Passing on wisdom and affluence
Podcast transcription - 27th November
Alan Cowley: Hello, I'm your host Alan Cowley and I'd like to welcome you to another compelling and Invested Investor Podcast. I'm thrilled to have Joel Solomon with me this week. Joel's accomplishments include co-author in The Clean Money Revolution. He's a founding partner of Renewal Funds, Canada's largest mission venture capital firm. Alongside this, he is a leading strategist for social and cultural change in British Columbia, Canada, as well as having a host of other ventures, such as university governor and a TEDx Vancouver speaker. But today, Joel, we'll concentrate on your career within the start-up ecosystem. So firstly, I'd just love to hear why you decided to become an investor.
Joel Solomon: Thanks for having me, Alan. I really appreciate it. I became an investor through the following. My father was a son of an immigrant, classic story, to United States and other countries and leaving somewhere for difficult conditions and going for new opportunities. And my mother, likewise, a generation earlier, her folks had come to the US that before him. Chattanooga, Tennessee, a small town in the south, and the '50s and '60s. So there were a lot of things to ask questions about in the '60s. There was a bit of societal unrest and young people were questioning Vietnam War and capitalism and all kinds of other things. And so I was influenced by a lot of that.
And my family became successful. My father became successful in the shopping mall business. I was not a huge fan of shopping malls as a life plan for me. And in any case, I first went into politics and I got a job working with Jimmy Carter before he was publicly announced to run for president. And that was a great experience and another entrepreneurial endeavour, right? You set out. You're unknown in the country and you decide you want to be president. That takes a quite a strategy and financing and all that.
And then from there, I had a diagnosis of a genetic kidney disease from my father's line. He actually did die from polycystic kidney disease. I'm going to say now that 12 years ago, my friend gave me her kidney because I forget that part of the story. It ended happily and went well, but it did cause me to think about what really mattered. Doctors had said, "You can live long, you could die soon, and you can't really do anything about it." That was a kind of a battle cry. "Well, okay, how much time do I have? What do I want to think about from my deathbed? What matters?"
And gradually, through a long series of stories ... You can read about it in the book ... I came to, "I have to go back into capitalism and the power of money and business and finance is immense and we need to apply values to it that we each care about." And so that led to getting involved with early organisations of entrepreneurs, I'd say do good entrepreneurs, that were experimenting with all kinds of things to make their company be a more responsible citizen, look at their products and services, and I got swept up in that exciting part of entrepreneurship and I began making investments in organic food, which followed my personal health quest.
And then over time, we settled in. So we still do organic food, nontoxic households, but climate is increasingly the most compelling. All these things touch on climate. So environmental technologies has become a really exciting area that we're enjoying. So there's a bit of an intro. Today, we'll probably complete our current fund with several hundred investors from around the world, all of whom are waking up to the ideas that business can be part of the solution and an important part of it. And so our job is to make them above market rate of return, prove that these new sectors matter and find great entrepreneurs and support them in their journey.
Alan Cowley: You touched on environmental technologies. Does that come under the bracket of social venture? Is that an override in terminology for it?
Joel Solomon: I would say that ... So first of all, all of these terms are ultimately vague and they're new and people are using them in all kinds of different ways. I think where I came from or how I think about it is at Social Ventures, generally I'm looking at not-for-profits that are doing subsidiary for-profits. That's a Canadian and maybe American version of it. People are using the term very broadly, also.
We of course do look at social issues and how employees are treated, supply chains. We want to understand as much as we can about the actual side effects of creating products and of building a rapid growth company, and we want to balance that with being good employers and good citizens. And so we can't just look at the environmental alone. We use various rating services and standards, B corporation being a really important one for us from early on, and we use B Corp type questions, if people know what a B Corp is, but they give you a long list of questions if you want to get certified as a better impact company. And we do the same with our portfolio companies and in due diligence. We want to know as much as we can about how the entrepreneur and the team think about the larger world around them while figuring out a product that's going to succeed.
