Syama Bunten: What if getting rich had less to do with adding more and everything to do with what to subtract? In this episode, Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey joins me for a deeply thoughtful conversation on wealth, purpose, and legacy.

Women don’t talk about money the way we should. Not honestly, not openly, and not with each other. But that’s changing. I’m Syama Bunten, founder of Wealth Catalyst. And Getting Rich Together is where the conversation lives. Every week, a different woman, a different path, and a conversation that will change how you think about your own financial power. This community is growing and you belong in it.

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I am here today with a brilliant and beautiful woman with a smile that could charm anyone from across the world, the incredible Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey. Also known to so many beloved people as Nell 3D. Nell, you’ve got a last name that can kill. One of the things I love most about you is how fascinating and interesting the work you’ve chosen to align yourself with is in the world. You’re sitting at this intersection of performance and purpose, helping people manage through pressures in their life, thinking about not what to add more to their life, which is honestly, I think, what most people try to tell others to do. Add this, do this, overdo this. But your philosophy really anchors around subtraction, what subtraction looks like, and how we can challenge some of these notions and ideas in the world.

You’re also published, you’re prolific, you’re an incredible speaker, very dynamic. But the thing I think is fascinating about this combination is the way you’re able to influence people. So today I think we get to talk not just about the ways you’ve influenced culture, people, and capital, but also the people around you as a little girl, what life was like, and all those fabulous things. So now, welcome to Getting Rich Together. Thank you for being here.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Trauma, not surprisingly, a once in a lifetime intro and warm up. Thank you for that. So glad to be here. I love it. I’ve been listening to episodes, and “Getting Rich Together” just works so well as an intro, because you’re like, let’s get rich together. I’m like, that title just works. So let’s do it.

Syama Bunten: It’s like, who’s going to say no to that? Now, I love your home, your aesthetic, your style. But let’s take it back to a little girl. Did she always have such great aesthetic and style? Was she always so fabulous? Where were you, my love, at a young age of seven, ten, twelve years old? What was life like around you on this planet? Spill the tea.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Definitely fabulous, always, for sure, clearly, nerdily, for sure, but that’s cool. I don’t know if there’s an option for images in show notes, but regardless, I’m going to send you a fabulous little picture just to illustrate. There’s a boa involved and, what were those things called, maybe like a tankini. The little one piece with a hole in the middle. That, and it was a birthday party. I was wearing a tankini and a boa. So maybe there’ll be a picture in the show notes, or maybe people can just picture that.

Syama Bunten: I love it. A little girl after my own heart. So where did you grow up? What was life like around you as a little girl?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: I grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. There’s a day that illustrates the whole journey. I was little, like three, maybe four, so I partially remember it. I have some visuals on the story, and I’ve been told it a few times, so it’s one of those memories that’s a hybrid of what you have viscerally and what people have told you.

It starts in Manhattan, or in New York, sitting around a mahogany dinner table, being served lunch by the Jamaican house staff woman at my great-grandfather’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, with his second wife, who he was married to at the time. That’s my dad’s side of the family, but we’re with my mom, not my dad. My dad was kind of the black sheep of that family, but my mom stayed very close, and I was the first grandchild.

So here we are having lunch on Fifth Avenue around the mahogany table, and the little silver finger bowls come out to clean our fingers after lunch. I put my chubby four-year-old fingers in the sink, in the finger bowl, and push back from the chair and put my chubby little toes up on the mahogany dining table. My mom was mortified, because it wasn’t her family, so she wasn’t feeling totally at ease, and it was quite stuffy. But my great-grandfather was just totally tickled by a three-year-old grandbaby’s feet on the table.

So we wrap up lunch there and drive north, through Hartford, Connecticut, which is where I grew up, in a little carriage house behind a bigger house in the West End, a nice neighborhood that got not so nice over the next decade, which is why we moved. But then we keep driving north, up to a little town somewhere around Burlington, Vermont, to my mom’s best friend from growing up, who lived up there off grid. We got there just in time for dinner after dark, sat around the campfire with tofu hot dogs on sticks that we roasted over the fire, same little baby feet resting warm by the fire. They talked about Buddhism and hippies, about when they’d lived in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, in their post-high school, pre-college, post-dropout years. Then we went to bed and spent a few days in Vermont.

So I think that’s the contrast. Speaking of what you know about my work now, being at the intersection, that duality is in me.

