Isabelle Charter - Everything I wrote in that plan was absolutely wrong [LIVE @ WestTechFest]

Live from West Tech Fest - the biggest startup and innovation focused festival in Western Australia.

Head of Venture Studio at BetterLabs, Isabelle Charter is committed to helping startups grow faster, smarter, and bolder — and shaking up what a venture studio can be. Isabelle has spent nearly 20 years in startups, during which she’s started, scaled, sold, pivoted, and killed ventures. Most recently, Isabelle built and sold Drip - Australia’s first investing app for under-18s.

In this episode, Isabelle joins the raft to talk about her many startup journeys, micro-investing, and the importance of financial literacy.

Isabelle is also a Board Member at Meridian Global Foundation, an organisation that aims to change the way Australians think about giving. She'd love for you to check out how you can become an everyday philanthropist, and if you have children (or know someone who does) don't forget to download Drip on your app store!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hi Rafters, before this episode begins, we just want to share a content warning with you. This episode touches on some difficult topics including talking about burnout. If that is triggering for you, catch us back up in the next episode. Otherwise, it's a really great chat and we hope you'll get a lot out of it. As usual, this episode contains adult language and concepts. For centuries we've been told that women are each other's worst enemies, but in reality, we're more like otters than queen bees. Female otters, bitches, if you will, join hands with each other to create rafts that stop them from drifting apart and losing each other while they are asleep. Thriving women have one thing in common. They have a tight-knit circle of other women who help them get there by providing information and support. Join us each episode as we shine a light on an amazing woman and give her a platform to share with us her story, her passion, and the raft of which is supporting her.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Hi everyone, welcome. We are live this week at West Tech Fest, and I am joined by my co-host Ricky, and our guest this week actually asked us to focus on a specific theme for our fun facts, and that theme is kind of bucking gender norms. And we really had a bit of a problem with this one for Ricky because everything she's done for her entire life has bucked gender norms. So when other kids were out there doing ballet lessons, Ricky was out doing BMX, and when everyone else was wearing pink, she was aggressively not wearing pink. Aggressively. Aggressively. And you know, when other kids were out there wearing unicorn shirts, Ricky was wearing dinosaur shirts, much like she is today.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

And yes, it's persisted all the way through my childhood and into adulthood. It's funny, actually, my mum said to me one time recently that when I was really small, about kind of I don't know, five or six or something, I said to her, I wish I was a boy, because boys get to do more things. And like, A, I'm onto the patriarchy, like quite young in my life, but also B, I think the things I meant at the time was like climbing trees, getting to play with Lego rather than Barbies. Like, I had quite a narrow definition of what boys and girls should do, but I was already like, I'm not interested in the girl stuff. I love that. And I'm here with my co-host Joe, and a fun fact about Jo, that is gender norm bucking, is that when she goes on cruise ships, and she goes on cruises fairly often, gang, uh, she likes to get her dance on, and when she does that, she takes what I was describing as the man's role, but Joe tells me is called the lead. So we're we're thinking like salsa, ballroom, that kind of thing. Joe is out there, Joe's very good at all this sort of dancing, and she takes the lead and shows up all the men.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

It's true, it's so fun to watch these men crumple next to me because every single woman that goes around the circle is like, you are so much better at this than every other man here. I'm like, thank you, I know. And we are joined today by another fellow dancer. We have, in fact, danced at a Christmas party once together, which is when we discovered we both did salsa. Our guest this week is Isabel Charter. She is the head of Venture Studio at Better Labs, helping startups grow faster, smarter, and bolder, and shaking up what a venture studio can be. Isabel has spent nearly 20 years in Startup Land, which she jokes is about 147 pounder years. And in that time she started, scaled, sold, pivoted, and killed ventures. I'm interested to know later how you kill ventures. Recently, you have built and sold Drip, Isabel, and Drip is Australia's first investing app for under-18s. Isabel is also a board member at Meridian Global Foundation, changing the way Australians think about giving. You're also a recent award recipient of the Women in Tech WA Award. So, congratulations on that one, and welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. And what is your story about how you've bucked gender norms? This is your request for the icebreaker today.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

