Kate Richard:

We're going to do something differently. We're going to look at the same assets that everyone else is looking at differently and we're going to have true integrity to the data. And that was what united us. And so it was almost like accuracy and a deeper understanding of risk and a different way of doing things. That was the biggest uniter. And I jokingly, but it was like apted. Would say this is an Ocean's 11 team because a lot of those early people that you need in building a business are truly excellent in certain things. And it was a team of different people from different places that had not worked together but deeply respected each other intellectually. You're always trying to keep what you had originally as the business grows. And I think that's the biggest cultural challenge that you see.

Nancy Lashine:

Hello and thanks for tuning in to Real Estate Capital. I'm your host Nancy Lashine of Park Madison Partners. Park Madison is a capital solutions and advisory firm serving the global institutional real estate business. We sit at the intersection of real estate managers and their capital partners. In bringing these two groups together, we speak to a broad range of thought leaders about recent trends in real estate investing, capital markets, operations and technology. And on this show, we try to bring some of those insights and conversations directly to you.

Our guest on this episode is Kate Richard, founder, CEO and co-chief Investment Officer of Warwick Investment Group. Warwick is a global real estate and natural resources SEC registered investment advisor with two and a half billion under management and an impressive roster of institutional clients. My conversation with Kate focuses on her story as a female entrepreneur and how she built a global investment management business in a decade. Kate started Warwick when she was 28 years old. She now leads a team of over 90 people with capital commitments from some of the world's most sophisticated institutions. Kate has been extraordinarily successful and has a wonderful personal story. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Kate, so delighted to have you. Welcome to the show. I'm just thrilled to have a female entrepreneur and also an entrepreneur who's formed a firm that crosses asset classes and continents. So why don't we start by having you describe what the status of the firm is today.

Kate Richard:

Thank you for having me, Nancy. I am happy to talk with you and always enjoy our conversations. So I founded this business, Warwick Investment Group 13 years ago. We invest in real assets, so both in real estate and in natural resources both in the US and Europe. And we invest in three different asset classes through a variety of vehicles, whether private equity funds or special purpose vehicles or evergreen or open-ended. So we have a variety of structures that we invest through. The business is about 95 people internally today we are about two and a half billion, and this is a big year for us on all of the platforms. So we're growing in AUM and in headcount.

Nancy Lashine:

Amazing. And what are the three asset classes that you invest in?

Kate Richard:

We invest in upstream energy in royalties and in real estate. And in real estate. Our focus is multifamily and industrial and self storage, multifamily mostly in the UK. And industrial and self storage, mostly in Europe.

Nancy Lashine:

Wow, that's a lot of different things and I'd love to talk with you about how you've evolved the strategy, but why don't we start from the beginning. What was the inspiration for forming Warwick?

Kate Richard:

The original inspiration was to be able to buy assets in the private market cheaper than in the public market. And what we quickly found is that going underneath the market and buying from the original sellers and pursuing aggregation strategies was something we were really good at. And we also had a core data science advantage. Some of our original investors are Silicon Valley founders, and because of that we went through Y Combinator in 2014. So one of the largest teams at the GP is actually data science. And that came from our experience coming out of Y Combinator. So we use data science and various in-house built acquisition algorithms to both help with market selection, acquisition targeting sellers, and then also with asset management and portfolio construction. We don't pursue AI strategies, but we are fundamental investors in our different asset classes that are assisted by AI.

Nancy Lashine:

So I'm rolling back to the beginning. When you started this, did you start by yourself? Did you have partners initially? How did it come together?

Kate Richard:

I did start by myself. I didn't want to necessarily start by myself, but it just happened. And I think I considered working with one or two partners along the way. And it just so happens that the things that we wanted to do or were focused on or our investment styles were different enough that it didn't gel to the point that it was really a successful partnership. I would say what's happened over the life of the business for the past 13 years is that there are people whose style of investing and quality of thinking and sense of risk is really aligned with mine. And so they have become partners over time, but they are homegrown as opposed to starting off with a partner.

