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Bringing Money Back Down to Earth with Claude Arpels
145 Plays10 days ago
If we want regenerative farms and food businesses to thrive, we have to talk about money. How do we help them grow without forcing them to sell out their values?
That’s exactly what Claude Arpels - and Slow Money NYC - is working to solve. Claude has spent years rethinking investment strategies to support regenerative food systems. After a first career in luxury fashion, he pivoted to impact investing, helping farms and food businesses secure the land and capital they need—without compromising their mission.
In this episode, Claude breaks down:
- Why traditional venture capital and private equity push businesses toward environmental and labor exploitation.
- How Slow Money NYC was created as a response to these challenges.
- The creative funding tools—like revenue notes—that align investment with long-term sustainability.
- The role of local investment in building resilient food systems.
- And much more…
More about Claude and Slow Money:
After a first career in the fashion and luxury biz, Claude chose to dedicate himself to his interests in food, the environment, social enterprise, and the arts. He has become an impact angel investor, with a focus on local economies and businesses that have a sustainable/regenerative food and agriculture mission. His portfolio of investments includes Brooklyn Grange, Matriark Foods, Raven & Boar, and Edenesque. Claude is the Co-Chair of Slow Money NYC and a founding member of Foodshed Investors New York, which is now part of Investors Circle, whose advisory board he sits on. An important part of Slow Money’s work is helping small farms find access to land and capital. As part of this mission, Claude was one of the founding investors in Local Farms Fund and has led several investments in local farm projects.
Claude is the Board President of International Contemporary Ensemble, the nation’s pre-eminent contemporary music ensemble. Championing the works of emerging and under-represented composers, ICE has developed and performed over 1000 world premieres since its founding in 2001.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
The Zero-Sum Economy and Wall Street
00:00:01
Speaker
If you think about things in terms of zero sum, and you think about our economy, and you think especially about Wall Street's role in that, and you think those double-digit returns don't come without a cost.
00:00:20
Speaker
And as we know, usually that cost is environmental and it's labor exploitation.
Introduction to Agrarian Futures and Hosts
00:00:35
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Radcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
Meet Claude Arpels: Activist Investor
00:01:06
Speaker
So I'm really excited to be joined today by Claude Arpels, currently an activist investor with Slow Money New York, a company focused on patient capital and investing in local communities.
00:01:19
Speaker
Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Claude. To get us started, we're going to talk a lot about Slow Money and and what it does, but to frame the conversation, could you start a little bit by describing the phenomenon and the issues with the current financial system that required Slow Money to be started?
00:01:37
Speaker
Sure. Thanks, Emma, for having me on the show. I'm excited to have this conversation with you.
Origin and Mission of Slow Money
00:01:43
Speaker
So I wasn't around when Slow Money started. It came out of the early impact investing ecosystem.
00:01:51
Speaker
Woody Tash, who founded Slow Money, and wrote the book entitled Slow Money, was the executive director of Investor Circle, held his Investor Circle. it's more than 20-something years old. It was the first national network of impact angel investors.
00:02:06
Speaker
And Woody was very interested in steering it more in a patient capital direction. I guess he didn't feel that Investor Circle was the right place for that, so he left and started Slow Money.
00:02:18
Speaker
So I wasn't around for the first meetings. Actually, the very first meeting was in either in Santa Fe or in Shelburne Farms in Vermont. Anyway, I miss both of those. And I got introduced to Slow Money in San Francisco in, gosh, it must have 2009, 2010.
00:02:34
Speaker
Because i remember I remember going to the Slow Money, my first Slow Money gathering in San Francisco, and it was during Occupy Wall Street. Every morning when we'd start, we'd get an update on yeah what was going on and in downtown New York.
00:02:49
Speaker
That's interesting because maybe some relatedness between those two things.
Finance with Environmental and Labor Impact
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah. One of slow money's principles is bringing finance back down to earth. So I think that's probably a good way to summarize the need for slow money and the one of the problems that slow money was trying to address and continues to try to address.
