Diana, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you today about everything, money, especially show her the money. Also, since you are an executive producer on the film, so why don't you start out, just tell us a little bit about your background and how did you get involved with Catherine Gray and show her the money.

Well, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here. I met Catherine Gray through a mutual friend and we had lunch one day and she told me about this fantastic documentary that she was pulling together and they were looking for investors in the documentary. And I just knew that I was going to know her and that I needed to invest in this project. And really the reason that I got started in this and what compelled me to work with her is actually in 2020, in May of 2020, my mother unexpectedly passed away. Not due to Covid, but right after Covid started. And I received a little bit of a lump sum distribution from a life insurance policy that allowed me to actually start investing in a material and meaningful way. And I also faced a dark night of the soul where I really started thinking about my legacy.

This was my second parent to pass away and I didn't have any kids and what am I leaving behind, what am I doing with my life and what is going to be here after I'm gone. And that thought about legacy really led me to the impact that I want to have and impact investing. And I simply wasn't seeing in the market the opportunities to really support women, minorities, marginalized communities and the causes that were near and dear to my heart. So Catherine Gray was a hub for a lot of amazing opportunities that have come my way since and I'm excited to be involved with her. I joined she angel investors as well, which she helped co found and the rest is history.

Amazing, I love that. So tell us a little bit about your background before you got into investing.

Sure. So I am a CPA in the state of California and I worked at one of the big four accounting firms who shall remain nameless on this podcast for about 12 years in San Francisco and in Sydney, Australia. I actually was the leader of their Northern California LGBT group and I helped co found the group in Sydney, Australia as well and worked shortly in their diversity office down there and beyond that. I then got into private industry so I was an auditor with them and I audited financial services companies and mainly asset management companies. So so I went into asset management and I currently work with a private equity firm, but I worked at a boutique firm in Seattle and I've worked with all sorts of Investments for 20 years, working with institutional and private funds and being a founder myself, working at those asset management firms and being a funder, I have this holistic view of seeing all sides of the financial services industry and the asset management space.

Wow, that is very interesting. And so is that what led you then? Tell me more about Fan youn Flame and how you.

Yeah, so part of me wondering what my impact was going to be was I started working with a life coach shortly after my mother passed away. And I found it also was an incubator for founders, female founders of businesses. And it was accidentally that way. And lots of females and non binary folks getting into the coaching space. And I found these entrepreneurs, while they were really great when they were in their wheelhouse, not a lot of them had the financial acumen or the business knowledge that they really needed to get their companies going up and off the ground. And I realized this need to democratize access to financial information for people who didn't major in it. In college. We look at the curricula that are at schools, even elementary, middle, high school, even colleges.

You don't get much of a financial education unless you major in finance and accounting like I did. And what they do teach you is very often around spending rather than saving, investing, credit scores, debt, all of those things that you really need to know about and make your own financial plan so that you can live your best life. Do people even know what their goals are besides not being in the hamster wheel for the rest of their lives, just getting enough money to pay the bills next month?

Right. So what did you find in talking to people were some of the differences in how women think about money and how men think about money?