Gino Borges:
At what moment did it become clear to you that not only did you want to live intentionally, but you also wanted to invest intentionally as well?
Jesse Fink:
I have always known that I wanted to live intentionally. That’s why I went to forestry college and started my career in the environment. However, it wasn’t until the success that we had at Priceline that allowed me to have the financial means to align my values with my investments. I was all of 42 years old then. It was an opportunity to align all different aspects of my life.
Gino Borges:
Many people may assume that having material wealth is all positive. However, there is also a particular emotional continuum that one goes through, varying from trust issues, doubt, honor, and sometimes even guilt. You and Betsy went from forestry school to part of the professional workforce to disproportionate wealth. Take me back to when you and Betsy realized that you were living in a different world due to that moment.
Jesse Fink:
I grew up with middle-class values. My parents were schoolteachers, and they lived through the Depression Era. We learned how to share and conserve everything we can. Then, Priceline went public. When a company goes public, it’s public. We are private people. It was a challenging time when everybody in our town, and beyond, got a sense of what I was up to for the last three or four years as we were creating Priceline. With the information out there, our concern was privacy. Our concern was being young, figuring out how to spend the rest of our life. Our biggest concern was how do we raise wonderful children to be wonderful adults. That’s the area that we focused on early on.
Gino Borges:
This is a unique time in a historical sense. There has been no other time in economic history where people younger and younger are coming into material wealth. Most wealth has been intergenerationally passed on, but now we’re seeing even younger people come into enormous sums of wealth in their twenties. There’s a big difference between being 40 and being 20, coming across this wealth. Where does this lead us as a culture at large, fundamentally shifting the dynamics of wealth and responsibility?
Jesse Fink:
This week I had the opportunity to talk to three different groups of people who were all about to have a big life transition, from selling their business and wondering what they should do next, to exiting as a high profile CEO and considering next steps, to another who exited recently and has a plan in place already. It’s a great opportunity. I’m thrilled when people seek me out because if they’re taking the time to seek me out, they see something in my journey that they, too, could learn from. It’s happening to people younger and younger. It’s probably very challenging for those 30 and younger, not having the experience of wealth before and all of a sudden becoming a steward of money. I, myself, had worked for 20 years. We have a mentor who often says it’s a meteor that hits, regardless if you’re first-generation creating the wealth or if you are an inheritor of the wealth. When the meteor hit, how do you catch that meteor? I love visuals. I imagined running around with a catcher’s mitt and thinking, how do I catch this? How do I prepare? That’s what Betsy and I did. We took it very seriously and surrounded ourselves with folks who had been successful entrepreneurs and wealth holders. We created a wisdom council. They were amazingly valuable to us in understanding how to stay grounded and utilize our various forms of assets and capital so that we could have a fulfilling and harmonious life.
Gino Borges:
What was the demographic makeup of your wisdom council? Was it composed of merely other businesspeople or people outside the business realm: psychologists, theologians, sociologists…? I am curious about the range of vantage points you were receiving.
Jesse Fink:
I would say none of them were like us. They were older than us and brought the experience of working with other families and professionals in the field. They were all service professionals: a CFO for a large private wealth organization, another the head of a family office of seven-generations, a trusted estate attorney who has transformed himself into an incredibly successful philosopher, another gentleman who was our accountant, but also a wise mentor, and someone who had expertise in philanthropic activities.
Gino Borges:
You have a heartfelt desire to pull in various forms of capital. Part of your relevancy in this particular phase of your life is investing in people and trusting early ideas you think you can catalyze. Where does that desire for integration come from? And, what do these varying types of capital look like?
Jesse Fink:
Our mentor introduced us to five forms of capital and how to utilize those five forms of capital to a complete outcome. The first form of capital is financial capital. Without financial capital, I would not have had the experience and the opportunity to learn everything we did. The second form of capital is intellectual capital. That’s something that we spend a lot of time with: doing the research and investing in ourselves. Social capital, the third form, is just utilizing your networks, which we all do differently.
The fourth is human capital. Since the beginning of this, I’ve made a real effort to invest in human capital, spend time with people, grow, mentor, and learn from people. The last is spiritual capital, which is essential in understanding why we are doing what we’re doing. An example I would say that puts all of these pieces together is the creation of ReFED to find solutions to food waste. It’s something that I am very proud of. Just as important as what we created with Priceline 20 years ago, ReFED is another high point of my career. I’m thrilled about it. ReFED is working on huge issues: climate change, food, and justice.