Alan Cowley: Oh, okay. Okay. That's really interesting. Can you give us some examples of some of the businesses on your portfolio at the moment?
Joel Solomon: Absolutely. And I will start with RenewalFunds.com. Has the whole portfolio.
Alan Cowley: We'll put on this podcast notes as well.
Joel Solomon: Yeah. So now the portfolio is 21 companies, six exits, one collapse and the others in various states of big success, struggle, all of the above. And a few that I'll speak about, I'm going to focus on the environmental technology unless you want me to-
Alan Cowley: No, no, that's fine.
Joel Solomon: Well, I do want to say this about food. Organic food is growing astronomically and it's still small in the bigger scheme of things, so there are many, many opportunities there. There is an aspect of innovation that becomes a little thinner if you're talking about consumer products, which is where we focus. We do some food tech, but we've been mostly in consumer, and there gets to be a point where the market is flooded with power bars and even meat alternatives and plant-based and and all these things and there's only so far you can actually go.
When we started, we were flooded with those opportunities and it's more competitive than ever. So the environmental tech, because it's so directly a climate factor, has a much bigger world of invention and creativity. I'll start with a food tech company. The last investment in our previous fund is called Food Logic. And Food Logic is a trace ability product that when there's an incident in a chain restaurant or really anywhere in the food chain, supply chain, e. Coli or other things that come up, already, and this will increasingly become common, that you'll know which farm the offending product came from, et cetera. So you'll know everything about it.
Also, ultimately, a consumer will be walking through a grocery store and swiping their phone and getting the providence of the food, where'd it come from, who grew it, what do they like, just hear stories from them. And so there's a lot of advances now to come in awareness and information that can personalise but also professionalise a lot of things, a lot of systems that were hard to track in the past. They work with Blockchain looking at how that will go further, deeper. And one of the largest food companies in the world came in after us in that investment, which is of course always a promising signal. That's a story about that company.
In Green Building, we've been in a very successful business from one of our earliest funds, that is Fibreglass windows and doors. Now, that's not very sexy and the reality of insulating materials for buildings and their effectiveness in blocking leaks of heat, for example, Fibreglass is the material that leaves all the others in the dust, and it probably will cost a bit more until it becomes mass market. But in cities like Vancouver, which has been an very aggressive leader in climate action, building codes are moving towards passive buildings. We're getting a lot of high rise that are getting passive building certified.
And so the inventive and the ingenuity of how to make building ... Buildings are complicated because the landlord wants less cost. The tenant, who cares about recycling or energy efficiency and things like that wants a lot more services, doesn't really want to pay for it, and you have different owners and different interests that end up leaving us with a really wasteful built environment in terms of energy and all kinds of other factors. So there's a world just in that which is evolving and has many tracking and new ways of handling wastewater and roofs and heat and all this kind of thing.
So fibre glass windows and doors has been a profitable company from the moment we got into them. We had an opportunity. They don't want very many investors. They wanted someone that was aligned with their values. They sort us out because of that, we think. And we felt the same, and so we were a very good match and they're local here, so that is always easier for us to be dealing locally. Fibreglass reduces heat loss dramatically, including in high rises, and that will mean that the glass tower that is an entire wall of glass will change over time because there's a lot of leakage going on there. So there's two. I'm happy to mention more if you'd like to hear them.
Alan Cowley: Absolutely. You touched on the company was local to you. Are all your investments within the Vancouver, British Columbia area?
Joel Solomon: No. We're in Canada and the US.
Alan Cowley: And in the US. Okay.
Joel Solomon: And we started out nobly, one plane flight west coast of North America and then across Canada was our strategy. But we failed at that. We have companies all over the place and we just have to deal with it.
Alan Cowley: Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. So obviously, a key characteristic of the entrepreneurs that you're investing in are people that care about the environment. What other key characteristics do you look for in your entrepreneurs?