Nancy Lashine:

And when you started, how did you capitalize the business?

Kate Richard:

I personally capitalized it, which means it wasn't very well capitalized. I was pretty young, I was 28, so I cut my fixed expenses to zero. I just basically eliminated all my fixed expenses and put everything that I had into G&A. And so that was into paying the salary of my original employees. And then honestly, by the time we closed the first energy fund, I was at the point that I think I had $11,000 left. We needed to close that fund or I needed to go back and work for someone else. So I was definitely all in and super invested in it.

And it took longer than I thought to start. That was something that one of my mentors at Goldman had said, if you want to start this thing, it's going to take five years for you to have any sense of whether this is actually going to work. And I thought that's not true. I'll know in six months. But that ended up being almost exactly true. You needed five years to say, yeah, this is a real business. I think you needed three years to say directionally I'm pretty comfortable with where we are and that this continues to be a really good investment in my time and money and career and energy. So we knew by 2014 it was a real business and I started it in May of 2010. So just to give you a sense of how that timing worked out.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah. I remember very, very early on when I was thinking about starting a business, a friend said to me, he had recently started an analogous business, and I said, so how did you know this was going to work? And he said, it took a few years before we knew if this was a deal or if it was going to be a business. So many managers, operators come to us wanting to become institutional managers and they think they want to start by raising a blind pool fund, but they also have an operating business and expenses. And when the reality comes home that they're going to spend a year raising money and not actually doing deals or investing money, they may change their view. So how did you think about that at the beginning about capitalizing? Did you capitalize a deal and try to do it that way? Did you go out and raise a blind pool? Did you do some mix? How did it work?

Kate Richard:

Well, the way that I was answering your prior question was how did we get started? I poured the money into the team and working with the right people to identify the original core team. And when I started the business, I knew that there were a few people, a handful of people for whom I had worked that had indicated loosely that they would invest with me. And I knew how they thought about risks, they knew how they thought about returns, they knew the quality of the work that I did, they knew how I thought about risks. So I took it on faith that if I found something I believed in, they would invest in it. And that sounds very basic, and it was. And then one of my mentors at Goldman who ran the investment bank called me. And this was just one of those things that when you start off, you need to be smart and you need to be lucky and you need to be equally both.

And he called me and said, we have a client that wants to invest in energy. We've showed them everything they have invested in nothing. They won't invest in you, but go and show them what you're doing and it'll be a good experience. So I went and met with them and they were a public chemicals company and after about 25 minutes, Dave just said, we'll do it. And I called the guys back to Goldman and said, "Do you want me to pay you a fee?" And he said, "No, I never thought you could close this gap."

Nancy Lashine:

Wow, what a good story.

Kate Richard:

Yeah, it was so funny. And I was actually very unprepared for the meeting and had pulled an all-nighter working on something for a totally different investor. So that was our first fund.

Nancy Lashine:

Kate, is there a lesson in that by the way?

Kate Richard:

I think that one of my fundamental precepts was that I didn't want anyone else to control the business. And so this first fund and my second fund were not discretionary funds, they were board structures. But when someone would come in and say, "I'll give you 100% of the equity for me, I always knew that was not good equity for us." And that's something I've been very picky about. And we could have grown faster probably with control equity, but I was never willing to partner with that capital. And that was a personal decision. It continues to be a precept that I invest on. I didn't want anybody to be able to turn off the lights. As you grow, you can become more flexible and do SPVs and JVs and probably work with control in different kinds of ways. But for me, that was super critical.

Nancy Lashine:

That makes a lot of sense. It's really important to just in your gut know what really matters and what compromises you're willing to make as you grow a business because inevitably there are. So how did you build the team that you have today?

Kate Richard:

It's different by products. Usually we have a pretty strong thought process around the types of leaders that we bring in originally, and I think it's well said and offset, but critical to say that the early people that you bring into these businesses are really important and they need to be able to execute. Number one, they need to be able to build strategy, number two, to make sure that as you run into roadblocks, they can strategize around solutions to continue talking to market in different ways. And thirdly, they need to be able to work laterally, I wouldn't say as one man bands, but they really need to be able to do a lot of things.

