Hey, Hey, Hey, we're black. We're back. We're brown ambition, ambition and ambition. We're extra brown today. Hey, Mandram, how are you?
Hi?
Beautiful, I'm doing pretty good.
How are you? I'm good. I'm good And we just popped.
A couple of extra strength talent all so I'm rare and to go.
We have some extra brown in this SEU. I love what I say this su. I feel so cool. We have some extra brown in the sue today. Super special because she's like super impressive, but she's also my friend friend. Let's welcome Lauren and Melman to the studio.
Welcome Lauren.
She's a change agent committed to diversity, innovation, equity, and inclusion. She's an award winning marketer, prolific investor, advisor, entrepreneur, and board member with a multi house you hyphen It career spanning over fifteen years. She's advised invested in over forty starters in her portfolio represents over five billion in market cap.
Okay.
She's the founder and the CEO of LMB Group, a strategic marketing and advisory company partnering with brands like CoverGirl. She also started Straight Up and Successful Women focused community and professional development firm. She discovers and sees this hidden profitable value across retail CpG, lifestyle brands, luxury goods, YadA, YadA, YadA, it's about pioneer stuff. She's based at the bomb dot Com. Okay, Oh, last,
but not least. When she was nineteen, she became the youngest winery owner girl in the country, co founding the internationally recognized Sugar Leaf Vineyards.
Oh my gosh, this is incredible, Lauren. I'm exhausted and I don't need la is a mama of two beautiful kids. On top of her now I'm dead not also a badass my mom.
And she got that.
Her mom is so awesome and she got a bad as mama.
And it's self proclaimed. Would you call yourself a rich auntie in this space?
Oh me, I call myself like a dinosaur in this space. An auntie.
I'm just like the auntie dinosaur because I've been around this for a long time. Like Tiffany says, we've known each other a long time, so I've been able to see, you know, her glow up and you know the beginning of this incredible podcast. But I just feel like I feel like a lot of people's auntie in this space because I have been around since we were all starting and we're still here and now we're all thriving.
So I'm not new to this. I'm true to this. Yeah.
Well, it's such a pleasure for me. This is my first time meeting you, and I feel like just from that, just from getting to know you a little bit, I'm like, oh, Brown ambition personified. Obviously. Why haven't you we had you
on before? Well, tell everybody, Like, I mean, there's so much you have going on, and I feel like, you know, seasons come and go as far as like entrepreneurship, So like, now, what are you focusing on because I or are you going to tell me that you do everything perfectly and you can do it all?
No?
The babies in the vineyard and the venture capital and all that, well, let me decide you.
My babies are not babies.
So first of all, my babies are at the age of being like useful. So I know everyone thinks that I have like these little babies and it's like, girl, how are you doing all this and wrangling like toddlers. Luckily I've already gone through that stage. They are well potty trained, they can cook they can. My son is about to start driving, So I have a fifteen year old son and.
A thirteen year old daughter, and so they keep me busy. For sure.
I'm more like a chauffeur than anything until they can take them as all everywhere they need to go. So it's a good age for sure. And the things that I'm working on now as an entrepreneur, it's been really interesting. I think I'm in I'm in the stage of my life where Rando we're talking about this before we went live, where the bar is heightening, right, it is raising, and both by design but also by choice, because I want to do more and I have found ways to do more.
And I think the epiphany season that I'm in right now is that as women, especially as founders and entrepreneurs, we try to create a life that gives us the license to do the things we love. We try to create a life that allows us to move in these spaces. So, you know, ten years ago, when I wrote my best selling book, The Path We Defined, I have this chapter that was so enlightening for everyone, and it's entitled build a life That's serendipitous by Design, And I just think I'm doing that.
At that next level. So it's like, you know, serendipity is not happenstance.
It is still strategic and it's by design to keep around good people, good ideas come, good businesses come, good investments come right, like one thing kind of begets the other.
So I think, you know, as women.
