Gino Borges:
In the impact space, a lot of us present our front-facing personas and our public successes, but for many of us, there’s also a part of us that is often confused, trying to make decisions in the midst of fog in order to do our best. A lot of us come to this journey from different vantage points, and some of us are just beginning the journey. Some of us are halfway through, and some of us don’t even know where we’re at in this process.
Today, we’re here with Erika Karp, Founder and CEO of Cornerstone Capital. Before Cornerstone Capital, she was Managing Director and Head of Global Security Research at UBS Investment Bank. She is also as a founding member of Sustainability Accounting, a standards-based board.
Erika, you’re in a lot of top 50, and top 100, lists! Amongst them: one of the top 50 Women in Wealth by Adviser One, one of the Purpose Economy 100, a 100 of the Good 100 and one of the 50 Conscious Capitalists who are transforming Wall Street.
I’d like to jump right in on what life looked like way before you entered impact investing. Take us back to that world before this evocation of consciousness, and then we’ll work our way forward.
Erika Karp:
I’m going to take you way back. I’ll take you way back when I was about five years old, and my dad was a lawyer. He did securities work and was a very fine lawyer. He cared a lot about people and was very smart. One day I remember he was on the phone with clients, and they were talking about some kind of deal. I remember my father looked at me; he was in a good mood and he showed me, putting his hands up. He said, “the stock market is so wonderful. It’s so beautiful that on your word, you can do millions of dollars of business – on your honor.” I just always remembered that.
Then, from the time I was five years old, somebody would ask me, “what are you going to do when you grow up?” I’d say, “I’m going to be a stockbroker.” I had no idea what a stockbroker was, but I knew that I was going to be a stockbroker. Over the years, I learned the value of money as a tool, as an instrument. I also learned that helping people is honorable. So over the years, I studied economics and finance. I’ve always thought that capitalism can be beautiful and can be good. I went to Wharton Undergrad, and I read the basic books that you read as an economics major, Adam Smith on the Wealth of Nations.
I remember how people would talk about Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations more recently. It’s economics about maximizing profits. Before the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote about the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and that’s about people. It’s really humanistic. He talks about the extent to which people care about the circumstances of other human beings. It’s about traveling and globalization: all the good stuff about capitalism. It’s a bummer that Adam Smith didn’t warn us about the negative externalities that happen with capitalism. I think about those things a lot. Then, I went to Wall Street. This is now 25, 30 years ago.
Most recently before founding Cornerstone, I was at UBS, managing global research. I got to see global industries, global economics, and the capital market structures. I could use what I knew about capitalism and the wonderful research organization, but I had to learn more to understand those pivotal environmental, social, and governance factors that have to go into the investment process.
Gino Borges:
Conventional Wall Street, and likely your training at Wharton, didn’t use three- dimensional thinking about finance. At that particular period of time, it was very one-dimensional: maximizing shareholder value. Where did your awareness of these limitations come into play and your edge to these limitations?
Take us through the narrative, where you’re a woman at a Wall Street firm, trained in one-dimensionality, living with those the limitations doing the work at Wall Street. What happened? Was it a particular, pivotal moment, or a rather longer transitional period?
Erika Karp:
There wasn’t a single moment, but I’ve always cared about people. I’ve always been sensitive to how “stuff” feels. I was the first out-lesbian on a Wall Street trading floor. That was a really, really hard time, about 25 years ago. There were a lot of times in my life that I felt stuff that maybe was a little different, feelings that other people hadn’t felt. I’ll give you an example, and this isn’t about sustainability. In my first year or two in finance, I was at Credit Suisse. I was an institutional equity salesperson on the desk, and they were pushing me to pitch a deal. I knew I had done a really good job on it and they were kind of pushing me to go a little further than I otherwise thought I should. So I did, and I pushed too hard. I went against my gut, and it was a mistake. I learned early on not to go against my gut.
When you see something that’s not quite right, question it. There’s always a line to walk. How hard do I question? How hard do I push back? There was one announcement at one of my former firms that our research analyst was now going to be reporting to the Head of Banking. I thought, “wait a second, that’s not okay.” I would always ask questions and look with a critical eye. That’s always what’s made the difference.