We have a family office and a foundation, and we are very fortunate to have a wonderful team with us. Mark Cirilli has been our partner for 20 years and has run MissionPoint Partners and other aspects of our life. Joan Briggs was running our foundation at the time, another incredibly wise investor, real friend, and partner. Our foundation focused on environmental solutions and sustainable agriculture, which led to a focus on food waste and the recognition that there wasn’t a roadmap there. If someone was interested in food waste solutions, there wasn’t a place to see the problems in food waste or what solutions to invest in.
Our approach was through our lens as philanthropists and investors. We hope to create a roadmap through ReFED that people can look at and understand visually that food waste is a huge problem related to climate change, emissions, and other environmental issues. Yet, it’s a solvable problem. It’s solvable through philanthropic efforts, consumer awareness, and impact investing. There’s a huge opportunity to make investments in solutions to food waste. That’s where we decided to start. We were lucky enough to bring other funders with us to get different voices around the table. We created an advisory council of about 40 individuals who were all in the food sector. From that, we were able to launch the ReFED food waste roadmap about four years ago. Since then, ReFED has become a free-standing non-profit with an amazing staff led by Dana Gunders. More and more climate funders are recognizing that there are solutions to food waste. ReFED works to educate people on where they can put their investment dollars to work.
Gino Borges:
Was there a visceral moment in your life that brought forth an awareness around food waste?
Jesse Fink:
The food waste journey began as Betsy’s vision. Betsy and I have been partners for 40 years now, married for 38. We have a truly remarkable partnership, and we each have unique skills that we bring to the table. We were both interested in agriculture. Betsy created a farm called Millstone Farm in our town of Wilton, Connecticut. We did amazing things on the farm. I would visit, take walks on the farm, and bring people out there. But, Betsy was the farmer. She was doing the work with a wonderful team. One realization from that farm was how difficult it was to grow healthy produce.
Betsy would go to the local markets and drop off our lettuce or our eggs. As she would go in through the backdoor, she saw pallets and racks of broccoli, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and everything else in the dumpster. That brought forth the awareness of food waste going out the back door of supermarkets and simultaneously on our farm. So, we gleaned, which is a practice that once you’ve done your harvest, you let other people come to harvest. We helped fund a program here on Martha’s Vineyard, getting the island to glean from farmers who had already harvested sellable fruits and vegetables. For Betsy, this is a big issue. People are putting a lot of time and effort into growing food, yet much is going to waste. We’d done all these practices on our property to reduce food waste. We’d funded many non-profits, both locally and nationally. But, we kept asking, “What’s missing? What can we do as a family to amplify the problems of food waste and accelerate the solutions of food waste?”
Gino Borges:
Why is so much food being wasted?
Jesse Fink:
In about four months, ReFED will be releasing the next version of the roadmap, current to what has changed in the five years since the first roadmap came out, but also includes the whole supply chain, from the farm to processing, through transportation, to the retailer, at the restaurant level and the household level. It’s an issue across all of those layers.
For the 20 years I’ve been involved in the energy sector, there is right now an opportunity to accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy. There is also a transition happening to a less wasteful food economy. The difference is that food businesses are interested in reducing waste, whereas the energy companies initially were not. It took a lot of scrapping your way up if you were an entrepreneur to develop solar, wind, and energy efficiency because the utilities were not ready for change.
On the other hand, the food businesses are welcoming that. They’re very supportive around the table of ReFED, working to support the cause. We have a very efficient food system, but we don’t have an effective food system. It’s very efficient that you can grow lettuce in California, and it could be here on the East Coast in four days while still pretty inexpensive. But, it’s not effective when you think about the amount of water used and transportation along the way. And, 40% of food in aggregate gets wasted in this country.
We all saw this playing out with COVID and the disruption of the food supply chain. We saw the supply chain break, and then we saw the result. The large amounts of people going to the food banks who weren’t doing that before that show us a spotlight on the food supply chain’s fragility. Many smart people within the food sector, from food businesses, from the investment community, from policy people looking to see how the food sector and the supply chain could be more resilient to ensure we don’t have the hiccups as we had before.
Gino Borges:
There is a significant and ongoing disconnection with the natural world, which includes food. Our mouth is the most intimate part of our body, and we anonymously and impersonally and often without any mindfulness, just put it in our mouth. When you look at the whole picture, what level of environmental reconnection, nature reconnection, and education integration needs to be a part of this puzzle, as opposed to just the technocratic redesign of systems? How do we teach our kids about what food can potentially mean?