And then as they scale, we use training wheels. So we work with them very closely on the early people that they are hiring in because when you're building these platforms, especially on the aggregation or consolidation side, you need a very different skillset than you need at businesses that are not doing that. So an example that we use is somebody that is an amazing ambassador at Blackstone may not necessarily work very well in the context of what we're doing because what we're doing really requires a different thinking than doing a deal, because we're really looking at how to penetrate and disintermediate markets and deal flow

Nancy Lashine:

As you're 28 years old. And I say this with respect because I have learned so much over my years about managing people and selecting people. You're 28 years old, how did you pick the team? Are they people that you knew? Did you just get lucky? Was it a trial and error? How hard was that?

Kate Richard:

The early hires were easy, because I was working so closely with them. I basically would work with consultants on projects. And then after working with 50 consultants, you can spot a diamond in the rough very quickly. That was really the story of the early years. In no cases in my first 10 employees had I worked with any of those before. One, was a reference from someone that I trusted, but I was really looking for work ethic. And then I think about this a lot now. It's actually interesting being 13 years in and looking at how employees in the US workforce has changed. But the core people that we built the business together, I mean the core people that built the business with me were people for whom accuracy and getting the right answer and thinking creatively are almost like a separate body of ethics. With those early people that were so foundational to building the business, they were builders, they were creators, they wanted to get it right, they put their heart and soul into it. And I think they were probably like that in their own second grade years of their own lives. It was really just an absolute commitment to what they did. And a lot of these are scientists and technicians on the natural resources side of the business, but there was just a true commitment to the asset and to accuracy and to how to look at risk.

And it sounds cheesy to say, but a total passion, I mean almost an obsession with it. So the people that were right to build the business with for me were people that were calling me at 5:58 in the morning saying, "I've been thinking about it. I think this is it." And looking back now I can say their hearts were bleeding Warwick. We all had it in us and we were all really designed to build together, but they were real builders.

And honestly, it wasn't about compensation and it wasn't about equity because we didn't know if it was going to be worth anything. It was just about we're going to do something differently. We're going to look at the same assets that everyone else is looking at differently and we're going to have true integrity to the data. And that was what united us. And so it was almost like accuracy and a deeper understanding of risk and a different way of doing things that was the biggest uniter. And I jokingly, but it was apted, would say this is an Oceans 11 team. Because a lot of those early people that you need in building a business are truly excellent in certain things. And it was a team of different people from different places that had not worked together but deeply respected each other intellectually.

As time goes on, you build out people at the junior level and you build out people in the middle level that end up becoming managers in their own right. And you're always trying to keep what you had originally as the business grows. And I think that's the biggest cultural challenge that you see. Another thing I would say is I was 28 when I started. I had never managed a single employee. I had not even had an analyst working under me. So what I found is that when I had these legends in different industries that I was working with and building with and we were working in models together and we were working through assumptions and analytics and processes, that was easy. When we got to about 14 to 16 people, that was when things started being really hard because all of a sudden it wasn't nine people that you were working with and that were reporting to you.

For whatever reason, that 14 to 16 became a breaking point and it was a really challenge at time for me until we started to get some other people in that could start taking different reporting functions.

Nancy Lashine:

What were the biggest challenges that you needed to overcome in the early years?

Kate Richard:

It's always people. Capital was a limitation, but that wasn't the biggest rate limiting factor, the biggest rate limiting factors, getting the right people into the right business, working in the most efficient manner. I think capital is the challenge that people like to focus on. But for me, it's always been hiring the right people because if you don't hire the right people or if you hire someone that's like a 60% fit, in these early years of these businesses, it needs to be a better fit than that. It's got to be super synced. I think it's just hiring the right people. And honestly, having enough confidence in your instincts to know when to call it. I think off-boarding the wrong people quickly is really important.