I remember I was with a research analyst. I was taking her out to see a client – a very senior portfolio manager in tech. The analyst said something really interesting and the portfolio manager was Peter. I remember Peter looked up, saying, I hadn’t thought about that before. I have to tell you, I actually got goose bumps. “Oh my God, I have learned about Peter’s decision-making process.” I learned that finding those really interesting questions that somebody hadn’t thought about, that’s great. That was the start of 25 years of looking for questions that people hadn’t thought about. That’s what gets us to ESG.
It’s not a semiconductor analyst’s first thought to ask about water when a semiconductor company is putting up $3 billion, but ultimately they have to ask about water. We know that it’s not your first question of a shipping company to ask about the safety track record and their fuel economy. Rather, you’re probably going to ask about pricing and revenues. ESG analysis, and again, this is what started it for me, is a matter of finding different questions that you have to pursue. They don’t come to mind first. People weren’t trained to look at all the externalities associated with capitalism. I was fortunate enough that I started becoming trained to look at them, and then I was part of training others and everyone to look at these things. We can talk about the true cost of business and then we can talk about financial capital and human capital and natural capital, all of them. That desire to ask questions and to understand the impact of investment decisions on the whole world, that’s core to me. Maybe that comes from having some diverse experiences.
Gino Borges:
How much has your coming out as the first lesbian on Wall Street influenced your idea of what it means to bring your whole self to the investing equation? You’re looking at the whole investment now, but how about the whole self? How has that influenced your approach day to day at this point? It might seem like a long time ago, and although culture’s made headways with sexual orientation, it still has a long way to go obviously. Contextualize it for me. What does it mean in the impact investing space, and how has it shaped how you conduct yourself today?
Erika Karp:
The experience has influenced and shaped everything. I was married to a man at the time when I figured myself out, and later I was with the woman who became my wife. I also have three children. I’m as different as any other lesbian as people are from each other. One of the big things is that you learn a lot about respect. You learn a lot about self confidence. Being closeted takes up an enormous amount of psychic energy when you’re changing pronouns, when you’re making up stuff about where you were or where you weren’t. When you’re genuinely worried about your career, your colleagues, your boss, your clients, it takes up a huge amount of energy.
It was probably a year long process between when I decided to come out and to when I actually did. In that process, I had to gear myself up to make sacrifices. That’s one thing about understanding and respecting LGBTQ rights. It has to start from respect. In the corporate world, the company has to be willing at times to make tradeoffs and sacrifices. “I’m not going to put a plant in Saudi Arabia because you won’t respect human rights,” those type of decisions. Since I’ve been out, I have never been more creative, engaged, innovative, or articulate. I couldn’t imagine not being out. But I do remember the stress of coming out.
Gino Borges:
I’ve met your partner and one of your three kids as she was in the office one day when I was there visiting with you. One of my interests is understanding how to create impact families, meaning that it’s not that this individual “Gino Borges” that just goes to an impact gathering to come back and report on it. Rather I try integrate my family in my living with impact. Take us through how your family has been integrated or how they haven’t. How does your family and your partner approach these conversations? How do you talk about your work with your family, and what level of interest and engagement do they have in what you’re doing?
Erika Karp:
For me, my personal life and my work life are very integrated. Of course, we have the normal fights that families do. I work too hard. I travel too much. But, there’s some really great stuff, too. Sari is a professional jazz singer and a clinical psychologist. On the jazz singer side, there’s so much to learn. Jazz is about collaboration, experimentation, and respect. It’s about communication. I actually interviewed Sari for an article that we wrote called Jazz-Inspired Finance. The best of jazz, the characteristics I just mentioned, are the same as the best of finance. I can find inspiration everywhere.
Sometimes, musicians and artists do not feel the respect and the commercial appreciation that they should. Sometimes in the sustainability world, when we get to do stuff that fixes that through investing in the creative economy, we actually write about it. We show examples of our events.
Sari and I are completely combined when it comes to our children, or the making of the children. Our children have come to be in three very different ways, a single donor, but three different ways to make these babies. When I was at UBS, each time we had a baby, we would ask for a benefit that UBS was like, “hmm, I don’t know if we do that.” They said, we’ll be back, and then they came back to say “yes.” I’d ask, will you pay for the sperm that we need to buy even though I’m not infertile. Will you cover it? Yes. We need to have maternity leave for me, even though Sari gave birth to the baby, that’s okay, right? Yes. We need your adoption reimbursement payments because I have to adopt my own baby because we’re in the state of New York. You’re ok with that? Yes, yes. Each time it was precedent. Each time there was no rule. They didn’t know that each time they came back and said yes, it was from the standpoint of human rights, labor rights, diversity and inclusion; each time I was very fortunate to work in a company that made the right decision. That’s another very explicit example of how I bring the personal into the business.