Jesse Fink:
In the 15 years I’ve gotten deeper into agriculture and food systems, the awareness around where our food comes from is so much greater. The buzz words – healthy, organic, local – students are learning about it in school. There’s been a real heightened awareness about that. That’s huge! When we first started our farm, everything was grown organic, and we would bring the tomatoes and other vegetables to the markets. No two tomatoes looked alike, and after a month or so, we just realized that the supermarkets didn’t know how to accept organic food. They liked our eggs, and they liked that we had 50 varieties of lettuce, but they couldn’t handle that. That’s changed so much, just the fact that people understand that organic is not going to look the same. And now, in the food waste area, some great companies are taking in food that would have been second. Maybe it wasn’t pretty or consistent, but it’s still wonderful food. They’re creating markets for this hole with the concept of upcycled food and just figuring out how else you can use food that isn’t exactly perfect like we’re used to. Consumer awareness is an integral part of what came out in the ReFED roadmap. There’s an opportunity for the food businesses to use consumer awareness and enlighten their customers about food and food waste. It would cost so much money to have a non-profit go out there and try to change people’s behavior. Some large retailers, like Walmart and Kroger, for example, are creating awareness for their customers, showing that all food doesn’t have to be perfect and that waste is an important issue. There’s an opportunity here for the food businesses, for restaurants, for colleges to have that awareness. It doesn’t have to be a public service, but just incorporate it into the business practices.
Gino Borges:
How do we do that? I get it, and the top 20% of America gets that. The top 20% of America has access to that, access to the farmer’s market and organic food. When we look at it from a justice angle and an environmental justice angle, more and more people are moving to urban areas, essentially another way of saying that there’s going to be less and less connection to the natural world as these demographics shift. Certain school districts are more resourceful than others. Certain groups of parents want certain things for their kids. We’re really at a crux. As you just talked about in terms of the supply chain, the crest of civilization is very fragile. Production gets rattled only slightly and suddenly enter COVID, and you see long lines at the food bank. How do you see life from the vantage point of “not the world of you and me” and “not the world of the top 20%”?
Jesse Fink:
That’s a great question. Betsy and I consistently find ways to be involved at a local and community level in our portfolio of activities. We’re doing it here in Martha’s Vineyard. We’ve done it in Colorado where we spend the winters. In Connecticut where we had the farm and raised our family, we did it in a big way. We extended into Harlem, supporting a great organization called Harlem Grown, spending time with Mr. Tony as he likes to be called. Harlem Grown understands what life is like for families that don’t even have a home or a consistent home. Mr. Tony continues to educate elementary-aged kids on healthy eating, composting, and recycling through Harlem Grown.
It’s happening at the grassroots level. For Betsy and I, the more time we can put our ears to the ground, work with people, listen and observe them, the better we will find a systemic solution. Is there a national solution? We go back and forth. We’ll work locally, and then we’ll figure out how that can be scaled nationally, which is exactly what we did with ReFED. Then, we go back locally, and we stress test if these great ideas and great solutions can happen.
We’re doing that right here in Martha’s Vineyard, where composting and collecting food from restaurants and supermarkets is an important part. They started doing it here, but it just wasn’t happening as quickly. So, Betsy and I bought a pickup truck for the local group, the Island Grown Initiative, and we bought this ugly looking tumbler that was like 30 years old. It’s a tumbler that’s taking the food waste and mixing it with cardboard. What’s coming out at the other end is the beginning of compost. It still has to cure. For us, we’re interested in looking at the solutions and then working with the local groups to learn as much as we can. I’m not sure I directly answered about how to understand everybody else’s situation, but I feel like that’s what we’re committed to doing.
Gino Borges:
This dialectical dance between the global initiative and the local touch can be challenging, but it’s a local touch that keeps you in close contact with a reference. You can see whether these ideas are working like you mentioned, “stress testing.” Most people I talk with are working on a global scale. It’s very easy to forget about our local scene as a potential incubator or a pilot to stay in touch with the very lifestyles around us.
You’ve been at the forefront of connecting money to climate resiliency initiatives and finance. Before we go into the technical aspects of this, I imagine there has to be some grieving element that has taken place. Take us through what you feel is being lost. How have your inner experiences led you into this scene, and how are you moving energy within this space?
Jesse Fink:
We are grieving the Earth as we know it is dying. Betsy feels it more profoundly than me – for the birds, the insects, the animals, and the plants that are dying back at rates that we’ve never seen before. Her focus is on biodiversity, spending a lot more time on the ground right now, similar to what she did with food waste. It gives us a reason for hope. When we started doing this 20 years ago, there was this countdown clock that we need to make these changes and bend the curve. Now, we only have 20 years or ten years or five years. Are we running out of time, or are we extending the clock? Many great friends and similar people are using their philanthropic assets, their investment assets, and their social capital to do everything they possibly can to bend the curve of climate change. We were focused early on as a family office and in our investments in the transition to the low carbon economy, which meant climate change mitigation. The investments we made were all about reducing the amount of carbon emitted and doing anything to reduce what was already there. I think it was when the Waxman-Markey Bill didn’t pass, I realized, as did many of our peers, we can’t keep doing exactly what we’re doing.