And that was less of an issue until we started raising discretionary capital and consultants were pushing us on how much turnover have you had and how consistent has the team been? Because in truth, I should have turned over some of those people way in advance of when I did. They're amazing people, they just weren't a good fit for what we were doing. So I did go through a period of time where I was afraid to make the decisions I knew were correct because of the turnover. And then I realized I know exactly what we need to do and the most important thing to do is the right thing for the business, not the right thing optically.

Nancy Lashine:

Right. I'm sure our audience does want to hear about the capital side of how you got to two and a half billion and grew this business in multiple strategies because it is so unusual. So can you walk us through how did you initially capitalize your deals and who were those first investors and then what is your investor team look like today?

Kate Richard:

Yeah. So the first two funds were non-discretionary, so they were board structures. And in the first fund I had the public chemicals company that I mentioned as 50% and then family offices for the remaining 50%. In the second fund, I had a private equity partner that did not have super majority control, so we had a fair amount of control with that structure. We also had a very large insurance company that had some special control, which was helpful to balance them against each other. And then we had family offices from the first one and the second. And the third fund, I can say this because there was a Bloomberg article about it, UTIMCO was our first investor at the University of Texas endowment. And that was a funny story because we had a very specific way we were approaching what we did and we went in and the who ran the part of UTIMCO that ultimately invested in us basically said to me, I know exactly what you're doing. We've been looking for this, we will invest in it. It'll take you a year to get documents done and you won't like me by the end.

Nancy Lashine:

And I can say I just saw him about three weeks ago and I still do like him, but everything that he said was roughly accurate.

Kate Richard:

But at that point, I started realizing this is a private equity business and we need to raise discretionary capital. And it's funny to say in retrospect, but I hired a great lawyer who worked for one of my competitors. And I just said to him, I want to pay you for three days of time to walk me through private equity documents. So I read every single document that he had prepared for us and I negotiated them all directly in the first fund. So that was really helpful because I learned it really from the bottom up and he was very generous with his time and we had to go through SEC registration with them and they led us through that and I have a lot of gratitude for that, but we decided that we couldn't afford a placement agent. Also, what we were doing was pretty specific, so we felt like we needed to be the ones representing it. And so on that third fundraise, I visited personally 46 of the 50 states fundraising. And that one ended up being a really good use of time over the long run because we really learned these groups and they started their file on us. So now if we call them, they'll say, oh yeah, we've known Warwick for seven years or eight years. Even if the relationship didn't ultimately result in capital back then, it ended up being foundational.

Nancy Lashine:

And how many investors do you have today?

Kate Richard:

I think we probably have about 50 today, but we manage money for nine of the US state pension funds and for a number of university endowments and a few foundations and a number of US insurance companies as well as the Canadian sovereign. The vast majority of our money is US pension funds.

Nancy Lashine:

I have to say, wow, Kate, that's just an incredible success. I mean, to build a client roster like that while you're building a business in a short period of time is extraordinary. Many of our listeners are interested in the real estate space and you're active in real estate. So can you tell us a little bit about your real estate investment business?

Kate Richard:

Yeah, we look for markets that are fragmented where we can come in and consolidate and where we have a real durable competitive advantage in terms of what our data science work can help us do. So when we go into a new market, we generally form data science partnerships with key data providers that allow us to disintermediate brokers whether on the debt or equity side, and that's what we have done in the UK broadly. So we consolidate residential housing, we have a value add component, but we do not take development risk and we are capital stack agnostic. So as you can imagine, two years ago, 100% of the pipeline was equity, and today vast majority of the pipeline is credit and roughly similar returns. So there's some things in the UK that make it particularly interesting. Right now about 88% of the mortgages are only fixed for two to five years and 8% of the market is expiring every quarter. So what we're seeing is that the UK is basically going to have 33% of its mortgages expire in the next 12 months, and that's creating some pretty interesting lending opportunities. We are vertically integrated, so we manage the 21 multifamily buildings we own in London directly, and that can help on the credit servicing side as well.

