Syama Bunten:
Most wealthy families shelter their kids from money. Amy Dornbusch put hers at the table. Through Atlas Daughters, she takes mothers, grandmothers, and children to invest in high impact projects around the world together, because she read that eighty percent of the time you will ever spend with your kids happens before they turn ten. Her resume runs from a Brooklyn restaurant to a decade running a Napa vineyard and raising over fifty million dollars for cancer research. If you want to go deeper with Amy, she’s speaking at the Wealth Catalyst Summit this fall in San Francisco. Meet her there. Tickets are available at wealthcatalyst.com.

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 the incredible Amy Dornbusch, founder of Atlas Daughters and a philanthropic leader, investor, and champion for women and girls. She’s redesigning how families, especially mothers and daughters, use travel, capital, and giving to build lasting impact and generational legacy. I think what I love the most about Amy, and I’m so happy you’re here today, is the passion and enthusiasm that you’ve brought to all aspects of your life.

You seem to me, in the short time I’ve known you, to be fearless, not afraid to tackle big obstacles, and someone who also wants to take people with them, which I think is one of the most powerful things we can do when we see that there is something in the world we can do about it. Everybody, welcome this incredible woman, Amy Dornbusch. Amy, welcome to Getting Rich Together.

Amy Dornbusch:
Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be fun.

Syama Bunten:
I’m so excited. Okay, so before we jump into all the fabulousness and all the stuff you’re up to today, I want to take us back to a little girl, Amy. I want to take us way back to the age of ten, twelve years old. Where were you in this beautiful world of ours? What was life like around you? And what was money like around you?

Amy Dornbusch:
Well, I love this question, because my oldest daughter is almost ten, so I see myself in her, and I also don’t. But it’s amazing for me to think about what it was like for me and how different it was, and also the same. I was in the Bay Area. I grew up in the Midwest, but when I was about four, my parents decided to leave all of our family and everything behind and move us out to California, to Menlo Park. That’s mostly where I grew up.

I was in Palo Alto when I was ten. I was born in eighty three, so this would have been ninety three. My dad was an early tech person, but we were a very middle class family. We had a nice home and a pool in the backyard. We didn’t go to summer camp or anything like that. We just had a little bit of property, and we would get lost in the backyard during summer, or after school we would swim, we would pretend we were getting lost, and we would go back into the creeks and the trees behind our house and disappear for several hours and come back home for dinner. Our parents were very trusting in that way. It was a wonderful way to grow up. We lived at the end of a cul de sac. We were friends with all of our neighbors. It was lovely. Public school educated, all those things. But a wonderful way to grow up.

Syama Bunten:
I love that. What kind of student were you, Amy? Was it head down in the books? Were you selling friendship bracelets? Obviously, having a father in the tech space, being around all this entrepreneurship, were you like, all right, I’ve got the bug, I’ve got to do something? How did you start to think about your early independence, and let’s say maybe high school-ish?

Amy Dornbusch:
Well, I’ll go back a few years before that, because you asked me to think about ten or eleven. One of the companies my dad was running for many years was a tech company based in Singapore. When I was eleven, I was in sixth grade, and we went to Singapore and lived there for a year. I actually sold scrunchies. We lived in kind of a high rise building. I remember it very well. This was before he took the company public, and we had to go spend that year in Singapore. It was obviously a very safe city, so we were incredibly independent. We got to ride the bus anywhere we wanted. My brother and I, who were eleven and thirteen at the time, took the trains and buses. We went to the zoo. We explored that entire city, and we were left to our own devices. It was an amazing place to be able to do that.

That was really my first experience going out into the world and being independent, being allowed to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do, and to make some extra money. We made scrunchies and sold them by the pool. That was fun. But I was an average student for most of my childhood, and then I started to get pretty serious about academics. For those of you who have been in large public schools, you understand and remember, either favorably or unfavorably depending on what group you were in, how cliquey big public schools can be. When I became a teenager, the group I had grown up with had become sort of latchkey kids. A lot of their parents were single parents working, and they were left to their own devices, not heavy into sports, and got into the things you could imagine getting into. I became studious when I was about fourteen.

So I decided at fifteen, to my parents’ dismay at first, they looked at me like I had three eyes, that I wanted to go to boarding school. No one from California goes to boarding school. I think that’s changed a little bit now, but back then I went to a boarding school in New England. There were twelve hundred students, and only three in my class were from the West Coast. It was a very unusual thing, but I had this premonition that I wasn’t going to suddenly switch cliques and be in some other group of people. I became very self aware, and I really wanted to be studious, and I just needed to get out of Dodge. Not that Palo Alto is Dodge, but you know what I mean. So I decided on my own accord that I wanted to be part of this New England prep school kind of life.