Joel Solomon: My simple statement is we want products that matter and entrepreneurs who actually care, because if you're doing this just as an exercise, and this is one of the key features, do these people really believe, or they just found the latest angle to try to sell? And so therefore the choices that they make through the whole life cycle will be very different than with the fanatics. We're fanatics. I meant that word positively, those who passionately care about issues and are using the financial system as part of the way to address them. We want people that live and breathe and teams who are doing this because they care. That's an important factor.
After that, okay, you could say there's a dating game in this. I mean, what are your values? What do you like, personalities, and is it a fit? Are you comfortable with us and how we think? Are we comfortable with you? After that, it gets fairly typical. Do you know what you're doing? Do you know how to adapt? Do you understand your field? How well are you able to connect and find expertise when you need it? How effective are you raising money? Because we won't be your only funder, probably. And then we move into maybe a not totally unique, but a less attended to area, which is, who are you as a human being? What are your personal skills, your human skills? Can you handle conflict? Can you manage well? Are you a good leader? What do you do when you're facing personal crisis? How do you handle ... People have lives happen, marriages, divorces, health. All kinds of things happen.
We're looking at a long-term relationship. We'll be involved probably at least five years and possibly legally or technically our documents allow us to go to 14 years. And then in the venture business, I mean, at 14 years it's not like just magically, it all completes and so you have to then ... Sometimes you're on a long, long time, but your average is going to be five to seven years, or at least that's where we're focused. But these are long relationships, so there will be many issues and there'll be pressures. There's challenge stress and their success stress. It doesn't all just get happy and smooth because you're financially successful. It raises all kinds of new issues, new markets, expansion of staff, new investors.
The only thing ... I mean, it is somewhat like choosing a life partner. These don't go on forever, but life partnerships may not either. These are intended to end in that period of time through some form of exit. So at least you go in on the same page there. But deciding together that it's time for that becomes really, really important, and we want to do the best we can on the front end to think about who were getting in business with, how are they relating to us, what are they concerned? We want to try to get on the table. I
Joel Solomon: People are, a lot of entrepreneurs have ... I mean venture capital has a bad reputation, in this regard. So we think we stand a lot on our reputation for being decent people and treating entrepreneurs well. But that's always give and take and push and pull, and each of us want more from the other, always. So we want people who also want more from themselves, and we do from ourselves, and so we try to balance that the best we can.
Alan Cowley: Yeah. You've touched, or you didn't touch, you speak a lot about the entrepreneur caring about the issue and the problem. Can you just give some advice to some potential investors? How do you spot that? How do you know that they're not just making it up?
Joel Solomon: Right. Well I think you're talking about human skills, and judgement , experience, and that you are someone, I would say as an investor, we know that we have to understand a lot of dimensions about who the people are that we're going into business with. You can compare this to dating and marriage. It's not a bad analogy. But these are partners and we are not interested in being the King who tells our partner do this now, jump that high. We want to be partners and if you're going to be a partner you want to ask the kinds of questions that might reveal what someone is like under pressure. Because that's where the trouble starts. We've run out of money or, I've lost my key staff person or these kinds of things. Do they ask for help or are they the strong silent sufferer?
And all of these patterns about understanding of what motivates people and how we become who we are, I would say as an investor, the better instincts you have about that, the more likely you will find someone who's authentic and adaptive and realistic about how they handle things. If we're talking to angel investors that are not able to get the same kind of face time and depth of research and things like that. You have to be careful as an angel investor not to take too much of the entrepreneur's time because your dollar figure's probably smaller. And so I would have a conversation with entrepreneurs about how do you pick investors as well. So to the investor, the entrepreneur gets challenged with this kind of thing and I'm going to say investors get away with a pass card on this more, which is, well who are you? And how do you deal with conflict? And what's your track record of disagreement and how you handle it? And we want to do ... the investor, I'm sorry, the entrepreneurs should do due diligence on their investors also.