Nancy Lashine:

So backing up a moment more of a macro question. Your natural resources business is primarily in the US, is that right?

Kate Richard:

On the energy side, it's in the US. There are other things that we do within natural resources that can be outside of the US, primarily Canada and Australia, and that is more on the royalty side.

Nancy Lashine:

So is it a macro view that you have that the real estate opportunity in the UK or on the continent is better than in the US? Is that why you're there or are there some other reasons?

Kate Richard:

I wouldn't say that the opportunity in the UK is better than the US. The US is a massive market and there are all kinds of opportunities in the US. For what we do, we have a real competitive advantage in aggregating a very fragmented market. So when you look at UK ownership in terms of the rental market overall, it's pretty non-institutional, it's probably 20 to 25 years behind what we would see in the US or big markets in Europe like Germany. So we like those markets that are not yet fully institutionalized. And to give you I guess an empirical data point around that, 78% of landlords in the UK own less than five units, so it's still a pretty mom and pop ownership and there's some generational elements to that make consolidation interesting, but the fragmentation of the market overall is one of the drivers. We really specialize in consolidating these fragmented markets.

And then secondly, because you have such fragmented ownership, for the most part, these assets are third party managed. And because we're vertically integrated and we've studied the third party management pretty deeply, we can generally manage them about 20% more efficiently on the asset management side. So I wouldn't say that we think the UK is overall more interesting than the US. I do think the UK credit cycle is certainly more accelerated than the US because of some of the funky structural issues in their mortgage market that I just mentioned. But what we're doing is really our bread and butter.

And interestingly, Nancy, the other place that looks most like London in terms of the lack of consolidation and some of the landlord friendly dynamics is Tokyo. It's not a decision against the US, it's really just based on the structure of the market.

Nancy Lashine:

You've talked about your data science advantage a few times, and obviously that's a very hot subject and everybody wants to think that they have some data science advantage. There's a broad view that that advantage will go to the largest companies who have the most resources to tap information and to put resources on it. What is it that you've been able to accomplish and why do you feel like you really have an advantage there?

Kate Richard:

Yeah, it's a good question. I think that when we hire and when we go through interviewing, we still see a very old school way of doing things, and I would say almost more in real estate than in other sectors. In other parts of the real assets chain, we have a focus on markets that most people don't want to deal with because I mean on the national resources side, we're moving money in as little as $60,000 increments on average per fund, and these are very small transactions. In real estate, we're moving five to 25 million of equity per investment. That's pretty small. So to do that and to have a scalable private equity business, you have to do that at volume. And that's really what the data science aspect allows us to do. It drives efficiency and it allows us to do low dollar value, high volume again and again and again.

One of my favorite questions to get in diligence is how is this scalable? Because there's an unbelievability that you could actually scale and really deploy hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into these strategies sometimes when you see the average dollar size of the transaction. And that's what our track record allows us to evidence. So we don't need to be using the most cutting edge AI about how a particular tenant is going to behave. We're dealing in markets where there's such limited supply and such lack of supply coming online that we can come in and try to disintermediate and we can acquire at scale, and you have to have some advantage on the asset management side. I think there's a lot that's discussed in real estate right now about how if we have interest rates and cap rates moving against us, this is going to be where asset management shines. And there is no doubt that's true. And so that's another place that we see that we do have a clear competitive advantage in how we use things like optical character recognition and natural language processing and combining different types of databases that just aren't being combined.

Nancy Lashine:

And are these all independent verticals and independently funded by different investors, or do your funds cross these different strategies?

Kate Richard:

They are independently, yeah. So energy is separate from royalties, which is separate from real estate.

Nancy Lashine:

Got it. I want to make sure we leave time to talk about you because your story is really so unusual, Kate, and I'm excited that you're on this podcast with us. Is there anything in your background or your career path that you think especially prepared you for founding a company?