Gino Borges:
Take us into that area of how jazz has shaped your insights into creating this impact advisory firm from scratch. It’s not easy. Give us a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to say “I want to do this!” and what followed after; the first couple of steps.
Erika Karp:
That’s interesting to think of it together. With jazz experimentation, communication is a back and forth thing as it relates to respect and collaboration. Some of those pieces are not present to the degree that they should be in large institutions. With the founding of Cornerstone, it was very progressive. It breaks down the silos on traditional Wall Street. It breaks down silos between investment banks, asset managers, and asset owners. It brings transparency, and it basically transforms the existing norms. Progressive jazz is about experimentation and making something beautiful, making something that people can feel. When it comes to getting people to feel, you can align people’s values, their priorities, and their aspirations with their finances and their assets. That feels great and that’s progressive, but you need to know how to do it well. In founding the company, we brought together some of the best pieces of the capital markets and turned it into something that I think is transformational, a platform for growth and a platform to turn different pieces into something beautiful like jazz.
Gino Borges:
Who is it that you help? Where is your firm currently at in the process of its experimentation?
Erika Karp:
When you’re building a new, highly-regulated firm, it takes a while. You find the people and the pieces that you need. You’re building your back office capability, you’re building your front office reporting capability, you’re getting your SEC registration, and you’re getting all the pieces together to figure out the advisory proposition that you want to create. Then, it’s an ongoing process. At Cornerstone, we advise individuals, families, and foundations. We have about $1 billion in assets under management, and we’re going to continue evolving that business so we can figure out how to scale impact investing. We want to figure out how to really democratize impact investing, to give access to the whole world to the kind of investing that’s really progressive. It’s going to make a difference, and whether you want to call it the sustainable development goals or personal aspirations of our clients, it will be an ongoing experiment. Our job is to lead the way and stay ahead of things. An example of that is our new access impact framework, our vision of how you report on people’s social impact. Access is the key.
Gino Borges:
A lot of us from the outside don’t understand what’s happening in the advisory world, but we read articles about robo-advising, ETFs, and index funds. How are advisors going to stay relevant in five, ten, fifteen years from now with artificial intelligence and algorithms that can check a lot of boxes in essence? How’s Cornerstone going to carve out a moat, per se, in an advisory world that’s largely being commodified?
Erika Karp:
It’s very challenging, and we’re seeing huge pressures. That said, I believe there will always be a part of the asset owner world that will need genuine human advice, thought and reasoning. There are two things in life that don’t become a commodity. One is new ideas; the second is relationships. Everything else, yes, becomes a commodity. When I think of our new access impact framework, this is a framework that’s intended to bring humanity back to the idea of impact and sustainability. In looking at the Sustainable Development Goals, these seventeen big, audacious goals, the goals are great, but they’re un-investible. Thus, it takes human beings to think about, how do we get to that?
You can do that with AI and machine learning, but the core of it is still a human sensibility. Our approach is to think of a single common denominator around the sustainable development goals. The only thing that we could think of that is a denominator for all of them is the idea of access. If you don’t have access to water, you’re dead. You don’t have access to food, you’re dead. If you don’t have access to capital, you’re not going to scale solutions. If you don’t have access to broadband, you don’t have access to education. Access, access, access! That’s what it’s about. When we sit down with a client and say, let’s talk about what you care about most. Then we take those sustainable development goals and use that as a roadmap to finding what are the access points that industries, companies, and portfolios can give you. We’re going to be able to show you a heat map for where your values align via the idea of access with your portfolio. When we talk about this, it’s very human. It’s not just analytical. We think you need both. If you can’t move people, you can’t move money, and we’re trying to move money for impact.
Gino Borges:
How is access relevant to the products and services that you find yourself aligning? Do you assess the degree of access? For example, if I’m a client, how does access play out in those conversations?
Erika Karp:
Client by client, we know what they care about. Let’s say we have a client who says “I really care about the oceans, the health of the seas and the health of life below water.” We go to our framework and ask what gets you there? What are the things that are necessary to have healthy life below the seas? Then you go back and look at the other SDGs. “Oh look at the number again, look at number 12! It’s about the circular economy, plastics and recycling and the manufacturing process.”
