Money Activism - Episode 20
Augustus teaches us how to build financial confidence through engaging with financial information regularly through his platform ShareScoops. The inaccessibility of financial information builds our psychological barriers around financial action. The world needs more context on the economy to understand how to make informed decisions about their job, home, savings, and spending.
Take advantage of the opportunity to become an early investor in ShareScoopes. They are fundraising so their community and users can invest in their company alongside our other backers for the next month. Anyone can invest in our company and take part in our growth in shares as small as $100 by April 24th.
Join their newsletter and app waitlist for daily news bites to feel informed on the economy and companies impacting your lives.
About Our Guest: Augustus is the Founder & CEO of Share Scoops, the world’s first money activism platform, delivering accessible news and resources to inform your money decisions and keep a pulse on companies impacting your life. A 2x startup founder and former Wall Street portfolio manager, Augustus proudly comes from a small-town landscaping family that understands financial insecurity. Share Scoops aims to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy by making the financial world more accessible.
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TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] Naseema: What's up? What's up? My financially intentional people? Well, I have the honor of bringing you Augustus Christensen here from a Share Scoops, a startup that he is a founder of. So we got a startup founder here. Super smart, super innovative, but. very humble background. So I really wanna welcome you on the Financially Intentional Podcast, Augustus.
And what love, love, love to hear your story. So welcome.
[00:00:34] Augustus: Thank you. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Yes, this is, Yeah, my only second podcast here, so I'll try and do my best. I've been told I can be verbose, so just feel free to cut me off at any point. I'm happy to jump, you know, I can start with my background.
Mm-hmm. You know, I come from a small town landscaping family from a town called North Branford. Most well known for our annual potato and corn festival. Nice. And it's. There's a lot of ways you can cook a potato and we ha so I grew up, you know, understanding the challenges of a small business, literally based out of our house and woke up to the sound of, you know, truck shovels and hitting the trucks and, You know, understanding what can happen to a family in a recession and you know, then earn some scholarships to some great schools, you know, but also had to take out, you know, crazy amounts of debt.
Right. And work multiple jobs. I think I like to, I'm pretty sure the most, I had jobs I had at one point was five at one point during school. Yeah. Not all of them were paid, which is why I had to take so many,
[00:01:45] Naseema: but Oh yes, I remember those days.
[00:01:47] Augustus: Yeah. Exactly. So, and then I got into finance really in college working for entirely student run credit union from teller to ceo, multi-million dollar institution, which was such a huge opportunity.
And then I was focused a lot on our financial literacy program, really helping students understand credit cards, debit cards, those kinds of things. That sparked for me. You know, how do I make this stuff more accessible? And then went into went to, got a job on Wall Street at JP Morgan a lot because I wanted to understand this stuff, but also because I needed to pay out down those student loans and, you know, worked at JP Morgan.
Then for eight years I was a portfolio manager, which, Which means, you know, I was mostly working with nonprofits, endowments, foundations. They have a big pool of money, right? And they need somebody to oversee it. They would hire me, and it would be my job to understand what's happening across every economy, across the world, every market, every type of assets, stocks, bonds, private investments, hedge funds, real estate.
All of it had to understand how it all fits together and how to. You know, billion dollar portfolios to make sure that we're not losing money. And then, so that was my that was my career up until I started chair scoops.
[00:03:16] Naseema: So before you started working for this credit union, which is. Amazing. To me that was, it was entirely like student run.
Like what was your background like personally with finance?
[00:03:32] Augustus: Almost nothing. I mean. Mm-hmm. My mom been, you know, okay. You know, pretty good. I mean, she's brilliant. So she, you know, figured stuff out like, you know. Most smart moms do. Right? My dad did not go to college, does not have a background in finance, you know, grew up his mom, you know, like struggled a a lot, you know, in terms of mm-hmm.
You know, financially. So they really understood financial insecurity for me. You know, I didn't know much about it, but I did, I think I started buying my first stock. For my grandma told me to buy stock in college in 2012. My first stock was Facebook. It was actually a great trade. It was Facebook right after they iPod.