That’s what I did. As a junior in high school, I moved to Massachusetts, northwest Mass, a very small town with only a single stop sign and a laundromat, but a fairly large student body, eleven hundred students, two different campuses, no religious affiliation, and no uniforms, which was sort of my three requirements. So the school I ended up going to had a very small liberal arts college kind of vibe to it. It was incredible. After coming off of twenty minutes of homework every day at my public school, I had three hours of homework. My first night’s assignment was two hundred and fifty pages of Thoreau. My very first night of school. I thought, okay, I am in a different place now, but I was just over the moon.

Syama Bunten:
That’s so cool. What was that education like for you? It sounds like you found your people. It sounds like things started to really click. What did you really think about yourself at the time? Exhibiting that much self awareness, was it, okay, I’m preparing myself for a career ahead of me, or I want to be, fill in the blank? What did you know of yourself at that time, and who did you think you wanted to be?

Amy Dornbusch:
It was a really interesting time, because I am dating myself now, but this was ninety nine. As I mentioned, my dad was part of this tech world, and we were a middle class family for all intents and purposes until about two thousand. What was happening in Silicon Valley at the exact same time I had decided to move to New England, there was this overnight wealth. All of a sudden the sixteen year olds are driving their BMW three twenty fives to school. There was a real change and division then between the haves and the have nots in Silicon Valley, and I saw that unfolding in real time. At the same time I was kind of friends with the pot smoking kids behind the bleachers who were left to their own devices until their moms came home.

It was an interesting time for me to be in these places. What I loved about the environment I chose was that this school represented sixty five different countries. My roommate, who remains one of my best friends today, was the granddaughter of the president of Colombia. She was from Bogota. So I spent this time, at fifteen years old, listening to the Gipsy Kings, her forcing me to talk to her in Spanish, learning about everything happening with the guerrillas in Bogota, and all of it was an incredible opportunity for me to be exposed to the world without necessarily incorporating global travel. I realized a couple of things. One, we can do hard things. We just have to lean in. But also, there’s a whole world out there of people coming from different places with different backgrounds.

My roommate told me the story of how she came from a very politically important family in Colombia, and there was a point in time, right before she came to school, when the guerrillas came for her at her house, and she was hiding under her bed. She told me that story, and there were so many other people like that at my school that the whole world just opened up to me, and I was never going to go back to that sort of suburban lifestyle.

Syama Bunten:
Awesome. So that international awareness, how did you start to think about what was happening in Silicon Valley, your personal desires and interests in the world, how you were starting to think about establishing yourself, university? As a young person, it seems like there are so many additive components to start to unlock within yourself, but also a sense of self determination around what’s next. What were some of the key moments that allowed you to start putting these pieces together?

Amy Dornbusch:
It’s a big question. There were several moments. I think that, for all intents and purposes, the boarding school experience affords kids an independence they don’t have at home. There’s certainly not a lack of discipline, but I think there’s a freedom to exploring friendships and relationships with different people, understanding where they come from. There was a globalism perspective that I didn’t have at home. I’ve always been someone who wanted to do everything. You get to make certain choices growing up, and certain choices are made for you. When I made the choice to go to boarding school, that was the beginning of, okay, I get to make these decisions. Where do I want to go from here?

I did suffer from a great amount of seasonal depression, being a California girl and then being stuck in ice storms in northwest Mass where I didn’t see the sun for six months. I had light boxes in my room, and that was very difficult for me. So while all my friends were moving on to Ivy Leagues and all of that, I had one requirement for the next place I was going to go, and I knew it was only going to be for two years, and it had to be a place that was sunny every single day. That was Arizona. I knew I wasn’t going to graduate from this school, but I went to Arizona for two years. I just needed to get my sun fixed, and I got that and more. I had that huge public school experience again. But then I wanted to go back to the small East Coast private school feel, so I decided to move to DC. A totally different environment. I went to George Washington. It was an incredible experience.

I’ve just been eyes wide open with everything. I had two internships. I studied international affairs and women’s studies, and I had two internships my senior year. I wanted to have an internship with someone on the left, and I wanted to have an internship with someone on the right. My first internship was at the National Organization for Women. Pretty much can’t get more left than that. I was opening envelopes and getting these six figure checks from wives of conservative politicians who demanded anonymity. It was an incredible experience. My second internship was for Kellyanne Conway. I don’t care for politics, but this woman, I mean, she slept in her office. She worked fifteen hours a day. She would come out of her office at six thirty in the morning wearing five inch heels looking like a million bucks. It was a different experience. It was a think tank, so it wasn’t a super political internship, but I wanted to get both experiences. I’ve always been like that, trying to soak up everything I can so I can get to a place of true understanding and self awareness of who I am.