You start with one of these big SDGs, then you’ve go to one that is more investible, more clear. Then we find products and funds that are serving that different SDG than the one you said you were interested in. You have to know what the connections are. You have to know the next issues, and then you have to have products. You have to have companies with fund managers that are addressing recycling or the culture of recycling, the closed-loop-type economy. It’s a matter of playing around with the connection and the way we use connection through the idea of access. It’s our roadmap to get each of the SDGs to align with clients. Then, obviously we diligence the hell out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of managers to take a look at their holdings to see what kind of acts that manager is giving to a particular SDG.
Gino Borges:
People repeat ad nauseam without being reflective, and they’ve just normalized the language of impact investment being measurable by “blank, blank, blank.” They use the word “measurable” maybe because it just feels safe and secure. I know that there’s a certain amount of measurement. Where does measurement begin, and then where do the limitations start to emerge? Where does it choke out more expansive ways of seeing impact?
Erika Karp:
It depends on where measurements begin. Again, that’s my economics training. It depends. You can’t measure something when you don’t know what it is you want to get to. First, we say here’s my objective, and then I can figure out how am I going to measure it. The objective has to come first. When people throw it out there, it’s measurable. Now here’s the second part of your question – the measurability. Looking at hard metrics is problematic because the data out there from corporate disclosures on material factors, or not even material factors, the data is poor quality still.
We’re getting better at that with standards for disclosure and the work of GRI. But the reality is that the quality and the data still remain weak and not comfortable. You can’t really make projections off it. So, we have a problem. If you try to give a hard number for some measure of something, I’ll pretty much guarantee that you’re wrong. If somebody says you’re going to create a million liters of water and this is going to affect ultimately the GDP of some nation by X, again, it’s going to be wrong. I would rather see a concerted effort to move towards the idea of measurement while we know the objectives that we’re looking for. I’m not waiting for the perfect wheel. We all know what Aristotle said.
With regard to our measurement system, we are admitting to and we are not trying to get perfect data out of public ratings and rankings. We’re saying, here’s our objective on behalf of our clients and we’re going to have a strong roadmap so we can start getting there. Ours is quantum. It’s part qualitative and part quantitative with a reasonable structure for how to do it. We’re not pretending to have accurate data.
By the way, I would argue thinking about access is just as much a more humanistic approach than just telling us how much carbon emissions we’ve delayed. I’m not resigned, but I’m not waiting until we move perfect data forward.
Gino Borges:
I’ve really liked your idea of access as a humanistic lens and then it’s part of the objective. I liked the idea of starting off with the objective, understanding where the quantitative begins and ends. Yet, the massaging happens with the access. Are we trending in a certain direction? Do we need to know everything down to the third decimal point? I think if the impact space can just get really comfortable and hold itself responsible for trending in a certain direction rather than going down to the third decimal point, I think that we can stay out in front of the movement and we can capture more of the expanding universe as opposed to the mindset of wanting to appropriate the one-dimensional, reductionist tools.
It really has me thinking about another issue that’s related to this idea, the connection between sustainability and growth. On the surface, it seems contradictory. I’m wondering how you have come to grips and manage these terms that we use in the impact investing space and the geopolitical realities of the larger economy. How do you box and weave and dance with this idea of an obsessive growth mentality on a geopolitical level? Yet, at an impact level, we still use that language because there’s our financial value. It’s still tied to economic growth, and yet sometimes it really cuts into sustainability if we were authentic and genuine about it.
Erika Karp:
I love this discussion. This is about how the markets and sustainability are tied, and they are. The big issue is timing. By the way, sustainability is not enough. We need to go beyond sustainability. We need to be regenerative; we need to be inclusive. So if you go back to economics, it’s tricky with regards to some things because there’s always a debate. We believe that income inequality and wealth inequality is a drag on economic growth over the long term. We believe that globalization and global trade is additive to economic growth over the long term. We believe that diversity is just an absolute imperative for economic growth. We have these fundamental views that you take and apply them to whatever else you’re doing, but the timeframe does matter. For instance, when we talk about market structures, people talk about short-term trading or statistical arbitrage. There are people in sustainability that say that’s terrible. People talk about derivatives, and some sustainable investors think that’s terrible. Both of those examples are market structure realities, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them unless they undermine the structure and the operations of the market. Then there’s a problem; then you need regulation. But just by virtue of some people being short-term traders, that’s okay. The reason I use those examples is because we’re talking about economics and capital markets. It’s good to sometimes separate value judgments and make it practical. Again, I spent a lot of years almost being subversive to talk about issues of ESG and sustainability to mainstream analysts that didn’t want to think about stuff that was ideological or divisive or politicized.
