Ellevest's founder went to Wall Street when she didn't secure a journalism job. Now her $2 billion empire is helping women build their own wealth.
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00:00I think my gender was always a factor. There's a reason that I was successful
00:04very quickly as a research analyst. One, I worked hard. Two, I was very analytical.
00:09Three, I took risks. But part of it was, you couldn't forget me. You just couldn't forget me.
00:15I'm a Charlestonian. I'm from the South. Those early days when I was younger,
00:19things were pretty tight. So I went to the University of North Carolina,
00:22and I was a journalism major, poli-sci major there. I worked at Fortune one summer. Didn't
00:27get the full-time job. So I went to Wall Street instead. I was in investment banking for a few
00:34years. Never, anybody ever do this, but I quit my job. I was like, I've had it with investment
00:39banking. This is not where I want to be. I wanted to be an equity research analyst,
00:44a sell-side research analyst. Research analysts really had two jobs. One job was to write research
00:50telling individual and institutional investors to buy low and sell high. And the other was to be
00:55part-time investment bankers and to advise the corporates to issue the stock high and buy it low,
01:01which was a direct conflict to each other. At Sanford Bernstein, we too were in those two
01:06businesses. But when I had the opportunity to run the business, I took us out of the
01:10conflicted investment banking business. The business struggled for a while, but when the
01:14internet bubble burst and it was clear that there was these conflicts, our business did this. And I
01:19was on the cover of Fortune magazine as the last honest analyst, which then brought me job offers.
01:25I got a call from Sandy Weil, who was then the titan of Wall Street, running Citi, and the stock
01:30was under pressure. And so I got a call, would you come and turn around our research business? And so
01:36I got the opportunity, the first woman to ever have run that company. I was putting on my mascara
01:41one morning and I came up with the idea for Ellevest, or I came up with the idea that led to
01:46the idea that led to Ellevest. The stats are so compelling about how much less wealth women have
01:52and about how women's wealth has been going backwards in comparison to men. There simply
01:56has to be something that we can build and do in order to solve this big issue. It's a digital
02:04advisor. We also have financial planners and our success is really driven by we've got a fantastic
02:09team who is willing to build differentiated products and really focus on our clients who are
02:16women who've been underserved by the industry.