Name: Watch Ellevest’s CEO Speak at Fortune’s MPW NextGen Summit
Uploaded: 2016-12-01
Duration: 12 min 21 s
Description: Sallie Krawcheck has some advice for entrepreneurs.

[ MUSIC ] So one thing that I love about Most Powerful Women Next Gen that's a little from what we call our flagship summit which we had here a month ago is that we're talking about issues and companies and corporate strategies here. But there is so much richness here about, [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Resilience, navigating your career, finding your whole self, happiness and authenticity. And the next person who we're gonna hear from Has done it all. She was the CEO of Sanford Bernstein at a very young age, a couple of decades ago. She was the CFO of Citigroup. She was the head of Merrill Lynch Smith Barney at Bank of America. She got fired from the last two jobs and she has reinvented herself more Deftly, than I think any other most powerful woman, welcome Ellevest Chairman, Sallie Krawcheck. [ MUSIC ] So Sally- You always bring up that fire thing. [ LAUGH ] Hey, you've used that beautifully to your benefit and it's really interesting. I think it's the most courageous thing of all to talk about your failures and you have used them to come out on the other side smarter and more powerful. well they're instructive I also love talking, I hate talking about them, I love talking about them because we're going to fail increasingly going forward The business world is changing so fast that our careers are not going to be nearly as stable as our parent's were . And so this idea of failing because you're trying and how do you get through it and how do you as a woman-- well, women tend to take failure much harder than men do. We tend to blame ourselves whereas the guys tend to say it's the external world. So how do you get your way through it and learn from it and go on to the next, better step? So Sallie has become an entrepreneur, first creating Ellevate and then more recently raising $ 19 million to create Ellevest, which is a digital investment platform. For women to help narrow, eliminate, the financial gender gap. Is that a good explanation? Yep. So there is a gender investing gap that you probably haven't heard about until right now. [ LAUGH ] We all know the gender pay gap, we all know the gender board gap, some of us know the gender expense gap. We know the gender funding gap, we've talked about this here but there's a gender investing gap. Men invest more than women do. It cost the typical professional woman hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of her career. It cost the women in this room maybe millions of dollars and when you sort of take a step back you realize, well gosh Wall Street 86 % men for national advisors, talks in war and sports analogies. CNBC is ESPN. And the in the industry symbol's a bowl. It's a bowl! It's a Phallic symbol! [ LAUGH ] And so when you look at it, it just hasn't been built for us, and so we set out to build something for us. And raised $ 19 million so far to do it. And men and women's, sort of financial path, is very, very different. You make the point that women's pay tends to peak at 40, and mens pay tends to peak at 55. Huge difference. So there's a couple things, right? There's that salary curve, which was news to me. The other thing is we live longer than men, due by good measure. So I put as an aside, my ha moment on this, was the retirement savings crisis, is actually a woman's crisis. Because of that. Because we retire with two thirds the money of men and live five, six, eight years longer. Wall street doesn't take those things into account now and we do, at Alabast. So, Sally, the theme here is, of our conversation, is making connections work for you. How do you make connections work for you? Well first of all, for all of those for whom it's their first visit to a Fortune Next Gen conference, these could well be the two most important days of the year. Cuz I'll tell you for me, having, I was actually ->> Thank you. You're welcome. [ LAUGH ] She did not pay me to say this, but I was actually, you remember, you and I were Where the first conference together. I know back in 1999. Back awhile ago. But when I look at my funders, whether it is Melody Hobson, who's the CEO of Aerial Capital. President. President of Aerial. She and I actually had he first discussion about Ellevest, two years ago at the first Fortune NextGen Conference in San Francisco. Karen Feinerman, who's another of our funders, met at a Fortune Most Powerful Women's conference. Probably three years ago. Therese Gao, who's an investor, she and I met at a Fortune Most Powerful Women's conference. Fantastic. I mean, it really is one after the other. These connections that we make, whether it's here at other places, As they say, because it's true, your next business opportunity is much more likely to come from a loose connection then from a good friend of yours or from someone you're in business with, because you've got different interests, you know different things. These connections are enormously powerful. They have been for me. So among Sally's other investors in Ellevest Or Aja Banga who, former Citigroup now CEO of MasterCard, Venus Williams, Mohamed El- Erian, right. Yeah we've got a good crowd who I've gotten to know over the