Syama Bunten: Wow. As you were growing up in these real dualities, experiencing and seeing both, how did that express itself within you as a young girl in school? Did you find yourself academically inclined, gravitating toward a set path, or were you more free spirited, on the creative side? Was it a bit of both? How did that duality start to form as you were developing?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: I was just a grinder, an academic. I was not a grinder, I was an academic, purely and singly, and a gold star junkie, but in a more academic, non-athletic lane, for sure.

My maternal family, my great-grandmother came to the United States, so I’m third generation, not a direct immigrant, but solidly middle class, World War II greatest generation family, do-good types. My grandfather paid me for every A and bought my watercolors from me starting at age six. A real capitalist, work hard, straightforward approach.

My dad’s family, the apartment we were at, was Debevoise, the founder of Debevoise Plimpton, which for lawyers or New York people is a huge law firm in New York. They’d started that with a very firm policy against nepotism, so my grandfather was left to go elsewhere. He was a lawyer, but went up to Vermont, interestingly, and did a bunch of legal work for the Rockefellers, helped bring Vermont Law School back to life, was attorney general. Also very achievement oriented, but in a civic minded way, not a capitalist wealth creation way.

That grandmother was probably the most parental to me, in some ways, even more than my own parents. She was tough. She was a New Englander, and she made no bones about what she thought was a good life, which was serving, not being at the mercy of any man, working really hard. My uncle, the dairy farmer, is definitely her pinnacle of success. She was very disappointed that I wasn’t athletic. That was part of the well-rounded piece she wanted. I remember pretty vividly her saying, you’re probably a little chubby because you don’t do sports, are you sure you don’t want to keep doing lacrosse. There was some of that.

Anyway. So how did I find myself? In elementary school, we were middle class like everybody else. There were one or two families that were kind of rich, probably upper middle class, and other families where you’d think, oh, they live in an apartment, they don’t have as much. We were solidly in the middle. I moved when I was twelve. My mom scraped together money to buy a house, as a self-employed massage therapist, because the school I would have gone to was a real battle zone, not safe. The school I went to instead was quite fancy for my frame of reference at the time, jazz band toured Europe, there was a ski bus on Wednesdays, a lot of opportunity. So there I was not a rich kid, I was on the lower end economically. I wasn’t going to J.Crew as often as those other girls. I was fine, I wasn’t lacking for anything, but I wasn’t a cool kid, partly because of my nerdiness, and partly, I think, because of the economics.

So that’s a long, rambling answer to your question.

Syama Bunten: No, thank you. Moving schools, moving geographies, especially as a young person, you don’t have any control over that. Sometimes what’s interesting is seeing your socioeconomic status shift, and it only becomes apparent when you’re looking around you. It’s almost like you wouldn’t have known anything except that your environment changed, and therefore how you related to yourself changed, because it was very in your face. As a young person that can be confusing. What does that mean, how do I reconcile these things?

Did you see yourself, as you think about your high school days, thinking, okay, I’m going to work super hard at school so I can go to a great college? Was there any sense of, I need some financial independence, let me get a part time job? How did you think about that high school version of yourself, looking at independence and launching, in those three years before college?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: I always had a job as soon as I could, definitely, not forced by my parents, but that was how I was going to get to the mall on the bus, much less buy anything at the mall. My grandmother would sometimes take me shopping, or my mom, I think I had some version of an allowance. But I definitely worked, from when I was fifteen or so. I babysat even earlier. I started a party planning company at eleven or so.

Syama Bunten: Hold on a second. You started a party planning company. No wonder you were so fabulous at hosting the Greenwich salon. Backtrack, what was this party planning company at eleven, and what did you do with the money you made from it?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Well, ironically, patterns continue. I don’t know how much money I made from it, but it felt like a good idea. I think one of my babysitting clients asked me to help with a party, and I thought, that was fun, and I could charge a lot more for it. Even that, when you look at it, has depth. I remember deciding I was going to offer this, this was before we moved, so I was eleven or twelve. I had a few babysitting clients and I put it out to them. I think I drew a flyer.

My mom was really supportive. She wasn’t like, honey, you’re crazy, you can’t do this, this is scary, I’m not driving you. She did drive me, but she also wasn’t proactive about it, she wasn’t like, well, how are you going to think about pricing, let me take you to Kinko’s. There wasn’t a real push from her into that kind of entrepreneurship, which is interesting to me in retrospect. I’ve thought about that since, like, have at it, no barriers, no restriction, no shame, but also no active encouragement in that direction of business. In other ways she was more encouraging, but not really in the lane of business or economics. So I had those jobs to have some pocket money.

