The More You Known: Trevor Rozier-Byrd — The Investment App Invested in Bridging the Racial Wealth Gap
Centuries of systemic racism have caused extreme racial disparities in income, opportunity, health, and education. To this day, the racial wealth gap is only widening, with White millennials holding a whopping 17x more wealth than Black millennials in the US. It begs the question, “has it always been a system set up for us not to get rich, but die trying?”
I’m biracial –Black on my father’s side, Armenian on my mother’s side. I existed, to a degree, in both worlds (I call it going Black and Forth, but that’s a conversation for another time). This has provided me with a personal understanding and relationship with the dichotomy between a white-adjacent experience and the Black experience.
Of the many disparities that I understood was the one that separated my home from my White-Armenian cousin’s. Simply put, we were renters and they were owners. A memory that for some reason stuck, and as I reminisce, maybe even defined me to a point, was a time when I was washing dishes at her house, letting the water run. A relative noticed and critiqued my technique by jokingly barking, “you renters!” It was the moment I learned that inherently meant something more. Like our economic status was a residue sprinkled all over me and everyone else but me could see. Like there was some greater truth about life that I wasn’t in on. And for years following as my cousin and I grew older I discovered what “it” was: hosting dinner parties, getting a car at 16, studying abroad in Paris for a semester, family vacations, and having a job in college to “build character”. It was an opportunity she was afforded. It was freedom.
Don’t get me wrong, I had an amazing childhood and I am extremely privileged for a myriad of reasons, but sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I had access to some of those same resources. Nonetheless, early this year when my partner (who’s family also never owned a home) and I bought our first home, which happens to be a duplex with income opportunity in a really nice suburb of Detroit, I felt one step closer to the dream of “catching up up”, so my kids will have a head start. And today, when I wash my dishes and reflect on the many generations this home was passed down in the White family we purchased it from, I know now that I can do the same, and find myself still letting the water run.
While I know homeownership is one of the core ways people build generational wealth, I, and many in my community, have slept on investing as an avenue, whether it’s because of a lack of knowledge, familiarity, or just being overwhelmed at the thought.
Trevor Rozier-Byrd, Founder and CEO of Stackwell, created a space to specifically acknowledge and address these barriers, and then some. As a lawyer and business executive in the finance and asset management industry, Trevor saw first-hand the power the stock market can have for amassing wealth. He believes the racial wealth gap is the social issue of our time and has designed an industry-disrupting robo-investing app that is building more than wealth. It is building community and a bridge that disenfranchised folks can use to access more opportunity and ultimately, freedom.
Kern Schireson, Known Chairman & CEO, sat down with Trevor to discuss his journey from idea inception, to the recent launch of the Stackwell app, and what’s next as the PR and partnership opportunities roll in. Below are excerpts from the live interview — in Trevor’s words.
On being invested
We don’t have to look very far to see the range of social issues that are taking place in the country right now. My response to that, and what I knew to be true, was that if you have money, you have power and influence, and you can control outcomes. And rather than waiting for the larger society, or our government or whomever, to do right by the Black community, my solution was to help us do it for ourselves, both individually and for our families for generations to come. So, I started working on Stackwell three and a half years ago.
A lot of people told me I was crazy, and asked me why I would quit my job to do this, “there are other companies out there trying to do the same sort of thing, it’s not going to work for you.” I had to be really sure about what I was doing, and it was really hard. I just continued to work on it. I got to a point 18 months ago where I decided I was going to go all in on it. I just felt in my heart that it was the right thing to do.
I’m a middle child. I now fully appreciate what I experienced growing up now that I have three children of my own. I felt like I didn’t have a place in the world. Like, I was always trying to prove myself, whether it was in school, or in sports, or in my career. I personally loved Kobe Bryant, that was my person in sports and it wasn’t only because of who Kobe was on the basketball court. It was his mentality. Nothing was taken for granted and he constantly felt like he needed to prove something. I felt like in my professional career at that moment in time, I was being told that I couldn’t do something, that I’d regret the decision. I had been promoted to managing director, I was working on nothing but the most strategic things at the company I was at and was leading our executive management team. I felt like I wanted more. And it’s not personal, but when I looked at the individuals that were leading the company, I felt like I could do better. And I was being told that I had to wait my turn. That didn’t sit well with me because of the way I’ve always approached everything in my life.