Alan Cowley: Touching on that, what does the right investor look like then?
Joel Solomon: The right investor in my view, of course that's a broad, broad answer but I'll give a few. You want someone, again, who has emotional maturity because everything won't turn out the way you hoped it would, as the entrepreneur, and they may be disappointed investors, and how do you handle that? And vice versa. And so, I would look for, we try to do this with our major investors, are these people that we want to deal with if we run into challenging times?
I think that's more important in many, many ways than the long track record they may have with financial success. What you want to know in that case is, talk to people that they were financially successful with, other entrepreneurs, and find out what it was like when things got tough and how ... there's a human factor in which greed is very triggerable around the making of money. So you almost have to assume that everyone is susceptible to a bit of less beautiful performance when it's my pocket versus your pocket. So who would you want to be in business with when you face that? How reasonable do you think they, how mature are they? How driven to win against you, or be on the same side of the table with you?
Alan Cowley: Yeah, yeah. It stems back to your comment about due diligence going both ways and the fact that a shareholder agreement is stronger, legally binding than a marriage. So you've got to really know the other person don't you? And it's often hard within a very short amount of time to realise that.
Joel Solomon: That's right and you're the entrepreneur and you've got your idea and you're poised, and you see all the good signs in the marketplace and you just need some money. One piece of advice on that is, start understanding where money is before you get there, of course, even before you go into business. These days, we've got an incubator system around the world and accelerators and all kinds of support for entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurism seems to be the new global religion and many, many people want to do it. But there are supportive environments that know how to bring in angel investors that have been vetted, or they have some track record with. And then you've got senior advisors that can tell you about experiences they've had or look at an experience and help you navigate it and things like that. So there really are a lot of supports.
It's wise to be a person who knows how to ask for help and receive help. That's another skill. Everybody can't do it. It depends a lot on our childhood, our lineage, our family, all kinds of things. What we went through in high school. And so the well-developed human being is a prized commodity in every line of life. Wisdom, reasonableness, seasoned-ness with challenges and things not going the way that they were expected to. And all of the, I would say psychological and emotional makeup of a human is super important. Track record that's a list of what I was involved in tells you a lot about what my expertise might be on the technical side. And you definitely want that, but you want to be careful if your gut tells you you're going to regret getting in business with someone. Because it works out more painfully than you think about on the front end of it when you don't.
Alan Cowley: Well, you've invested in over a hundred businesses now, and you touched on it with human skills and managing well, do you think that entrepreneurs anticipate the personal sacrifice that running a business entails?
Joel Solomon: No.
Alan Cowley: No. And why not? Why do they not?
Joel Solomon: It's not easy to go get trained in this reality, outside the incubator system and things. But when you go through school, you're lucky if you even get any kind of personal skill training and you're certainly not going through your first 12 years learning much about business or running a company or managing people and things like that. So those skills tend to, there are people that are naturally good at a lot of that. There's natural leaders, there's not, there's all kinds. But maybe when you get to university and maybe when you get out on the street and you get experience watching others and working under them, then you start to learn a whole lot more about this particular part of life and the world. You've asked me a question about ... so I haven't done over a hundred investments.
Alan Cowley: Oh sorry.
Joel Solomon: No, you said the right thing. Many of them are tiny, tiny investments. So I have a strategy that I love being involved with entrepreneurs and creativity and watching things grow and all the positive other impacts and influences that can come from it. So I know that even the smallest check is a great booster supplement for the entrepreneur, because they know that they're getting the possibility of another one. They know that they're getting some bit of my network and my relationships, well that's the same thing, but the history and the connections and all that kind of thing.
So I think that it's really a beautiful act to have a dollar amount. If you're somebody that has wealth, to have a dollar amount under which you let go of conventional super rigorous due diligence and you use your instincts and you put in some fun factor for yourself. There's something you can learn here, you like these people, you can share some of what you've gained over time that might be useful to them. And that is a really good thing to do post a successful career. Give back. And give back to the kinds of things and people that helped you along the way or the circumstances, and be that person. We'll create a better world that way. If everything is all hard-nosed analysis of how am I going to get a higher rate of return than I could somewhere else? It's a different game, and it's a different relationship.