But there was never a sense, and I got the A’s to get into Harvard, did the extracurriculars, all of that, but not with any sense of, I’m going to get to this new level of upper middle class that I’ve seen. It really wasn’t, I don’t know that we could quite call it intrinsic motivation, because it was totally external gold stars I was chasing, but it wasn’t really about stepping stones toward wealth.

Syama Bunten: And also, to think of it more practically, I need money so I can do the things I want, that’s very practical. It’s like, I don’t realize I’m giving myself this advantage of what we call work ethic, I’m more just supporting myself so I can have the things I want. You had no barriers, it was just, all right, how about it.

Did you, when you started earning a little more money in high school, have a mindset of saving any of it? Or was it more, let’s go shopping? I remember when I was around fifteen, going to Nordstrom with my girlfriends. My girlfriends’ parents would give them money to go shopping, and I remember my first pair of designer jeans that I bought myself, Sergio Valente jeans from Nordstrom, and I just remember feeling so, and it was paired with a Michael Stars shirt, very of that moment. Were there any purchases in high school that felt like a moment for you?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Yes. I think mine was, let’s see, it was the summer after I graduated from college. I went with six friends, a high school friend and two of her college friends, and two of my college friends, we rented a house together, seven of us, three bedrooms, just to be clear, in Newport, Rhode Island. Great beach, fabulous destination, and we got waitressing jobs. Touch wood, this is no longer true, but until probably my mid-thirties, that summer waitressing I made more per hour in a few of those shifts than I did for probably ten more years after, because of Newport. You’d get great tips, Saturday lunch by the water at a restaurant on a Friday.

Anyway, I was headed to Tokyo after that, with a real job teaching English, not a finance job in New York, but teaching English in Tokyo was pretty good money, with subsidized accommodation. So I didn’t really have the sense that I was saving for the year, much less for retirement. I had all my cash literally under my pillow at the end of the summer from waitressing, and I bought a pair of Burberry sunglasses, plaid all around the whole rim, and a Gucci purse, which is probably why we’re actually friends.

Syama Bunten: Oh my god, I love that.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: The Gucci purse is upstairs, three or four purses later.

Syama Bunten: You know, some of those moments, I don’t know, there’s something, nowadays I think luxury and fashion are so overexposed, but back then it had a greater significance.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: I mean, how did I even know? I guess by then I was in college, so there were more places to see it, but there was no Instagram. Gucci wasn’t on Facebook. There was no Facebook.

Syama Bunten: There was no Facebook. That’s so funny. So when you were at Harvard, did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? How did you think about crafting your education, what did you think about wanting to create in the world at that time?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: So from that twelve-year-old moment of seeing kids divided by an arbitrary line, where some kids have to worry about their physical safety, and other kids are getting nourished into Harvard and Europe and skiing, I wanted to go into education. I wanted to fix that. It felt like bullshit, not in a pity-party way, just suboptimal. I told you I was a bit of a nerd, and it was really this sense of, we’re losing out, we’re all losing out by not cultivating everyone the same way.

So I cross-registered at the education school during undergrad for a few classes, and at the policy school for a few classes, and studied psychology with a real focus on social psych, developmental psych, learning. The job in Tokyo happened because I’d gotten the travel bug studying in Paris junior fall, and loved being an expat. So I wasn’t quite healing American public education, but that became ten years of international work, as frontline as I could get in education, ending in Palestine, living in a refugee community for four years and building a mental health program there.

Syama Bunten: Hold up, wait a second. These ten years, gosh, I remember some of the most formative life experiences for me happened when I was international. It’s this opportunity to see that people can be happy anywhere, that the idea of what we need is so relative and subjective and arbitrary, so much more about media and socialized culture than it is about necessity, or true, spirit-led desires and wants.

Talk to me about those ten years. Where was your mind, your heart, how did you decide to go to these different countries? Being in a refugee camp is not for the faint of heart. It’s something where you’re preparing yourself, but also probably walking in a bit blindly, like, all right, I’m going to go do this. What were those ten years like for you?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Phenomenally educational and formative, for sure. Frustrating, because of the up close exposure to the extent of brokenness, of the economic system, of the political system, of every education system, not just the American one. And very reaffirming of the universality of humanity, that talent, and assholeness, and creativity, is just sprinkled around all eight billion of us. There are no geographic or religious or racial trends, it’s just sprinkled like sprinkles on ice cream. So these inequities in how we allow, much less encourage, people to get to their best selves are really suboptimal.