Syama Bunten:
I love that. As you look back on those two very different internships, one’s obviously a person, the other’s an organization, but two very strong personalities and two different ways to get things done. What did you take away from those experiences that helped inform you, either on a strategic or tactical level, or understanding politics in a different direction?

Amy Dornbusch:
Well, I would say there are different ways of getting things done, making progress, and accomplishing your task at hand. There’s crowdsourcing and grassroots organizing, and there’s loud leadership. They’re both different methods, and they’re both effective. Neither of them is wrong. One of the things I’m really leaning into and teaching my children is that power doesn’t equate to leadership. You have to look for the leaders, and the leaders are everywhere. It’s just like Fred Rogers told the kids, you have to look for the helpers, and the helpers are everywhere.

I don’t want our children to be confused about what’s loud versus what’s also exhibiting leadership, getting things done, accomplishing amazing things. There are people all over the world doing amazing things you will never hear of, and they’re leaders. We have to lean into that. Both are different methods of getting something done, and they’re both effective. You have to find your people, and you have to find your method. You can do both, but that’s a real self awareness thing. You have to understand what you care about, what your values are, what you want to get done, and who the people or organizations are that you want to get behind.

Syama Bunten:
Which is incredible, because you have led with that ever since, it seems. You’ve put your name behind organizations, had clear vision, embarked on entrepreneurial endeavors that have led you to exercising a lot of that, figuring out how to get it done, how to mobilize and activate and get people to rally behind a vision or mission. Okay, so you’re graduating university, which is obviously a scary time for every young person.

Amy Dornbusch:
You’re here now.

Syama Bunten:
What am I going to do? How am I going to do it? How do I figure out my life? What did you do next? When you were getting ready to leave university and start to establish yourself in the world and try to get your footing, what did you think you were going to be or do? How did you decide on those initial first landing steps?

Amy Dornbusch:
Oh my gosh, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did not want to live in DC. I learned after having been there what an incredible place it was to be in college, but for me it was never going to be politics. I got everything I could while I was there, and I wanted to leave. I did not have a job when I graduated. In fact, one of my friends came to me and said, I don’t have a job either. I don’t know what I want to do. All I know is I’m packing up all of my stuff and moving to New York City next week. Do you want to come with me? Of course I said yes. Let’s go.

We got on the train and moved to New York and got an apartment together on the Upper East Side. She ended up ditching me after four weeks and went back to live with this deadbeat boyfriend she had in DC. So I was alone. I didn’t know anyone there. It was hard. I thankfully had some financial support from my parents until I figured out what I was going to do. I ended up applying for a bunch of jobs, and the first week I got there I thought, I just have to get a job, I have to do something. So I got a job at some clothing store on Madison Avenue.

My family, we did well. We had some wealth at this point, and this was a boutique that catered to young people, high school age and college age girls living on the Upper West Side. I’m working in this boutique, getting an hourly wage, and waiting on these girls my age or a little younger who have their credit cards on file and are spending six hundred dollars on jeans. After I got off the last half hour of my shift, I had to deliver these bags to their Upper West Side mega mansions, where their butlers would open the door and take the bags. It was excruciating, but it was a job. I wasn’t going to just sit there and not make any money until I could find something real to do.

That luckily didn’t last too long. After a few months I found a job at a creative agency called Frog Design, a global creative agency, a lot like IDEO, which is more of a household name. I was doing project management, and it was nothing I imagined doing, but it was so exciting, and everybody was so creative. Project management is an operational role, so I had the opportunity to be involved on the creative side. I could use the writing skills and other things I’d learned in college. I had a very multidisciplinary degree, so I was really excited.

I was managing programs for Fortune 500 companies. I ran a program for Seventh Generation when they were landing their Target deal, and we did all the in store displays and really strategic creative around what that whole line would look like. That was very exciting. I also had a project working for Alcatel Lucent shortly after that company merged. We were doing change management and things like that. It was really exciting, and I was there for several years, and then two thousand eight happened, and we were in New York watching people jump out of bank buildings. It was a really hard time.

What I saw was an opportunity. The economy had collapsed everywhere, but it was really felt in New York for anyone who was there. Restaurants and clothing stores and all of this support industry to wealth in New York were closing down, and there were empty storefronts everywhere. I had become very close to a friend in New York, and we were both so into hospitality. We were hosting dinner parties, and no one our age was doing that. We were in our twenties, and everyone was like, you guys are so old, you need to move to the Hamptons or whatever. But we loved cooking, we loved hospitality, we loved all of it. She was working in the finance industry, and I was working at this creative agency, and we both still had jobs, but we decided to dig in.

