They say, yes, the retail options are lesser, but they’re fine. And that strikes me as fundamentally insincere. If the existing public market options are good enough for individuals, then they should be good enough for institutions. But we know that wealthy institutions and family offices have long since moved on from stock bond portfolios, and they’ve reaped the benefits of their more sophisticated portfolios, and they’re not going back.
Aoifinn Devitt: Really interesting. And I’d just like to take that, so, because I agree with you completely around the need to add value, providing access. The sophisticated experience you’re bringing in terms of asset allocation, and about why should this be an exclusive club? It provides essential diversification, essential access to talent and skill that is not available elsewhere. And I think it is an essential way to mute volatility. Well, in terms of though, some might say that there is the evolution of the investment management industry to be not just a product industry, but a service industry, and that many of these relationships are really sealed with the service provided by, say, an asset manager. And the fintech piece is fascinating because I think we all thought we’d be disintermediated in private wealth by robo-advisors that fintech would govern. How do you find your clients embrace the app, say the fintech component, but also need the service from you?
Wendy: I do think there’s different types of investors, and I do think there is a subset of investors that is well served by high-touch, high-service wealth advisors. I do think that there are folks who either from a level of wealth standpoint or for younger generations, just a personal preference standpoint, don’t necessarily want a high-touch experience or they don’t have the wealth to be eligible for a higher-touch service experience. And so I think there is a certainly large enough subset of folks who deserve to have that sophistication in terms of investment management, who deserve to have the type of access to a portfolio that we know is capable of generating better risk-adjusted returns and better returns overall. And there is an element of, again, sort of leveling the playing field, providing access to those investors. Who, for whatever reason, personal preference, level of wealth, don’t have access to higher-touch service providers, who can still access a really high-quality experience from a fintech standpoint, from a platform standpoint. And I do think that robo-advisors certainly have generated a lot of interest, and they’ve brought in new investors who previously weren’t investing and have provided them an option and a pathway to taking advantage of the returns in the public markets. And I think these are all trends in the right direction.
Aoifinn Devitt: And speaking of trends, tell us how much you think fintech will start to be present in the investment management industry. Do you see that we will do more, and even broadening beyond fintech, the use of AI, etc.? How do you see the investment management industry as evolving?
Wendy: I think it’s interesting to think about it from a tech and AI standpoint, and I think I see a lot of companies being built right now in what’s considered the wealth tech space, folks who are providing technology to help service wealth advisors and independent advisors. There’s a lot of both companies being built in this space and experimentation and the types of services that can be provided from a purely technology standpoint. I do think that it’s going to be a long time before, to your point, any of this technology or AI really supplants human judgment, whether that’s human judgment in terms of what I’m providing from an investment judgment standpoint or human judgment that’s being provided by a financial advisor in the way that they engage with their clients. So I think what we’re seeing, or at least what I’m seeing, is that there are a lot of companies being built to further supplement and provide additional resources and efficiencies to the existing folks who are in this space. But I think it’s going to be some time. And honestly, one of the things— this is purely anecdotal— I think this is going to be an area where, because of the consequence of getting things wrong with your personal wealth, I think this is an area where a lot of individual investors will still want to know there’s a person at the end of the day behind a lot of the decisions that are being made here.
Aoifinn Devitt: And let’s get into then some of the other aspects of the investment industry, given that the person is at the center, whether that’s on the advisor side or on the client side. How well do you think the industry has adapted to reflect its client base in terms of the diversity of the industry? Does fintech make that irrelevant because it’s an app and it doesn’t matter if it’s who, who the client is on the other side? How do you think, I mean, having been a woman in the industry yourself, the industry embraces inclusion?