Syama Bunten: Wow, that’s a lot to sit with, a lot to ingest, especially in those first ten years after being launched from university, which are also some of the most formative, because you’re figuring out what these things mean to you, how you incorporate them into your life. When you found yourself coming back to the States, how had you changed? What did you think differently about, or do differently? How did you start to relate to yourself and reintegrate back into the country?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: That’s such a good question, and it shows your knowledge of life abroad, because reverse culture shock is so real. I had changed, I’d never really been an adult, I’d never worked in the United States. I graduated college and left. So all of a sudden, I did an executive MBA in 2010, in New York and London, but I was still technically living in the West Bank, though on the road a lot, and then settled in New York around 2011, 2012.

I think the words that come are cynical, that’s one, and I’m not, if you’ve met me, I’m not. So I’d say not hardened, that’s another word that comes to mind, but grounded is another word, or maybe unflappable is the best hybrid of all of these. There’s just a sense of perspective, of knowing what could be true. You could be a Japanese salaryman sleeping through a rote, dismally boring, poorly constructed English class, headed to work tomorrow with a five to ten percent chance that a colleague might have committed suicide the day before on the train, and that’s your life in Tokyo. Or you could be the mother of a six-year-old who’s been suicidal for the last year or two, threatening to jump off your balcony, and now you’ve found this mental health program and that’s eased. Or you could be the kid of the Jordanian prime minister, who owns Hyatt and Coca-Cola in Jordan and the West Bank, and funds these programs so that kid isn’t suicidal. The range of human experience I was three to four feet from for those ten years made it a little surreal to bang around Manhattan as a thirty-two-year-old, in good and bad ways.

Syama Bunten: Yeah, and also, the perspective and experience, I mean, you can never know less, there’s no way to shut it off and pretend it didn’t happen. I don’t know if you were being paid by an American program or headquarters, but you come back to the country and now this money has to go so much further, the dynamics of where capital takes you, how far it takes you, how we think about what our money is funding or fueling, now that you have this different perspective, I’m sure was fascinating.

During those ten years, moving and traveling, being so frontline with education, when you were thinking about coming back to the States, were you thinking, all right, I have some savings, I can fuel myself until I get a job? Or was it more, I’m back here in New York, but what the hell am I doing, how do I land? How did you think about establishing yourself, coming back in your early thirties?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: So Syama, I have a superpower that’s really sharply double-edged, dangerous, of like total financial faith, maybe I’ll call it, because no, I didn’t really think that way. And yes, Manhattan is ridiculously expensive, even in 2012. And no, I didn’t have savings from my nonprofit salary, which was being paid by a US organization, but at local West Bank rates, essentially. We got paid a bit more than local staff, but not American salaries, not expat salaries. I had a little E-Trade account, thank god, with some Apple stock, thanks Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, so that was going a little ways, but it wasn’t six months of cash.

So I came back, still working in that job. I decided a freshly minted MBA from Columbia and London Business School would probably be the best moment to go get a real job. I applied to a few, probably not that many, didn’t get any of them, or very far with any of them. So I started a company.

Syama Bunten: As one does.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: One does. And to be clear, I didn’t just swing from a consulting thing to a consulting thing, though there wasn’t a time in those first few years that I wasn’t being paid by something or someone. I certainly didn’t have health insurance, or a 401k, or visibility four months out, these were all relatively short term contracts, still in the social impact sector, so not particularly highly remunerated.

Syama Bunten: Not a hedge fund manager, for sure.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: No.

Syama Bunten: What was it like for you to build this business? Coming from ten years of frontline, wild west, I’m going to find a way, I’m going to make it work, being a business owner in many ways feels very natural, like, I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I know I’m doubling down. You certainly had a good degree behind you to help get things going, but degrees don’t replace real life experience. What was it like to start establishing yourself as a business owner, this new identity, navigating earning money as a business owner, but also as an individual?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: It was phenomenal, I loved building the business. I wasn’t shy about charging as much as I thought we could justify from the people we were working with. It was a really interesting business model, two-sided training and consulting. Nonprofits were our clients, so were foundations and corporate donors. We sold MBA interns, in the summer, to do consulting we oversaw. We did training for them, they got the experience they wanted in the social impact sector, and the organizations got a really cheap resource.