So tell us a little bit about yours. Well, first of all, I love both of your stories because I'm also the person who goes to the dance floor and act as the lead, or I just know Switch all the time. I find that that's actually incredibly fun. But the story that I had for today was that I actually proposed to my husband, and every time that I say that I get people looking at me in a very weird way, but it was one of the most amazing experiences. It was so much fun. Yeah. And he said yes! Yeah, which is great.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

I love it.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Yeah, so that was a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_02 4:57

Amazing. So we're at Westtech Fest today, and Westtech is Australia's longest-running tech and innovation festival, providing opportunities for the local startup and tech community to connect with and hear from global leaders as they share insights into how to grow a successful business. And this is our second year at West Tech Fest. And as we're surrounded by startups, scale-ups, and everything in between, we'd like to hear a bit about your journey because you have been in startups and scale-ups and everything in between. So can you tell us a bit about your current role at Better Labs and a bit about your founder journey thus far?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Yeah, of course. So Better Labs is RAC's corporate venture fund. So we exist to both build and invest in startups. And right now I'm leading the build part. So I'm helping lots of founders build their own companies, and we do that internally from our own team. I was actually a founder, so I've been with Betalabs for about five years now, and my job was to create a new company such as Drip. So that's what we do at Betalabs. We have a very cool process from where we just create from idea to commercialization, and then we go through these companies and you ask, how do we kill companies? Well, you know, startups are very risky. So sometimes we have ideas that are great, and sometimes you have ideas that are not so great. Yeah. But we try it, we try to validate it. You ought to try them anyway, don't you? Exactly, exactly. So we go with the best assumption we have, we try to validate those assumptions, and when they don't work, we kill them and we move on and we try something different until we find something that actually works.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Amazing. And how did you get into this area of being a founder or being involved in the startup scene?

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Well, that actually goes back 20 years without saying how old I am. I was still at Uni and I was trying to solve a very, very important problem. So you probably notice I have an accent, and that's from Brazil. And when you're from Rio, one of the big, big problems that you have is making sure that you go into the correct nightclubs. So every night you have a lot of different options, and you know, some of them are great, and some of them are not great. And you need real-time information in order to make your decision. We didn't have a way to know what was happening right now. So I created something, imagine like a Twitter-like, but focused on you know, telling people what was happening in the best nightclubs in Rio. You know, we had thousands of users using that. And the fun part was I feel like I've actually done everything wrong. So I was studying engineering at a time, and my teachers told me to create this business model. So I had a hundred-page business plan that was my final project, got an A, and everything that I wrote in that plan was absolutely wrong, right? Nothing happened. So when things started to not go as planned, I delved a little bit more into what is a startup, you know, participated in a startup weekend, started to read books about it and customer development, and that just really, really opened my eyes to what a startup is, and I just got super passionate about it. I was like, yeah, that's that's what I want to do. I really love this thing. It's I love the roller coaster.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Amazing. Does the app still exist?

