Have you ever considered how women can leverage their influence and resources to drive impactful changes in entrepreneurship and investing? In this episode, Marcia engages in a dynamic discussion on women's leadership, angel investing, and the power of collective action with Julie Castro Abrams. Julie is a seasoned leader in social justice and shares her journey into angel investing and how and why she created How Women Lead and How Women Invest, organizations inspiring women to make positive change. From breaking glass ceilings in corporate boards to investing in ventures with a social impact focus, Julie is at the forefront of empowering women to make a difference. This episode is a must-listen for those interested in the intersection of entrepreneurship, gender equality, and social impact, offering practical insights and inspiration for women looking to drive positive change in the investment landscape.
Have you ever considered how women can leverage their influence and resources to drive impactful changes in entrepreneurship and investing? In this episode, Marcia engages in a dynamic discussion on women's leadership, angel investing, and the power of collective action with Julie Castro Abrams. Julie is a seasoned leader in social justice and shares her journey into angel investing and how and why she created How Women Lead and How Women Invest, organizations inspiring women to make positive change.
From breaking glass ceilings in corporate boards to investing in ventures with a social impact focus, Julie is at the forefront of empowering women to make a difference. This episode is a must-listen for those interested in the intersection of entrepreneurship, gender equality, and social impact, offering practical insights and inspiration for women looking to drive positive change in the investment landscape.
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Marcia Dawood
Welcome to the show.
Julie Castro Abrams
Hey, Marcia. Thanks for having me.
Marcia Dawood
I'm excited to talk to you today and learn all about how women lead, how women invest, and how women are just going to become such amazing, or are already such amazing, strong advocates, and we just need so many more. So as the angel next door is all about how women, or anyone, really can become an angel investor. And I love to hear stories about how people learned about angel investing and just what and why they do it. So maybe start with a little bit of your background.
Julie Castro Abrams
Yeah. Well, I came at this from a social justice angle, and I ran an organization that helped low income women start their own micro businesses, and we did loans for them and some mass matched savings accounts. And so I started this sort of my exposure to this world coming from that side. And then, of course, over time, your friends and family members create companies and they ask you to invest. And so that was really the beginning. And there's a woman I just love to death who started a financial services firm called Lend. Donate, and she asked me to be an investor. And the first thing, donate, yeah, it's a great organization.
Julie Castro Abrams
I mean, it's so mission aligned. It's like doing loans for nonprofits that need loans. First off, this has been a big problem for the market. And she was like, are you an accredited investor? I was like, oh, God, I don't want to go fill out a bunch of government forms. I really, my first reaction was very negative, and I actually didn't do it right away because I thought I had to go be accredited by the federal government of SEC. And so I sat on my hands for a long time, and I think somebody else said, oh, hey, would you like to invest in my. In my company? And I was like. And she was like, you don't need to do anything as an accredited investor.
Julie Castro Abrams
All you have to do is say, I make enough money, which is $200,000 a year as an individual or 300 as a family. We just, at that time, we, like, barely were making that measure, but we were making that much money. And I was like, yeah, I can do that. I just don't like administration. Doing my taxes always is, like the biggest nail on a chalkboard moment for me. I prefer to have somebody else help me with all those things. So I didn't jump at first. It seemed other.
Marcia Dawood
It seems daunting to people. I hear that pretty often people will be like, oh, sounds great.
Julie Castro Abrams
And, yeah, and it kind of depends on, you know, where you are in the world. Like, for the most part, more than I do about everything. But for me, it was like, can you invest $10,000? And I was at a life stage where my kids were out of college, and I could finally say, yeah, I can do that. And I knew the leaders, but the truth is, I did not due diligence on the companies. I was like, I think that makes sense. Like, some people, like, came to me with things that was like, no way. Like, I. I'm not even.
Julie Castro Abrams
I don't even do diligence. And I'm like, forget that. But if I knew the person and I thought they were strong and I liked what they were up to, that's, frankly, all the diligence I did. And then I just sent them a check, and they sent me a convertible note, and quick in and out. And in one case, it's so funny. I started as an angel investment. It's now a series c. But at one point, I was like, wait, I think you guys dropped me off your list.
Julie Castro Abrams
And I had to remind them and be like, oh, no. Investor information from you guys. And it kind of makes you. If you're not, I think maybe it's a bit of a cautionary tale. It's like, you kind of have to be a little bit on it. You don't have to kill yourself. And depending on how serious you want to take this and how scarce your resources are, for me, if I most, in most cases, I was like, $10,000. I guess maybe I shouldn't say this out in the world, but I was like, if I lose, I want to support this person.