Any given summer, we had a client that was a startup nonprofit supporting women in New York City with zero budget dollars, an executive director and a volunteer staff of six who’d put her own money in, and we had Guggenheim Partners too, a very different level of cash. So for that same intern, the nonprofit paid twenty-five hundred dollars, and Guggenheim paid fifteen thousand.

Syama Bunten: That makes sense.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: It makes total sense to me. I wasn’t shy about it.

Syama Bunten: To me that’s actually equity.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Correct, I felt great about it. I didn’t pay myself more than what I needed, which for the first few years was rent in a shared small New York apartment and student loans. I was getting paid back by Columbia, that was a twelve thousand dollar a year subsidy they were paying because I was in social enterprise, life changing, that was the baseline.

Then I started dating my now husband in 2012, and by probably year three of the business, a lot of my lifestyle was dates with him, or travel with him. So there’s definitely been this theme of access, not ownership. I lived a pretty good New York life, because I could afford to go out with friends sometimes on my own time, and then we got into a serious relationship pretty quickly, and I was in Iceland for the weekend on his dime. Even with my nonprofit role in the Middle East, the founder was the son of the former prime minister of Jordan, so we stayed in the Hyatt suites when we were in Amman, and Bill Clinton chaired our gala, I introduced him in DC, and we stayed at the Four Seasons, not because I was paying for it, and not because the organization was paying for it, but because we kind of rode his coattails to stay at all these places.

So as I was thinking about our conversation, that’s a loud and clear theme so far, one I intend to shift over my next twenty years of wealth creation and then some. It’s been really interesting, this approach, for better or worse, to earn, find, accept this interesting version of access, not ownership. I’ve had this life that looks very fancy, very rich in experience and exposure and privilege, but not on my own time.

Syama Bunten: Wow, that’s a really profound thing to land on for oneself, like the responsibility that comes with being in this position of stewardship. It sounds like, I’m here on the dime of this other organization, but I’m stewarding this access in a way that’s going to help support certain things. It’s almost like you’re finding ways to be socially responsible with capital that isn’t yours.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: And it’s powering, indirectly but not that distantly, impact work I feel very good and clear about. Which is really interesting, the more I look at it and watch it. To be clear, I raised four hundred thousand dollars for that company and hired a team that way, and we’re in our tenth year of a two to three hundred fifty thousand dollar federal contract. So there has been real revenue and money powering the organization. I’ve taken very little of that as salary for myself, because I’ve had this access to a very comfortable life from pretty early on. So it’s really interesting, is that disingenuous, to kind of funnel my husband’s wealth into supporting this career that the world hasn’t chosen to financially reward, for all the reasons, not externalizing that for my own choices about how slowly I’m building my practice now, and not aiming at wealth creation and capturing financial value, but having the luxury of really building thought and network and community slowly, which doesn’t immediately generate wealth. Is that kosher? I’m okay with it, but I watch it. It is interesting to see.

Syama Bunten: It sounds like another form of equity in action, there’s no one right way to do this life thing, and every moment, every choice point, every opportunity gives us a chance to think about who we are, what world we want to create, and whether the things in front of us can help further that. I think our action or inaction really reflects our values and integrity. So no matter how much money there is, we tend to show up as who we are, and the money amplifies the ways we’re already in the world.

How have you been thinking, with the development of your practice and your work and your voice, and recently you’ve done some great writing, including the work we’re doing at Wealth Catalyst, but in general around subtraction and wealth, I’ve seen you grapple with these ideas in real time. What are some of the sociological observations you’re seeing? Because you really are like a social anthropologist in many ways, pulling together arguments intellectually, but also pulling yourself into it, from what I’ve seen in your writing. It’s a dance between the two. What have you been noticing in your recent work around money?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: So, we started our conversation with the tables turned, really just talking about, let’s subtract private wealth, not the industry, don’t worry wealth managers, we value your work and your insights and guidance, but the privacy and the silence, right. Amen, hallelujah, get to that Wealth Catalyst salon or summit in New York or San Francisco, or the salons in your neighborhood. For sure that’s a big one, for women, for younger people, for humans, we’ve got to talk about it. But you’re the pro on that, I’ll leave that one there.

I think the one that’s so pointy and activating for me is this wealth-for-wealth’s-sake, money-for-money’s-sake, and the derivative industries and practices and habits we’ve developed around it. I found, with great delight, this twenty-five-hundred-year-old word, chrematistics. Say that one ten times fast, even harder than pistol.