SPEAKER_00 8:28

No, it does not.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

So, Isabel, you mentioned that you uh are obviously from Brazil and you're now living in Western Australia. What was the impetus for you for making that that move? That's quite a big move to make.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Yeah, it was quite a big move. So, like two things happen at the same time. So, first I had a sister, well, I do have a sister, that she lives in Melbourne. I keep trying to convince her to move to Perth, but she's been here for 15 years. But mostly I actually burned out pretty badly in Brazil. At the time, I was on my second startup, so I founded a non-profit in Brazil, and I like to say that starting a company is hard. Starting a company in Brazil is harder. Starting a non-profit in Brazil, you gotta be crazy. So at the time I was doing easily like 14-hour days, just really working hard to make the startup, the non-profit, work. I was teaching on the side to actually make some money, thanks grandma. I was living with her, so I didn't have to pay rent and just trying to make things work. And that was like an incredibly stressful time of my life, and I was so committed to actually making that work that it really drove me to my complete edge, and I felt like I really, really needed a break. So I actually started dancing. That's how I started dancing. I had never danced before. I was about 26, and I was like, I need I need to try something new, and I feel like the way to get away from this burnout is gonna be with music. So on the same week, I actually joined a DJ course, and I bought a guitar and I joined dancing classes. I discovered that I prefer to be on the dance floor than actually behind DJ set, and the guitar, it's still there. Can you play guitar? I can pretend like a few, a few songs, but not really. Sure. My place, I belong to the dance floor. Yeah. That was a certainty. But that process really, really started to help me get away from that emotional load and have something else in my life. I would actually stop working to go dancing. And even when you talk about the roles that you play when you lead and when you follow, I think I've always been, you know, such a you know, strong, independent woman, you have to do everything by yourself. And there's actually something quite magical about being led and being a follower. It was incredibly healing for me to just follow and to just allow someone else to help me in that journey, and I absolutely fell in love with dancing, and from that I ended up coming to Australia to take six months off to stay with my sister, and I enrolled in a full-time dancing university. So for six months I was only dancing. I was by far the worst student in class because no one who has never danced before joins a full-time dancing university, right? But it was just so much fun, and I think it just opened up the possibilities of my life, and and uh yeah, and from there I just fell in love with Australia, decided that I wanted to stay, and got a job offer here in Perth, came here, and yeah, the rest is history. Here I am.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

Wow, that's so interesting. I I love the kind of psychology of I need to take some time to stop being a leader and just relax into being a follower. That's really interesting, I think. Do you have any other learnings that you could share with our listeners that you learned through your burnout experience and how you got through it?

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Yeah. So I've actually burnt out twice, so it was actually quite interesting when I burnt out the second time I was here in Australia. I was just leaving work and I called this friend and it was like pretty late, and I was, you know, at that stage I was just super, super stressed. And she said to me, Isn't it interesting that you went to the other side of the world to repeat exactly the same behaviors you're running from?

SPEAKER_02 12:45

Truth forms.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Oh, oh yeah, that was, you know, slap on the face. But I really needed to hear that because I was literally trying to be in a different environment. But if I didn't change who I was from the inside, if I didn't change the conceptions that I had about myself and the way that I connected my self-worth to what I was doing at work, that would never change, right? Because I didn't want my work to fail, because that would mean that I personally failed, because those two things were so attached. So I think just really understanding that my self-worth is not connected to you know my work delivery, and it is okay if the app fails, and it is okay if you know something has a bug, or if I try different things until it finally works out. And I think that really, really helped me in my journey of just a lot of self-awareness and also getting away from just the mental thing, so like the dance, and I also started to do triathlon, so I committed to doing an Iron Man in 2017, and that that was really good because it made me have a commitment with something else, so I knew that at five o'clock I had to close my computer and I yeah, I had to go running because that was the other commitment that I had. So I think just really not only growing personally but creating the structure in your life that will help you with the right habits and the right routines, I think that was instrumental to create the life that I wanted for myself.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

That is a pretty good segue, I think, into finding out who is in your raft. I presume this friend of yours who gave you a real wake-up call when you needed it is in your raft. Who else is in your raft? You do you want to give your friend a shout out by name? Oh yes, and then who else is in your raft?