We talk about fundamentals and the stuff that we all know is critically important among the ESG factors to a company’s long-term behavior. That’s how you can feel that even if someone’s going against you, you know you’ve got your principles, you’ve got your views of how the economy and how markets work.
Let me give you a perfect example of a political and economic mess up. I don’t want to talk about politics much, but Obama should have gone after infrastructure as a huge policy – the biggest thing he should’ve gone for – because the word ‘infrastructure’ is not political. It’s not divisive. It engages everybody, and a great infrastructure program would’ve been incredibly stimulative economically. By virtue of technology, it would have been built out in a much more sound way in terms of sustainability. The new installations are more sustainable. We’ve got the technology. We do have the capital to do what we need to do, to have a sustainable, or even regenerative, economy. We just don’t have the force of will, and we don’t have the political force of will to do it. For me, it’s that sustainability and economics are simultaneous; it’s not one or the other. It’s a matter of understanding what you’re doing, and it’s a matter of conviction.
Gino Borges:
Can you articulate the difference between sustainability versus regenerative?
Erika Karp:
With sustainability, we can sustain. We can keep doing this well with where the world is right now. If we keep doing this, we’re done. We’re screwed. By the way, the earth really doesn’t give a damn about whether or not human beings are here. We’re in the sixth great extinction, we’re losing thousands of species a year and when’s it going to be human beings? The earth doesn’t care. If we keep going on sustaining what we’re doing, we’re done. Regenerative, that’s a big aspiration. You had John Fullerton on here, so he would have more to say than I do about this, but we are talking about major systems change: the idea of the circular economy.
That’s what gets us towards being able to give back and not just extracting, which is where we are now. One day we don’t even have to have the concept of waste. That’s where we can get to. That’s super exciting. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen in my lifetime, but it is a nice aspiration. When I talk about humanity’s relationship to capitalism and to finance and to investing, it’s one of the reasons we really do think that access is the way. It makes people feel that they can give back. It’s not just “I give my money, I get a return, and that’s the end of it.” Rather, it’s “I invest my money, I get a financial return, and look what I am trying to give to the world.”
Gino Borges:
How are you helping people get to the feeling part? What do you do practically to get people to feel?
Erika Karp:
This is why the ETFs, AI, and all these other things out there won’t entirely replace an advisory proposition. When you’re with someone, when you’re sitting there together, there is energy, and there are signals. There is learning. That’s how it gets to feeling. This is the whole thing about the next generation of wealth. They’ll be damned if they sit there and talk to somebody with no authenticity, no feeling, and no kind of urgency. That’s not what people are going to want. When you sit there with someone, or even a group people, investors don’t actually even know what they want for themselves. But you start to see energy, you start to feel energy around something that you’re talking about. You look for the heat, and we found with access that it’s resonating with people. I think there’s one answer to how you make people feel. My wife’s a psychologist and reminds me that I need to do ‘active listening’ and it needs to be empathic. So, I do my job.
Gino Borges:
What really makes the impact space unique besides considering social and environmental externalities? What have you noticed as the difference between the kinds of people that tend to gravitate and gather with the impact intentionality versus the kinds of people that gravitated toward your previous investment banking experience?
Erika Karp:
I make more friends every six months to a year than I did in 25 years. I think what’s cool about our discipline is that you almost immediately know that you’re meeting someone who’s aligned in their sensibilities to you. Right away, you have stuff that connects you. I think that’s the biggest thing, the early connection. It doesn’t take as long to feel and sniff somebody out in terms of their priorities. It’s almost the opposite of mainstream Wall Street. You meet someone on a trading floor in New York and you can assume they’re probably an asshole. In our discipline, you meet someone, and you find out what they’re interested in. What that means is that relationships are built even faster, which is why the discipline, and those of us in it, can accelerate the impact frankly. That’s another thing that’s emotional.