I decided in that moment that I was no longer willing to ask for permission to do the things that I want to do in my career. I feel like there’s a direct correlation to how I felt professionally, and how many people in the Black community feel about issues of financial access and inclusion. We have been waiting to have broader equity across a range of issues and hoping that we would be in a more inclusive environment and culture. It hasn’t always played out as we would have hoped, but I believe there are other pathways to get there. So, I felt as crazy as it may sound, the risk of me staying was far greater than the risk of me stepping out here and trying. And clearly, it’s proven to be the right decision.
In terms of where we’re at right now, we just launched Stackwell on September 21. The last six months or so leading up to this has just been crazy; lining up partners, lining up some significant investors and then actually executing the task of getting this idea that was in my head out and into the world and making people feel excited about it. The response that we’ve gotten in the last few weeks has been overwhelmingly positive.
I was talking with Stephanie (Knowner) as I walked in and she was saying to me, “I’ve tried a lot of apps before. This is the simplest, most straightforward and not in-your-face experience I’ve ever had.” That is exactly what we were trying to accomplish with this app.
On freedom
One of the most unexpected things that happened on this journey was that I ended up becoming the parent that I always wanted to be. For the longest time my son would come home from school everyday and bust open the door of my office and say to me, “Dad, did Stackwell make it today?” Like he actually understands how tenuous the proposition of starting a company is, right? Through this experience, every single day I’m showing them what I hope to teach them as a parent, which is, if you have a dream, go chase it. There’s no need to fear failure because the journey that I’m on is not about making a lot of money, or people recognizing me as a great leader, or Stackwell being the number one fintech out there. The personal journey that I’m going on right now is far more important than those other things.
I’m teaching them that they can dare to dream. I have always known as a Black man in this country that my margin for error is razor thin. Kern, you talked about me being a lawyer and being on a linear path, right? I went to a great high school, was good at sports, was captain, went to Boston College and leveraged that to go to law school so that I could get a good corporate legal job. Because that’s the path I had to be on. I understood that people that look like me don’t traditionally get those opportunities, so if you get them you take them.
I want to provide my children with freedom. Freedom is not anything other than the ability to dream, and the ability to believe that your possibilities are endless. And just like I want that for my children, I want that for the people that are becoming a part of the Stackwell ecosystem. I want us to empower them by the way in which we are showing up for them, and encouraging them to believe that they belong in the financial markets, and that they can be successful once they get there.
On the subject of building a team
If you think about my career prior to Stackwell, I was in institutional, very structured environments where there was no margin for error. You had to be right all of the time and if you weren’t, your job was on the line. Obviously, in a startup environment there’s so much that you don’t know and you need to understand that mistakes will prepare you because you’re going to learn from them. I’m self-aware enough to know what my own biases were coming into this. I’m constantly checking that because I understand that I’m building a team with a group of people that are not like me and didn’t come out of the environments that I’m coming out of. So the way I interact with them, the way I can motivate them, the things that would work for me are not necessarily going to work for them, right?
The thing that I definitely learned along the way was getting out of that structured mindset, and thinking about building a team. That is really, really hard to do, especially in a virtual environment with a group of people who have never met each other before. There’s all these skill sets that I’m developing along the way. And my perspective around it is, “I’ll figure it out.” It’s great that I’m learning because I’m most motivated by the journey. The thing that has enabled me to have some success is my orientation around learning. One of the core values of Stackwell is that I want people to have a learning mindset. It’s not about having to be perfect every day or knowing the right answer, but having this insatiable desire to get better and to be your best self.
And where that comes from for me is sports, especially with track. You could do everything right, but it could be cold or windy or whatever that day, and the race could not go your way. You could be completely in shape and you don’t run the time, or you don’t win the race. It’s about being able to contextualize your successes and failures, and continuing to show up and train and prepare every single day. That unwavering persistence that I learned from being an athlete is what has enabled me to go through the ups and downs as we continue to grow as a company.
One of the core values of Stackwell is that I want people to have a learning mindset. It’s not about having to be perfect every day or knowing the right answer, but having this insatiable desire to get better and to be your best self.
One of the biggest motivating factors for me in founding the company was culture. I want to build a company and a culture that I’m proud of, and one that everyone involved can be proud of, too. That’s why I’m hyper focused on the way we interact and support each other. I talk to my team all the time about pushing each other and providing feedback to one another so that we can be our best selves. To me, I think my most important job as a manager of people is understanding their motivations and goals, individually. If I can figure out how to help each team member to acquire the skills they need to get there. If we can get to that place together, then we have achieved success. And my goal for everybody that’s on my team right now is not that they stay in Stackwell. I want them to spend some time at Stackwell, feel like they contributed something, that they grew and developed individually, and then I want them to go on and find their own path, be leaders in their own right. That’s the culture that I’m trying to create.