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Tamara is her name, and she's been in my raft since we were like three years old. Oh my god. So I I actually have a pretty big raft of my childhood friends that you know we're still very, very close. They traveled here for my wedding, and you know, I I'm actually going to Brazil in February, and we try to keep in contact, at least for all of the important stuff, and it's hard, like long distance is super, super hard, but they really mean a lot. And I think just here in Australia, my family, number one, you know, my sisters, I have one here and one in Melbourne, 100% part of my raft. My parents, number one fans. If you ask my mom, you know, I'm I'm just a winner in everything that I do. And my husband, I don't know, yeah. The last king. Yeah, I I mean they do ones anyway. There's a reason why there's a reason why I proposed. Yeah. You know, I actually needed to make sure that he was mine.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Yeah, yeah. Lock that down with a ring and a signature on the certificate. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Put a ring on it, right?

unknown 16:02

For sure.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

So, in preparation for having you on the podcast today, we did some stalking and we found a headline in Women's Agenda about Drip, the startup that you recently sold. So, congratulations on selling a startup. I know that's kind of the dream for a lot of startup founders, right? Is like build something successful and then get the hell out before it crashes.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Lit a sweep, you know? It's your baby.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Yeah. So the headline was early exposure to investing will help close Australia's financial literacy gender gap. And I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit about what Drip is and what your goal there was, and also what is the financial literacy gender gap?

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Yeah, of course. So Drip is the first investing app for under 18s in Australia. So I'm very, very passionate about the financial education, financial literacy topic because it does make a huge, huge difference. And I feel like we don't talk about it enough and we don't know about it enough, and there's actually data to prove it. You know, almost half of Australians are considered financially illiterate. So that means that we don't know basic concepts that we actually need to apply in our daily lives, and that can make a pretty big difference in what we're capable of doing, and especially as we grow older, you know, for retirement. And I really believe that the best way to change that is with early education. Because one of the big reasons why we don't talk about it or you know we don't invest is because we don't have familiarity. And if you don't have familiarity, you don't have confidence, and you end up doing what is probably one of the worst things that you can do with your money that is nothing. Right?

SPEAKER_02 17:48

That's what I do. Let's have a chat about it after. You did invest in Lego once. I did. I did. I it's it's actually an ongoing project. So we haven't we don't know what the returns are yet. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

But you know, imagine if you had grown up and then since the age of 11, your parents were giving you the choice to invest in Lego, you know, actually buy shares. What if you bought Uber shares instead of ordering Uber Eats and Nike shares instead of buying Nike shoes? Allowing kids to actually start thinking about, oh, I actually can have part of a company. What happens if I put five dollars into the top 200 companies of Australia and that money's gonna go up and that money's gonna go down, and you're gonna you're gonna see, you're gonna feel it, you're gonna emotionally connect with that because it's yours. So with DRIP, the kids actually had their own version of the app and it was parent supervised because minors are not legally allowed to invest. So what we created was this environment where the child had the the feeling and the emotional experience of actually investing, but everything was under parental supervision. So mom and dad always needed to say yes or no to whatever they were doing. But the important part is so we we gamified it so they could earn rewards for learning. You know, every week we had three questions of the week like what happened with Apple this week? And then they would have to answer that. Imagine if every single week from the age of 11 you were investing five dollars and learning just one thing about what happened in the market. By the age of 18, you would feel comfortable with terms like ETFs or shares or bonds that are things that we don't talk about. So again, yeah, I know what two of those three things are. But if you were a drip user since the age of 11, you would. So can adults use it?

SPEAKER_02 19:49

Yeah, yeah. Is it is it too late? Can Joe be my parent? Yeah, and I'll just and I'll be her parent.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

So that's the thing. Today you guys don't need parental supervision, but you can start. There are so many micro investing apps, and you can't start with five dollars, ten dollars, and this is not financial advice, you know, big disclaimers. I do like the idea of having educational play money and just give yourself just pick whatever value that you're comfortable if you lose a hundred percent. It doesn't matter if the value is five, ten, a hundred. Pick one of the micro investing apps and just play around. Don't worry if that's going up or down. Just put that money into shares. Pick something that you love, you know, something that you know.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

