Capital Insight

Summary: In this episode, Capital Insight co-hosts and securities attorneys Jenny Kassan and Michelle Thimesch  talk with Maggie Kulyk of Chicory Wealth, an investment advisory firm that helps people align their values with how they understand their financial stewardship.  Maggie shares insights about the diversity of investors she works with and what they care about.

Bio: Maggie Kulyk has worked in the financial industry since the early 2000s, but her main interest is in people – getting to know them, listening to them, and helping them balance their finances with the rest of their lives in a way that has meaning to them. She opened Maggie Kulyk and Associates in 2004, and in 2018 this business became Chicory Wealth, a fee-only financial life planning and sustainable wealth management firm. Maggie graduated summa cum laude with a BA in political philosophy from West Chester (PA) State University, then worked for six years in her family’s business, Rogers Brothers Corp. in Albion, Pennsylvania. She went on to receive an MDiv from Candler School of Theology at Emory, and finished ABD from the Graduate School of Religion at Emory. She is a CRPC® (Chartered Retirement Planning CounselorSM), a Chartered SRI CounselorTM, and a member of the Financial Planning Association and the Life Planning Institute. She’s also the author of Integrating Money and Meaning: Practices for a Heart-Centered Life and president of the board of the nonprofit Women Donors Network.

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Angels of Main Street:

Summary: In this episode, Capital Insight co-host and securities attorney Jenny Kassan talks with Matt Kreutz about his experiences growing his business and raising values-aligned funding that grows worker wealth and allows the business to focus on the mission to provide good jobs to people that are formerly incarcerated and formerly homeless.

Bio: Matt Kreutz is the CEO and Founder of Firebrand Artisan Breads.  Matt turned his lifelong passion for baking and working in the food service industry into Firebrand in 2007.  Matt grew up in the kitchen, spending hours helping his mom make meals for the family.  At 14 he got his first job in a bakery and has never worked outside the baking industry since.

Matt has a passion to create a great workplace culture of inclusion, hard work and service.  Matt believes that a company has the responsibility to its employees as well as the community it serves.  Being raised in a house where his mother went to jail as a teenager and having experienced homelessness himself, Matt aims to make Firebrand a place where people can create a better life for themselves, their families and their community.

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Angels of Main Street:

Summary: In this episode, Capital Insight co-hosts and securities attorneys Jenny Kassan and Michelle Thimesch talk with Katrina Spade of Recompose, a full-service funeral home specializing in human composting. Listen to catch Katrina’s insight into the process of raising capital for a business that was still not legal when it started and how to stay true to your vision even when you need large amounts of capital to get your business off the ground.

Bio: Katrina Spade is a designer and the inventor of a system that transforms the dead into soil (aka human composting). In 2017, Katrina founded Recompose with the goal of offering earth-centric, participatory, and meaningful death care. Recompose has led the successful legalization of human composting in Washington State, Oregon, and Colorado. In 2020, Recompose began offering the service of human composting to the public. Katrina and her team have been featured in Fast Company, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka fellow, and a Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Social Innovator.

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Angels of Main Street:

Summary: Dan Fireside is a key player in the world of creative financing strategy, but he does not come from a high finance or private equity background. After working as a program officer at Rights Action, a grassroots NGO based in Guatemala and Peru, Dan went on to work at Equal Exchange, the worker-coop, Fair Trade coffee company where he helped raise over $17 million in mission-aligned equity and debt. Now, he’s sitting down with hosts Jenny Kassan and Michelle Thimesch to discuss how he applied the skills he learned as an activist to help co-ops and other mission-driven businesses raise values-aligned funding.

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Bio: Daniel Fireside, founder of Uncommon Capital Solutions, is a fundraising consultant for co-ops and other mission-driven companies. He was the Capital Coordinator for Equal Exchange, one of the largest worker-owned cooperatives in the U.S. for over a decade. At Equal Exchange, Daniel raised over $15 million in investments and mission-aligned debt. He was elected to the board of Equal Exchange, as well as the Cooperative Fund of New England, and Namaste Solar. As the lead fundraiser for Downtown Crenshaw Rising, he has helped raise nearly $35 million for a Black community-led initiative to protect neighborhoods in South LA from gentrification and displacement by using community land trusts and supporting solidarity economy programs.

Daniel has worked with non-profits, social enterprises, and community development organizations in the U.S., Guatemala, and elsewhere. He holds a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University and a BA from UC Santa Cruz. He also speaks regularly at universities and conferences, including: Harvard Law School, MIT, Tufts, Northeastern University, Slow Money, SOCAP, among others.

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Angels of Main Street:

Summary: In today’s episode, Capital Insight co-host and securities lawyer Michelle Thimesch sits down with investment crowdfunding strategist Bill Huston to talk about the tools we have at our disposal to dismantle oppressive economic systems and build more equitable ones.

Bio: Bill Huston is an INC. Magazine top 19 global crowdfunding expert, author, speaker, and educator with over a decade of crowdfunding experience. He founded Crowd-Max, an investment crowdfunding accelerator and incubator to introduce and educate Black founders on how to successfully use investment crowdfunding to raise capital and build Black wealth with one goal in mind: to close the racial wealth gap. The organization’s core mission is to help Black entrepreneurs raise capital and scale via crowdfunding.

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Angels of Main Street:

In mid-October, Capital Insight co-host Jenny Kassan was asked to speak at the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce about the advantages of choosing community-based methods of fundraising rather than venture capital. In this episode, we revisit Jenny’s Berkeley presentation as she breaks down how to raise funding from the right investors.

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Bio: The Berkeley Chamber of Commerce is a private, not-for-profit organization established in 1900 to support business in Berkeley, California. The Chamber is a mostly volunteer organization, and remains dedicated to hosting educational and networking events.

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Angels of Main Street:

In this episode, Capital Insight co-host and securities attorney Jenny Kassan talks with Sean Campbell about his journey from Wall Street investor to regenerative finance expert.

Sean Campbell is the founder of Capital for Communities, an advisory and consulting firm that works to broaden access to capital and create a just, equitable financial system that supports thriving communities and works for everyone. His engagements include advice on fund and financial product structuring, strategic advice on the financial markets, and advice on and management of individual project financings; his clients include social enterprises, government agencies, financial institutions, and non-profit organizations. He is a Technical Advisor to Common Future, a network of leaders (re) building an economy that includes everyone; he is also the facilitator of the Real Estate Circle of the Inclusive Capital Collective.

Prior to founding Capital for Communities, Sean worked for 15 years in investment management, most recently as a managing director in the principal investing group at Macquarie. Sean has made and managed hundreds of millions of dollars of equity and credit investments, and has invested in debt and equity in the public and private markets. He holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

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Angels of Main Street:

David Ferran, Founder & CEO of the Torrey Project, shares his background in venture capitalism and his motivation for pivoting to conscious stakeholder capitalism. Together with Jenny Kassan and Michelle Thimesch, David walks us through an understanding of stakeholder capitalism as a model for sustainable value creation.

Laina Greene is a Social Impact Investor & Tech Entrepreneur. In this episode, Laina shares her journey and background on social impact investing and why she believes in funding resilient and resourceful women entrepreneurs in indigenous communities.

In this episode, GO Box CEO Jocelyn Gaudi Quarrell shares her plans to eliminate waste for to-go food and drinks, her journey in fundraising, how her company's core value of sustainability impacts her management decisions, and her strategy to get investors on board.

Though Jocelyn is no stranger to fundraising, she shares why she approached Jenny Kassan and her team to be guided and gain more insights into the best way forward.