Gino Borges:
Where do you see it evolving five to ten years from now? What does this space look like?
Erika Karp:
Hopefully, we’ll have seen the quality of the data dramatically improve. Hopefully, we will have aligned along the idea of the data reporting and the form and nature of it. Purism in this case is not helpful. There are those in impact investing who may be purist in the context of “you can only do impact with private equity, private deals.” I don’t believe that personally. I think you can get impact from everywhere. You have that intentionality. I hope to see that the purists will come around because if we’re going to move the quantum of capital, the trillions, we need the public equity markets and the private markets as well.
With regard to the language, hopefully we’ll see a language that is more pragmatic and analytical than ideological. One day, we won’t have to have impact and sustainability in double bottom-line value, it’s just investing. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but it’s just investing. I also hope that we can side step some of the risks that are going on right now. We’re in a place where there is a bunch of green-washing in places. There is the introduction of a huge number of “so-called” sustainability or impact products. The problem with that is they’re not vetted to the same degree. Sometimes, it is just marketing. Sometimes it’s purposeful; sometimes it’s not. But there is the risk of a bad product being introduced and that potentially undermines everything we’re trying to do. So we’re at a risky point here. Diligence in managers is what we do all day long and it’s really important. But again, we’ll be in a place hopefully where this is what people do, and hopefully firms like mine, can keep moving the ball forward in terms of both qualitative and quantitative aspects of sustainable investment.
Gino Borges:
When talking to multiple generations, when you’re speaking to families, do you notice any key distinctions between millennials versus the elder generation in the same families? What different questions are they asking?
Erika Karp:
There are traumatic differences between the generations, even third or second generations are very different. What we’re seeing in the older generation is still a high level of skepticism that you can invest both for competitive financial returns and social impact. In the younger generations, you’re feeling this is what makes it good for me. You’re feeling the urgency. That’s great. They’re pushing the urgency through. They’re demanding the authenticity. They are very knowledgeable and educated about what’s out there. They are very cynical about the kind of heritage, legacy investment banks and the large wire houses. They’re working very hard to bring the older generation along in terms of what has to happen in the world. It’s quite a different conversation. We are seeing in the good situations that the older generation is giving more and more control to the younger generation. The smart ones are starting to be willing to be educated. This is an interesting thing at big investment firms, banks, and wealth management groups. The older executives don’t think they have anything to learn from the younger executives. That is stupid! When I think about my little one, the one you met Molly, who’s 11, I have so much to learn from my 11 year old. It’s wonderful. I think the most engaged families realize that the younger generation has a lot to teach them. Because it’s a different world, between social media and big data, their brains are different. They’re faster, they’re smarter, they’re more demanding, and that’s okay. So yes, it’s still quite a different conversation. For us, it’s helpful that Cornerstone has half mainstream Wall Street and half the sensibility of impact and social consciousness. It works.
Gino Borges:
Do you bring them in all together? Do you actually curate and psychologize the gatherings, or are you speaking to them individually? What do you really want to learn more about?
Erika Karp:
We have to do both. In some cases, you can see that that older generation, they’re just not going to get it. Even if they let the young guns go, you have to figure out when there’s not even a chance of openness to get it and spend that much time. A lot of the advising we do is that with the whole family. Everyone knows families are different and complicated. Sometimes you’re with the whole, sometimes you’re with part, sometimes they’re telling you stuff that the others don’t know, but really we have to do everything. What’s really gratifying? I’ll give you an example. We were with a family, and they thought that their biggest interest was climate change and solutions.
We’re talking and talking; this was a whole day facilitation. As we’re talking, we’re taking notes, and we start to see what subjects come up a lot in the conversations. They didn’t even realize it, but the subject of gender equality came up a lot in almost every conversation over hours. We said to them, do you realize a lot of what we’re talking about relates to gender? Is that something you want to delve into?
They were like, “Oh my God!” They were delighted; they had no idea. It’s very much like that very first conversation I had 30 years ago with an investor who said, “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.” Those are the conversations that are really satisfying as an advisor.
Gino Borges:
Are there any last words that you’d like to share about your journey to impact before we close it out?
Erika Karp:
The last thing that I would say is, after 30 years on Wall Street, I still feel like a kid in a candy store. I have more energy. I’m optimistic, even in areas that look really, really dreadful. I’m still optimistic and I’m having a ball!