Syama Bunten: When you wrote it, I hadn’t said it out loud yet, I was like, okay, chroma, chre, what is it, chromatistics, I was going to call it chromastics, but okay, chrematistics.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: chrematistics. Which I feel like is almost onomatopoeic, not quite, but it’s as hard to say as it should be to do. Only it’s not that hard to do in our modern economy, and it’s a real problem, I’ll say the intentional word, a real fucking problem, because of all three of the D’s, my three D’s we lead for, me, we, and the world. When we’re making money only for money’s sake, it very quickly and nastily erodes our soul. We’ve all seen it, Scrooge, right, A Christmas Carol is a story for a reason that continues. If you don’t see that, you’re one of them, and I’m sorry, have a great life. So that’s the me problem, and the we problem, also for companies, we’ve all seen companies spiral off in pursuit of profit, and it works for a minute, whether that’s a quarter or a decade, but have you seen how quickly companies are dropping off the Fortune 500 these days. It’s not sustainable, you’ve got to have some soul, some reason for being. And if that reason for being is gorgeous, aspirational, buttery leather bags that twenty-two-year-olds are spending their whole summer’s earnings on, I think that’s okay, maybe, as long as they’re not made by seven-year-olds in a factory that’s burning down around them. That’s part of the economy, so be it. But in the world, when we start making money for money’s sake, people go hungry, and people burn in factories that aren’t responsibly run, because the owner is worried about the money, not about baseline safety.

So I have nothing wrong with wealth, we’ve said it before, we’re not subtracting wealth, go earn it, women, steward it, pass it on, use it, whatever you want to do with it. But we need to subtract this circular, self-contained wealth for wealth’s sake. It’s a disease, it’s cancerous, unhealthy cells that generate more of themselves, tumors we’re dying from and spending billions of dollars on research to end. That’s really the sociological statement I’m landing on around money.

Syama Bunten: That’s really powerful. It puts so many new financial instruments to the test, what’s the point, does every investment need to be a ten x, can it be a two x, and have some social…

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Or even worse. But it’s not even that everyone needs to be ten x, it’s that our model, venture capital, is that only two will work and they need to be a hundred or a thousand x, and the rest, ninety-eight others, will go to zero. That’s insane. It’s hard to build a business, but it’s not that hard if you’re paying attention and doing smart things. But when you’re gambling on…

Syama Bunten: No.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: …getting pizza there faster, or renting tuxes to men more conveniently, but not dresses to women, what are we doing.

Syama Bunten: Yeah, and the model of who gets funded, how, and some of the broken models of venture capital, they’ll invest in ten businesses that are all the same, and they’re like, best of luck to you, and there’s often no further support from the big ones, no real investment in the success of that company, without realizing maybe the lives at stake when these companies get funded. I want to turn our…

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: But it’s the opposite of support, sorry, I’ll let you move on in a minute, but this is real. It’s the opposite of support, it’s forced toxicity of pace, move fast, break things, including your people. No. It’s really, touch wood, I think we’re finally near the end of the worst of that era. I’m not opposed to venture entirely, it’s just not a great model for most businesses. And for a while, when I was in New York, I should never have raised those four hundred thousand dollars. That wasn’t a good plan. There was no exit, there was no scale, that was a bad idea. Thankfully, to them, for the support and belief, but it was a terrible model for all of us. Anyway, rant over, it’s true.

Syama Bunten: I totally agree with you. That’s why we have the summit, so people can learn about all the other things, including venture capital, but context and access and opportunity, I just think is so incredible. What I wanted to talk about was stewardship, legacy, the future, conversations at home, what the future looks like, as sort of an active mind and member in your family. As you’re thinking about what’s important to you both, how do you want to shape the world with your capital and time and energy? What are some of those conversations like at home? How are you seeing this responsibility of stewardship evolve as you’re evolving?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Yeah, so, framing, my husband is nineteen years older than me. He’s sixty-four, I’m forty-five, and he worked in finance for forty-two years. This is his ramp-down, part-time year, and next year he’ll be fully retired. He was in municipal finance, we should have a panel on munis at the summit at some point, excellent tax-free impact investment, bottom line, funding schools, bridges, public transportation. Just a little shout-out there for munis. Unsexy but really fabulous asset class.