We spend a lot of time trying to create our careers are lives that give us the license to do the things we love, and that often means having the ability to do the.
Next thing right.
So we spent so long talking about you know, the next level, the next chapter, next, next, next, and next really means move on from one thing and replace it with another. And I think I'm in the season of accumulation right and like portfolio building, legacy building, where I want to do more.
But it doesn't mean to replace something.
It means to be good enough and have great teams and infrastructure and systems that allow you to create a portfolio that is an ongoing repertoire of all the things. And so it's about building instead of replacing. So the season that I'm in right now is about building, bigger, building, more building at scale, bigger impact. So it is a
lot of what I've always done. When you ask what am I up to, the same things, but in the season of building for scale, for impact, for global for global awareness, which just looks different because I'm not looking to replace it.
I still want to sustain and maintain the things.
That I've already done well and established, and I want to establish something else right.
I want to layer on top of it.
I want to want to make it more complex and more robust, want to again have that scale. And I think we think about scale and businesses, but I'm starting to think about scale in my life and in my career and in the people that I'm able to help and influence and advise and invest in.
And I've got a feeling when you say portfolio, you ain't talking about index funds like me and the basic the basic bees out here still trying to like make sure we're investing. I mean, you are an investor in businesses, you have your own you have your own VC firm, Is that right?
I do so, I have a family office. I had started a VC more than ten years ago. To my capital partners, really early to the game in terms of creating founder friendly capital, which was not cool in twenty eleven twenty eleven was very much the time of the VC and not the time of the founder. So the idea of Founder Friends Capital was like this, humh, like you're either one or the other. You're either on this side of the table as the founder or you're on
this side of the table. That was the funder and shom My Capital, and my role was to really say, hey, look, founders can become funders, and we can be really great funders because we know what it's like to be the founder, and so we're going to do more than just give
you money. We're going to give you money, but we're going to make sure that you use that money in the right way, that you stay on the right track, that you know the right people, that you're around the right networks, because the money and alone is not enough to achieve what you want. And so yes, now I have this incredible portfolio that has been just so fun and exciting to build because I could have never imagined that it would take me to where it has today.
So now I look back and it's yes, it's angel investments, it's real estate, it's art, it's growth equity investments that I've made of later.
Stage into later stage companies.
It's, you know, a year and a half ago, meeting into the stack world a purpose of acquisition companies and being a partner investor and athena consumer and helping to take companies public trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
So it's been that for me was probably the beginning of the build.
When I talk about build not replace, right, it's like, it's not you know, stocks for crypto and like moving from one to the other.
It's like, no, how do you create a portfolio that's a little bit of everything?
Right? In my case, I don't do crypto, but just as an example, a lot of people are like going to the next thing. Right we think about a gold rush, it's still like leaving one thing to rush to another. It's not building upon what you have to create a larger portfolio that can become even more valuable. So that's the season I'm in and the lessons that I've learned that continue to kind of dictate the steps that I take in my career.
But also I'm a big believer that proof is in the pudding. So like you look at the.
Pudding and it's profitable, and the companies are growing, and there's unicorns in there, and there are companies that are getting a fired and that are really meaningful and that are changing lives and making a difference. And that's the portfolio I always wanted to have, Right So it's not always going to be the unicorn's, it's not always going to.
Be the you know, the companies that are just in one sector.
I've always looked at my life as this medley, and I think the world is finally catching up to this idea, like this is what innovation looks like, because if we stay in one lane, we get stale and stagnant, even if we keep researching. Right, Like I look at Tiff, like Tip's been doing budget. Okay, budget, but not all budgets are created equal. One minute, you budget in for
saving money, then you're budgeting for doing something big. Then you're budgeting for acquiring an asset, right, Like, not all budgets are the same. They have different purposes, and you begin to build that portfolio of where you want to go.
But we all have to start somewhere.
That's a good like segue into like where what did's starting look like for you? You know, because I feel like you started so young, you know, starting your winery at nineteen.