00:03:09
Speaker
mean, it's kind of funny. I feel like I've been involved for for close to 15 years and... I feel we've made some headway, ah but there's still a lot to there's still a lot to do.
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, so bringing in money back down to earth, going from there, like let's flesh that out a little bit. What does that look like? There's several ways that I frame it. i mean, the first one is that I personally, and a lot of people who I think are in the environmental movement and in the food movement,
00:03:36
Speaker
probably agree with me, see economic matters more in a zero sum manner than others. So the notion that I remember learning about in business school that you know you have this ever expanding pie, if you're an environmentalist, it's hard to agree with that.
00:03:54
Speaker
And especially if you're interested in in food system issues, You know, you kind of see the food economics and profits in the food system coming at the expense of both environmental and labor subsidies.
00:04:11
Speaker
When I think about historical food systems, I sometimes wonder, like, was farming and food production ever profitable on its own. Because when I think about it, it's always coming at the expense of something. Think about think about the early United States as the as as the as the most obvious example. like None of that would have happened without slavery.
00:04:30
Speaker
Right. And then in the Northeast, you know, where I spent a lot of time, you had indentured servitude. I mean, I lived next to a town called Germantown in in the Hudson Valley. And I learned that the Germantown was founded by German indentured servants who were brought to New York State to farm in the 18th century.
00:04:49
Speaker
And when they eventually earned their freedom, they gathered, you know, and started and started community in Germantown. And it made me think that you know even even then, ah food production couldn't be done profitably without basically free labor.
The Slow Money Approach to Investing
00:05:04
Speaker
If you think about things in terms of zero sum, and you think about our economy, and you think especially about Wall Street's role in that, or you know the financial system's role in that, and you think about you know the need for risk-adjusted capital to provide double-digit returns,
00:05:23
Speaker
you know you think those double digit returns don't come without a cost. And as we know, usually that cost is environmental and it's labor exploit exploitation. So one of the things Slow Money tries to do is make that explicit and argue that investing in food needs to be ah balance between impact mission objectives and returns.
00:05:53
Speaker
You know, one of the challenges of of of slow money is that, at least in the New York area, a lot of the investments are I participate in are lower than market returns.
00:06:05
Speaker
They provide lower than market returns. But on the flip side, they also provide non-financial impact. So slow money, that's kind of what we're about. We're about trying to balance all the factors involved in food systems.
00:06:19
Speaker
And in the name slow money, there's there's already kind of like an implication there that it's not just money. It's slow money, that normal money is not slow money, I guess. And you talk about kind of return expectations being one of the maybe key differences with a a normal investment. Like there's there's this belief or recognition that if you want to have some of these other outcomes like fair labor or healthy, diverse food systems, you might need to take a lower return as the investor.
00:06:48
Speaker
That recognition is maybe one thing that differentiates that from a more traditional investor, I guess you would say. It seems like and another piece that might make slow money different from, i guess, just normal money, I guess, or the normal financial system is... Fast money. is Yeah.
00:07:05
Speaker
Is that Wall Street, is that connection to the entrepreneurs and to the the food projects that Can you talk a little bit about how important it is for that kind of personal connection with the projects that you're supporting?
00:07:18
Speaker
Let me specify one one thing that the slow and slow money is a ah deliberate reference to slow food. So Woody, when he wrote Slow Money or before he wrote Slow Money, he was a part of the slow food movement.
00:07:30
Speaker
And it was specifically at the urging of Carlo Petrini, the founder of slo of Slow Food, that Woody tried to apply the slow food principles to the world of finance and investing.
00:07:43
Speaker
That's a deliberate reference. I mean, I think slow food was really important in getting people to think about you know where the food came from and getting people to think about the impact of their eating and purchasing decisions.
00:07:58
Speaker
And so Woody tried to take that and apply it to finance, especially as it relates to investing in food systems. So I remember early on, there was a lot of talk about soil health, about soil in a kind of mystical way.