Syama Bunten: Need it, by the way, we need that infrastructure.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Correct, much needed. And it saves tax money. So he’s accumulated significant wealth, not hedge fund manager wealth, if that’s gone well, but real money. We’ve been together for fourteen years, married for ten, so we’re a partnership, and he was fifty when we met. So our lifestyle is ours, and a lot of that wealth I still feel is rightly his, I don’t feel a lot of ownership over it. So we’re thought partners, we talk about the donations we make, he finally got on, here’s a little tidbit for folks, the donor-advised fund, which I have mixed feelings about, because so much money is kind of marooned there, with the tax break but without the impact. So a word on that, but also very powerful from a tax treatment perspective, you can put a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of appreciated stock away in that way, and then give out of it as you want. So please don’t sit on it forever, let it go to work, it’s a powerful way to get above that itemized deduction, we’ve been kind of swimming in that, ten grand here, two grand here, five hundred here, that comes out in the wash on the tax return because it’s not enough to make a valuable deduction. Anyway, sidebar.

But we’re definitely thinking and talking about it together, which is great. We invested, with him as the funder and me as the face, in a women’s fund here in Connecticut, which has been great. I was really glad to be in the first group of women doing just twenty-five thousand dollars each, which has amounted to, I think, one and a half or two million dollars we’ve been investing, primarily in women-led firms, some in Connecticut, some not, a lot of healthcare. We have this fabulous arrangement with a Connecticut venture firm, which is actually top of the active VC firms. Our former first lady, the governor’s wife, carried Steve Jobs’ briefcase during the IPO, she came out of Stanford at the right year, and has been in venture forever. So we have this really interesting, quiet venture thing happening in Connecticut, which is great.

So all of those choices we’re thinking about together, ish, and we very much prioritize experience in terms of spending in our life. It’s not like our house isn’t beautiful, we got it at a great price at a great moment, and we’re on the way to downsizing, as we bought a new house in Big Sky, and care a lot about that kind of experience for this next chapter, being in the mountains with a community that’s ours together.

But the legacy piece, he’s a very young sixty-four, so touch wood, we’ve got several decades, at least two, maybe closer to three or more. I’m forty-five, so who knows, I could go out anytime, but I’m not planning for it yet. My legacy at this point, that I think about every day and care about, is very much my intellectual capital and my social capital.

Syama Bunten: Yeah.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Not because I’m not excited about the fact that this work and my voice may well generate tens of millions of dollars of wealth over the next twenty years, and then I’ll be thrilled to really dig in, I have some ideas, but I haven’t mapped it yet because it’s not real yet. Of investing, of leaving my half sister really secure, of setting examples, of funding businesses that aren’t making money to make money, but delivering value in their local communities, led by humans who haven’t generally started off on third base.

But I’m, and he cares deeply about leaving solid grounding for his kids, which I think is a beautiful thing for him to want to do, and I support it, I understand it, but I’m not connected to that part of it. That feels clearly like his, by right, by logic, by heart, and again, I’m so happy that’s there, and we’re very much a family, but I’m not tuned into that as my legacy at this point.

Syama Bunten: How do you sort of think about, you’re so grounded in your identity and your values, it feels so secure, a really wonderful sense of self, and something that’s clearly been inside of you for a long time, this narrative arc of different experiences throughout your life almost feels like a lifelong preparation for this moment, where you are today is no accident, you’re exactly where you need to be.

When I ask people on the show what are the most fabulous things they do with their money and how they live life, experience tends to be the number one thing I hear. I feel like that’s a shift, if we’d asked people this fifteen or twenty years ago, I think the world would have seemed a bit smaller, this geographical flexibility, how we think about the world. What have been some of your favorite experiences together, where you’ve felt a sense of awe and wonder?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Lots, but a few peaks. The first one I’ll share, probably the year we weren’t married yet, maybe year two or three of dating. We were traveling a lot, that was something I’d already lived, a decade on the road, three years and thirty countries while I was in business school, so I was kind of an addict, and he was totally fascinated and on board.

So one weekend, I think we spent three nights, I took him to Paris. I think we got flights with miles, maybe, and then I paid for, booked and paid for, the Airbnb. We stayed in this adorable, delightful apartment right in Saint-Germain, which is where my study abroad program was, and which I loved. I got the trip, the museums, six euros for this or that, whatever, I got this. And he was charming, and amazing, really. I was like, yeah, definitely. And then he said, I would love to go to that restaurant, but I don’t want you to pay for it, I’m going to pay for it. I said, that sounds great, why don’t you do that.