Uhhuh, now that I think about it. But I didn't, did not buy or invest again until really two years after I was working on Wall Street, which is what I talk about a lot. Like I didn't understand how to roll over. You know the difference between an IRA until I was managing a hundred million dollar portfolios, right?
Like I still had to figure that stuff out on my own. Mm-hmm. I was getting paid for my investment advice, but you know, I wasn't dealing with, you know, personal, financial issues. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that is the stuff that's so complicated. The taxes, you know, the different account structures, all of those things that we have to make decisions on every day that no one teaches you.
And I. It's like most people have had to figure this out on my own and that, and that's
[00:05:06] Naseema: crazy hard part because you're managing millions of dollars for these organizations, but people don't understand, first of all, a finance degree does not teach you personal finances, and just because you work in financial institutions doesn't mean that you understand personal finance.
Right. And so these are things that aren't widely taught, so people can easily like downplay your experience and be like, well, he works in finance. Of course he would know these things, but they're totally different when they apply to your personal finances. Yeah. So I, and I love that you sharing your background and how you had to deal with financial insecurity.
I mean, A landscaping business. You know, if you're going through a recession, that's one of the luxuries most people cut. Right? And so you kind of have to adjust around that. And so I, I, you've got to experience that firsthand, but then to come into like this financial world where you're like handling all this money, like was.
An adjustment that you had to make in order to like understand that difference for yourself personally.
[00:06:12] Augustus: That's really interesting. You know interesting thought. I think psychologically there. Yeah. There was a lot that went through my mind through this career. One that I felt almost like, you know, constantly, you know, Be here, shouldn't be in these rooms, but you know, that also, you know, those people think about money in such a different way, right?
Yes. Is, for me it was, you know, I've never been someone who. You know, was drawn to money for money's sake mm-hmm. By my parents. Mm-hmm. Never just had that, you know, value for stuff or, you know acquiring money. I never had this love, and that's why, you know, I think I became a really great portfolio manager is because I was able to disassociate with.
You know the numbers a little bit more. Mm-hmm. Right. That I was less emotionally attached to it. I could just think analytically, you know, analyze probabilities really well and say, you know, these are the logical, rational decisions to make. Because the emotional decisions are typically the ones that get you into trouble.
With mm-hmm. Your investments. And so for me that I think was, you know, the biggest learning process. But otherwise, outside of that, from a personal perspective, you know, I was, from this time, I was there really working on share scoops in theory, right? Mm-hmm. Cause I was focused on this problem and you know, it goes by a lot of different names, and it might be financial literacy, but financial literacy people often think about, Budgeting is savings, right?
Thinking about that, like very basic personal finance stuff. But for me it went, the problem was bigger than that, that I talk a lot about economic literacy, where I, what didn't make sense to me is why my smartest, most intelligent, most well-informed friends, which would still actively. Disengage from having any kind of opinion on anything financial, right?
Mm-hmm. I would literally be a 27 year old sitting across the table from a billionaire. I would talk to them about, you know, stock market and they'd clam up, right? Like they wouldn't, like these are titans of industry who have built businesses that worth mil billions of dollars that still. Feel like they don't know about, like have an opinion about the stock market because the entire financial world has created this barrier and these psychological feelings that we all feel like this stuff isn't for us.
Like we shouldn't know anything about it. It's way too complicated for us and we can't even, there's not really anywhere to start and that mm-hmm. I found is mostly psychological. This stuff, once you're into it, it's not a problem of like the actual concepts or the actions that you need to take that are being difficult.
It's just the way that the information is presented and just are, you know, hesitation towards action and not being able to have any. Context, right? Mm-hmm. Do I take out a mortgage variable rate mortgage or a fixed rate mortgage? To buy a home is a very difficult decision to make without, mm-hmm. Without any context of understanding whether, you know, real estate prices are up or down, or why they go up or down at all, or where we are in the economy or the recession, or you know, is this booming?