Julie Castro Abrams
If I get money back or I make money, that's great, but I'm not counting on it. I'm not waiting and bugging them and saying, where's the money and where's the exit? I think that's probably the measure everybody should consider. It should be kind of like money you've got separate from what you're really counting on, because these can be, if you're doing angel investing to get to a series C company, I think it's been six years. Like, it's a, it could be a really long time before this company ever exits and gets, and sends me money back. So I think it's just like once a year, I need to at least be in touch with the founder in some way, just so I'm still top of mind and don't lose, lose momentum in.
Marcia Dawood
Absolutely. And when did you first become an angel investor?
Julie Castro Abrams
I mean, I think that was probably probably eight years ago, maybe is the first time I did it. So I think that's pretty new. And it wasn't very often like, I just did a handful. It's kind of one one year, and then two years later you did another. I wouldn't say I turned this into a professional vocation. What I ended up doing is learning enough or having enough fun with that. And just like, you get to hang out with people like Marcia. Like, I mean, like that.
Julie Castro Abrams
To me, it's, I think for many women, it's as much social and innovation economy and that kind of thing as it is a financial play. I think it's sort of like I want to be part of cool stuff with great women. That's my, that's my definition of fun in life.
Marcia Dawood
I would totally agree with that. So then tell us more about how, how women lead and how women invest and all that came to be.
Julie Castro Abrams
Yeah, well, I ran that microfinance and micro enterprise organization, which really was the most amazing mission. Unbelievable results. Women are still in business now, 25 years later, and I keep up with them and go to the restaurants and stuff. And it was really hard. Basically, it was a nonprofit, and you had to raise five to $10 million from scratch every single year. And so that lift, while I can do it, when you have economic downturns, like when the mortgage crisis happened in 2009, and one of our biggest sponsors was a bank that went out of business, Washington Mutual, if anyone remembers. I kind of, I was like, all right, I did that for twelve years. I did enough.
Julie Castro Abrams
And in fact, at eight years, I was like, I think I'm done. And most people running nonprofits in particular, eight years is like a magic number. You either need to really do a serious reset or it's time to think about whether you should hand the baton over to someone else, I think. And I was done. I was exhausted and I was, my kids, my youngest was about, it was a senior in high school. And so I thought, you know what? I want to take a break and I want to just consult. And frankly, I was like, I'm never running anything again. I just needed, I needed a breath.
Julie Castro Abrams
And, and I think a lot of women experienced that. Marcia, I don't know if you've gotten to do that yet, but, you know, in my mid forties, I got to take 18 months and I consulted and stuff, but I really, it took me 18 months of just resting and not being, living on adrenaline in the same way to reset my life and my health. And I think that's pretty standard for most women I know. That's kind of when you hit this moment where you're also like, you know what? I have enough experience. I have enough power, influence, a little bit of wealth. And even though I wasn't wealthy, I had enough that I could, like, I wasn't in a crisis, and I had to find the next paycheck in two weeks. I could make sure I had the next paycheck in six to twelve months, which is sort of a good place to be anyway. And so after that sort of reset, I really thought, like, what's the impact I want to have in the world? And I started to research and get together with other women and realize there's actually a developmental life stage that I'm talking about in our mid forties, where you enter something called middle essence and we don't even know it exists.
Julie Castro Abrams
But in your younger life, you're scaffolding career advancement. I'm going to be a manager next, and then I'm going to be a director. And you kind of go up the ladder and you might also be raising a family like I did. And I don't even remember my thirties. I think I barely survived it. But you get beyond that stage and you actually have a big reset in both. You're not willing to put up with baloney anymore. For many of us, we want to architect a life that we feel good about, whether it's how much pressure we're under or who we work with.
Julie Castro Abrams
But the other thing is, women need to do things with other women in order and have an impact in order to be happy. It's actually a very interesting and powerful shift in how we're seeing, how we're interfacing with the world. It's very visceral. And so you see, well, you and I are part of this first generation of women like us with 30 years of work experience, and we've got a huge generation of us. We're the first ones. Now, there were women older than me that were ceiling breakers, but they weren't part of a big generation. They were always the absolutely only woman in the room and the complete standout. And they had to act like men in many cases to survive.
Julie Castro Abrams
We are part of a whole big volume of women now who have, and we all collectively have 52% of the wealth. And so it's a new day for women to be able to say, like, we now have some time, power, influence and money that we can collectively come together and shift the world, break ceilings for ourselves individually, like getting on corporate boards or venture, but also collectively pass laws. And this wave of women, if we all come together and change things. We can see that 2% of venture capital funding that goes to companies founded by women is so horrible, but we can change it. And that's sort of what started to come up for me is like, if I get all these women I know together, well, I did, and then they were like, do this again. But I'm going to bring five friends, like, all of a sudden, like, they're so hungry to do things together. And I focus only on women in that life stage, and it makes it really yummy. It's very different than if you're just mentoring all the younger women who.