course of my career. The story I did want to tell though, Regards our venture capital firm. So I went out to the valley and we were gonna raise money, we wanted a traditional venture capital firm. My meetings were going okay. I got some of the but why do women need their own thing? And, gee, do women really have assets to manage? Five trillion. Right, don't their husbands do it for them. Well 90 % of women manage their money on their own at some point in their lives. And so I'm going through meetings and this raising money is hard. I go to coastal ventures, I sit down with one of the partners and he says to me you know you and I are connected and I say really? and he said yes. When you were director of research at stanford Bernstein you interviewed me for a job and you didn't give it to me. So I had one reaction which was let me get out of here except my real reaction was your welcome Because now you're a venture capitalist partner at COSLA, as opposed to being, sort of slaving away at Bernstein. But he said to me, I remember the interview, I remember the advice you gave me, I remember things you told me about management, we had the meeting, and it wasn't right away, but he said, we're gonna invest in your company because of that. And so What you're seeing more and more when you're not 23, the way Patti and I are not 23, is that it's not just the connections even that you keep in touch with all the time. The world gets smaller and smaller, and things come back 10 and 20 years later. It does, and don't burn any bridges. I've done that though. [ LAUGH ] I have, I've burned bridges. And you've rebuilt them. Yeah, some, some not as much. [ LAUGH ] [ LAUGH ] I don't know, because also, Patty, I took- You found new bridges to cross, Sally. Well, here's, I made a decision, because I do hold this world record of being the only woman fired on the front page of the Wall Street Journal twice And there are a lot of lessons from it, I took a decision to share those lessons, and of course I share those lessons from my perspective. And as you might imagine, and I don't name names, but look, it's kinda obvious when I'm like, hey, the CEO of Citigroup and I got in this business back and forth That doesn't engender a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings. I thought about that, but actually made the decision that it was really almost my responsiblity to share this story. That's great. That I had been so fortunate in my career. That if I can keep you, or you, or you from making just one of the mistakes I made, then that's something that I want to give back. Sally has always understood the value of storytelling though. I joined in Fortune in 1984. Sally was an intern at Fortune in what, 1980- 5. 1985. I do not remember her. I don't remember you either. [ LAUGH ] We have time for one question [ BLANK_AUDIO ] anyone have a question? No, okay. Sally briefly in moving from a corporate executive to becoming an entrepreneur what is, because I think a lot of these women in this room Are thinking about that or have done that. What is your best advice and I want you to mention one thing that I love which is playing in traffic. Yeah, my best advice is you'd better feel truly passionate about what you're going to do. Because it is, I've said it and it's true, it's harder to be an entrepreneur than it is to run Merrill Lynch. And I know because I've done both. I was up this morning at 2 AM, thinking about this, working through this. So you have to be passionate to get you through it. You have to be willing to work extremely hard. And on things that, in my case, I haven't worked in 15, 20 years the types of things we're doing. So really get your hands dirty. And to your point, everywhere and always play in traffic. That if you are head down, not out there, not talking about what you're doing, not going to a conference like this if no body knows what you are doing it doesn't count. I think it can be hard for us as women to share what we are up to to try to establish a personal brand. I think you and I share this, I am an abervert. I thought you were an extrovert until I read that about you. You'd think In a minute, I'm an extrovert. I had to go back to my room after lunch, because I just had to take a few minutes and sort of decompress. Wow, that's fascinating. But I push myself to do it, because the returns on it are so high. One final thing on connections. The way that I got to my cofounder of Ellevest Was because I happened to sit next to Arthur Levitt on a plane, the former chair of the SEC, a handful of years ago. I said, you're Arthur Levitt, he said, you are? I'm Sallie Krawcheck! We had a connection, Sandy Weill. Over the years, Arthur introduced me To a Goldman Sachs professional who introduced me to an entrepreneur, who introduced me to a venture capitalist, who introduced me to a head of research. Who introduced me to another entrepreneur, who introduced me to a founder. I can keep going, but it was nine connections later and I met my co- founder. Fantastic. And so headhunters, executive search people do a great job, But it really is getting in there and playing in traffic where the magic happens. The other advice here is, fly business class. [ LAUGH ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Sallie Krawcheck has some advice for entrepreneurs.