How do mortgage rates work? Why do rates. Why did they go down? So trying to make any decision without context is very difficult. But for us, every single financial decision we have to make with almost no context, it's a multi-hour research project just to kind of figure out how to make this life changing decision.
And that was what got me onto Share Scoops was how can I create an experience where it's easier for people to engage with? More regularly, right? Mm-hmm. More incrementally each day. How can I show people the storyline of the economy, right? Each little day so that the stock market being up or down is not so scary.
You know, when you only see the. Gow down 300, 500 points. Well, it's actually not that much in a day, right? Yeah. But like they make it, you know, with all the red graphics, it's gonna look scary. But if you can see that goes up and it goes down every day, then oh, okay. It's not quite as scary. And if you can understand now why it goes up and down, you can say, oh, this might be a good time.
I'm a little bit more comfortable trying to invest. And the same thing works with companies, right? A stock. Is just the quantification of a company's story arc. So if you can know its story, you understand why the stock is going up or down over time, and it's easier to get a grasp on it than it being this, you know, number that just goes up and down.
So we started talking about the economy. Companies in a way that people can relate to and feel passionately about, right? How are they affecting their employees, their communities, the planet, and things that people can then have an opinion on? And I found that if I can just get people to have an opinion, I like this company or I don't.
It gets them over that psychological barrier that, you know, this stuff isn't for me and can get them on the on-ramp towards some level of financial activity.
[00:11:46] Naseema: I love that. I love that. And thank you for sharing like the origins of Share Scoop and what you guys do, because I think. Accessibility is important.
And I think so many people make financial decisions like, oh, whether I should take out a fix or a variable rate mortgage based off of people that don't have financial expertise because of the intimidation factor of trying to learn it on their own. And I feel like there's a lot of gatekeeping in finance.
Yes. Intentional or non-intentional. Where people just don't know how to access information that is actually consumable at a level that most people can understand. Like these concepts do not have to be hard. Like you said, if you can get somebody interested in learning about a company, you can kind of get them to understand those financial concepts.
And I think like, This thing that we do by making, talking about money taboo and by making an or over complicating financial concepts to you know, like I, I I really think it's intentional. Keep certain people out of conversations. Yeah. I think is something that you're aiming to change. And I think that you're, ma you're What you're doing with Share Scoops is phenomenal as far as, as you call it, financial activism as far as putting information in front of people in a digestible way so they can make informed decisions about their personal finance.
So I love what you're doing. Right? Thank
[00:13:22] Augustus: you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's it's been a battle and you know, we're building and now we're catching a lot of momentum, which is exciting. Mm-hmm. The, mm-hmm. To your point The financial activism, I think, can be taken a lot of ways, but the main key is that we're trying to help empower people to understand what they can do, right?
Yeah. What the, you know, impact of their decisions, not only for themselves, for their future, to build wealth, to build stability. To build a better career, but also, you know, how that can affect society, companies, the future, our planet in ways that, you know, align with our individual values that we have a say in what we're doing.
Because a lot of it is intentional, right? And the gatekeeping, mm-hmm. Of the financial information, because the two. You know, revenue models for the financial world are advice and transactions, right? Mm-hmm. So if you don't need to pay for my advice, that's a huge, that's one revenue stream down. And then transactions.
So if I'm, you know, Talking about, I'm trying to get you to trade more. Here's my next idea, right? Here's this next product or investment. So something as simple as, you know, buying this and P 500 index fund and automating $10 into that every week puts the financial world out of business, basically. Right?
And so, and that applies to so many things. You know, you talk about the mortgages, One, we're forced to either because we're hesitant and lack confidence to go to people that we shouldn't be listening to, but otherwise, the majority of these decisions we have to get advice from the people who are benefiting from our action regardless of the outcome.
Right? Yes. You need to take out you know, you're trying to buy a car. Should I take out a loan? You're asking the, you know, auto dealer. You need to buy a home. Is it a good time to buy a home? You're asking your realtor who makes money regardless, right? You need to, you know, start to invest. Should I be buying this investment product?