Julie Castro Abrams
And it's exhausting to keep doing that. Only it's really, when I talk to you, Marcia, my nervous system relaxes. I'm like, you get me? I get you. We speak the same language. And that how women lead is that a network of 20,000 very senior women leaders who come together and say, let's individually get on corporate boards, let's change the corporate board structures. Let's individually invest in venture, but let's change the venture structures. And then we have, how do you completely reset and elevate your brand? Things that we need giving, donating together, those are all things that we are doing in this network together. And it evolves every day.
Julie Castro Abrams
It'll be different tomorrow than it is today.
Marcia Dawood
So how women lead is primarily focused on getting on corporate boards, philanthropy, all.
Julie Castro Abrams
Of those things, and the structures around investing. And I would just say it's like, what are those glass ceilings? And you just named the ones, what are the glass ceilings that are impacting us as women? And how can we collectively and individually break them? That's how I describe it. Now, the ways we've done that is around those things you just mentioned. But it could be something. We've talked, we've done some. We dipped our toes and things around politics and women in public office. So we continually tackle things and leverage our power of our network to change things. We've done a lot around reproductive justice.
Julie Castro Abrams
We have a fellowship program. We've donated a bunch. We've elevated and connected women in on the front lines. So it's almost the world is our oyster because there's so many of us with so much.
Marcia Dawood
And if people want to join that group, how do they do that?
Julie Castro Abrams
It is literally a network, not a membership organization. So if you go to howwomenlead.com, you really, if you can come to anything, we offer any of our events, they're pay to play. So instead of a membership fee, it's like, you pay $50 to go to something, but I do a 1 hour call every month. That is an overview of the whole organization. And you do a personal plan. And that's, to me, that's really wonderful is people get an opportunity to really figure out how can I best get my needs met and be part of something cool with other women.
Marcia Dawood
Tell me more about the personal plan.
Julie Castro Abrams
It's everything from like, I just talked about some developmental life stage stuff. So is your goal right now that you've been the only woman in the room when, as a CEO? Like my daughter said when she was eleven, she was like, mommy, you're not like the other mothers. I'm like, I know, and I, and I love those women that I, my kids grew up with, but they're not, they don't get me at the same level. So for me, in my mid forties, I need to build a network of friends. And in fact, there's a Harvard study that shows you're happier. Happiness is defined by how many social connections you have at 45 years old, which is really interesting, and you can live up to 20 years longer. So that social isolation is really bad for us. And so women will come to me and be like, I've been the head of everything and I'm, I don't have women at my level.
Julie Castro Abrams
So it might be that, it might be like, I just want to go on a, we like, do weekend retreats and trips to Cuba and different leadership classes and stuff. They may, it may be purely for their social, but you can architect. What are those things? Do I want to do? You can say, I want to get on a corporate board. So I'm going to hear all the things I'm going to participate in as part of my journey. So we have like, journey outlines. It's like, we would recommend you do the following four or five things if you really want to get to the end goal. So, like, investing in venture capital and being part of that world, some people are like, I want to learn how to be a venture capitalist. Great.
Julie Castro Abrams
We have classes. You can come to a monthly venture capital session, like, where you can meet VC's and hear how they're thinking about their investing strategy. We do LinkedIn lives. I did podcasts. We got a whole bunch of stuff here. And then we started our own venture firm. So in 2020, a bunch of us got together and they're like, all right, let's all invest in venture together. And we raised $10 million in a couple months.
Julie Castro Abrams
And we've made great choices in great companies. Then we did another fund. We're on our third fund now, $100 million fund. It's pretty game changing because we're the only fund that I know of that only invests in companies with women founders with no male co founders. So it's very exciting and very dynamic right now in everything that we're doing. And one of the things we realized is we can't have all 20,000 women invest in our funds. So we thought, well, we have this huge community of women who really want to be involved in this and should be. It's really important that we should all be thinking about where we're making our investments.
Julie Castro Abrams
And venture is like another asset class, like in the stock market. You don't need to decide where the investments make the investments you make, like you do with angel investing. You have somebody who's a professional venture capitalist, was doing all the vetting and deciding, and you can participate as much as you want in a fund like mine. So we give a lot of people back access to the process if they want it. They can even go to pitch days every month and hear some of the founders pitch. So lots of opportunities to learn by doing and being involved in it. So. So, yeah, I mean, everybody's got a different path.