But as far as like this where you are now?
You know, if someone was like, oh my gosh, I want to chart the course that Lauren charted. I want to create a portfolio for myself, but I have no idea where to start. So someone is listening, like what does that look like? We're like, what's the iteration of like Lauren, Like we started here and I learned this, and I did this, Like what did that look like?
Your journey?
I think the journey is a series of baby steps. Like I look at the baby steps I was making early on in my career, and they were quick succession of baby steps because it was much easier to break down the big, lofty goal into these short, achievable goals.
And in the early days, it was really easy to.
Get to those next little milestones, especially when I was only focused on that one thing, because I was still trying to establish subject matter expertise, right, So, like, you can't create the expertise and build a portfolio.
At the same time. I think that's difficult to do.
And so I learned a lot of ways to achieve what I wanted to achieve, and also realizing what had the most leverage, what had the most influence, what had the most power. A lot of times people think it's money, but then there were times when as a founder, I didn't always have the money, but I had the network, and the network showed up for me in ways that were more powerful and opened more doors than the money
would have. And I think a lot of those experiences were happening to me, which were the lessons that I was designed to learn to determine which path to take when conventional, traditional methods and books and articles.
Would say to go one way.
I would have these series of aha moments within my baby steps of achievement, and I was also able to very quickly figure out, Okay, well, if this is not going the way that I wanted to, I'm not going to keep trying something that's clearly not working right Because if it's a baby step.
O your step a little bit, you go stop, and you're.
Going to go onto something else because you're not trying to leap, so you can figure out sooner what's not right for you. And I think that the accumulation of those lessons for me, combined with taking those baby steps, allowed me to be where I am now, but also allowed me to a mass networks knowledge, access, acumen, and expertise at the same time. So I was absorbing information from top sources because in that moment, especially ten eleven years.
Ago, black women were not There was not the movement that we have now. There was not a fotlight on us, if you remember this, This was not how this.
Ecosystem was, And so I think there weren't a lot of us that were paying attention to the lessons. And I think when you paid attention to the lessons and kept learning and kept your intentionality, you saw a lot of movement. You saw the needle moving in ways that were important. But a lot of us didn't know what
to do with that. And so I spent a lot of time listening as much as I was learning, you know, researching, analyzing, but also trying to figure out how I someone who was completely self made, who did not come up with the soilver spoon in their mouth. Yes, my parents worked really hard to give you what they have, But I always say, like, if I had siblings, I would not have even been raised the same way.
Like my parents told me all the time.
We had enough money to weve all money we had to send you to school by yourself, like there was only one of you, there was three or four of you would not have been going on the same school. So, you know, where do we learn these lessons if we don't grow up with families that can tell us how it's done or that can usher us through that process. And so for me, that's what starting looked like. And I was also really grateful to have people in my life in my career who gravitated towards me because I
was so persistent. So my persistence was very off putting to a lot of people for a long time. It was like, ah, it's too much. But if you don't ask, you don't get. And the people who saw me continue
to ask were like, okay, we see you. And people started telling me even then ten eleven years ago that they weren't initially going to take my meetings for Genera Capital, but when they saw my emails coming in it, you know, one, two, three, four o'clock in the morning, they were like, okay, she's serious, right, I wasn't sitting there scheduling send for seven am. No, if I was up in the middle of the night. I was up in the middle of the night. But
that's what people paid attention to. That's what folks noticed. It was that consistency, that dedication that allowed me to start and allowed me to realize the way in which I wanted to build a portfolio or the ways in which I wanted to be diversified based upon my experiences, but also based upon the opportunities that were coming to me.
And so some of the greatest opportunities for me as an investor, as a founder, as you know, someone in media, as a women's advocate, came from people saying, hey, look, maybe you don't have the expertise, Lauren, but what you do have is the drive and the persistence, and so if we can just teach you these things, we.
Want to watch you go. And there was a lot of that.
