Profile

I’m the President of a start-up investment management firm, Rose Park Advisors. There are three partners; two of us do the day-to-day work. We currently have about $20 million dollars in assets that families and individuals have entrusted to us, to both safeguard and grow, with the goal of increasing the value of their investment by 15-20% per year. We do this by buying stocks in companies whose products we like, whose management is good – like Target or Coach – and whose stock we think is undervalued. In very simple terms, we like to go shopping – and buy really great things – on sale.

Prior to co-founding Rose Park Advisors, I worked on Wall Street as an equity analyst for Merrill Lynch, a global investment firm. It was my job to have an opinion on telecom and media stocks, in Latin America, stocks such as America Movil, a wireless company, that owns Tracfone here in the U.S. and Televisa, Mexico’s largest television broadcaster.

In forming an opinion about a company’s stock, I analyzed companies in great, great detail. I looked at a company’s sales – are they growing - and expenses – are they under control. I then looked at what people were currently willing to pay to own stock, decided whether it was under or over-valued (e.g. on sale, or better to wait for a sale), put my thoughts in writing, and presented it to the investment community, whether large institutions such as Fidelity, or individuals, such as you and me.

Making a Buy or Sell recommendation on a stock was not initially easy to do – it required me to have an opinion – a definitive opinion. I might be right or wrong. But the times – fortunately more often than not – when I would say BUY this stock, it’s going to go up, and then it did on my recommendation—was heady, a real adrenaline surge.

My work at Rose Park is quite different from what I did at Merrill Lynch. At Merrill, I was what was referred to as a ‘sell-side’ analyst in that I would research and make recommendations to the investment community whether to buy or sell. In contrast, at Rose Park Advisors, I work on the ‘buy-side’, meaning I listen to recommendations made, but I’m a buyer of ideas, rather than a purveyor of ideas, a buyer of stocks.

When our basket of stocks, or portfolio, increases in value, and we have earned money for our investors, it feels great. But when stocks go down, it’s much more painful, because on the ‘buy side’, we have skin in the game.

My work space has changed a lot over the years.

When I worked on Wall Street in New York, I worked in a high-rise office building on the 20th floor overlooking the Statue of Liberty. It was very thrilling.

At Rose Park, which is a start-up, I first worked in a very small room, about 10 X 12, in downtown Boston. It had two desks and two computers with two screens each.

We recently moved to a new office in a hundred-year-old office building in the financial district. It’s close to historic places and a great location for strolling. Our office is large, open space, making it easy for my partner and I to discuss investment ideas, with two dome-shaped floor to ceiling windows that give a lot of sunlight.

I’ve always primarily worked with men. There have been many, many times when I have been the only woman in the room.

My two business partners are men. The founding partner, whose ideas we use to invest, is Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School.

The other partner is Clayton’s son, Matt Christensen, who is a Harvard Business School graduate. He is the person that I work with day-to-day.

I wake up around 5:30 and I drive my kids to school. It’s about an hour drive in traffic into Cambridge. Then, I come into work and get in about 8:30.

As an entrepreneur, I don’t get to delegate a lot of tasks. I work with our broker, Goldman, Sachs re: trades, the administrator re: record-keeping on behalf of investors, lawyers on legal documentation, accountants to make sure that “our check book is balanced” and financial statements audited, landlord on the lease, IT professionals re: computers, etc.

When I’m not attending to the operational aspect of the business, which interestingly is the side that frequently gets neglected and is responsible for more failures of small investment service firms than one would expect, I spend most of the day on analytics, analyzing our trades, performance, examining whether what we think we are doing in terms of how we trade is actually what we are doing. We also have several meetings/calls a week with potential or current investors.

Around 6:30-7:00pm I head home and spend time with my kids, my husband having picked them up from school. My son is in 7th grade and my daughter is in 3rd grade.

Many of the skills that are important to my job are skills I didn’t have when I started. I had taken pre-calculus in high school – algebra is enough for this job, but knowing calculus would make it much easier.

Good analytical skills.

An understanding of finance, accounting, and statistics.

The ability to use Excel and build spread sheets.

The ability to build a financial model that includes an income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement.

Communication skills -- the ability to write and speak persuasively.

A high degree of initiative.

Trustworthiness.

I do. It has varied over the years. There have been periods where I’ve traveled two to three weeks out of the month. Part of the time when I worked for Merrill Lynch I was commuting back and forth from Boston to New York, in addition to travel to Latin America to meet with company managements, and U.S. and European travel to meet with investors.

Currently, I travel 3-4 days a month, primarily domestic. When our fund is larger, I will travel more to meet with investors and companies to learn more about them.

I love that I get to work with really smart people. I love knowing that I have gotten into the sandbox with these really smart people, especially men, and that I can compete and be successful.

I love being able to do detailed research, make a stock call, and have it work. It’s very exhilarating.

Another piece of my job, albeit tangential, is that I love meeting interesting people and connecting them to each other.

Scut work. Right now I have to do a lot of administrative work which isn’t really all that fun for me.

What I most dislike is being in a situation where I do something really well but because I’m a woman, people don’t value it. They think I’m just being nice.

Similarly, I don’t like being in situations where I’m not taken seriously. That’s hard.

Empowering women. I have a blog called Dare to Dream. I want to help women and girls understand that women are very capable and that they have opportunities and choices. I want to help girls see this early on so they can take advantage of opportunities and make it happen.

Take calculus and statistics, even if you think you’ll NEVER use them. From my experience recruiting on Wall Street, any woman who has a degree in math or statistics is automatically considered smart, a notch above; it doesn’t matter if you struggled with that degree.