00:08:10
Speaker
Like I remember being little bit freaked out by it when I first got involved, because I'm not, you know, I mean, I consider myself to be very spiritual, but you know, I'm not, I'm not a mystic. But I remember people talking about, about soil in this, in this kind of like pseudo spiritual way, in a way that I found, you know, eventually found kind of compelling. And and and now i'm I'm, I do a lot of gardening and myself and and I get that.
00:08:32
Speaker
But in the meantime, you've had the you've had the evolution of regenerative ag science, which has really come to explain what that love of soil was really about.
00:08:43
Speaker
But anyway, to address your question more directly, in I had to summarize my approach to investing, I would describe myself as primarily a community focused investor. So for me, investing in the projects that I invest in, in the food system, in local food systems, so it's really fundamentally about community.
00:09:02
Speaker
And that implies a whole number of things. It implies the importance of relationships, So relationships with other investors, relationships, especially with the businesses we're investing into.
00:09:16
Speaker
And that's another one of those slow food principles. One of the key slow food principles is know your farmer. That's a direct corollary. When you think about community, you also think about what makes you know what makes ah a community rich. It's a diversity of of members. It's a diversity of businesses.
00:09:33
Speaker
So there's also a love of small business. That's a key part of how I see community investing. But yeah, relationships, you know, it's trying to it's trying to take things from the transactional to the more relationship-based.
00:09:46
Speaker
And you talk about companies that have maybe a kind of more patient path towards growth and that are also taking alternative strategies to raising capital.
00:09:58
Speaker
do you have a few or maybe like one good example of a company that's doing that, what that looks like in practice?
Innovative Financing: The Oyster Farm Example
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, a few. There's two that I'm working on right now. One from this recent Food Funded and then one that I was working on before that.
00:10:13
Speaker
So the first one that I'm working on is an oyster farm in eastern Long Island. Now, oysters are probably the protein out there that has the lowest carbon footprint of like every food you can think of.
00:10:28
Speaker
It's an... incredibly environmentally responsible thing to be in in the first place. And this is an oyster farm who wants to grow gradually and eventually wants his business to become a farmer cooperative.
00:10:44
Speaker
So that means that means a couple of things in terms of how he raises money. It means that, first of all, he needs patient capital because he wants to grow gradually. And second of all, it means that he doesn't want investors to own part of his business.
00:10:57
Speaker
He wants to retain ownership of his business. The tool that we're using these days more and more is is something called a revenue note. This is something we've been in interested in for for a long time, but have had trouble convincing both businesses and investors to get behind.
00:11:15
Speaker
You know, most businesses, you know, they learn the basics of fundraising. What they learn ends up looking a little bit like Shark Tank. Right? Entrepreneurs are super busy. They don't want to learn a whole new thing that's not primary to to growing their business.
00:11:30
Speaker
So a lot of them do that. and and And I've seen, we've all seen businesses go that route, raise equity capital, bring on investors who were expecting some big return somewhere down the road.
00:11:44
Speaker
The fact is that in the food sector, that rarely works out. So I don't know if you've seen examples of this, but I've seen plenty of examples. And, and you know, in this past year in particular, like I've seen a number of, of,
00:11:58
Speaker
of people who raised money this way, who grew their businesses, they got a lot of attention, a lot of press, they were able to raise even more money. But then investors, you know, after a few years wondered, okay, what's in it for us?
00:12:14
Speaker
And they kind of like ran out of runway. And so I know i know several and investors who had what looked like really successful businesses end up basically getting fired from their own businesses. And you know the investors now own their businesses and they're going to try to figure out how to milk them or how to sell them or I don't know what.
00:12:30
Speaker
So what we've been working on is an alternative set of tools for investing in the kinds of businesses that
Revenue Notes Explained
00:12:37
Speaker
we like. So slower growth, slower margin, because you know that's the just one of the realities of the food sector.
00:12:44
Speaker
Investment tools that don't require a business to to sell or to do an IPO or some kind of exit for the investors to to realize their a return on their investment. As I mentioned, the tool that we're using a lot these days is called the Revenue Note.