There were a lot of people that I just knew wanted to see if that energy of Lauren, like how long they could sustain that for And that was exhausting because that was the game of proving myself essentially right, But that's what's allowed me to build.
Can we talk about I mean, I'm just listening in the common theme I'm hearing are things that I love to talk about, which is the secret sauce of people and relationships and networking. So you mean you early in your career. I know you owned a winery, you worked in modeling, but eventually someone showed you it was possible to become a founder and an investor and an angel
investor in all of that. And for someone like yourself, who, like you said, you haven't grown up surrounded by those types of people, how did you Because so many people somebody of us struggled with that, especially as you know, minority women getting ourselves in even the same orbit as
people who can help us think bigger? So how did you start putting yourself in those spaces to feel like it was possible and then make those connections translate into I'm going to enter this new path room myself, and I'm going to make it happen.
It's a great question.
I think when when I really analyze my career to date, it's that my approach is one that most people don't forget, either because I am persistent, or because I am outspoken, or because they meet me in a room at a conference and I walk in and I'm the six foot tall black woman, like, well, where did she come from?
But it's always he.
Seems so calm, but like I'm imagining, like when you say your approach, I'm just like, what do you do to these people? Intimidates them?
Well?
It does.
It does intimidate a lot of people, but it also intrigues them. And so there was so many times and again it was like you've got to be comfortable knowing that you're being tested, right. So in those instances, it was like, Okay, I want to be in this room, but I know why they're inviting me in this room.
I'm not silly.
I know why they're asking me if I can show up this way or if I'm available to speak on X y Z topic. But I had to be strategic about what my presence in those moments were going to mean to me, not what they were going to mean to the audience that was inviting me in the room, because for me, that was no different than like having your one shot at the meeting.
Right.
So I started being invited to conferences and on stages to speak because I had been outspoken, because some people considered my opinions to be radical, Because if it was in the corporate sphere, they could bring me in to talk about it far easier than someone on the inside that wanted to say the same thing, knew they couldn't, right, And so I knew that how I showed up in those moments was going to create my reputation, was going
to create an opinion of me. And I do think I was really thoughtful in that process of what is it that I What is it that I want them to leave feeling or knowing about me? That's different, right, because what they knew about me was the obvious. But what they didn't know about me, what wasn't here or what was driving me from here? And so that's what I spent and I know there some people that are going to be listening to it. So I was touching my head and I was touching my heart in terms
of they don't know what's in my mind. They don't know my ideas, they don't know how I strategize, how I analyze. They don't know the intellectual property that I could bring to their companies or to their clients or to their projects. They don't know how driven I am. They don't know the integrity that I come to work with.
And so when people were able to see that and experience that, even if it was in short engagements, those same people, many of whom are the ones that would circle back and say, it doesn't matter, Lauren, that you don't have the resume experience. We trust you, trust that you're going to figure it out, or we trust that they're going to work really hard to figure it out because we've been watching you and so for a long time.
You know, early on in my career, I was frustrated that a lot of people would ask me to do things and then there wasn't follow up, or the follow up would be another invitation to do something else again, but not an answer to the feedback I was asking for in that exact moment. And I realized years later that that was basically my audition for if I would be allowed into these rooms, into these circles, into these networks.
And I kept showing up, and I kept showing up with a level of consistency that created trust that I had no other way to establish with these rooms and these groups of people, who are the stakeholders, who are the decision makers, who are the leaders of tech and venture capital, who are the ones that you know, are the ones to watch, the ones to know, the ones who can make or break, you know, a major career decision or you know, if you go on to be
the founder to watch or not. And so I had to find other ways to establish credibility and trust with these people that I also really wanted to learn from, and I had to show them that I was going to be a good student.
I guess my question really is is just like if someone is like, I feel like you've come so far, but it could not have been easy during that time, and if you could kind of like, especially when it comes to investing, how did you learn?
You know what I mean? Like I mean, I know it wasn't like mentors, was it sponsors?