I mean you're like just have a punt, but I'm like, well, I don't have the financial literacy, so then I would be like, what am I having a punt on? What is an ETF? I don't know, you know? Is there somewhere that women can go to learn these things that we probably should have been taught as kids? Yeah. And then get that confidence to then start.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Like I I'm sure it's never too late, but so nowadays nowadays there are actually quite a few organizations that have really cool resources. And honestly, even if you just Google investing for beginners, there are a lot of really, really, really cool resources. I am a very big believer in the learn by doing because just going online and doing a course, yeah, you're gonna do half an hour. The actual learning will come when you have your money as at stake. No content is gonna be as powerful as again get five dollars, pick a microinvesting app, and then just see how it goes. And if you do the wrong decision, that's okay. Just put it in something you love.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

I think that's really interesting because I I think there's also this maybe misconception, it sounds like, that if you're going to invest money in something, you have to have a lot of money. Like we had Cheryl uh last year when we were at West Tech Fest talking to us about angel investment, and one of the challenges with something like angel investment is you kind of have to have a reasonable amount saved up to be able to invest to start with. But it sounds like what you're talking about with the micro investment, anyone can get in at any price point.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Exactly. And I think that is one of the really cool things about micro investing. Like, Australians are crazy about investing in property, right? And yeah, this is one of the things I noticed when I came to Brazil, right? And I actually think it's so interesting how people are not scared of getting a half a million dollar mortgage because you think that's safe because it's brick and mortar, but putting ten dollars into shares, like, oh my god, that's so scary.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

Yeah, like it is that mindset though, you've nailed it.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Yeah, and and I so that's again, that's that's cultural, like that's that's just behavior. That's because you probably heard your parents talking a lot about property, and you're seeing the property market, you know, going up. And yeah, in the last five years, the property market went crazy. But if you look at the data from like 10 years ago, you know, people lost money if you bought, you know, and sold five years ago. I think there's a behavior shift and there's a culture shift, and it is we need to start talking about more affordable ways of investing and more affordable ways of doing things with their money, especially because property is getting less and less affordable. Right? So the average age of an Aussie buying a property, you know, that was in the in the 20s, if you look at 15 years ago, now is 38. So it's getting harder to access your first property. That means that you need to at least know what to do with your money before you have enough for a deposit, even if property is your choice. Why do you think it is that we don't have those conversations? Well, to starters, because it's a cycle, like if you don't have the knowledge, you don't talk about it, and then your kids don't hear about like my parents don't have any investing literacy. I did not learn anything from them. Actually, I do the I invest for them now, you know, their money I manage. So we need some generation, we need people to start breaking the cycle, and we need to start pushing to talk this the same way we're talking more about, you know, what does gender mean? The same way that we're talking about a raft of women. We need to talk about money, we need to break something, because right now it's not gonna come up in conversations because we naturally don't have the knowledge and we naturally don't have the interest for it.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Sounds like Drip maybe almost solves two problems there because, as well as teaching the kids, it's also kind of a way of the parents being able to learn as they go.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

I'm sure that that was partially intentional. And I have so many parents that came to me. One of my best friends actually, and he was first user of DRIP, also came from Brazil, had no financial literacy at all. And the first app that he has ever downloaded was Drip for his child, who was nine at the time, and uh he was so excited because they were learning together. And today I was in the car coming here, I got a text message from a friend. She's got a one-month-old baby, and she was like, Hey, I want to do something for my child. I have no idea what to do, my partner has no idea what to do. Can you help me? And that's it. I think parents really want for their kids sometimes even more than what they want for themselves. So it is a great opportunity to learn for yourself when you want something better for your child.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

I don't know about you, Ricky, but I'm definitely gonna be like setting it up for my niece when I'm thinking the whole time.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

I am actually the nerd auntie.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Oh yeah, so are we. It's it's at basically our entire identities, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

Not only from sorry. Oh, I was just gonna say, I think my brother-in-law is also a nerd, so if I just like tell him about this, he will probably be like, ooh, let's do that.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