For anyone who’s lived in New York for many years, it’s sort of a pipe dream at some point to own a restaurant, or to get into the food business even passively. We took a risk and left our jobs and opened a restaurant. We were twenty five, twenty six, and we opened a restaurant in Brooklyn, and it was so much fun. We had a blog, and we talked about what it was like to open our own business. People started asking us for catering, so we built a catering business, and we were catering lunches for Etsy, who I believe was still headquartered in Dumbo, Brooklyn. At the time we were doing lunches for all four hundred and fifty of their employees three days a week, and on weekends we were doing weddings and fashion shoots. We were so busy, working seventy hours a week.

Then we saw what all the venues were making, and thought, the venues are making so much money, and all they have is a building. So we opened a venue. My dad’s high school roommate, who is still an architect in New York, designed all of the Keith McNally restaurants, Pastis, Balthazar, and all of those amazing restaurants, and I asked him to help us open our venue. So we opened a banquet hall. We had a restaurant, a catering business, and a banquet hall, and we were not sleeping, and it was so much fun, and we were making money. I was twenty seven, and my friend, who was my business partner, did all the books, and every month, when we finally started making enough money to justify an office space, we got one, and on the first of the month, our first month in the black, she printed out the numbers in big black letters and put them above my desk, and we just cried and hugged each other. It was so great.

Syama Bunten:
That is such an incredible story, Amy. It’s so ambitious and bold to just say, we’re going to open a restaurant. How did you guys think about the planning for all of this? Obviously it expanded over time, so you didn’t bite off everything all at once. It sounds like you started off and then added other revenue streams. But to get it going and off the ground, dealing with the food business, which has so many moving components, so many moments of chaos, how did you think about how much money you needed to get going, the research, the planning, the organization, going from working at an agency to this, which is a whole other level?

Amy Dornbusch:
Well, it’s building the airplane while flying it. Neither one of us had a background in any of these things. My business partner, who’s still one of my best friends today, was the first in her family to go to college, and she was so organized and had the best attitude, so responsible, and she rounded me out in a lot of ways. After spending some time at the agency, I thought, maybe I’ll go to business school. And then we had this idea of opening this food business, and my dad said, you don’t have to go to business school, I’ll teach you everything you need to know, you don’t need the network, go build the restaurant, let’s do this.

We had some financial support from friends and family, but we had to learn as we went along. It’s not rocket science opening a little restaurant, but it was new. We wrote our business plan, and we were so academic about it, using books like the dummies guide to writing a business plan. We asked ourselves, how do we pick vendors? We would go sit outside restaurants like the Keith McNally places, or Dean and DeLuca, at five o’clock in the morning and see where the delivery trucks were coming from. Where does the best food come from in New York? It was gritty, and it was amazing. It was so much fun.

We just dove in. We were lucky, we had financial and other kinds of support from our friends and family, and that was helpful, but we definitely had to do the work. We worked so many hours. It’s New York, so we didn’t have a fancy office. Our first office under the restaurant was outside the walk in refrigerator, with a pop up six foot table and both of our laptops, and we would put our feet on an upside down milk crate so cockroaches wouldn’t run over our shoes. It was disgusting. If anyone’s ever read Kitchen Confidential, or read any of these stories about the back of the house in the New York food business, it is not glamorous, but it was fun, and we learned a lot. It was like business school for me.

Syama Bunten:
Yeah, launching a business is the best way to learn how to run a business.

Amy Dornbusch:
You have to learn your market, you have to learn what’s working, you have to get customer feedback, you have to understand what’s important to your customers. Managing people is very difficult, especially in a wage earning business in a transient place like New York. It’s excruciating, constantly letting go of people, hiring people. It’s hard, and it’s complete experiential learning, to its highest degree.

Syama Bunten:
So how did you decide to exit this business? What were some of the dominoes that fell? Tell me about the transition points. Obviously you’re not living in New York City today, so what happened next?

Amy Dornbusch:
Well, that’s easy to answer, because I fell in love. I fell in love with my now husband, Adam. He ran business development for Current TV, if you remember that company, and he essentially brokered the deal when they sold to Al Jazeera. As a Jewish man, he thought, this was a great deal, but I’m never going to work for Al Jazeera. He left Current TV and was going to take a year to travel around the world, and his first stop was New York. A mutual friend set us up, and he never took that world trip. We did long distance. He went back to California, and we did long distance for about a year.