At that point, I shifted and expanded my focus to resiliency and adaptation while still focusing on mitigation. People didn’t want to talk about adaptation and resiliency because they felt like everyone would take their eye off the ball of reducing emissions. Reducing emissions is critical, but the world is changing. We need to think about what’s happening with hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters. Great folks like the Rockefeller Foundation and others took it up in a big way. Adaptation and resiliency are incredibly important down to the local level.
Gino Borges:
How do you keep going? How do we all keep going when it’s hard to know whether it’s making a difference? Can you share another aspect of your time portfolio that says, “I’m going to help these people right now because I can make their life different and better?”
Jesse Fink:
I was on a walk with my son Drew years ago. He said, “Dad, you ought to think about your activities as a portfolio because, for me, it’s the hands-on service that gives me great gratification.” At the time, I was focused on the biggest issues out there. Like everybody else, we did everything we could. It’s hard to know if you’re successful or not successful because you’re part of this big initiative. When I do something locally, touch a person, mentor somebody, feed a family, or help a family, that recharges me, enabling me to continue to take on these daunting but hugely important issues.
Gino Borges:
You mentioned resiliency and mitigation. That’s an acknowledgment that essentially, the world climate has changed our scene, and it’s going to disrupt lives and the ecological landscape systemically. Then, there’s another long-term level where we focus on making sure that the systemic changes don’t become even more systemic disruptions and even more volatile. How does climate technology play a part in the dance between carbon reduction and resiliency? Are we moving forward on this issue?
Jesse Fink:
About ten years ago, everyone was hot to trot on Big Data. Everything was Big Data then. So, I asked what are we doing about Environmental Big Data? How do we use technology and data to solve environmental issues? Priceline was a technology company, but its business model was innovation; same at Walker Digital, an intellectual property think tank looking at the future on how to use technology in business models. Again, this was 20 years ago, but to go from the analog world to the digital world, I’m encouraged. I’m encouraged by young college students interested in using their engineering background to do good things. I’m encouraged by the investors who support the new companies in our MissionPoint portfolio. We have companies that are using technology focused on resilience, such as stormwater monitoring and controlled-environment agriculture. There is a considerable advantage to controlled-environment agriculture, and it’s economical. It will pay off for entrepreneurs and investors; it will pay off for consumers. I went back to business school because I originally studied the environment, and there needs to be an alignment between the environment and business. That’s what I’ve teed up my whole life to do. It’s exciting to be here with opportunities to invest in the future for energy efficiency, food efficiency, climate resiliency, green buildings. I’m seeing young folks and mid-career people want to do something different. They want to turn their trade around to use it positively. So, I’m very upbeat about the interests of individuals. And, in our country, we need a federal government that’s supporting the interests of individuals.
Gino Borges:
As we’re rounding out our conversation and coming to a close, is there anything else that came up for you during our conversation or something you’re currently working on that you would like to share?
Jesse Fink:
Part of my next journey is going from an owner-operator, what I’ve done much my whole career, to being more of a patron advisor to inspire others. This is a way I can have a purpose but not from my activities, specifically. There’ll be more and more supporting people. It’s an opportunity to help and to encourage folks who want to do similar work that we’ve done at MissionPoint and with the Fink Family Foundation by sharing some wisdom and things to avoid. And, more personally, I just want to go on the road. We’re getting a 4×4 Sprinter van converted, and I want to get out there. I want to talk to people everywhere to better understand what it is like not to have access to fresh food, to not have water. As we’re traveling, if we come across entrepreneurs, whether they are for-profit or non-profit, doing wonderful work, we will ask ourselves how we can amplify their work. How can I connect them to other people doing similar work? While it’s not in itself going to change global climate change, it’s another part of the satisfaction in my role. Being supportive of folks on the ground who are so well-intended has a ripple effect of our own activities that’s very gratifying.
Gino Borges:
Thank you, Jesse, for sharing your journey, your insights, and your thoughts. You have an obvious knack for connecting so many dots, and it’s a blessing for you to share this because, as we know, it’s easy to feel dire amid media saturation and how the news is framed. There is a certain amount of benevolence and intentionality that’s yearning to express itself amongst the collective. To stay close and attuned to that is what makes liveliness possible. It keeps hope alive.