This is what I do for all of my all of my nieces. I actually only have nieces, only women. Uh nice. And for some of my friends' kids too, I actually have an investing account for them. So it's under my name, but on their behalf. And instead of giving them gifts, every birthday I I give them chairs. So I just buy them, you know.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Oh my gosh, so they're gonna like turn 18 and have an entire portfolio already. Yes, they will be so cool. Can you be my auntie? Too late to sign up. So I remember when I was working in my first sort of grown-up job at Rio Tinto, and I'd just come out of university, and they did a like a seminar for International Women's Day where they got all of the girls in the room and they were talking about financial literacy. I still remember how impactful this was. The person that was running it was like, who here knows how much is in their bank account right now? And maybe like a tenth of people put their hand up, and then they're like, Who knows how much is in their super right now? Like a tenth of people put their hand up, and then like who knows how much they owe on their mortgage? Like, everyone put your hand up if you've got a mortgage, and then like nobody knew how much they owed on their mortgage, and it it really showed that there's this tendency for women to just offload a lot of that financial literacy stuff onto the men in their relationships. Is this still a thing that's happening and and how do we fix it?

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Yes, so if we think that like 45% of Australians are financially illiterate, for men that is one in three, for women, that is one in two. And if we look at the most financially illiterate group, that will be women 18 to 24, and that is four in five. So when we look at our young women, this is the group with the least amount of knowledge around money, and you know, obviously talking less about it and having less of those conversations.

SPEAKER_02 28:19

So, what is some advice you would have for, particularly for those young women starting out? What's the best advice that you could give them about trying to assure their financial future?

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Start doing. We are great at doing what we love. If you don't love it or if you're not interested, you're just gonna offload it to someone else. But if you start having a connection with it, I think just build your interest and build your knowledge and the rest will come. I would not start with big decisions because that is overwhelming. And this is a long-term plan. Have a long-term plan in mind. So it's not gonna be the first few weeks or first few months of learning that is gonna actually change the outcome. But if you try to go too big, you're gonna have paralysis by analysis, and then you're gonna end up doing nothing. So just get moving, small steps, that's what's gonna have the biggest impact.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Good advice for me as well, potentially. Yes. What's the next challenge for you? Where are you now in your journey, and what's the next thing that you're working on?

SPEAKER_00 29:34

I've actually just stepped into my new role at Better Labs. So, as I mentioned, I was a founder, so Drip is part of Better Labs. So within Drip, within Better Labs, I've created and sold Drip, and about four months ago I stepped into the head of the venture studio. So that means that right now my part is to you know support the other teams, but also think strategically. How do we position Better Labs as the best venture studio that we can be? How do we take advantage of you know everything that we've learned so far, and how can we make it better? So I actually love this part because a lot of strategy and a lot of culture building, a lot of you know, just empowering people and seeing people grow, and it's it's just a lot of fun, and we have an amazing team. So I'm I'm really, really loving it.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Amazing. And who do you need to help you there? Like, who would you like in your raft that's not already in there?

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Is it gonna sound too arrogant if I say I actually feel like I have everyone in my raft that I need?

SPEAKER_02 30:42

Yes! I don't I don't think that's arrogant, I think that's heartwarming.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

Yeah, I feel very privileged to be honest. Like, our team is so amazing. I can give a shout out to James Edwards, you know, like my manager, he's amazing. And the entire team at Better Labs and REC, I'm just I just feel very, very grateful to be where I am. And I think also just here in Perth, it's such a welcoming startup environment, you know. I feel like even though I arrived and I knew no one, I just really feel like I have lots of friends and people that account. I have lots of mentors and I reach out to them and everyone is always very, very open when I'm lost and I'm like, hey, I really need some help. I feel like I always get a response. So I just feel very privileged to be where I am right now. So good.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

And so how can we use our raft of bitches, our listeners, to help you? Is there anything that our audience can do for you? Or for themselves. Or for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