You're gonna pay a financial advisor who then, you know, is making money off of you. Either way. Should I be saving at all of these things? We are being guided by the people who are making money, regardless of the outcome. Mm-hmm. So what we're trying to do is make this whole world, these resources, the news, the, you know, tools accessible so that people have this resource and this power at their fingertips.
To actually take action in a way that benefits them.
[00:16:11] Naseema: So walk us through the Share scoops platform, like how can your everyday consumer access share scoops and benefit
[00:16:19] Augustus: from it? Awesome. So right now we are still in our closed. Beta, which means we have a small group of users who are using our app, giving us feedback so we can tweak the last final things to make sure it's really great experience, you know, giving people the right background and the onboarding, all of that awesome stuff and we should be, or targeting to release that.
And we're starting to open, add more people each week, each month, and we'll hope to be releasing the app publicly very soon. But right now, you can also get what's our initial experience that's helped us, you know, reach a community of over 50,000 people and through our website@sharescoops.com, sign up for our newsletter where you get our high level.
Daily economic bites. Our weekend, you know, deep dives into bigger questions about, you know, what's happening in the economy, how corporations are impacting our lives, and how do we make smart, you know, money decisions. And then within our daily newsletter you're also get a brief look into our, you know, early app, which was you can open up, see individual company news scoops that we're sharing and you get to vote on them and react.
And that voting is a key thing that we have been building because not only do we want you to, you know, be able to have an impact with your dollars and your work decisions, but also with your voice or trying to create a daily mm-hmm. You know, feedback loop where. We can put consumers, your average person, get them a voice in the boardroom of these companies and create a more democratic process here where we can create that level of feedback.
So our voting, you know, within our app, what we're excited to be launching is now. Basically like a news app with company profiles on every single public company so you can look up and not understand, not only, you know, how do they make money in simple terms, but what are their emissions? What is their board diversity?
How do they treat their workers? What is their waste? And then importantly, how do all your peers feel about this company? How have they rated it and voted on this company the whole time so that you can make informed decisions whether you wanna work there, shop there, invest there, and then we're curating daily pieces of news that are much simpler that you get to vote on and stay in touch with what's happening.
And all combined with that, We gamify everything with financial education tools that you know right there at your fingertips. Right? So you know, that quick access little toolbox of I need to open an investment account, let me like, Scroll through a few images in the video and feel like I know what I'm about to do.
And then we've pulled together, I think I've signed up for, I don't know, literally countless financial services at this time to test everything out. I don't, just the test. I did a whole video of like my. Debit cards are raining down. Cause I think I have 30 something debit cards now. Don't worry, not credit cards, don't open that many credit cards.
But we've tested all these services and found partners that we really, really trust. Right. And trying to narrow it down. Cuz overall over and over again, it's, you know, I guess like you've helped me start to invest. How, where do I do it and what do you recommend? Mm-hmm. So we're trying to make sure that that action step, whether it's.
A budgeting app or credit builder or investment platform is right there at your fingertips. And now we're doing some cool things with like micro philanthropy apps and you know, some carbon you know, carbon offsetting apps and those kinds of things. So we've got some exciting stuff going. And I think the last exciting thing about our app, if you can't tell, we put a lot of work into this, is.
We have some partnerships now where our users, everything that you're doing in the app, reading, voting, sharing, all of these things that help you engage with the economy, build your financial confidence, and subtly teach you how to be like an investor. Earn you points that you'll soon be able to convert at our partners for cash in a savings account and an investment account, and suspend at over 200 different brands from Amazon to Uber, Marriott, Southwest, so that our users will literally earn money.
Just for reading the news and having an opinion about it. So like talk about, you know, financial equality, like we're really trying to make this accessible and not only accessible, but valuable for people.
[00:20:56] Naseema: I love everything that you're saying and this is like super exciting. And I also know that, you know as a startup you got in about to go public with your app, you are also.
You also have the opportunity for people to invest in your platform as well, for very little money. You wanna talk about that?