So if you're an entrepreneur, you want to try to get a good mix of your investors because they're your bosses. There's going to be a board, they can fire you, ultimately. So you're picking your bosses to some degree. And then as an investor, decide how much is enough money. Protect your core. Experiment, have fun, do things that you think might matter. Go for learning experiences. Though there are many, many people that are living on way too little money, like several billion of them, there are way too many people living on too much money, in my view. I don't think infinite accumulation of wealth, by the individual, is healthy for society or much of anything really, even themselves and their families.
When you try to pass on a couple of billion dollars to your kids, that's not an easy ... I know it sounds good. But anyhow, I'm wandering a bit here, but I just want to say that to be an investor and make good choices about entrepreneurs entails also being a good human being and knowing how to make good choices in relationships. There are skill sets to gather, but I maintain that you can purchase skillsets, you can contract skillsets. You're real skill is your instinct, your way of being, and how you deal with people.
Alan Cowley: Yeah. No, no, I completely agree. And I think your point that using your wealth to invest and give back to the future, i.e., start-up s and what could be the future of protecting the world and having a better world is completely the right thing to do, rather than just leaving it in a bank or spending it on frivolous things. No, I think that's hugely-
Joel Solomon: The right, the societal right that we can make a lot of money, other systems question that. There's good reasons to question it. Yes, it drives innovation and makes opportunity and great lives for some people. It'd work better if those people were also going through advanced human being ness training along the way and we really should think about accumulated wealth as a privilege, not a right because we were so smart. And we should use it to invest in the things we actually believe in and care about.
And if it works out that we're just so good that no matter what we do, we make more money, then there's charity, and you can do some of. And there are also ways to use investment dollars that are less driven by maximum return, and there's a middle zone of social enterprise, and all kinds of creative, non-profits that are doing things. I like to talk about this topic because I think money has lost the moral compass and the understanding of what it actually is and what its power is and what it means to be someone who controls a lot of money and how to do that well.
Alan Cowley: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a good transition into us talking about your book, The Clean Money Revolution. Can you just give us, our audience, the reasons why you decided to write the book, and what they'll find within it.
Joel Solomon: I moved into my sixties. I am very aware that not only did I live through kidney disease and happily ever after, for now. I outmanoeuvred death for a little while, I guess, and I've had a really great number of opportunities in my life and I've lived during a period where I've been in a peaceful ... I haven't had war going on in countries where I live and things like that. So I felt a sense of giving back, as the purpose of life. Help support the future, the best possible. And I had a unique set of experiences at the beginning of this movement of looking at money and business as a holistic tool that should be making the world better.
And so I wanted to share some of that because I think that it's, as histories evolve, there's people that don't know the history or any of the history or what the roots of this kind of thinking is. And so it seemed like a very intellectually stimulating and good contribution that I could make. I've been a very ... a lot of my work has been going to conferences and being parts of networks and the learning environments and the relationship
Joel Solomon: ...ship fields where I could learn, grow and have a good time and have colleagues.
The book is made up of three parts. The first are personal journey stories. I needed those to get my life figured out. I had to read books that [inaudible 00:34:17] people. I told them. I think I mentioned to you Jimmy Carter. I have some other visionary, unlikely characters that set big, ambitious goals and pulled them off. About things that matter. I really want people to get exposed to the vulnerabilities and the journey that one goes through navigating this life, which is actually more and more complex of a journey. So that's the first part of the book.
The second part is I've done my own non-academic mapping of a taxonomy of how I saw this field develop and this thinking. Here was the first thing I joined and that one split off and we focused on that. And then these four things grew out of that. So it's been a very ripe period, this last 20, 30 years of shifting mindset about capitalism and the tools and how they can be used.