Julie Castro Abrams
The truth is, Marcia, that most people will do our boards and invest and give the philanthropically and volunteer to mentor a global leader of a social impact organization. Like, over time, most people participate in many things. They may come for one thing, but the. We have this. I just think that hunger to do things with other women at your level, and that that's really what they find here. I think that that's the magic. And this is, this is everybody's place and community, because it's. There's such a powerful group of women.
Julie Castro Abrams
So I just think that that's the sticky part and how we are with each other. We make. We have a credo where we commit to being fierce advocates for each other. I literally say no mean girl behavior. If you're mean and talk crap about other women and stuff, I ask you to leave the community. So nobody pays to be a member, but you have to commit to being better with each other. You have to say yes to making introductions, which is so important. You have to reinforce the voices of the other women here.
Julie Castro Abrams
And then you literally putting you on stage, take up space, be unabashedly visible. If we could all have a culture where women did that with and for each other, and the culture shifted, I think it would change everything for us and all these women founders you and I love say yes. Introduce them, fund them, support them. Don't tear them down. We're, as women, our culture's just been so yucky to us.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. Yeah. So much. Well, we talked earlier about sometimes women especially, will look at investing in a company and think, oh, my gosh, it seems so daunting. But what you're talking about is learning by doing and learning by watching other things. And I just think that's, that's so awesome and really important in the process, because then it, all of a sudden, it's not so scary because you're actually seeing it firsthand.
Julie Castro Abrams
Right. And I would just say whether it's as an angel investor or investing in a venture fund, $10,000 or $25,000 of your retirement funds, for example, or even your donor advised funds or cash, you can use a lot of different. Anywhere where you're investing money, you can just set that aside and say, all right. And that's what most women do with us. It's like they start with a modest dollar amount, even though they might have a lot of money. And they're like, well, let me just put in $25,000. And in my fund, for example, it's spread over four years, so it's $6,250 a year. Pretty accessible for most corporate women leaders.
Julie Castro Abrams
And so they'll start with that, and then within a year, they're investing in two and three other funds. And I want to make sure they know who they are. And it really, it's a power play, and it changes how people think about you in your career, in other parts of, like, getting on a board, because people see you as a player, as somebody who's really doing cool stuff.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. And then just to get access to watch pitches and be able to see all these amazing women who are doing incredible things in the world.
Julie Castro Abrams
Yeah.
Marcia Dawood
Amazing.
Julie Castro Abrams
And, I mean, it is so fun. Like, we had a pitch from somebody who's doing this water filtration. She's so nerdy and brilliant, and it was a blast. And we know that getting desalinization of water is sort of one of the things we're counting on for the future. But how do you do that in the middle of the country without huge pipelines and just have people who can, who are really figuring out these naughty issues that we all, it's so fun to be part of that and see, like, the future of medicine is no longer taking pills or shots, but actually having cells encapsulated in your body that are, for, that, replace the, the poorly functioning cells you already have in diabetes or whatever. Like, think about that. It's smart. It's delivered in the right amount.
Julie Castro Abrams
You no longer, you no longer have people dying because they took insulin when it actually made their blood sugar drop or whatever. That's the future of medicine. And we are investing in a company that's doing that. Like, how freaking cool is that?
Marcia Dawood
That is amazing.
Julie Castro Abrams
Yeah.
Marcia Dawood
I love, I love companies. And of course, clean water is going to be the big, or, like, somebody.
Julie Castro Abrams
Who'S got a really important technology solution and platform and all in one tool for small farmers. Because we should not be eating these massive, these over processed and tons of antibiotics in our meat and other things. There's no more vitamins and nutrients in the food we're eating. So small farms, we need access to them, but they also, it's expensive to do it if they don't have a really big lift. So we're looking at a company that's providing all kinds of solutions for them. So that's how we get to the tomorrow we want.
Marcia Dawood
Yes, absolutely. So how do people get in touch with you related to the fund? How do they get in touch with you? I mean, you said before about the network for how women lead.
Julie Castro Abrams
Yeah, tell us. Yeah, I mean, if you want investment from us or you want to check out investing in one of our funds, it's at howwomeninvest.com. you can also get there through our howwomenlead.com website. I'm super accessible. So reach out to me, Julie, at how women lead that. I'm excited to hear from you and would love to meet you. We can do an overview and you can create your own personal plan.
Marcia Dawood
I love that. And you do put out a fabulous newsletter.
Julie Castro Abrams
Thank you.
Marcia Dawood
Well, everybody should be on that mailing list to get all the insights and what's going on so well. Julie, thank you so much for coming on the show today and telling us all about all of the amazing things that you're doing to help women advance.
Julie Castro Abrams
My pleasure. Thank you for providing a platform for women in all you do. Marcia, thank you.