00:13:00
Speaker
We look at it a little bit as a hybrid between debt and equity. Fundamentally, it's debt. yeah You lend the company money and then they pay you back down the road. But it's ah it's an investment structure that allows a business to share some of the risk, some of the business risk and some of the some of the growth risk with those investors.
00:13:22
Speaker
Yeah, so it's tied to the revenue. So effectively, the repayment would ramp up as they are making more revenue. So it's kind of aligns better with as opposed to like a fixed repayment schedule where you're committed to paying back this amount per year, regardless of how you end up doing what your sales are.
00:13:39
Speaker
Exactly. In addition to to sharing that growth risk, it also allows you to take into account seasonality that a lot of food businesses have intrinsically in their business. I'll give you an example of how we structure them.
00:13:51
Speaker
I mean, say a company needs half a million dollars. so So we would structure a revenue note for half a million dollars. We would agree ahead of time what will get paid back in nominal terms.
00:14:03
Speaker
So say... We lend you half a million dollars. You're going to repay us, say, 1.5 markup on that on that half a million, so $750,000. agree you're going to pay us back for lending you.
00:14:18
Speaker
And you're gonna do it by when your revenues are above a certain minimum threshold that allow you to pay your expenses, you're gonna do it with a percentage of your revenue. So say two and a half percent of your revenue is gonna go toward paying down this note.
00:14:33
Speaker
However long that takes, that becomes a variable. I like the structure because it's very transparent. The business knows exactly how much they're gonna repay upfront and then the variable becomes time.
00:14:47
Speaker
So you look at the projections, you know you come up with a with that percent of revenue based on the on the projections. say Say we want to get repaid within four years or five years, you know you figure out what what makes sense.
00:15:00
Speaker
And then if the business does better in the projections, the investors get paid back more quickly, they get their $750,000 more quickly and that gives them a better return. If it takes longer, then the return goes down because it takes it takes a little bit longer.
00:15:16
Speaker
That's the basics of a revenue note. So we did one with this with this oyster farm. That's going to be a longer one because they've got a it's a complicated deal, but that one's that one's designed to get repaid within within about nine or 10 years.
Franchising in Artisanal Food
00:15:28
Speaker
And then the new one that we're negotiating that came out of Food Funded is with ah is with a bakery upstate. This is a really cool one. I went to visit this bakery last weekend and I was just i just fell in love with this business.
00:15:39
Speaker
It's a bakery that started just before the pandemic in a small town in the Hudson Valley, you know, a very blue collar town. They started this bakery. you know They've grown it basically to the limit that they can if they want to keep the business the way they like it.
00:15:53
Speaker
right so So it's an artisanal bakery business, and they love you know and they love what they do. They love their customers. It's mostly wholesale, so they supply a lot of businesses in the area, farm stores who sell bread, sandwich shops, you know businesses like that.
00:16:09
Speaker
And they've asked themselves, so we want to keep growing this business, but we don't want to turn it into a more industrial business. bakery. You know, they don't want to use more machines. They don't want to use additives, preservatives.
00:16:22
Speaker
So what they've come up with is they're going to basically start educating other bakers and they want to franchise what they do. You know, they want to keep their market the way it is, but they're going to start franchising their concept, their know-how, their brand, if somebody's interested in that, in other regions in the area.
00:16:42
Speaker
It's a really beautiful concept. In my approach to investing, i've often looked I've often looked to find models that can succeed in the difficult economic context that you have if you want to be a responsible food business.
00:16:56
Speaker
and And I had this fantasy that that you know if you find these models, they can then be replicated in other markets. It's hard to do, but it's it's exactly what this bakery is trying to is trying to accomplish.
00:17:07
Speaker
So we're going to help help them raise money basically so that they can launch this franchise concept. I think that's a really good example of what we're looking to do. Help businesses like that who have really solid values, you know who are building their businesses in a way that's consistent with those values and helping them figure out innovative ways to grow slowly so that they stay you know solid members of their communities, but also have you know some kind of catalytic impact on the food system the way we'd like it to be.
