The Exchanges

Q How did you come up with the idea of extending this beyond Aries?

A About a year ago, we have about, call it a third of our team that volunteers time for what we do for the different grants under the Pathfinder Family of Funds. A couple people from that team came with this idea of, we'd been talking for years of, how do we get others to do it? I talked to a number of GPs and said, you should do this. This is amazing for culture. It's amazing for your ability to drive the underlying philanthropies. They said, what if we kept it simple? What if we just made it like the giving pledge where you agree to give five percent, you get to direct where that goes. It's just a pledge that you're going to do that. And I said, that's actually brilliant. I use other words that I'm not allowed to cuss anymore. I said, that's brilliant just because of the simplicity of it. So what we did behind the scenes is we worked with our internal teams on PR as IR. We worked with an external term on building a brand piece. But what we came up with is what we call promote giving. The idea is that simple. You're agreeing to give at least five percent of your promote of a fund or fund series. It doesn't even have to be the entire firm to philanthropy, whether it's housing, whether it's health, whether it's education, whether it's homelessness, whether it's climate, whatever the passion is from that particular group. We launched that October, the last year really did come from…

AI assessment note: “A couple people from that team came with this idea”

Q Well, this is going to be fun to dive into what you've created with Promote Giving. To start, why don't you give a little perspective on your background and path into this charitable endeavor?

A I love the use of the word path from that standpoint. Whenever I interview anybody, The question I always ask people is, where did you grow up? What did your parents do? Because I find that you can learn so much about somebody by answering of those questions and seeing where it goes. For myself, I was born in Eugene, Oregon. I went to high school in Boise, Idaho. We moved over there when I was 13. My dad was a pastor. Not only was my dad a pastor, but my grandpa was a pastor and his dad was a pastor. So I broke the chain. My mom in her early thirties went to college to get a degree, and she went into nursing. She ended up doing open heart and OR nursing. I had four or five aunts that are nurses, and both of my grandmas were nurses. I grew up within that world. My sister is CEO of a division of Adventist Health, which is a healthcare company out in California. So that part of the family kept going there. We always drove to our holidays. We always drove to our vacations. We went to the KOA campgrounds. We did all those other things out west. I never went East of Mississippi until after college. The first flight I ever went on my life, I was 15 years old. I went to visit my sister, who was five years older, who was at college in California. When I went to visit Tammy, I got off the plane and I said, I'm going to college in California. Why have you kept this from me? I ended up goi…

AI assessment note: “For myself, I was born in Eugene, Oregon. I went to high school in Boise”

Q What's the uptake been in the initial six months?

A We had eight founding signatories, so it included groups like Silverpoint and Robert O'Shea has been an amazing supporter of this. Jeremy Collar and Collar, same thing. Some groups that are newer because they've just launched funds, but people have been in the industry for a long time. Chad Pike, Ed Mac Aurora, Adam Pierkowski, Derby Lane. We also have some smaller groups that are more impact or others related. Venture like Ascend. We have Pantheon on the secondary side and then Predium. Which makes all this sense in the world. And Ted over there became that person who said, this is what I want to do. And the internal rabbi. The coolest part is the last of the eight family signatories was related management. So Jeff Blau and others. We've now done deals with most of the groups because in this whole process of putting this together, you're all talking to each other at the top of the house level. And part of the conversation is we should be partnering with you on this. We've already done a couple billion dollars of deals with those that are in it because you've created this unique community that are all like-minded. As you know, half the getting deals done is who do I want to trust and who I want to partner? And you've been able to do that. The uptake has been amazing and we've had some snowball since then.

AI assessment note: “We had eight founding signatories... The uptake has been amazing”

Q How's that snowball worked? Had you go from the initial eight to whoever else is involved today?

A We've had two C's, which is a hedge fund who signed on since that. We have four or five others that are in different forms of documentation or others that have verbally said and gone through. As you can imagine, two C's, it was a credit. It was a quick process because he loved it. And he said, I'm absolutely in. And very quickly we moved it forward. When you get the very large organizations, it's about 17 meetings and formal approvals and boards and others to go through it. Just to make sure you're thinking through all those pieces. And how that will work out. The interest has been amazing. We've had inbounds from Asia that are reaching out and saying, hey, I run this hedge fund. I love what you guys are doing. Can you tell me more? The goal long-term is you want private equity. You want private credit. You want venture. You want real estate. You want hedge funds. You want fund to funds. You want secondaries. And we're getting pretty close to that. We pretty much have almost every type of alts because it really is this mechanism for more We call it compounding purpose. You're compounding purpose, but you're also building permanent type funding models for philanthropy, as opposed to them starting from scratch every year.

AI assessment note: “We've had two C's, which is a hedge fund who signed on since that.”

Q What was the charity tie-in that you required when you were going to join?

A We played around with different options. There was even this idea of maybe we do an impact sleeve. A lot of people that know some about impact and a lot that know some about investing and not a lot that know a lot about both. I also came around going, I've been doing this for a long time. This is my skill set. This is my 10,000 hours. I don't want to have an impact type direct tie-in. But what if I just do what I know how to do, but have it indirectly? Mike Garagetti has been a friend for 20 years, so it was a lot of back and forth, and hey, what if we did this? What if we did this? And whiteboarding? I said, I'll do five percent of the promote if you get Aries to do five percent of the promote. For what we call our Pathfinder flagship of family of funds, which is a little bit of a tip of the hat to path, and a tip of the hat to Aries for any space geeks. I was driving along with my son And I said, oh yeah, we're actually thinking of naming it Pathfinder. He was 11 at the time. Then he goes, oh, I get it, like the Mars rover, Pathfinder. I'm like, well, no, but that makes sense. He goes, no, that makes sense, because it's Aries, it's Mars, which is Aries. And I was like, oh, eh, you're smarter than me. But we named it Pathfinder, and that one, it's 10%, and now close to half of our capital is under the Pathfinder family of funds. It's been amazing if you think of the growth we'…

AI assessment note: “I said, I'll do five percent of the promote if you get Aries to do”

Q When you get an inbound or you're reaching out to someone to tell them about it, what's your elevator pitch for Promote Giving?

A First, I tell the origin story. I do believe karma is real. I do believe a lot of our success and our progress has been because you put good things into the universe and good things happen. It helps who you are as an organization when you've said this is our true north. This is what we stand for. This is what we're doing. This is what we're driving going forward. I've even Had transactions. We did something with Mike and Lowell Milken on their family office. Mike absolutely loved that we had this alignment and we had this transaction. On a deal where it's a tie with three or four people, it's like, I think I'd rather partner with this person. He's been an amazing supporter ever since across that. It is walking through the simplicity of it where people can get hung up as they can say, well, wait a minute, is it the whole firm? And what's the timing? There was even some misperception up front of, oh, it all goes into promote giving, and then we give the money away to the different charities. No, everybody directs their own. In our quarterly calls and others, what we're doing is we're saying, okay, you're focused on housing. You're focused on help. You guys should be talking to each other though, because there's great stuff you guys could be doing together, like investing. There's people who have never really done it. There's people that have DAFs and have done some individual don…

AI assessment note: “First, I tell the origin story. I do believe karma is real.”