I was working seventy hours a week and couldn’t come to California, so he came to New York every weekend. He’d be plating hors d’oeuvres for a two hundred person bar mitzvah in Midtown, or whatever, and I’d say, you want to come hang out with me, you’ve got to work, because I have to work every single day. That’s what we did. All of my employees, my business partner, everyone said, if you don’t marry this person, you’re crazy. My business partner had a baby, and we were getting ready for that, and it had been a year. I thought she was going to come back after maternity leave and we’d continue to build the food business, but the writing was on the wall. My now husband said, I love you and I want to raise a family with you, but I don’t want to do it in New York, I really envision raising my family in California.

I went to my friend’s house, and it was two in the afternoon, and her two month old baby was lying on the bed, and I came over and just started crying. She asked, do you need a glass of wine? And I said yes. We sat down on her bed, shared a glass of wine, her baby right there, and she looked at me and said, you’re going to move to California, aren’t you? I said, oh my god, I’m going to start crying. And she said, do it. So I did it. We sold the company, and she’s now living in Connecticut, and her family’s doing very well. I moved back to California, and we started our life together. That’s when I started to get into the family business.

Syama Bunten:
When’s the last time anyone asked you what money actually meant to you growing up? Not how to budget it, what it meant. That’s the reason I built the money story reset. Five reflections on the beliefs shaping your relationship with money, and my own stories are included in every single one, including the parts I normally don’t say out loud. I didn’t write this from the outside, I did every page myself first. It’s free. The link is in the show notes, or go straight to wealthcatalyst.com slash reset. That’s wealthcatalyst.com slash reset.

What was it like to sell a business? Did you call your dad and think, holy crap, how do I do this? Your father seems like a great potential mentor in navigating some of these things. Google could have also been your friend. Who did you call? How did you figure this out, because launching a business is one thing and selling it is a totally different ballgame.

Amy Dornbusch:
Well, this wasn’t a big payday, okay, but we did manage to sell the business. This was a services business, and services businesses are hard to sell. Acquirers are looking for the client list, and we had big clients. We had Etsy, and our Monday through Friday business was all corporate. Of course we had the restaurant too, which was open and doing well, but the catering business was by far the most profitable, and we had a lot of regular corporate clients, which is valuable. We also did weddings and things like that, so we had personal business as well. We essentially went to a company that had similar operations, restaurants, catering arms, that would value the contracts we had and all the assets we were able to offer.

Like I said, it wasn’t a major payday, but it was a relatively seamless way to move on to the next chapter of our lives, and it was a wonderful experience. I was excited. I was in love. I was excited.

Syama Bunten:
It also sounds like a really honorable way to move on to the next chapter, this ability to say, I did something spectacular, let me put it into good hands, let me make sure this vision gets stewarded. It’s really an intelligent move, but also an honorable move, to mark the ending of this incredible thing you built. Okay, so now you’re in California. Was your husband already living in Northern California? Did you two have to negotiate on where you wanted to live?

Amy Dornbusch:
My dad, in not these exact words but something similar, said, you better not screw this up. They loved him. He was still my boyfriend at this time. We weren’t engaged yet, but shortly after I moved. My husband grew up in the East Bay, in Oakland, and I grew up on the peninsula. I had never lived in San Francisco. I was coming off living in New York for over ten years, and I needed to move to a city as my next step. I never really loved San Francisco, but we lived there for a little bit, about six months. Then we decided, are we going to move to where I grew up, or where you grew up? So basically, are we going to move to the East Bay, or the peninsula, where we’d have a house with twenty percent of the square footage.

So we went to the East Bay, and it was great. We lived in Oakland for several years. Adam spent his year after Current TV basically courting me, and then he joined the media company at GoPro and got back into it once I moved back to the Bay. That’s when I started getting into the family business. We have lots of things going on in our family office, a single family office. We were part of a multifamily office at one point, but that fell apart. Anyway, all good. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. We have our hands in a lot of different things. My dad’s been in tech, he’s been in VC. My brother’s been in the motorsports business forever. He was a NASCAR driver and drove for all kinds of teams, and now he’s a team owner in NASCAR and also a team owner in MotoGP, and I have a little bit of ownership with him on the motorsports side.