Was it books? Was it podcasts? Like you know, like cauld. I remember like you had a party at your house. I don't know if it was New Year's or something, and we just were talking and you were telling me how like girls you invest in art, and then you went to this whole diatribe.
About like if you do this and you can put the art here.
And I remember being like way long talking about me at a party, but you know, like you had such this deep and like deep knowledge of like the way art can be used to like to grow well, to shield well to you know, and I just like, but where did this knowledge come from? Like was it you know, did you go to school for this?
You know?
Like because I know there are people who are listening and they're like, I want to start, but you know, is.
It a book? Is it a class? Is it?
I need to find someone to put me under their wing. So, like, where did your knowledge, like at least the beginning of it, really start to come from.
So so much of my knowledge is acquired through reading and asking questions. I've always been so inquisitive, so I've been fascinated with my whole life. I've been fascinated with how certain cultures and communities grow, create, keep, maintain, share, and spread wealth amongst themselves in ways that we don't see in our community.
And I've lived several places around the world.
I've lived in Europe, I've lived in West Africa, I've lived in South America. I speak fluent Spanish, I speak French. I consider myself to really truly be a global citizen in many ways. And I've always had this interesting network of you know, I've got folks that are at every end of the socioeconomic spectrum. I've got folks that fly coach, I got folks that have g fives.
I got folks, I got net jets, Like I've always.
Had this kind of access or network to a variety of lifestyles, and it didn't matter that I wasn't maybe living all of those lifestyles. For whatever reason, I was still being invited into the room, whether it was because I had established trust or credibility, whether I was on a long audition and didn't realize it, you know, like, whatever that was, I took note. I took note of how those families were constructed. I took note of how
wealthy family businesses were hiring. I had asked questions when the time was appropriate. I'll never forget I once asked a wealthy family leader. I said, how do you determine like who gets to rise in the ranks in the company, and if you promote the family member or not the family member. They said, well, years ago, it used to be the family members were the ones that led the business.
But you know, now we have nepotism rules and this is how it works, and we actually require that they go work at competing businesses outside of college, like after college in Europe or in North America to go acquire this knowledge to see how other companies do it, and they're required to work at least two jobs or minimum of two years for competitive companies or companies where they can grow their skill set before they're even allowed to work for the family business.
That to me was like, oh, mental note, mental note for my children. Should my children be working in the family business right off of the cup?
Probably not right, because what are they going to learn and is going to learn from me on the job versus if I'm going to be in media, do they go work at a big media company for two years? And then if we're going to be an investing do they go work at a big VC for two years even if they're just an intern, just to even be a fly on the wall to learn process or see people move in a different way.
And then should they.
Come back to meet four years after college? And I'd sit and think about it, just as one of many examples, and it was like, hmm, makes more sense, right, Like go learn out in the world from folks that are doing it at this level and then come back to mom.
And keep it all on the family. Right.
But I don't have the framework for doing that because I'm an only child, I'm a black woman, it has not been done in my family.
But I'm around people who, for.
Whatever reason, variety of reasons, wanted me around them, and I knew that I had a purpose to them. But I also knew that there was something I could learn and me becoming a good student in that regard. Yeah, it was helpful for me for my own personal life because it can help me figure out. Oh, Jaden and Chloe,
this is what I want you to do. This is how I want you to think about internships even now thirteen and fifteen, and talk to them about how I want them to build their resume, because what do we
see happening in other communities. We see kids going off to college already worked at three fortune one hundred companies because the parents hooked them up right, or because they grew up with an auntie and uncle who are an executive and they've heard the vernacular and they've had the interest, and the parents have been sending them articles and so they can they're qualified to be an intern while in high school, right, and they can have a great resume.
These are things that I say, hmm, let me see how folks that are doing things far better than me are doing them, and let me see which components of that, what pieces of that I want to replicate or emulate in my life, in my family and my career, in my construct to try to escape achieve something similar.
The same thing with art.
