Friends,
Happy MLK weekend.
Some inspiration:
My friend RPC started a foundation 4 years ago when he was 25 that provides mentoring and grants to students graduating from large public high schools.
He wrote reflection that bursts with highly practical insights that apply to anyone or any organization that needs to develop or guide students or employees. I found it powerful and well-written and intend to draw from it whenever I find myself in the role of shepherd (including as a parent). It also directly relates to organizational behavior, interviewing, even and some of the challenges I see in make our local community club the best it can be for members.
Four Years Running A Scholarship Foundation (RPC3)
Excerpts of note (emphasis mine):
- I don’t worry about finding meaning in my life because I don’t have the time…I don’t ever lack motivation in my main career, because I always have something obvious I can do with more money.
- An old manager once told me that his only real job as a manager was to figure out how to fire himself.
It’s not enough to understand what needs to be done and be able to explain it to others; you need to be able to explain it so well that the person you’re explaining it to can explain it to some third party. That might seem like a small distinction, but I’ve found that one extra step requires an entirely different mental muscle group than what is needed for building personal understanding. I’ve also found that last step to be one of the most important for being an effective leader in this role. The foundation is a part-time effort for everyone involved — all of the board members have other jobs, and we go weeks or months between discussions depending on the application cycle. Deeply distilling the understanding of what needs to be done is essential to building continuity across those time gaps.
The fact is, people are busy and there’s a lot competing for their attention. You can’t just mention something once and have people latch onto it; you have to introduce the idea, remind people about it, and make it easy for them to participate.
- On the application process
- Nothing here is really new or exceptional in any way, and I’m happy leaving it like that. It’s important to be picky about where you feel like you have unique insight and really want to invest the time and energy into being innovative, because otherwise you’ll stretch yourself too thin. For the ALF I just don’t think it’s that important for our application process to be groundbreaking, especially since students are still finishing their senior year of high school when they apply.
- The one other point I’d call out here is that our essay prompt asks students to choose from a selection of films and compare or contrast themselves with their choice of character in that film. This was a very deliberate decision to push students to write in a way that expresses their personality more while still giving them enough structure within the prompt to help their writing. At 17-18 years old, most people will struggle with writing into a totally open-ended format; giving them choices within a defined structure can help focus their thinking and actually bring out more of their personality than asking them to just talk about themselves.
- Most of our time and energy in the application cycle bucket is currently focused on promoting the scholarship and getting students to actually apply, and I expect this to continue to be true.
- On the mentoring program
- Every board member contributes time to the program. Personally, I’m currently averaging about 2 meetings a month, generally lasting somewhere from 1-2 hours, with text follow ups and ad hoc discussions as needed, e.g. for certain internship application deadlines. I’ll typically talk to any given grant recipient somewhere between 2-6 times a year depending on their circumstances, with the general trend that I hear less from students as they get situated into a major and career path that they’re happy with. Long-term, I expect the mentoring program to be the single most important facet of the ALF, though it’s also been the most ambiguous and challenging to figure out.
- Some things are pretty straightforward. When a student knows what field they want to work in, it’s not too hard to help them figure out what internships they should be applying for, or who someone on the board knows that might be able to help them get their foot in the door. [
Kris: Reminder to ask RPC if they’d open source those resources!] - Helping with things like writing résumés and cover letters, doing mock interviews for internships, or figuring out good budgeting strategies are easy wins that help develop the relationship with our students while also delivering simple benefits. What’s trickier, but still worth doing, is coaching students on bigger topics of personal development. The cross-over points tend to be pretty obvious and intuitive. We can help students find and get internships when they know what field they’re interested in, which inevitably leads to some students asking what they should be interested in. When you’re just graduating high school and don’t have much or any work experience, even the question of what to major in can feel vague and daunting
[Kris: we adults struggle with this too with many probably not giving this enough thought and then wondering why they find themselves in existential crisis]. Some students definitely do come to us having a pretty clear plan of what they want to do and why they want to do it; talking to them, you can feel a certain level of conviction in them and realize all you have to do is support them in their vision, maybe pointing out some tips or shortcuts along the way. There are other students that benefit a lot from someone talking to them in an open ended way about different possibilities — one major distinction of the ALF vs other scholarship programs is that we don’t have any focus on students going into certain professions, which means we’re well positioned to have those open ended conversations and help people pursue anything that’s right for them. I don’t go into any of these conversations with any set agenda in mind. I keep notes while we talk, mainly as a way to cue myself to actively pay attention, and I’ll have threads from previous meetings to follow up on, but I try to focus on these discussions being as useful of a service to the student as possible. That usually means trying to listen and be reactive to the life circumstances of the day rather than proactively lay out how they should be living their lives. - Core competencies we can teach them about:
- Developing an internal locus of control
- Executive functioning skills
- Growing in confidence and assertiveness
- Focusing on what’s important, not just what’s salient
- One of the most interesting and most challenging aspects of the mentoring program has been the difficulty of isolating what really delivers impact in student lives. From a purely material perspective, almost all of the benefits and best outcomes stem from a very small set of the conversations I have with a student. A single conversation where I push a student to be more ambitious in what internships they’re applying to might account for all of the concrete benefit that the mentoring program provides to them…it’s probably less than 10% of my time talking to students that is directly responsible for virtually all of the positive outcomes. The tricky part is just that those 10% of conversations usually rely on the relationship we develop during the other 90%.