As a family we also bought a winery and a vineyard many years ago, and we had funds we were managing in the family office. There were lots of different things I could do when I came back. Naturally, because I’d been in hospitality forever, we had this vineyard in Napa, and it was a passive asset for our family. Nobody worked there. We had a general manager. It was just something we decided to do as a family many years ago. I had been traveling on the hospitality side of things to some of the wine auctions when I was still living in New York, so I was accustomed to the business, and I was used to being in front of people, and I loved food and wine, loved being around people. When I moved back, I thought, am I going to go into the venture space, or motorsports, or is there something else more interesting? As a family we were going to sell the vineyard, and I said, why don’t I take a crack at it.

So I took over the wine business, and eventually my husband and I bought the wine business from our family and owned and ran it for ten years. We really got into the Napa environment. We were still living in Oakland, but I was commuting back and forth several times a week, and we had a little place in the vineyard and would stay up there on weekends. It was an amazing business, an amazing community. I also launched a fund for our family office to continue some of the investments in the spaces I was interested in, primarily food and wine. We got into spirits, tequila, other wineries, and various food and consumer businesses, and I ran that fund alongside running the winery. Then, in the later years, about seven to ten years ago, I took over our family foundation.

So now I had the venture investing space, the wine and hospitality space, and I was starting to get into philanthropy. One of the things we decided to do, which is common for a lot of ultra premium Napa Valley wines with small productions and very loyal customer bases, is use their marketing budgets essentially through wine auctions. There’s a very prestigious circuit of wine auctions where you can participate in the acquisition of rare and small production, high quality wines while also doing good and giving back to philanthropic pursuits. That was lovely for me, because I got to straddle the philanthropy side and the wine and hospitality side in the business I was running.

One of the things I did to put myself in a leadership position on the philanthropy side was to take over chairing a wine auction for the V Foundation for Cancer Research. The V Foundation is an incredible organization, and our family has been supportive of it for the past twenty years. My mom is a two time cancer survivor. She’s actually a survivor today because of one of the early investments the V Foundation made in a clinical trial that eventually became Keytruda, which is the number one cancer selling drug in the world, and it saved my mom’s life. There was this wine auction in Napa, one of the highest grossing charitable auctions for cancer, and I took over this auction. Over four years at the helm, and it’s a team effort of course, we raised over fifty million dollars for cancer research in four years, and it really cemented my move into philanthropy full time.

It’s an incredible experience, an amazing event, the first weekend of August every year in Napa Valley. I stepped off as chair last year, but two years ago we sold the vineyard and moved up to the mountains, which is our true love. We love skiing and wanted to raise our kids in the mountains. That afforded us the opportunity, not just financially, but also so I wasn’t commuting to Napa anymore. All the things I do for our family office and running the foundation, I can do from home, and my husband runs his own startup software SaaS company that he also works from home, so we could move wherever we wanted. We decided to move to the mountains, and it marked a chapter for me that opened a door to decide what I was going to do next, what was exciting to me, and also what was incredibly meaningful.

Where I am right now, I have three kids. My oldest daughter is almost ten, my middle child, my youngest daughter, just turned seven, and I have a son who’s four. We live in the mountains and love living in a small town. I have a background in all of these things. Now I know how to start a business, I know how to invest and do due diligence, and understand what kinds of projects are worthy of investment and scalable. I’m forty three. I know what kind of people I want to spend my time around. I know who I am now. I’m strong, I’m confident, and I’m extremely devoted to my children. I’m thinking, how do we optimize all of this energy I have, but also make sure that whatever I’m going to do involves my kids.

When we first moved to the mountains, I read a statistic that eighty percent of the time you will ever spend with your kids is before they turn ten. My oldest is turning ten in five months. So it had to be something meaningful that brought all of these things together. That’s when I decided to start Atlas Daughters.

Syama Bunten:
Okay, I need like three more hours and a glass of wine. This could go in so many directions, but to be respectful of your time, what I’m hearing is fearless, bold ambition meets curiosity, meets supportive family, friends, community, and this ability to fly and taste and really get to know yourself through building the muscle of just doing it. There’s something really brave about jumping into, hey, I’m going to learn how this investing thing works, and taking it on yourself. The winery is so fascinating too, because you think about the restaurant business and how many moving pieces it has, and then you throw in Mother Nature and the planet and how a crop is doing, and you get so much closer to the ground and the earth, but it’s also so unpredictable, having to build a business around something like that.

Amy Dornbusch:
We’re at the mercy of Mother Nature. It’s a difficult business, especially now.