00:17:41
Speaker
Is this also going to be a revenue note? Yeah, it's also revenue note. I'm trying to do only revenue notes these days. Interesting.
Challenges of Venture Capital in Food Systems
00:17:49
Speaker
I'm really getting away from, I mean, I've got a portfolio of like 25 companies.
00:17:53
Speaker
Wow. Most of them are convertible notes or equity investments. You know, some of them I've had exits on. None of them have been anything that would impress anybody on Shark Tank.
00:18:07
Speaker
No unicorn. No unicorns. I've got some, you know, that I was really excited about their growth potential that have failed outright. mean, interestingly, like the more ambitious ones are the ones that are more likely to fail.
00:18:20
Speaker
I think that's kind of intrinsic to venture capital. Venture capital is a way of like raising the stakes in such a way that it really heightens the risks that businesses are exposed to. Yeah, that's interesting, though. I mean, that's kind of counter to what we think that the more or at least it's counter to the way, you know, and MBA type students think so that like the more ambitious the project, the more likely to fail.
00:18:43
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, think about think about how a venture capital portfolio is structured. Yeah. Right. So so the the way venture capital works is you have a ah broad portfolio.
00:18:55
Speaker
of say 100 investments and you count on the one or two that are going to make outsized returns to justify the whole portfolio. who And so what is that? you know So nobody talks about the other 98 or 99, but they're basically like collateral damage.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah. And often it's also that, you know, because they kind of have no idea which company is going to become the unicorn. They don't really know. so So they select 10, 20 companies and a few might outright fail.
00:19:27
Speaker
And then a number of them could have been maybe good mid-sized businesses. Like they were a good idea solving good problem. It just wasn't a billion dollar business.
00:19:39
Speaker
idea. And those often get broken in the process too, because their model is like, push the fire on all of them to see which ones can maybe make it to a billion. We don't care what happens to the rest. And they end up destroying a number of businesses that could have been very viable, mid-sized businesses solving you know a real need for a community.
00:19:59
Speaker
or even small businesses. Or small businesses, yeah. You know, I haven't talked to Woody about this specific framing of the issue, but but I think this was his issue when he started Slow Money. I mean, I meet a lot of impact investors and they basically think that you can take what you know about investing and just try to find companies that are mission, you know, that are mission focused.
00:20:19
Speaker
And it's just ah an easy sideways shift. And so they're all using these venture capital tools. i mean, they're all using safe notes and and convertible, you know, convertible notes. and And they're all targeting...
00:20:32
Speaker
You know, I mean, maybe not the 100 Xs, but, you know, they're all targeting 5 X, 10 X returns. And you can't have that without all that collateral damage. If you're really an impact investor, I mean, I'm not to speak for everybody else, but I'll speak for myself as as an impact investor, the way I see it.
00:20:52
Speaker
I want all my businesses to succeed, right? Because that's that's what I'm in it for. i'm I'm in it, honestly, I'm not in it to make a big return. I have, I mean, I'm lucky that I don't need ah don't need that to survive.
00:21:04
Speaker
So I'm really in it to give these businesses that I want to see exist a chance to succeed. So there's no way you can take a venture capital portfolio and apply it to to that that set of objectives, right? So you need to find something else. You need to find some other structures, you know, that are designed for that. And so revenue notes, I think, are are a really good solution.
00:21:29
Speaker
I think, you know, in the last few years, we've seen a lot of money go into to food businesses and go into, you know, sustainable or regenerative food businesses.
Exploring Alternatives to Venture Capital
00:21:38
Speaker
We've seen a lot of those businesses not succeed.
00:21:40
Speaker
who Right. i don't know if you've seen the same thing I have, but, you know, i've seen absolutely I've seen a ton of ton of money go into alternative proteins and go into vertical farms and indoor farming and and stuff like that.