On building community through partnerships
When we think about going to market, we’ve structured it around athletes, creatives of color, cultural influencers, room shakers, and young professionals. One of our advisers is Raven B. Varona, the internationally acclaimed celebrity photographer and Bronx native. Her clients include Jay Z, Beyoncé, Adele, LeBron, and Nas, among others. Raven champions her success with redefining her relationship with money. Like many people in her community, the conversations that build successful money habits were not being had.
Stories like hers and many others are why I created Stackwell. Those are the types of people that we think about in the creator [influencer] space — the ones who are truly oriented around having impact. Honestly, micro influencers and everyday people in our communities are extremely important to us as well.
At the beginning of this year we had a couple of college athletes that were helping out and interning at Stackwell that I was mentoring. I’m a former college athlete, it was just natural. Given everything that’s going on with NIL, we started a student-athlete ambassador program, which honestly was the catalyst for everything that is happening right now.
There were a bunch of professional sports teams that noticed what we were doing and just progressively, one after the other, started to reach out. Ultimately, we were able to identify six partners in the NBA and WNBA in four key markets that we see as being extremely impactful for us. We’re partnering with the Detroit Pistons, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, New Orleans Pelicans and the Washington Wizards and Mystics. And when you think about it, I know for a lot of people it’s like, “oh, a sports marketing deal for a fintech company, not much to see there.” But for us it’s so much more. I see the NBA and WNBA, the players and the leagues as institutions that are extremely culturally relevant. Obviously, being at the forefront of the social justice conversations that have been taking place in this country for the last several years. We wanted to leverage those relationships as a vouch to intentionally and authentically show up in communities that have high concentration of our target market and are most impacted by the effects of the racial wealth gap. Yes, we built an app, but that alone is not going to solve the problem.
What’s going to solve the problem is increasing representation and a belief that people belong in this space and can be successful once they get there. And so all of these things — whether it’s the student athlete program or the NBA partnership — is about starting to change that narrative, and making people feel like, okay, there’s people that look like me and have similar experiences to me that are doing this thing, and so maybe I can do it too.
On Representation
There’s a lot of other FinTech platforms out there that do similar things to what we do, but I don’t think that they are as intentionally focused on addressing the needs of people within the Black community — drawing people into a conversation and helping them break down the barriers of getting them into the market and the investment space. So much of this is about community. The first deal that I ever did when I graduated from law school was an IPO for a company that was founded by Bob Johnson. He was one of the first Black billionaires in the country, the founder of BET. I remember sitting in a conference room at the financial printer, representing the underwriters on the deal. Everybody on my side of the table was an older white male and everybody on his management team was Black.
What’s going to solve the problem is increasing representation and a belief that people belong in this space and can be successful once they get there.
The CEO and CFO of the company came up to me in the room and they wanted to know who I was, why I was there, what I was trying to accomplish in my career. And a five minute conversation changed everything. It made me feel like I could be them at some point in the future. It gave me the confidence to do what I’m doing at Stackwell. I very personally understand the power of seeing someone that looks like you doing this thing that you always thought was just in your wildest dreams. And so that’s why I’m focused on making sure we show up right way in this moment to encourage and empower people to believe that they belong.
On What’s Next
You’re going to think my answer is a little cliché, but I don’t allow myself to think about that. I don’t want to get too far from where we’re at, because I know how tenuous the situation is. It’s great that we launched and we’re getting all the inbound traction, but who knows what will happen.
That’s why beyond users on Stackwell, and money raised, I’m focused on impact, because that’s lasting. Someone is seeing you and I having this conversation today and taking something from it and feeling like, “Oh, I’m going to do something different with my professional career.” That’s the impact I’m trying to have. Everything that we put out in the world can help change their perspectives and realize their dreams. I can’t tell you how many times I meet people and they say, “Thank you for doing this. Thank you for stepping out here and having the courage to do this for our community. Those are the things that matter.”
I very personally understand the power of seeing someone that looks like you doing this thing that you always thought was just in your wildest dreams. And so that’s why I’m focused on making sure we show up right way in this moment to encourage and empower people to believe that they belong.
To learn more about Stackwell, visit StackwellCapital.com. Download the Stackwell app on the App store today.