Syama Bunten:
Not easy. And then to dive into the world of philanthropy, which is often not understood in terms of how we can best create impact and change, and where the resources go, with all the different crises happening in the world and so many different ways to enact change, to put yourself out there and say, okay, I’m going to take these business skills, this curiosity, and start creating change in a few different realms, and support the things I believe will change the world. Now, with Atlas Daughters, taking it forward into how we think about legacy and family and what stewardship looks like, which I think is a missing component in how we think about creating change. We sometimes think about how we, as adults, can create change, but really it starts with the inspiration of younger people in our lives, cultivating that long term thinking, that stewardship mentality. So dive further into where things are today with Atlas Daughters. What’s the vision, the legacy, what are you building toward, and how have these other experiences compounded, going back to your university days learning how pieces come together, how to push things forward? It feels like this is the beginning of a next volume of what you’re here to do on this planet.

Amy Dornbusch:
Yeah, I have a lot of opinions about this. We as a culture tend to think about our lives in very linear terms. What is our job, what is our purpose, we tend to think, when people are young, it’s all about education. You’re just a sponge, absorbing everything, learning who you are, how the world works, the basic building blocks of being a functioning person in society, educating yourself. Then you’re a little older, in my case in my twenties in New York, or wherever you are, this isn’t true for everyone’s situation, but from where I stand, for people who already have their basic needs taken care of, you’re entering an entertainment phase. You’re in your twenties, you want to get out there, meet people, find your partner, figure out who your friends are, experience new things, but it’s really entertaining yourself.

Then, maybe in your thirties and forties, you’re really interested in experiencing things. Now we have a little disposable income, let’s go travel, let’s do something we’ve never experienced before, because we want to expand our world further. And then later in life it’s the engagement piece. I call this the four E’s, education, entertainment, experience, and then engagement, civic engagement or giving back, being a mentor, philanthropy, once you’ve finally accumulated enough wealth, let’s give some of it back. We think about those things linearly, and from a wealth and asset management perspective we think about them linearly too. Most wealth planning optimizes against running out of money later in life, but wealth has a shelf life for maximum impact. Money spent when you’re seventy five is different than money spent when you’re forty five.

When you take everything I’ve said about how I’ve lived my life, experiencing things, caring about my kids, wanting to be engaged with them while they still want to hang out with me, I’m optimizing for something different, which is, we have the money, but there’s another risk. It’s not just running out of money late in life, it’s the risk of having the money but not the years, not the health we’re in right now, not the relationship we have with our kids. Money just sitting somewhere and growing isn’t doing anything. Wealth in motion, like funding a trip, or a risk you take investing in a friend’s business, or exposure to how the world works, that’s wealth doing its job of shaping people, not just growing quietly in an account somewhere. So I’m sorry if my wealth manager is listening, but she knows me very well, she’s actually one of my good friends now.

This is how we bring all of these pieces together. Atlas Daughters is a way of understanding that the best way to build relationships is when you take these four E’s, educating ourselves, entertaining ourselves, experiencing something totally new, and also engaging in something bigger than ourselves, and we do that together. We create the backbone for the most meaningful relationships we could ever make with our families. In a nutshell, what Atlas Daughters is, is we take wealth owning families, mothers, grandmothers, and their children, not just daughters, sons too, but moms and their children, to places in the world where we’ve identified NGOs doing incredible work, projects worthy of investment and ripe for scale. When I use the word investment, you have to think of different ways of thinking about return.

I mentioned I run a venture fund and also run our family foundation, and I think about investment the same way. There’s a financial return, that’s one return. But also, if we’re able to scale something incredibly effective and efficient in this post USAID world, we don’t have all the public funding we had before, we have to go find these change makers in the world doing something very effective, very efficient, and that can be scaled. We bring these families to these locations, give them intimate and unprecedented access to the work, and form a collective giving circle where we invest in the project together. While we do that, we deliver a proprietary education to our children that gives them a seat at the table, so they’re not spectators or left in the dark in families that have wealth, but actually become participants.

They understand all of the basic building blocks of global impact, and they participate in investing in these nonprofit projects. It’s so beautiful and so impactful, and you can’t believe the things we’re funding.

Syama Bunten:
Gosh, Amy, that’s incredible. I know our time is running short, but can you share, based on one of your experiences with your kids, what you saw on the other side of having that experience? What strengthened in your relationships? What were some of the moments you noticed with your children?

Amy Dornbusch:
I took my daughter, my oldest, who was six at the time, and also my mother, to Zimbabwe several years ago, to engage in a project we had already been funding through our foundation that brings life saving electricity to rural birthing clinics in sub Saharan Africa. It was sort of an eleventh hour decision to bring my daughter, because my husband said, so you’re going to be eleven hours on a different time zone, leaving me with all three kids, including a baby, for ten days, and you’re going to be somewhere I can’t reach you. And I said, you know what, it’s okay, Ruby’s young, but she can handle it, I’m going to take her. And I decided to take my mom too. So three generations.