You can one start thinking about your financial future. I would love if you did that. I would love if you taught your kids how to invest. And I would love if you actually believed in creating the future and and whatever you want for yourself and the structure for that. A lot of the times we feel stuck or we feel like it's not possible to create something better or to have or to change or to start over. And maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I always believe that you can change your life for the better. And I always believe that you can learn new things and that learning can be very exciting. I've had so many situations in my life. You know, I started dancing when I was 27, I started doing triathlon when I was 30. I started a lot of startups in different spaces, and every time that I start something new, I don't know anything about it. And it is hard when you see everyone around you and you think they all got it covered, and I don't. But one, I don't think anyone's got it covered. We're all humans, you know, we can pretend. Yeah, I think people look at me and they think, oh, you know, she's she's got it. Yeah, she's got it. She speaks with so much confidence, and you have no idea how crazy my head is inside. And I'm like, if I sound confident and there's all these things happening inside, I'm pretty sure everyone's like that too. So I feel like there's something very powerful about being comfortable in being a beginner and allowing yourself to change and be in that space. The learning curve is always steeper at the beginning when you start something. So if you embrace the learning and if you embrace the change, then you can actually create something better for yourself. And that can be work-related, you know, if you're not happy with your work environment or your teammates or your culture or your salary, just do something about it for your relationships, all of them. So yeah, I think that's the other thing. Like, believe in yourselves and believe that you can create for yourselves the life that you want.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

That's a very inspirational ask from our audience.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

It is. I love that that's actually the second episode in a row where we've had someone because I think Caitlin was also like, I just want everyone to go and like be the best version of themselves and learn everything there is to know. So we we have some excellent guests, like just saying. Any shameless plugs that you want to give a shout out to before we wrap up today?

SPEAKER_00 34:42

I would love a shameless plug to Meridian, which is a philanthropic foundation that I'm also a part of. And we like to say that we are changing the way that Australians think about giving. And I know we talked a lot about money, and we talked about how to do better with your own money, but at the same time, we have to recognize that in Australia we are incredibly privileged, and you know, if you're making the average Australian salary, you are already in the top, I should have gotten this number perfectly right, but I think it's about the top three or five percent in the world. So even though our life sometimes can feel hard, there are actually people in significantly harder situations. Maybe I'll put that in another ask. Yeah. If you can start thinking about what you can do for others that potentially are in a harder situation that you are, you know, with Meridian, we are a global foundation and we just we are a community of mates who get together to donate collectively to very different institutions. So every year we we select our our donors just come together and recommend charities. We do due diligence and then we select the top three and then we donate collectively. So that means that they get a bigger pool of money to just use towards really, really good work, and and you can be sure that it is good work because we've we've done the research. So if you don't know where to donate to, here's how you start. You join one of the Meridian events. If not, you find a cause that you're passionate about and you can do the research yourself.

SPEAKER_02 36:30

Yeah. That is actually the only type of investing I've ever done. Apart from Lego investing, is you know, like helping people in Africa buy cows and that kind of stuff. I've like invested in quite a few women-led micro businesses in various parts of the world.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

I love that.

SPEAKER_02 36:48

They yeah, and they they they say to you, you know, like, oh, um, such and such is doing so well that they're gonna pay your loan back, and you just go, alright, well give that money to someone else, and then just you know, but you can actually it's genuinely a loan, you can get the money back.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

That's beautiful. The raft is Friends of A Hundred Women, which is another collective giving circle. We've we've chatted about this one before. I think Meridian and 100 Women have the same model, the same model, the same goals, and they're just tackling sort of slightly different problems. And I believe that we're gonna be hosting a quiz night for them next year. So the bitch will be hosting 100 women quiz night. So hopefully. Yeah, excellent. Unfortunately, we are once again utterly out of time.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

That's right. But if you have a story about your investment or you want to get in contact and make Joe be your mum in Dream, we would love to hear from you. And where can people reach us? We're on Instagram at Raft Podcast, or you can email hello at raffpodcast.com.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

And for previous episodes or to find out more, don't forget to check out our website, raftpodcast.com.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Thanks for listening, Rafters. Catch you next time.