[00:21:19] Augustus: Yeah. This is something that's been, you know, part of my, you know, goal for a while because. And we're about financial accessibility, right? And this aligns really well with our mission.
So the way that startups work and startups funding is typically to invest in a private company because it's riskier, right? You're, it's not something you can trade in and out of, like a stock on the stock market. It's something that, you know, a lot of businesses, private businesses fail, and it's something that carries a lot more risk.
So the way that regulators handle that, Only what's called accredited investors are allowed to invest in private companies. And that is typically, you know, the ultra wealth. You have to hit, you know, wealth benchmarks or professional investors. You have to have certain levels of certifications or be a full, you know, investing institution.
So, It makes it startup startup investing inaccessible to most people. So we're working with a platform called Republic that allows us to open a portion of the round that we're, we're also in, you know, raising money from venture investors, angel investors. But this allows us for the next, I think, 45, 40 days to, for anyone in our c.
To and our users to invest in our company and actually own, be an owner, share scoops and take part in our growth for as low as a hundred dollars bite size. So really excited to be able to have, bring our, you know, users and community along with us.
[00:22:58] Naseema: That is super exciting. But one other thing I wanted to touch on that you were sharing is that voting aspect and getting people used to voting and sharing their voices and having an active say, is something that even I have been guilty of.
Like O only shares in companies, but not using my voting power to make decisions. So oftentimes these decisions. Aren't made by people that represent us or represent our values, right? And so our values get under a dress or are brushed under the rug. And I feel like that's a form of. Financial activism in itself is using your voice because even if you do own an s and p 500 index fund, you'll have shares in Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Google, all these places where you d where you have voting power that you can go to.
These meetings or attend these meetings and have a vo, a vote to say like, no, we don't. We don't believe in this. Right? We don't want you to do this. Actively use your voice to control what's going on in society. So I love that that's built into your app and that's something that you are normalizing for people, because I just don't think people understand that they have that power.
[00:24:19] Augustus: Absolutely. That is the biggest thing that we're trying to push. Like I said, it's, you know, yeah, it was fundamentally based in this, you know, financial, behavioral finance aspect to just get people to engage and then they comprehend this process a lot more quickly. But then we realized you. Try and get people to listen to this.
And now we are working on partnerships with press release firms. We've got public companies that are on our wait list to actually use our insights and be able to respond directly and hear directly. And what we're focused on is making sure that, one, we're super transparent in everything that we're doing here, that this is not, you know, trying to give the company something.
They, yeah. Another insight into what we're doing cuz we don't need that anymore. Yeah. But to create this feedback where you could see on, you know, right now if you pull up a Wall Street Journal article, you see the stock price move in there and a little widget, we'd love to be able to say like, this is how people are reacting across these different factors from their overall people planet product.
So that people can vote and actually show. We don't like what's what's happening, and that's what we're working on is because. What you were talking about is called proxy voting. If you're a shareholder mm-hmm. And a particular company, and we own an individual direct share, you can have a vote in their annual proxy report, their annual proxy vote, which is every year there's going to be different proposals.
You know, how much you pay the ceo, whether there's new board members, if they're, you know, if you wanna approve a merger or something like that, you actually have a say as a shareholder. But it's hard to have an effect with that scale because one, many of us own our investments through funds and with the fund.
Mm-hmm. You don't necessarily get that vote. You know, some of them are changing their rules, but you know. Mm-hmm. If you have, you're investing through Vanguard or, you know, m i-shares or spi, spider Right. S and p, these c. Own your vote fidelity, right? They are. So there are really like four companies that control most of the votes of every annual meeting for every public company.
They're like the biggest shareholders. In every company. And so it's really them who is deciding what happens. And that's why some of these, like BlackRock have had a lot of pressure on, you know, the sustainability, the E S G side, if you're familiar with that stuff, these different initiatives because where they vote, Matters and decides basically everything, but what mm-hmm.
We're trying to do is pull that a step back from the tough logistics of how do I even submit a vote on my proxy? Right? Like, I know I've been getting the emails in from, you know, my various different investment platforms. But I haven't been good about proxy voting individually. So what we're doing is taking this a step back because it's not all about individual shareholders.