I thought that it was helpful to give little snippets so people could see organisations they might want to participate in and look up information. Things like that. There's a lot of interviews and stories about other people and companies and entrepreneur stories and things like that.
And then the final part of the book goes up to the moral and ethical necessity that we think about money, what it's doing... money that we own, what it's doing right now to people and places. Money that comes to us, where did it come from? Did it do lots of damage and harm or did it work to do less damage and harm? And then when it becomes ours and we put it places, are we clear about our responsibility and connection to that money? When I go out and make investments, I hold myself accountable to having it meet standards that are the same standards I would employ as a human in personal relationships and family relationships. And I don't want to have my money representing me in a poor way just because we weren't taught to think about that.
This is really the point of the book. There's a lot, a lot of money now and it could be solving most all the problems we're facing as humanity and it needs to, and every one of us that can do anything to help encourage that along, we can be friendly. We can use sugar. We can use salt. We can yell. We need to do it, because the world has some really big challenges and there's plenty of money and there's lots of human ingenuity. So that's what the book is about.
Alan Cowley: It's absolutely, fascinating. And we will include the link to it at the podcast notes. So you have invested in a lot of businesses and there's a really interesting topic and it's about understanding and learning from failure. I was wondering whether you could just tell the audience, give us some stories why some companies failed.
Joel Solomon: Companies often fail because they face... The most common thing has to do with money. So you've run out of money. You haven't made sure to have relationships in advance and backup plans and you've been excited about the expansion that's possible. And there's a difficult formula about expansion success.
If you get orders for lots of products, you need capital to produce those orders, particularly if you're in consumer products or something that requires something to be built and created. You have to keep a very close eye on the balance of you can get too many orders and kill yourself. You can kill the company, because the financing to advance the materials and pay employees happens at a different time than the money comes back in. That's very common.
Management shortfalls and not being good at putting together a team and hiring choices at the culture of the company can lead to very unhealthy environments in which rather than everyone's pulling together and there's kind of a sense that you can share what you really think and that it's an honest and supportive environment where things can be questioned. The entrepreneur who is scared of that and insists on being the only person that's right and who doesn't listen well or understand people's needs very effectively and figure out how to generate them and how to have a corporate culture that is generative and causes people to want to stay, can create a constant series of problems.
I'm really proud that we have a very, very high retention rate in our business. It matters a lot. Anybody with experience knows what I'm talking about, that losing someone who's covering their job is expensive.
So financial aspects, you haven't stayed out ahead of where you're going to raise the next money if you need to do it, and then you end up getting a really crummy deal and you get taken advantage of because you're desperate. There are a lot of things in the financial part, lot of things in the human part.
Then there's, I guess, the product itself. Adaptation, pivoting, understanding the market better as you get further into it, competitors come up, people offer a better deal, all of that kind of thing. You've got to be very nimble and savvy about assessing. Do you get battered around like a flag in the wind when new things happen? Or are you adaptive? Are you anticipatory and are you nimble enough and can you take the risk? Do you have the ability to take the risk that I am going to have to shift my product now because the world's changing? I'm going to lose some customers doing that, but maybe I'm going to gain a lot. So those are a few thoughts about failures. Money. People. Adaptability. Culture.
Alan Cowley: There's a lot to think about for an entrepreneur, but it's important to know as an entrepreneur that businesses do fail and you need to close down that business in, I guess, the best possible way. What does that look like to you, the best possible closure, because it does happen? So we know that. Everyone knows that.
Joel Solomon: Honesty, integrity and decent human behaviour is an easy way to start. You have to have the ability to give disappointing news in a way that I believe it's important to take responsibility and I believe it's important to take more responsibility as the starting place. In other words, my job is not to blame everybody else. If I've got to shut something down, first blame is to me, first responsibility. I missed a few key things. I misjudged something. I'm very, very disappointed that I have to lose your money or that I'm planning on starting another venture. I'm going to give you some founder stock next time or something. I want to try to make it up to you in some way. Whether people accept that kind of thing or whether it happens, if I'm dealing with someone who whatever their plans, it hasn't worked out, I first want to hear that they understand that they just take responsibility. That shifts the playing field a lot right there.