And then we went shopping, we ended up in Saint-Germain shopping one day, and he said, can I do this, and I said, definitely, you can shop for me, that sounds excellent. It was just really sweet, because if he had booked the trip, we would have been at, not the George Sank, but some lovely hotel for, I don’t know, hotels were cheaper then, but call it a thousand dollars a night, or something. Instead we had this amazing apartment, so it was just really fabulous. I know Paris, I speak French, I’d lived there, he’d been there, but not the same. So to your point about equity, it’s not that things have to be level, that’s not equity, but we were both bringing different things in different categories, and it made for a phenomenal weekend. I can still remember it so vividly.

Syama Bunten: So magic. As we sort of, I feel like as per usual, I could talk to you forever, I know we can’t do that. But one of the things we talked about at the salon was, we’re all living so much longer now, with science and technology, especially as women, I’m really floored by the advancements in women’s health, we already live longer anyway, and now we’re finally starting to invest in women’s health. So imagine, women will truly be bionic in some capacity, because we already live so much longer.

Assuming that you and I get to catch up at a hundred and ten, and we’re like, my god, what a life we’ve lived, what do you think, in terms of the volumes and chapters and books to be written, that you’re writing, these chapters and volumes of your life, what would you want to look back and feel in your heart and spirit about this beautiful life of yours?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Right now it’s called subtraction, and I think that’s real. But if I can zoom out, recognizing that seventy-five years, is that what you’re talking about, seventy-five years is a long time, like twice what I’ve lived as a conscious being.

Syama Bunten: Like you’re a baby now, considering, right.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: I love it. Yeah, it’s phenomenal. It really is around permission to be ourselves, to live our one-eight-billionth life, for me to be happy and good and engaged and curious and socially supported, for we, my company or team or whatever, whether we have a universal basic income or whether we’re all our own entrepreneurs, or somewhere in the middle, and our family, our personal we, professional and personal we, and world, our one-eight-billionth of the world, not saving the rainforest, not ending racism, not curing cancer, because you cannot. You may be wealthy, you may be smart, you may be hardworking, you cannot do any one of those things on your own. So pick a really narrow, specific lane of impact you want to have, and do that. But that is the legacy I want. I want to give people permission to recognize that you don’t have to do it all, you don’t have to do more, you don’t have to do it right, you’ve just got to do the work, which is not insignificant work, to find your help, and go do that. I want that to become normalized. I want to be somewhat responsible for it, I don’t need a ton of credit, I don’t need my name on buildings, but I want to be part of that movement, a leader in that movement. I love teaching and influencing people, and I want to get paid for that.

So that I can invest in my own fabulous one-eight-billionth life, which is not cheap, frankly, and also so I can put money into the pot when money is required to move this movement.

Syama Bunten: I love that, it’s beautiful. My final question for you has to do with what you’re calling in right now. What do you need? How can we, the audience, support you, give you some extra love? What is it you’re calling in this year?

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: I really need engagement with this subtraction stuff. My Substack, Subtract to Succeed, is my laboratory. I love this social anthropologist promotion you’ve given me today, I’m going to run with that. So this month we’re just ending, wealth month was April, next month is joy, June is bias, July is interdependence. We’re getting into some juicy stuff. And I need, not like the hearts on the platform, though I guess editors and publishers do look at that, so that matters, drop a little heart, they’re free, but mostly what I want and need is engagement. What lands, what’s confusing, what feels aspirational and unrealistic, what feels helpful and transformational, format, topic, message, all of that. That’s what I need.

Syama Bunten: You got it. We’ll drop the link in the show notes so everyone can come find you. Nell, you are an incredible spirit, I’m grateful for your generosity, for who you are. We didn’t even get into the work you do with horses, there’s so much we didn’t get into today. But everyone who’s listening, please go find Nell and rally around her on Substack, say hi to her on LinkedIn, and know that there’s an incredible spirit of joy with us. Thank you so much for being here today, what a gift.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey: Thank you, Syama. Total pleasure.

Syama Bunten: Thank you for listening. This is the conversation we come back to every single week. Real women, real wealth, and what becomes possible when we stop being silent about money. If today’s episode moved you, don’t let it stop here. Wealth Catalyst is where women go to take it further. Our Freedom Tour salons are gathering women in thirty-two cities this year, intimate evenings in homes and private spaces where women talk honestly about money, risk, and what they’re building.

And if you’re ready to go even bigger, join us at the Wealth Catalyst Summit, a full-day event in San Francisco this October. Find your city and claim your seat at wealthcatalyst.com. We’ll see you there.