Stakeholders are really important here too, which means anybody who is. You know, has a stake in the outcome of this company. And that means employees, that means customers. The communities in which these companies operate are planet, are all stakeholders that should, you know, the planet probably can't speak up.
I mean, it's, I might have be doing a good job where you're hearing from the planet a lot more lately, so tell me about it. But that's the point is that we're trying to get everybody a. And then we can create this feedback loop where they hear, oh, we don't like this. We don't do like this. And our next step is to be able to have companies actually contribute to their profiles and.
Write their own scoops, communicate directly to our audience, get that poll based feedback from them and understand, oh great, you know, we made our product more sustainable, or we changed this, you know, policy to improve the. Financial wellbeing of our workers. Awesome. 80% of people loved it, improved our overall brand by 2%.
Our people score or 5% and drove 10,000 applications to our talent page. And now that company has a measurable brand and business opportunity that says, oh cool, investing in our workers is, has a measurable good outcome for us. We should maybe do this more. Okay, cool. So that's the kind of thing that we're building towards with this, is to be able to actually give our users and their votes a voice directly pipelined into these individual companies.
[00:29:20] Naseema: I love it. I love it. And thank you for politely correcting me because you know, like I think that Those proxy votes are, I mean, I still, I still get them, but I, but it's important to know like where the power still really stands and who gets to, who has a voice at the table. And so like one of them, you do
[00:29:44] Augustus: vote though not to, correct?
Yeah, exactly. Some of them you do vote, some of them they listen to you. Right. And then try, say, they try and vote you know, in accordance to their shareholders as well, you know, from the different funds. But it can. That's tough.
[00:29:58] Naseema: But I like that share scoops is like, all right, you got this table, but we're pulling up our own table that has voice, a voice and value, and what we're saying collectively makes an can make an impact and we matter.
And so I like that you guys are just like, no, we're changing the game. Yeah. Okay. And you're gonna listen to us and this, this is the voice of the people. So I think that's incredibly, incredibly dope. So I know that you have the share scoops, share scoops.com. You have your newsletter, you have your share scoops social media pages.
You wanna share those?
[00:30:37] Augustus: Yeah, absolutely. So you can find us. Share scoops Instagram. It's where we have our biggest community also on LinkedIn. And you know, we're doing our best on, on TikTok, but I just have not mastered those videos just yet. I don't know. I, I do like to dance, but I have not done it on videos yet.
[00:30:56] Naseema: I wanna see that. I guess so. I, I just know that you guys, you have some very exciting things coming up in the very near future. 45 days out is not a lot of time, so that's exciting. And so just if people wanna keep in touch with you, And keep in touch, like stay up to date right now and figure out what's going on right now.
The best way, what's the best way for them to learn more about shares,
[00:31:25] Augustus: scoops ota shares scoops.com. And there you can see a link to our fundraising page if you'd like to participate in our investment round. And then you can also sign up for our newsletter slash app wait list right there. And then all of our social links are there.
[00:31:45] Naseema: Yes. I love all the information that you've shared. Like I said, you are changing the game. You are bringing accessibility to personal finance and economics, which is can be super overwhelming for people to understand. So I love what you're doing out there. That's why I wanted to have you on the platform because I see the value and I can see how so many people can benefit from it.
And I just wanted. Thank you for making finance more accessible to the people.
[00:32:14] Augustus: Well, thank you. That means a lot. I do really appreciate that. So, you know, we're working to try and do this for people every day. So every little, you know, every additional person we can help is, you know, means a lot to all of us.
So yeah. Thank you so much. For having me here. This is a lot. This is a lot of fun.
[00:32:32] Naseema: Oh, thank you. And I can, I feel honored to say that, you know, I was, I've been there from the beginning. Absolutely. So when you blow up, don't forget about the little people. Never. All right. Thanks again, dude.
[00:32:47] Augustus: All right.
Thanks so much.
Hey there I’m Naseema
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