Kate Richard:

Well, I've always been a big athlete, and I think about this now having children, but I was a super competitive gymnast. And then late in life I became a competitive figure skater and I still skate every day and I still compete. And I think that when you grow up, whatever the sport is, but doing that sport before school and after school and on the weekends, and it is a passion, but it is also a job and you go through the highs and lows and the setbacks and the injuries and all the things that you go through, it is an incredible training for being an entrepreneur.

I heard another figure skater actually at a private equity conference say that she felt like ice skating at 5:00 o'clock in the morning at the rink in Chicago was the best training because she fell on the ice every day. And I think that that is a very good analogy for what founding these businesses is like. And honestly, for fundraising too, sometimes in fundraising I think you're treated in a way that is somewhat unspeakable, but you got to just brush it off and know that life is long and the world is round, and these are relationships and sometimes the people that are most hostile to you when you show up end up being the people that are actually some of the best relationships that you have because that rough exterior, they used to drive people away, and if you can keep it going, you can form some really cool relationships out of that.

Nancy Lashine:

Did I hear you say that you still skate every day and you still compete?

Kate Richard:

I still skate and I still compete, every day. It's my non-negotiable.

Nancy Lashine:

Wow. Wow. Okay. Well that's impressive. And you're also a mom and you're running a business on at least two continents maybe it sounds like more, so is there such a thing as doing it all?

Kate Richard:

I think there's such a thing as being highly structured. The way that I make things work is by waking up super early and going to sleep pretty early. So the ability to get hours in to work on the Middle East and Europe before the US wakes up is really critical. It's really structured. I have a 30-minute call on the way to skate and I have a 25-minute call on the way back from skating, which gives me time to get my skates off and get on the phone. So we use time super efficiently. I think that an hour long zoom is pretty unusual unless it's a internal team thing right now. What we see with investors is it's either in person or they want to do phone calls, that's easier for them.

And so we've adjusted before. That would definitely be an hour long phone call if we think about five years ago. But now I think people just want to do things on the phone and do it as fast as possible and do it as quickly as possible. I will say that I do think that that structure to the schedule is really critical. I also do not sleep on planes and I do not watch TV on planes or movies. I don't do any of that. That's just free time. So I'm trying to be as efficient as I can.

Nancy Lashine:

Fantastic. I'm going to ask you a couple of quick questions if I could as we wrap up our podcast here. Who've been your most important influences?

Kate Richard:

There've been so many important influences. I was at Goldman just at the tail end of the people that were still there from the IPO, and I was really fortunate because I wrote a letter about how to restructure the analyst program and a lot of the very senior pre-IPO people took it seriously. And so I was able to work with some really amazing people at Goldman who have continued to be in my life and also really influence my life and be very, very helpful in terms of the growth of the business. I would say that there are a few of my team members who have been transformational to how I think about investment processes and risk. And there's a woman that I worked for at Serengeti called the [inaudible 00:30:25], who has trained a lot of us at Goldman and at Serengeti after that.

And what you saw with people when she interviewed is that she spent a lot of time, I mean she do an hour and a half to two hour interview with everybody, with every candidate, and she was very fair, and she also is brilliant, and the number of things she can hold and the different things she can relate, and the amount of energy that she has for looking across sectors, across asset classes and at valuations was incredible and really inspiring. So I would say she had a huge influence on many people including me.

Nancy Lashine:

Wow, very fortunate. Are you willing to share with everybody what you think is the best investment asset class for 2023?

Kate Richard:

It has to be credit. I think the risk adjusted returns that we're seeing on credit are so much higher than they are on equity in some cases on a nominal basis. My big concern right now is that the recession is going to happen in real terms, not nominal terms. So I'm particularly interested in credit where there are equity kickers, because I do think we have to look at principal that's being paid back in nominal and real terms. So I'm very interested in super scalable, highly repeatable credit opportunities that have 12 to 18 months of duration.

Nancy Lashine:

That makes a lot of sense. What's your favorite city?