00:21:54
Speaker
Well, i mean, it seems like there was a moment when there was like all this optimism about how venture could go solve all the problems in food and, you know, invested in yeah all those companies you you imagined. And those didn't really pan out the way they imagined. i think there was a sobering where I kind of...
00:22:15
Speaker
typical social impact VCs, I kind of stepped away from thinking that they could invest and anything along the supply chain to them now recognizing, okay, we're not the whole solution. We recognize that our funding isn't, you know, appropriate for everything.
00:22:30
Speaker
we're here to really invest in the tech layer. But then it's like, okay, well, that's that's very nice. But you know you're going to take the the kind of scalable, profitable part of it. But then who's going to solve all the other issues like the infrastructure, the ah farming, the land, the assets, like all the really hard pieces of the puzzle to solve. And it doesn't seem like there's any particularly well-recognized funding mechanism to do that. People are still relying on this kind of and idea of venture as like the main tool to try to invest in these earlier lower growth type companies.
00:23:10
Speaker
But I think that you know one of the one of the bright spots of of that fallout of you know a lot of money going in and then you know realizing it was the wrong, there were not good investments.
00:23:23
Speaker
is that you know people are going to be more receptive to alternatives, to alternative approaches. I mean, you can't not have the food system. yeah You can't have those technology solutions without having anybody you know who could afford to to use them.
00:23:37
Speaker
On the bright side, I'm always looking for a bright side. I'm seeing all of a sudden, you know I've been trying to push these these this ah revenue-based finance and in this space for for like 10 years.
00:23:49
Speaker
you know And we've done like a few little ones here and there. But all of a sudden, I'm seeing both on the business side and on the investor side, I'm seeing like a new um i'm seeing people suddenly like receptive to looking at alternative solutions and alternative structures.
00:24:07
Speaker
So I'm personally kind of excited by that.
A Human Approach to Investing
00:24:10
Speaker
And it seems like one of the ah big advantages of SoMoney is that because it's so grassroots and so relational, you're you're able to really tailor to the exact needs of of the entrepreneur.
00:24:22
Speaker
And also, it's it's particularly meaningful. You learn a lot about the project. I'm sure they learn a lot about the funding. I mean, it seems like a much more human experience than kind of the more traditional way of of getting capital.
00:24:35
Speaker
I know you've also been involved with the So Money movement for 10 plus years. I'd be curious to hear, where do you see limitations or where maybe have have you seen kind of your expectations fall short with respect to the potential for So Money?
00:24:51
Speaker
I've got a portfolio of 25 or something companies that most of which are falling short, um you know, and that's just a reality of investing in, you know, sustainable or regenerative food.
00:25:07
Speaker
at least the way I see it. My goal and as ah as a food investor is try to decentralize the food system. I want to see really decentralized network. I want to see rich hyper-local markets and more small businesses.
00:25:20
Speaker
And the fact is that all of the forces in our economy are pushing in the opposite direction, right? So everything is about cheap food, Everything is about economies of scale.
00:25:34
Speaker
Everything is about national markets and distribution.
Scalability and Decentralized Finance
00:25:38
Speaker
ah kind of joke sometimes that the businesses I invest in, um basically investing in their ability to tread water. Mm-hmm.
00:25:46
Speaker
until the tide turns. But so, you know, there's like a couple of realities that you just got to be honest about. You're never going to get the real change we all want without significant regulatory change.
00:26:01
Speaker
And so fundamentally, you know, hopefully like a lot of what we're doing is going to to resonate and at some point the government's gonna you know is gonna take a look and start implementing some of this stuff on on a on a larger scale and and changing regulations to change the landscape so that's one one one reality The other reality is that we're doing pretty small deals and they basically run either on, you know, philanthropic capital or volunteer work.
00:26:32
Speaker
You know, so it's slow money. We're we're a network of individual investors. We're led by a board of volunteers. You know, all of the deals that I lead, ah do on a volunteer basis.