Wendy: I do think there’s certainly a lot of, there’s a lot of room for improvement on this front. And what I mean by that is I think investing is fundamentally a more nuanced exercise and there’s complexity both in the strategies that are being executed and complexity in the underlying investments themselves. And so I think breaking down that complexity for investors is important. And what I mean by that is there’s a piece of the challenge that is like a pure communication standpoint. A lot of the investment world is publishing information that’s intended to speak to other parts of the investment management world. And so a lot of how we communicate is really industry shorthand, mutually understood frames of reference. And so that’s one piece of the puzzle is just really figuring out how to speak to everyday investors. But back to the diversity point that you made, I think another part of it is that the individual investor base is broad, it is diverse. And part of communicating effectively has to include meeting investors where they are, metaphorically speaking. I think having shared frames of reference and shared backgrounds, that’s really where I think when you have greater diversity in the investment management space, you will be able to communicate more effectively with investors. And I do think, you know, there’s an element to your point to what you alluded to, that as a woman in this industry, it’s wonderful that I do think there are a lot of young women who are entering finance or entering investments who are rising through the ranks, but it is still more limited at the senior levels. And I do think it’s important to have different voices that can speak to different experiences, especially when you’re talking about communicating with a broader investor base like the individual investor base.
Aoifinn Devitt: Just moving on to some reflections. So having— now that you’ve embarked upon this entrepreneur’s journey, One of my favorite podcasts is How I Built This by Guy Raz that takes many entrepreneurs now successful through their ups and downs and, and just reflections. Have there been any key setbacks or challenges that you can talk about now where you maybe learned lessons?
Wendy: I do think that part of being an entrepreneur is experiencing a lot of challenges that are very unexpected challenges. And what I mean by that is you anticipate that certain things will be difficult. And so we anticipated that starting and launching an SEC-registered fund would take time and would be difficult because now we’re operating in a regulated environment. What we didn’t anticipate is that our onboarding process, for instance, for our customers, when we were building out our initial onboarding process for our customers, we had a series of questions where we were asking customers to put in their own information. And then part of that is, as a financial product, all of our customers, if they’re opening a financial account, they need to go through what’s known as know your customer, anti-money laundering processes. And so with that, when we were collecting information that was being entered directly and manually from our users, what we found is that the rate of user data entry error was really high, which created a lot of, let’s just call it, unscalable issues on our end. And so we had to refresh that account opening process and that data collection process. And it’s, you know, it was one of those learnings where, as we’re talking about it, it seems so obvious, like, of course, folks make mistakes when they enter their data. And it’s important that the data is accurate. That can have consequences. And so it’s one of those areas that I laugh when I talk about it because it’s both so obvious in hindsight, but it was also one of those things that it was very unexpected as we were dealing with it at the time. And there’s just so many, there’s so many of those examples as you build the company.
Aoifinn Devitt: I can certainly relate to that. And I think, you know, you can handle the challenges that you foresee. It’s these unforeseen things that trip you up that I think are what cause that kind of entrepreneur’s dilemma as they embark. And thinking about people, so you mentioned having two co-founders as well as other mentors throughout your career. Were there any key people who had a particular influence on you throughout your career and in what way?
Wendy: I mentioned Lauren and Suzanne at the Met Museum earlier. They were and are excellent investors with incredibly high standards across every aspect of running an investment program. And I was at the Met Museum for 4.5 years, so it was a formative experience. I then worked with Colin Ambrose across two institutions over the course of 13-plus years, including most recently when we started the investment office at the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. So I would consider Colin my most significant mentor and easily the person that has had the most influence on my career. Colin is an exceptional leader and chief investment officer. He has strong investment judgment, clear foundational principles, all the usual things you would expect from a great CIO. But I think the thing that sets Colin apart is his ability to bring out the best in every member of the team. He knows how to develop talent. He encourages professional growth, and it’s easy to tout the benefits of open discussions and intellectually honest team debates, but it’s actually really hard to foster the kind of environment that allows for those things. It requires a leader that is open-minded and transparent and humble and really trusted by the team. And so, when I think about key people who have influenced me throughout my career, I think of Colin as a great example because that’s really now how I aspire to lead. And he’s had such an influence on me as both an investor and just a professional and now a leader.