I'll never forget when I remember exactly what you're talking about with this party at the house, and I had just sold some art at Sotheby's for the first time ever at auction. It was my first auction experience. I didn't know anything about art at auction at that time. I knew the value of what we had, and I knew that the starting bid was going to be lower than its value. But I asked all the right questions in terms of how does the auction work, how quick
does it go? How many dollar values can you rise in sixty seconds, ninety seconds? And if you ever listened to an art auction, which is maybe a good exercise just because for whoever's listening, but you'd be wildly surprised at how how quick prices can double or how quickly something can triple or quadruple in a quick bid. And so that gave me an opportunity to have information to analyze,
to go ooh, do I want to take burdenhand. Do I want to take the surefire sale or do I want to risk going to auction starting at a lower bid but having working out some probability of my own decision calculus of what's best burden hand and sale and gallery or taking the risk of going to auction.
Ultimately, it was the risk of going to auction.
But then I learned something at that auction, and I'll ever forget this very wealthy family next to me that was watching their own.
Art in auction.
I had gone to the auctions previous just to see how the auctions went, because that was part of my decision calculus. I haven't seen it auction in action. Let me go see. The only auction I had seen before this was the car auctions because I used to go to those impound those tow yard auctions where you can pick up the cars, people don't pay their ticket.
That's the only auction I knew before.
Okay, and you go with the car mechanic and you pick up the cars and they make you a new key.
That was the only auction I knew. So I was like, how does this art work?
So I was going to the auctions to just be a float from the wall, and I watched another very wealthy family sell works of art, and I said ended up talking to them after I said, why are you selling so much of this incredible art like all at one time?
It turned out that.
They were doing it because the family member who owned the art had just passed and they didn't want to have to have all this inheritance tax. So they schooled me on the step up and basis quote unquote, and when to sell and how to sell, and so they were like, we have this window and we love this art, but we have so much art. They did their decision calculus. So I'm like, how come our people aren't talking about
step up and basis? How come our people aren't talking about how to hold these assets so that our children can grow up with art collections the way that others grow up with art collections.
I'm not just.
Accumulating these assets to just sit them here, and I'm not accumulating these assets to leave my children with more work to do. So I've always looked at the people who are more accomplished, who are wealthier, to know and understand what moves not that I always should be making, but what moves I could be making because I think that for black women, we don't even know the full extent of ways that we can You had mentioned before
make or shield our money and our wealth. We don't even know the full extent of things that are available to us. And oftentimes even we have an accountant, account's not telling you because the accountant's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't need to know this, or it doesn't apply to you, Like you don't know what's going to apply to me, right, And so that's why I've always been inquisitive, is that I never wanted anyone to tell me what
knowledge I needed to know. And I had enough people tell me early on when I started investing, Oh, you don't need this, or you don't need to know this. My first investment started when I was a single mom. I had two kids under two, and I remember people telling me why am I investing twenty five fifty thousand dollars in a startup when I'm going through a terrible divorce. I have kids to feed and diapers, and I need to get similar and my baby's actually one to similar.
One took NESTL, the.
Good start alementum, and I was on the expensive formula, and I was like, you know what, let me stop telling people, because I just believed in my soul that this was the way for me to use my entrepreneurial gifts to identify companies early, to make investments, to use my talents to help those companies ultimately grow.
And to ultimately help my money grow.
But I also knew that at that point in my life and my career, I didn't have people in my orbit who spoke that language, who understood that intention, or who appreciated that kind of of hustle. And so that was my first experience in life of don't get advice or don't attempt to get advice from people that aren't walking in your shoes in the most respectful way possible.
Because my grandparents love me, they wanted the best for me, but they're, well, baby, what are you doing? Why are you doing? It? Don't make any sense? Well, it makes a lot of sense now.
And so I took a lot of risks where I didn't always have people to talk to. I didn't always have the answers. For a long time, I was shooting from the hip for a long time. It was just my intuition. I think back to Ruggable Machine, Rashiable Rugs. I invested in that company in tw twenty sixteen, investor number five on the cap table.