Get an education that makes you employable and gets you a seat at the table so you can get things done, not only for you, but also for your children and community. Vast opportunities are closed when we major in something soft like history – or music. The caveat being – if history is what you love and it’s the only possible thing you can do to make you happy, then do it. But I don’t think that’s true for most people. There are many different majors we can love.

If you are not ready to go to college in a faraway place, then after college, go live somewhere big and grand and exciting, like New York or Boston. Moving to New York opened my eyes to the world. I’m a completely different person because I moved to Manhattan. I saw possibilities that I had no idea even existed.

If you want to be a professional when you get out of school, do not work as a secretary because you become pigeon-holed, and getting out of that hole is DIFFICULT.

At a seminar for senior ML executives (there were 2 women out of about 50 men), a Harvard Business professor told us about a study regarding women getting promoted. They found that when men get promoted the decision makers only consult with the men’s superiors. The men just have to do a good job and manage up to their superiors. If the man’s superiors think he is doing a good job he gets promoted.

When women get promoted the decision makers also consult the secretaries and the woman’s peers about her promotion. Women have to build relationships up, sideways and down. Because building those relationships takes women longer to do, it takes longer for women to lift off into their careers. But after building a foundation, women tend to go higher faster.

It gave me understanding retrospectively and prospectively.

My mother telling me I didn’t have to take Calculus.

Not getting advice. There was a vacuum. Good career advice would have made a big difference for me. I don’t want the same thing to happen to succeeding generations of women.

On Wall Street there were times when I worked 80 or 90 hours a week. We had a nanny. My husband was a post doc at Sloan Kettering and was able to be a primary care giver.

When kids are really young, caregivers tend to be a little more fungible because it doesn’t really matter who changes the diapers. As my kids get older, they seem to need me more, which means it’s more important for me to find balance as my kids are moving into the teenage years. And I am doing a better job than I did when the kids were little. I didn’t do it so well, but I really wanted to have a career - and my husband was in school so I needed to work - and so I did.

It’s a hard question to answer.

I would say to girls and women in college is that whatever you think your possibilities are -- what you think you can accomplish-- take that number and multiply it by ten and then you are still not even close.

Dare to dream. I say dare – because it takes courage to dream.

Take a few risks. Put yourself in places where you’re a little uncomfortable. If you’re uncomfortable, you are stretching.

It’s okay if you don’t have everything figured out at 18. Don’t give up, even if you’re 25 and unsure of your path. My history is a good example that you don’t have to be on track immediately. It’s okay to figure things out and start your career at 30. You still have 50 years of life. It may not feel like it, but you do.

I have a blog called Dare to Dream where women can support each other and their dreams.

I also have a blog called Know Your Neighbor that is a forum for members of the LDS church to help them reach out to the wider community.

Until recently, I was the director of the LDS church’s Public Affairs Committee in greater Boston.

When I went to Brigham Young University, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I am a talented musician and studied music; my parents also wanted me to major in music. But I really didn’t have any sense of direction as evidenced by my taking six years to graduate.

In high school, my goal was to be a cheerleader. It was before Title IX and girls didn’t really do sports. Being a cheerleader was at the top of the pecking order and so that’s what I did.

When I got to college I was a music major and I thought the most exciting thing I could do there was play in Synthesis, the jazz band. I was able to achieve that goal.

When I was 24, I got married; moved to New York at 27. My husband was starting a PhD program; I needed to work. I wanted to do something where I could speak Spanish. I studied Spanish and had served a mission for the LDS church in Latin America. So it was Spanish and working as a secretary for a stockbroker specializing in Mexico, that brought me to Wall Street.

As I started to look around, I saw a new brass ring, which was to work on Wall Street. Investment banking was in vogue. I had a friend who worked for an investment banker and I learned about analyst programs. They are two-year programs at firms like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley that recruit straight out of undergrad. I thought it was really exciting. In the analyst program, people worked on presentations and deals and 100-hour weeks. And I wanted to do that.

I started taking courses at night such as accounting. It was tricky getting into the analyst program from a secretarial position. Companies usually don’t allow secretaries to jump onto the professional track. I got lucky, by working hard and had a boss who was willing to take a chance on me.

It took me awhile to get my bearings. Fortunately, we moved firms shortly after I was promoted. It’s kind of like skipping a grade and changing schools. At the new firm no one knew any better. I was an analyst.

I look back now and realize there where ten years that I could have been making things happen if I’d been able to be more directed. I didn’t graduate from college until I was 27. I didn’t jump on the professional track until I was 29 (correction, I mistakenly said 32 on the podcast).

After 15 years on Wall Street, I walked away from a $1million dollar/a year job. People were pretty shocked, but as with any major decisions there’s always a push and a pull. The push was that I had won a lot of awards, was considered the best in my field, but I was being paid at the same level as my male peers whose performance wasn’t as good as mine on a very measurable basis. I saw that I wasn’t going to be able to further my career. I’d gotten the brass ring – and it was time to move on. The pull was that I was commuting from Boston and my kids were young. I also felt there was more to me, a creative, entrepreneurial side.

So I walked away, took a break, explored a number of entrepreneurial ideas, including starting a magazine, and eventually co-founded Rose Park Advisors. I don’t make as much money as I did but I think I will in the future. It was the right decision. I’m not stuck. It’s hard, but I’m not stuck.

One of my biggest challenges was having a mother who was always telling me that the brass ring is ahead and I wasn’t quite reaching it; I’m the oldest of four.

In some ways that’s a negative influence, in other ways positive. It made me really hungry for achievement, aspiring to get ‘brass rings’. It also made me want to encourage people in a way that I hadn’t been encouraged. Taking initiative and being encouraging are turning out to be two of my greatest strengths.

As a 16 year-old, whatever the painful thing is that you are going through, it is likely that the painful thing will be one of your great strengths – the magic that you bring to the world.