Aoifinn Devitt: Before we get to closing question, I always like to ask if people have any other interests that we don’t capture here in the career journey. Anything for you outside the office, say, that is an important cause that you hold dear?
Wendy: Yes, I love this question. I would highlight two smaller nonprofits that both in different ways look to level the playing field in their respective areas. And there’s clearly a theme here in terms of the types of missions that speak to me. The first nonprofit is called EWAB, which is spelled E-W-A-A-B and stands for Encouraging Women Across All Borders. It’s a college mentorship program primarily supporting women in STEM majors. EWAB provides academic mentorship and professional development opportunities for young women who would otherwise not have access to that kind of guidance. And I’ve seen it be a very impactful program for these young women many of whom come from less advantaged backgrounds as they prepare to navigate male-dominated industries in STEM. The second organization is a little bit different. It’s called Flightpath Dance Project, and Flightpath is incredible. It is a fully tuition-free dance company and preparatory program for high school dancers in New York. Flightpath provides training and workshops and experiences, and they prepare these high schoolers for college and a career in the performing arts. These are, to be clear, young men and women who otherwise wouldn’t have the option to train and reach for these opportunities. It’s hard to describe the level of talent that is clearly nurtured and captured by Flightpath through this program, and several alumni of this program are now professional dancers, which is really remarkable. So I’ll point to both EWAB and Flightpath as great organizations that mean a lot to me. They both address this common challenge of talent might be equally distributed, but opportunity isn’t, and widening access to opportunities is so important.
Aoifinn Devitt: I love that. And one of our previous guests, Sonali Patel-Wilson, also mentioned EWOP. I’m not sure if you know her, but she’s now at Wellington and a very, very important— it’s lovely to have the same connection. And on the dance front, we’ve had a number of guests who actually were former dancers who now have ended up in the investment world and that the poise and the choreography and the learning to work within a team and learning to perform, all of these are such critical skills. So I think it’s really important to just sort of circle back to the arts as training grounds for what we may do later because it’s rare to be able to be a dancer your entire career. But I love that, that this flight path has given rise to opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist. And my final question is around advice, whether there’s any key word of wisdom or creed or motto that you live by or advice for your younger self that you can share?
Wendy: I have one really simple piece of advice that I was lucky to receive early in my career, and I continue to find it invaluable. And it’s the one piece of advice I give to younger folks coming up in this business. Give first. Give first. It’s a big part of how I have built meaningful non-transactional relationships. And I tell younger investors as they look to grow their networks, When you meet folks, give first. What that means is be helpful within reason without the expectation of something in return. And that will serve you well throughout your career. And then the second, if I can offer to, there is something I do remind my kids of a lot. And this is more of a personal motto, which is that you don’t always get what you want, but you appreciate what you have. And so I always think about how I’m very grateful for all that I have from my family to my friends. To my co-founders.
Aoifinn Devitt: Well, I’m nodding here because that advice around networking is something that I have also started to internalize and pass on because everybody has something to give. And I think it’s and very— just in summing up here, your story is one in which humility runs through it. But I do think that certainly you noted at the beginning that you didn’t come from the same privileged, perhaps high school background that some of your Columbia peers did, but you knew even then that you had something to give. And it was actually through some giving of advice on LinkedIn that I was drawn to you. So I’m, I’m so happy to see that you’re continuing to give back to our industry. And thank you on this podcast, you’ve shared a lot about the fintech and the new frontier that that brings. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing your insights with us.
Wendy: Thank you, Aoifinn, for having me. This was a pleasure.
Aoifinn Devitt: I’m Aoifinn Devitt. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces Podcast. If you liked what you heard and would like to tune in to hear more inspiring investors and their personal journeys, Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice, and all views are personal and should not be attributed to the organizations and affiliations of the host or any guest.