Everyone was like, Rugs, they're only five by seven. Well now they're nine by twelve, and now they're sold all over the world. You know.
But a lot of it was just me trusting my gut because we didn't have these kinds of podcasting conversations, and we didn't have, you know, women like us that were at this level where we could have these conversations about art, and so I was like, let me just do it by myself, and I hope I'm making the right decision.
It sounds like you have to be really like when it comes to hearing all these different perspectives and here's what our path was, and here's why we're doing something. It sounds like you also have a really healthy understanding of the fact that you don't have to take everyone's path as Bible like as you need to emulate it.
And I think that's where so many people get overwhelmed and they start to get off course and out of center with them and their own goals when they absorb so much, you know, insight from other people and they don't know how to filter that through their values, their
dreams or goals. So can you talk a little bit about how all this information you have been able to you know, discern what fits for you, like what works for you and what advice do you have for people who are maybe hearing you talk about some things and thinking like how do I decide if that makes sense for me?
Yeah?
I think determining what is right for you is your personal decision calculus of the risks that you feel comfortable taking based.
Upon how long you can live in the unknown.
And I think the blessing, the blessing and the curse of being a founder is that you really know how to live in the unknown. Right.
I remember when COVID.
Happened, everyone was like, oh my god, I'm not going to get a paycheck, and I was like, I've.
Never had a weekly paycheck in my life, so you know, in that moment, it was like, oh, there's the blessing, Like I don't know what.
It's like to have that consistency there, and so those those just the same for me.
But it's also that we have goals.
We see what people are doing and a lot of us are sitting back now going I want to be an investor. I wanted this, I want to that. And recently somebody said to me, what do I What's the first investment I make if I want to invest in tech startups? And I asked them a series of questions, and the questions were along the lines up. This is not the whole list, but some of them. How much of a nest egg do you have? Do you have
at least six months of runway? The money that you're going to that you have that you're thinking about investing. Is that the only pot of money that you have to make that investment or are there more tranches of that same capital? Right? So, if you have twenty five k twenty I wouldn't say put twenty five k in one company, right, I'd say put it in five companies, even if you have a smaller position, just that you diversify your exposure because you're not there yet.
Right now, when you go to sell, I'd say, at least pay yourself back your.
Principle and one hundred percent. If you've got one hundred percent, then go play with the rest. A lot of people don't have a good handle on you know, what they're going to save, split, reinvest, what have you? And the more I think think about it, folks are often chasing what they think is the thing for now, and we see investors do the same thing. The investors that were hot into cannabis all went into crypto. Now all the crypto guys are just into blockchain. Now those guys are
into something else, right, gpto, you know. But it's also starting with the capital. You have to get to where you want to go to build towards where you want to be, and that means also baby steps, just like I said at the beginning. So things that I started doing when I started growing my money years ago, I don't do anymore, and not because they're not good for growing my money, but they grow my money at a different rate than I now have access to other.
Avenues and investment vehicles to grow my money. Right.
So I used to buy properties back in the day on list pendence pre for culture, and that was how I accumulated my money in the beginning was in real estate. I would not start out with tech because I didn't have a foundation to feel.
Come going into tech in the first place.
But I felt comfortable going into tech knowing that I had the stability of real estate.
Real estate that was income generating real estate that was a.
Growing asset, but also knowing that I could put smaller dollars into multi family units and rent them out and have small mortgages versus trying to come up with money to angel invest in a company that I'm not going to see for ten years. Right, that's not necessarily an appreciating asset that I could sell at any time, whether it's for break even or for profit. And so I'm speaking now a lot of the times to women, especially around what are the asset classes where you should start
with growing your money? What are the areas in your life? Even if we can think about asset classes, but we can also look at our expertise and our intellect as an asset. And there are so many women that have jobs doing one thing, but maybe they have a super skill doing something else that they could be having a side hustle making more money per hour than they are in a week doing their day job, which provides a separate set.
