For generations, economic mobility has been a cornerstone of American life. It shapes how families plan, how communities grow, and how individuals assess risk, from launching businesses to pursuing an education.

 

Today this promise is under strain. For many individuals, outcomes are shaped less by talent than by circumstance. Three in four Americans surveyed by Pew Research Center believe their children will be financially worse off than they are. And as Ian recently wrote in Forbes, when economic mobility stalls, the consequences affect our economy, dampening innovation and eroding trust in institutions.

 

There’s no single fix. Progress requires understanding how a complex system like ours works and where it breaks down. Sustained investments are needed in education, workforce pathways, small business creation, housing, and civic infrastructure. These investments also require smart policies that remove barriers and align incentives toward shared prosperity.

 

Expanding access to opportunity shapes our long-term investment strategy and approach to policy engagement. For instance, our investment in Better Tomorrow Ventures featured in this newsletter, was driven by its portfolio of companies working to expand financial inclusion across the economy. Our team also partnered with the Lafayette Square Institute to unlock state dollars flowing into employee-ownership models that can help workers build wealth.

 

As always, we’re open to sharing more and eager to hear what others are up to.

- Liesel and Ian

Financial services shape who participates in the economy and who is left out. One of our latest commitments is to Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV), a venture firm investing in pre-seed and seed-stage fintech companies. While BTV doesn’t explicitly position itself as an impact fund, its strategy backs ambitious founders tackling access and affordability challenges, making inclusion a natural byproduct.

 

As cofounder Jake Gibson puts it: “Financial services are a big lever that can change outcomes by giving people better access to financial information, credit, and the economy. Those are the ideas that get us out of bed.” 

 

One of the reasons we partnered with BTV is the hands-on approach and credibility Jake and cofounder Sheel Mohnot bring to supporting companies. They’re both successful founders and operators: Jake founded NerdWallet, and Sheel founded and sold two companies, one of them to Groupon. We like hearing from portfolio company founders that trust and engagement are among the meaningful ways BTV adds value, particularly during critical moments for their businesses. We asked Jake and Sheel to share how they assess founders at the earliest stages and here is what we learned:

 

What are the behaviors you look for in early-stage founders?

 

Sheel: Speed is important. Both speed of execution and speed of learning. We try to assess whether a founder is iterating their business based on what they’ve learned from customers. How quickly is that happening? We believe the more things you try, the better your chances of finding the right thing that works.

 

It’s also important to be a talent magnet. The team you build is the company you build and being able to hire and retain great people is important. It’s something we think about a lot.

 

The third thing we look for is tenacity. Is a founder going to break through walls to make things happen? In our fintech world, roadblocks come up. Maybe it’s a regulatory issue or a situation with a partner that means you need to rethink things. It's easy to give up. It’s hard to persevere. We look for founders who push through when challenges arise.

 

Jake: When I was starting NerdWallet, the only thing we had in the early days was urgency. We didn't really have a skill set. We had to learn and build everything ourselves. We didn’t pay ourselves for two years or so. The tenacity, the hunger, the urgency led to everything.

Are there qualities or experiences that are overrated?

 

Jake: Pedigree, especially educational pedigree, and experience at larger companies like Facebook, Google, or a bank. It doesn’t translate into being a founder. But experience at a high-growth, successful startup can be critically important because you’ve seen what “great” and “fast” look like.

 

Sheel: The other thing I'd say is overrated is the business idea. Often, at the stage that we're investing in, execution matters more. As investors, we need to like your concept, but we’ve seen founders with great ideas fail and founders with imperfect ones succeed. It's more about the team and their ability to execute than it is about the idea.

 

Any examples of a business that didn’t seem strong at first?

 

Sheel: Albert started out as a personal finance manager when there were a number of them out there. For that reason, the idea wasn’t interesting to some investors, including us. But we saw something in cofounder and CEO Yinon Ravid, who kept building more products off its starting base. Because the founder was all the things we talked about—fast at executing and iterating, tenacious and breaking through walls to make things happen, and able to hire a strong team—the company ended up being successful.

 

For all the thought you put into vetting founders, can you share a mistake you’ve made?