[Kris: This is an idea that is broadly underappreciated if you don’t look at relationships holistically and try to mastermind efficiency]Building trust and mutual understanding is fundamentally a time intensive process, but you need that trust and understanding to have a real impact in someone’s life rather than just address surface-level details. - Of the 17 grant recipients, I’ve had my connection with 3 of them fizzle out over time. I mostly attribute those cases to inherent differences of personality — you can never get along with everybody — but reflecting on those experiences has been useful for finding ways I can continue to grow. One small thing that’s been extremely helpful has been making a point of finding out every student’s birthday in one of my first conversations with them. I add each one to my calendar and make it a top priority to send some kind of well wishing text at least. (I do this with ordinary friends, too.) Everyone likes to be remembered, and it adds a no-pressure touch point with each student every year. Some large percentage of my happy birthday texts end up leading to us scheduling a catch-up call when a student has been busy with classes and clubs etc.
- On the organization
- When you start reading about these things, though, you realize there’s a fair amount of diversity within the “tax exempt organization” umbrella. Do you want to start a public charity? A private foundation? A social welfare organization?
- There’s a lot of thoughtfulness in the essay about making the org self-sufficient without relying on a single person’s energy: A funny contrast between non-profit work and business is that you have a lot of different ways you can succeed in business. Your company doesn’t necessarily have to become a behemoth and IPO on the New York Stock Exchange — being quietly acquired at some multiple of invested capital can be a great outcome for everyone involved. With non-profits that’s a lot less true. You either build an institution that endures or you end up winding yourself down and dispersing the funds to other people who did. And you can’t build an institution without eliminating your key man risk.
[Kris: This is also critical for small business owners who want to sell their company at retirement, a timely topic in the age of the silver tsunami]
From the closing thought:
Our first cohort of grant recipients is graduating from college in 2024, and the early successes there have been a huge confidence boost for me. I feel like I’m seeing that effort come to fruition in a way that’s more deeply satisfying than I can explain. But I would feel negligent if I gave you the impression that I never had doubts. Preparing a 50 page application for tax exempt status was never my idea of a good time; trying to improve our application process and figure out how to get our applicant numbers up is always stressful; trying to show up and be my best self with every grant recipient in every mentoring meeting can be utterly exhausting, even when it goes really well.
There are still times when I get a little nagging voice in my head that asks me why I bother with any of this stuff. What am I trying to prove? Who am I trying to impress? Truthfully, I basically never interact with anyone in my day-to-day life who cares at all about the foundation. It’s not even been a helpful résumé entry for me.
But it’s not about me — that’s the point.
To the extent that it is about me, it’s about my desire to genuinely be an altruistic person and a net-positive presence in the world. That means putting in the work; that means getting stubborn, digging in, and solving real problems; that means telling the little nagging voice to shut up if it’s not going to be helpful.
You have to believe in yourself in order to be the best version of yourself.
It can be really easy to feel lost in the world’s problems like some great lake. You just have to get your feet underneath you and look for a bit of sand. Refuse to drown. Find a foothold and push.
Money Angle
This interview is great. My notes:
Excerpts From Byrne Hobart on Hedge Funds, VC, and Finding Alpha (Moontower)
My excerpts cover:
- On Alfred Winslow Jones first hedge fund being similar to the modern pod shop
- Contrasting hedge fund strategies
- Risk-parity and 60/40 being implicit macro bets on low inflation (and how any strategy is an implicit bet on the yield curve)
- Why shorting overvalued or fraudulent companies is a weak hedge from a correlation point of view
- Framing the competition between retail and professional investors (inc retail advantages)
- What is a hedge fund solving for fundamentally? (And what it means for employees’ career satisfaction as they progress)
- “Peak-pod thesis” and efficiency
- Understanding the good and bad of the job can help you determine if pro investing is for you
☮️
Stay Groovy