Of security or benefits that they need.
Right, So what other assets do we have do we possess that we can grow to make money, to preserve money, or to shield the money that we're attempting to create.
Wealth with Well, honestly, I never was listening, like wait, what, like you think to yourself, how do I get here? And you know, like it's I'm glad that you share that you were a single mom, that you went through a divorce, that you didn't grow up with all of this access, and that you persisted your way through. I think that that's critically important if people want to stay connected with you, Lauren, if they want to learn more
about you. Maybe somebody's like, well, I want to be my mentor, Like how do they continue, like to connect with you and to learn what else you're going through, like what else you are working on? Like how does someone follow your journey digitally?
Yeah, So I'm pretty active on Instagram and on LinkedIn. So I'm at Lauren Mylin on LinkedIn and on Instagram, so you can find me there.
Pretty active on both of those sites.
I do a lot of writing, a lot of opinions, sharing, a lot of lifestyle hack sharing. But you know, we as brown women, as black women, being ambitious is not easy, right, Like we say ambition, it's cool, it's awesome that we can possess it.
What do we do with it?
Right?
What do we do with it.
How do we harness it in our life to achieve the outcomes that we want? And I'm so passionate about that, And I know that if it was not for entrepreneurship and my unconventional path, I wouldn't be here today. There's no way that at thirty eight years old, single bomb, you know, a single bomb for eight years, remarried, you know, fifteen and thirteen year.
Old, I mean, never gotten a diamond tiles of word till this day. So I'm grateful for what.
Entrepreneurship has taught me, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been around people who have allowed me to see frameworks and examples.
Of preserving and creating wealth that you know, we can.
Look at and we often see the end result, but do we understand the how or the why? Right we read the articles on what the moves that people are making, take it a step further. Go research, you know, go research what folks are doing. Go research smart way better ways to do something that you want to accomplish. Grab a couple of friends and start making investments in companies so that you can diversify your exposure. Right like you
great to have access that diversify your exposure. Is the worst thing that can happen is things are unplanned and they don't go as we'd like them to. But if we've got this portfolio, it's okay, you win some, you loose them, You win some, you loose some, and it all comes out in the wash and you get to hopefully perfectly have a life that you love and that you're proud of and that is authentic to who you are, and that sets you up to live the life that you want to create for your family.
I love that well. I feel like this was for many people listening, probably like for me, I feel like
the kid who's stuck into a college level course. It was like in the remedial class and it's like this is no, but it's so important, I think, to be witnessed to these kinds of conversations because it's like, Okay, this is possible, and my AHA moment is And what I'm so glad is you know, it's about those baby steps and really like, in order to get to where you are now, you had to first make some money and use wealth building strategies, basic ones to you know,
grow the capital so that you could do something with it. And I feel like Tiff, you're at this like rich Aunty phase where this is the level where it's like, where's the budget, needs to VC fund you know what I mean, like angel investing and all that kind of stuff. So thank you so much, Lauren for just sharing a little bit of your journey, because for me, I'm just like I will always remember it's possible because I met Lauren.
It's possible.
It is so possible, And I want to help you achieve whatever dreams you've got, So we'll talk offline and make that happen anyway that I can be helpful.
Well, BA fam Hopefully you're mind is blown like ours is, and you can take you to listen and yeah, Bob, we'll have ba q A at.
The end of the week.
You have questions you have, maybe you want to be on the podcast because you're dope and amazing. Certainly can hit us up at brownivisionpodcast dot com. We are Brown and Vision Podcast on ig the BA Podcast on Twitter.
But until next time, y'all, We'll see you soon.
Hey, BA fan, we could not do this show without your support or the support of our team behind the scenes. The Brown and Vision Podcast is produced by Cumulus podcast Network. It's edited by the wonderful Emani Crosby and produced by Tanya Bustos. Dennis Stimplinsky is our in house tech guru, and I am Bandy Wodrid Santos your co host, and I will see y'all next week