Kate Richard:

London.

Nancy Lashine:

Do you have a favorite movie or book?

Kate Richard:

Anna Karenina is my favorite book.

Nancy Lashine:

Wow. Okay. And finally, what's your best random piece of advice?

Kate Richard:

The best advice that I have was given to me by a woman called Linnea Conrad Roberts who ran technology banking at Goldman. And I went in and I was trying to figure out if I should go to banking and if I should go to business school. And she said to me, "Well, what are you trying to do?" I knew from the beginning I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I often think that people know from the beginning that that's how they're built, and for me, that was the case. So I told her I want to build a business, and she said, "Well, you don't have time to go to business school." For me, that was the right decision because I needed to start my business very early so that it could inflect quickly and quickly is a relative term because like I described earlier, it takes a very long time.

So I think that my best advice is be very careful with your time. Because in your 20s you think that you have so much time, but your 20s go very quickly and you have all kinds of obligations in your late 30s and 40s that you can't imagine. And so I think being very, very careful with those first 15 years out of college is really important. And I think the advice that is often given that you have to be careful about moving around from job to job. That is true. Because it's a big warning sign when we see that on resumes. But on the other hand, if you're in a job and you know that you are not getting what you need to go on the path that you are trying to go on, I think that you have to be your own advocate.

And I was fortunate because Goldman let me do that. I was in the London office, I was in the Paris office, I was in the New York office. I was in a number of different divisions. And I do think that people really need to make sure that they're getting new experience each year. Someone told me a long time ago, when you're interviewing people, make sure that they don't have five years of experience three times, make sure that it's really 15 years of novel applicable experience and that they've learned a lot and seen a lot. And I think that goes to that really important message about the first 15 years of your career and using it wisely to learn as much as you can to get where you're going. And that's different for all of us.

Nancy Lashine:

It is different. And it's funny when you first said that, I actually, I had chills because I thought that is so darn wise for someone of your age to be able to say that because I can look at the history of my career and say, yes, be very careful with your time. But on the other hand, it's a really, really hard thing to figure out when you're sitting there and looking in the present and thinking forward. And so also not to be too anxious about it because life just happens and whatever does happen will be informative. And so I do see people getting very anxious about their next career decisions, and sometimes I feel like saying, calm down. It does sort itself out. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, whatever happens.

Kate Richard:

And test your gut. When it just keeps popping up and you feel like you're in the wrong place. That's different than that anxiety about the next step. I do think it's interesting. I see a lot of anxiety when people are making the first move out of the name brand place. They're leaving PEMCO or they're leaving Bain or they're leaving Goldman or Blackstone. That's where the anxiety is the most. Once you're out, it's easier.

Nancy Lashine:

Yeah, it's true. It's true. I don't think I've ever told anybody this, but the day that I left my investment banking job, which was my first job out of business school, and I went to go draw some cash out of the ATM, those were days when you needed cash out of your ATM. I couldn't remember my code. And it was just such a weird thing, because it was so automatic. I didn't even have it written down anywhere. But I went, oh my gosh, I am really not myself. That was a long time ago. But yeah, that is a frightening moment and fortunately one that everybody does get a chance to move on from.

Kate Richard:

Yeah, it's funny. People also say, well, I think I want to start my own business, so I don't know if I want to leave Blackstone or wherever, whatever mega name, brand franchise. And I always think that there's something in the entrepreneur that people know from the beginning. I've gotten questions from people like at Exxon on the energy side of the business saying, "Well, I might want to leave Exxon, but I might want to start my own thing or go back to Exxon." And I don't really think that exists. I think people either want to work at big institutions or they don't, and it's pretty binary and it's a totally different life choice. So that's something that I'm always trying to help mentees and also employee applicants tease out because it's a pretty different life choice.

Nancy Lashine:

Kate, you've been amazing. You are amazing. I'm so happy to be your friend, and I'm so delighted that you joined us today, and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Kate Richard:

Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you for having me.

Nancy Lashine:

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