00:26:44
Speaker
So the kind of work we do is scalable only if there's some kind of subsidy to pay for the work that we do. mean, right now, the real hope is in collaborations between private investors and philanthropic ones.
00:27:01
Speaker
You know, the blended capital approach. You know, that's a reality. mean, it's one reason why the finance system is never going to shift to these approaches because they're just not theyre just not economical.
00:27:12
Speaker
Putting together ah half million dollar revenue note for ah for a small farm doesn't pay for itself. And that's one reason why you know we're trying to put these these assets out there like the like the revenue note document and the and the term sheets that we're developing and and make them really easy to to implement. Because if we can reduce the amount of work it takes to to execute these kinds of transactions, maybe that'll make it make it easier to to adopt and maybe business businesses can can lead them themselves.
00:27:44
Speaker
And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of a middle ground because to your point, asset allocation fundamentally requires scale. It's just no matter how you cut it, it's not going to be economical to be underwriting $100,000, $500,000 businesses with revenue notes tailored to their needs. I mean, it just doesn't work out.
00:28:02
Speaker
At the same time... the existing financial industry is massively consolidated. and you have basically Ivy League educated people sitting in New York making very large salaries, which they need to live in New York, allocating capital throughout our economy.
Future of Community-Based Capital Allocation
00:28:21
Speaker
And it would seem like you could at least try to decentralize a little bit and maybe bring it back to a more medium-sized scale and have you know people out in the communities doing that work, you know making
00:28:35
Speaker
a fair income for what they're doing, maybe not outsized to that of a teacher or farmer, and and still have it be, you know, and economically viable proposition for the fund or the bank or the the asset allocator.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, or there's also technology. i mean, technology could help. you know I've been rooting for you know for years for the crowdfunding platforms to be successful. I mean, crowdfunding is kind of like the ultimate slow money.
00:29:03
Speaker
I've yet to see it happen, but you know I'm still looking at that. I'm still like every deal I do, I'm encouraging the businesses to carve out part of the the raise and and try to raise it through crowdfunding.
00:29:14
Speaker
I mean, I personally invested in ah one of the the newer crowdfunding platforms. Steward. No, and honey co i invest in i invest in Honeycomb. I love Stewart. I love what they do. But Honeycomb is one that I invested in through to Investor Circle.
00:29:27
Speaker
So, I mean, that's a possibility, too, you know that that'll take off. and you know And maybe the hope for small businesses is is that, you know their own communities and their own customers financing them when they need it.
00:29:39
Speaker
And I guess to finish us off and kind of leading off of that last point, obviously, slow money is and extremely grassroots, extremely involved process. You said i mean you are yourself have 25 companies in your portfolio that you're actively kind of working with.
00:29:57
Speaker
I imagine that it's probably not realistic that the entire flow of capital and this country is going to be done in that way. But I guess my question would be, What would it look like for more of the financial industry to at least like adopt some of the principles of slow money?
00:30:13
Speaker
Well, I think it has to start with people thinking about the impact of their investing activity. Think about your community. People want small businesses in their communities, right?
00:30:27
Speaker
But a lot of... the impact of their investments is working contrary to that, right? So it's not it's not even just a question of like sustainable food. It's a question of of just what you want in your community when you go out and walk around your block or walk you know or drive around your your neighborhood.
00:30:45
Speaker
I think at some point, people have to think about those consequences and realize that for a lot of people, like their investment decisions are some of the most impactful things they do. you know Just think about how they can change that.
00:30:58
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, I think that's a ah great place to stop. Thank you so much for talking with us today and really appreciate your insight and your time. And it's really awesome the way in which SoMoney is thinking outside the box of all the other funds and projects that, you know, are doing social impact investing, but, you know, taking it back to the community element, which I think is so important and something that we're all realizing more and more.
00:31:25
Speaker
what makes it worth living in a specific place. So thanks. Yeah. What makes it worth living at all? Yeah. Makes it worth living at all. So thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
00:31:38
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:31:48
Speaker
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