And then sometimes for me, it's just like, that's good enough. It didn't work. It didn't work. That's fine. And then especially with these small investments, I'm not going to get worked up about that. My intention there is basically passing on some love.
But if we're managing a portfolio for a couple of hundred investors, then we want that to go as well as possible. And if the entrepreneur is cooperative, collaborative and open to feedback at that point of how to exit in the best way, how to shut down a company in the best way, that's going to be far healthier and happier than they pull out their six guns and blame everybody else and take no responsibility and blame you.
There's different kinds of investors. There's different ways the entrepreneur has to address it. But when we've had to go through that, it's like, "Okay, what's happening to the employees? Are they being treated as fairly as possible under the circumstances? What about all the other obligations? How are you handling the investors? How are your communications? And if we're in this together, we know we can't win every time. Our reputation is tied to your reputation also. And let's do this in a mature and wise way."
Alan Cowley: I completely agree. And I think that's extremely insightful for any entrepreneur and investors. Joel, Let's just find a new finish on the question. What does the future hold for yourself, for renewal funds? What's next?
Joel Solomon: Renewal funds is going to be very successful with the current fund that we're completing shortly. We've exceeded our goals. We'll have a substantial amount of capital for our scale to deploy. And we have a really strong young team here. I'm the old guy. My partner's maybe 12 years younger. Most of the team are pretty young. They're smart. They're motivated. They're motivated by values and purpose as well as their financial success. And we will see how that all translates as the elders here are taking on less of the primary workload.
We have hopes that we've built a brand and a way of being and a track record that will be attractive to other people. We're in a city that doesn't have a whole lot of these kinds of funds. We're not in the biggest cities and we're very fortunate that the interns we get and the staff that come here are thrilled to be here because of all of those reasons. So something good will happen even if it's to declare victory and wind it down some day. We will have contributed to a shift, some level, maybe it's micro, maybe it's more macro, who knows, in changing the way people think about investing. And we'll have supported some great entrepreneurs and great companies and changed some people's lives through those businesses.
For me personally, I'm in the era now where every next year that I am blessed to receive is an opportunity to pass on everything that I can pass on that's useful and to possibly say some things that others are not in position to say and to help awaken more awareness about what money is, where it comes from, what does it do before it gets to us, what does it do under our stewardship and what does it do after it leaves us. That needs to be much more seriously understood, thought about and prioritised because we are facing gigantic global crises of all kinds and we have to be the ancestors responsible for what's coming after us. I am going to continue learning how to be the best possible ancestor that I can and to do it while I'm still here.
That's one of the reasons I do a lot of podcasts and speaking and sharing, because I think it's my obligation to pass on the rewards of and the insights from being incredibly blessed to grow up in a peaceful geography, to have affluence and be able to have access to all the great things that exist today, but also be a responsible citizen and think about all the other people and circumstances like the ecology and the natural world and do my part to be an ever better steward and catalyst that more people will think that way.
Alan Cowley: Thank you for that. It's beneficial to us all and make sure that anyone listening to this or reading about this buys your book and continues to follow you.
Joel, you're extremely passionate and you greatly enjoy creating a better world and giving back. And then thank you very much for your stories and your insightful words in this podcast. Thank you for being on, on The Invested Investor.
Joel Solomon: Thank you so much for a kind interview and good luck with all that you're attempting to do with this podcast.
Alan Cowley: Brilliant. Thank you.
Peter Cowley: Thanks for listening to another Invested Investor podcast. You can subscribe to all future podcasts via our website, investedinvestor.com, or via a number of online podcast platforms. And be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to get the most up-to-date, interesting and insightful content.