 

Jake: Sometimes we’ve passed on investing in founders we really like because we didn’t like their idea, only to see them immediately change the idea and go on to become successful. As much as we try to bet on people, there are times we just can’t get excited about what they’re building, and that has cost us.

 

You’re known for working closely with the founders you invest in. How do you support them?

 

Jake: We’ve mediated founder breakups and helped negotiate exit packages. We’ve supported every fundraising round throughout a company’s life, even after we’ve stopped investing. We’re often on a company’s board through Series B or C, and for some companies we’ve stayed close all the way through IPO.

 

We’re also deeply involved in talent. We help hire, source, and secure senior leaders for a company. Recently, one of our companies was shutting down, but we really believed in the founder and helped place him in an executive role at another high-performing company in our portfolio. We now have a full-time talent partner at our firm.

 

Sheel: We help with business development, too. Because we’re focused on fintech, we know the stakeholders that founders need to work with. In banking, for example, they may need providers for compliance or banking-as-a-service. It can be hard for founders to know who to trust and how to evaluate them. We can lend credibility and make introductions, and that goes a long way.

 

It sounds like you’re the investors you wish you’d had as founders.

 

Sheel: The world was a different place when we were founders. It took us time to realize the importance of this kind of support. And as we say now, the founder journey doesn’t have to be a lonely one. 

                                   

“Every founder thinks they are moving as fast as they can, but until you’ve been in an environment where things are truly moving at speed, you don’t really know what that feels like. And until you’ve worked with people who are exceptional, you don’t really know what good looks like.” – Jake Gibson

AT BLUE HAVEN: GOVERNANCE THAT STICKS

It’s hard to imagine a successful team without a great coach, an orchestra without a conductor, or a play without a director.

 

At Blue Haven, the seasoned investors on our Investment Committee play a similar role. They help shape portfolio priorities, sharpen our thinking, and challenge our assumptions as we deploy capital. We’re deeply grateful for their partnership and the thoughtfulness they bring. (Thanks, Jonathan Kirschner, Paul Tregidgo, Priya Parrish, Michael Barry, and Renee Beaumont!)

 

Strong governance, whether on an Investment Committee, at a for-profit company or in a nonprofit organization, doesn’t happen by accident. We’ve seen well-intentioned groups struggle when members aren’t onboarded with enough context or brought in after the strategy is shaped. And too often, meetings prioritize reviewing materials over working together to make sense of them. We believe the best way to capture value from governance is by converting strong individual expertise into shared judgment. In our experience, effective governance rests on a few core practices.

 

Intentional Planning

The most effective boards are designed carefully. This starts with selecting members for complementary expertise, understanding their motivations, investing in thoughtful onboarding, and creating norms for how members are expected to contribute. We plan to experiment with a few new practices on our Investment Committee, including:

• Pairing new members with a buddy to make it easier to ask questions, get up to speed, and build relationships early

• Providing summaries and guiding questions for long meeting materials that help focus attention on what matters, and where judgment and guidance is needed

  
  

Active Engagement

In our experience, the biggest risk for governing bodies isn’t disagreement, it’s passivity. Bringing the governing body into conversations early, while strategies are being defined, builds ownership, better learning, and richer discussions. This year, we’re introducing a learning agenda shaped by our Investment Committee to focus our collective inquiry and shared learning. We’re discussing questions like:

• What is the right mix of public and private investments?

• Why are there fewer strong impact managers in the public equity space?

• What is the promise and challenge of impact venture as an asset class?

• How should we, as impact investors, consider the sustainability risks of AI?

  
  

Reflection and Improvement

By force of habit, governing bodies can easily default to routines that make them more efficient but not more effective. Bill Ryan, co-author of “Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards,” recommends boards conduct a formal self-assessment at least every few years, and we agree. Regular one-on-one conversations with members and management are equally valuable, surfacing insights about how meetings are running, where members feel they can add more value, and what goals should guide the year ahead.

Strong governance isn’t about more meetings or larger decks, it’s about designing the conditions and culture to make good judgments and better strategy together.

 

Interested in learning more?

• Harvard Business Review: Top Boards Do These 4 Things Differently

 

— Megan McCarthy