We’re driving down these bumpy roads for five hours, everyone’s throwing up, and we go to this rural birthing clinic and see the work. We’re employing women who are installing solar panels, and my six year old daughter is up on the roof with a woman who has her own micro solar business that we hired to install these solar panels, and she’s learning about solar electricity. Meanwhile, there’s a woman giving an unmedicated birth in the birthing clinic, and this is a girl who witnessed her two younger siblings come into the world via C section in a fluorescent lit hospital at Alta Bates in Oakland and UCSF, some of the best hospitals we have in our country, and here there’s a dirt floor, and she’s learning.

My mom is there experiencing the same thing. Three generations, we all bring different approaches. My mom grew up on a farm, she didn’t have running water, she’s come so far in her life, and my daughter doesn’t know anything about which way is up when it comes to any of this. We all had completely different perspectives on what we were seeing and what healthcare is like for people around the world. I didn’t fully understand the extent of what my daughter absorbed until we came back. She was in kindergarten, and I prepared her to give a presentation, because I took her out of school for a week and a half to go to Zimbabwe, and I was going to help her give this presentation, but she insisted I not, and she gave a presentation to the entire lower school in kindergarten, for forty five minutes, by herself. She went through every slide, describing everything that was happening and how solar electricity works. She had this little mock up of a foil wrapped piece of cardboard, and she was explaining, in the way a six year old understands, how solar electricity works and how that’s important for healthcare and can actually improve healthcare outcomes.

That was when I realized Atlas Daughters was something I needed to bring to other families, because it brought our family so close together. Going back to Fred Rogers, kids can understand hard things. We don’t have to shelter them from these things. We don’t have to shelter them from our wealth. We don’t have to shelter them from things that are difficult for them to see. Kids view the world with eyes wide open, without all of the layers that adults have, the biases and experiences that have shaded the way adults look at the world. They ask the right questions. They are fully capable of capturing and internalizing difficult things. In the age of AI, nothing will replace this, nothing will replace these experiences in terms of how we build relationships with each other as families.

Allowing kids to be a participant at the table, they’re just so capable. It’s so beautiful. We can’t shelter them from these things. We have to bring them in.

Syama Bunten:
I love that, Amy. My final two questions. We’ve been talking a lot about money and wealth and what it can do and how it can shape the world, and investing it, and so many different components. I’d love to ask something a little more lighthearted, because we both know money can also do fabulous things. What has been one of the most recent, fabulous ways you’ve spent your money?

Amy Dornbusch:
Oh gosh. Well, I’ll tell you something I’m looking forward to, because I don’t know if this is just my season of life, but I just don’t like being hot, I don’t want to go anywhere hot. My birthday’s in one week, it’s July thirteenth, and my husband asked what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I said, I want to do something I’ve never done before. I wish I could say I’m one of those people who’s not on Instagram, but I am, and I look at all these travelers doing crazy adventures. I saw something on Instagram and told my husband I wanted to do it. So in a week and a half we’re going to Alaska for the weekend, and we’re going to go paddle boarding on glacier melt pools just outside of Anchorage. He asked what I wanted for my birthday, and I said that. So we’re going to Alaska for the weekend, put on our dry suits, take a helicopter to a glacier, find some melt pools, and go paddle boarding.

Syama Bunten:
Oh my god, how fabulous. And then, my last question is, Amy, you do so much for others, for humanity, you’re pushing things forward in a really prolific way, but what is it that you are calling in right now? How can we, the audience, support you? What do you need? What’s on your heart? What can we do?

Amy Dornbusch:
I say this to everybody, you are such a community builder, Syama, and I’m a community builder too, and we recognize, at this stage in our lives, how important community is. You have to find your people, and you just have to lean in. If anything I’ve said resonates with you, and you have school age children at home, and you’re interested in dabbling in philanthropy, or perhaps you even have a more structured giving approach, maybe you have a foundation, if any of this sounds interesting to you, drop me a line, because I will be your people. Come join us on one of our trips and bring your kids. Atlas Daughters, we don’t make any money, I don’t make any money doing this. I do this because it’s important to me to live my values and align wealth with our values, and I want to find other women who care about that and want to do that too. So if that’s you, come find me, and let’s go on an adventure of a lifetime together.

Syama Bunten:
Amy Dornbusch, you are a rock star. I am so grateful to have had you on today’s show. Thank you for all that you are. Grateful to be in community with you. And my gosh, what a rock star. Thank you.

Amy Dornbusch:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This is so much fun, and it’s a mutual admiration society.

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.