Margot de Broglie (#011)
Women will on average miss out on £1m over their lifetimes compared to men, and investing plays a huge part in this.
Company: Juno
Headcount: 5
Stage: Pre-Seed
Warm intro from Mehdi Benbrahim (#006)
Tell us your story
I discovered entrepreneurship completely accidentally. After my 2nd year of university, I started hosting a series of niche events in London called ‘Secret Sunrise’. The basic idea was guided silent discos, outdoors, and at sunrise. There was something magical about these sessions that were so different to the usual thing you’d do in London.
Within 6 months, I was hosting them with companies like TED, Coca-Cola, Babylon Health, NatWest or Microsoft. I would rock up at sunrise, 18 years old, with my flashy leggings and my suitcase full of headphones. Within an hour, I would lead the executives on air-guitar to AC/DC!
Then the pandemic put the events to a grinding halt. I started thinking about ‘getting my life together’. Like many my age, the topic of money had been one that I actively tried to avoid. One day I found myself staring at my small savings, and thought to myself: ‘now what?’. After 2 hours of Googling: ‘how to make more money’ which led me further down the rabbit hole to ‘how to invest’, I was even more confused than when I’d started.
My sister who works in financial advisory took me under her wings. I put down £20, and after making a return of 17p the first month, I was hooked! My first small but symbolic gain.
I started speaking to my friends about investing, and realized the conversation was very different between my male and female friends. While a lot of guys had cryptocurrency and trading accounts, most of my girlfriends had their money sitting in a savings account- actually losing value because of inflation.
That’s how Juno began. It’s been 5 months since my sister and I have teamed up to build a solution to investment inequality. Our mission is to build a financial education platform that makes investing and other financial topics engaging and actionable for as many women as possible. Learning the language of financial literacy should be as simple as learning French on Duolingo, and even more fun.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
Someone once told me what happens when you train fleas.
If you put fleas in a jar, they will jump up and hit the lid a couple of times. They eventually get tired and stop jumping. You can then remove the lid, and they will never jump higher again than where the lid once was.
I often think about the places in our lives where the lid has been taken off, but where we’re not jumping.
What can't you stop thinking about?
I recently heard the statistic that women will on average miss out on £1m over their lifetimes compared to men, and investing plays a huge part in this. The majority of women are not taught or encouraged to invest in the stock market. The result is that most don’t actively top up their pension contributions. Nor do they utilise the tax-efficiency of a Stocks and Shares ISA. In fact, as many as 70% of women keep their money in cash or uninvested. I can’t stop thinking about the freedom and the life-changing effect this £1m could have on the life of every woman.
If I could tell you just one thing...
At the risk of sounding like a broken record: invest in the stock market, as soon as you can.
Not through ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ type trading or trying to short the market. I’m speaking about long term, passive investing, for at least 10 years. It’s become incredibly easy to invest in products like ETFs that track the 500 largest companies on the US stock market (that’s actually where Warren Buffet, the king of investing, is putting his entire inheritance). You can automate a small portion of your income, even just £50 a month. If you never think about it again, when you retire, that is likely to have grown to 6 figures, at least!
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
I’ve been thinking about this, and simply cannot decide between these two women.
Alexa von Tobel, the founder of LearnVest. She is my hero when it comes to personal finance. I think she was a visionary ahead of her time. Whenever I’m down, I listen to her podcasts where she describes how she built LearnVest in the initial months before raising. Her passion and resilience always gets to me.
Michelle Kennedy, the founder of Peanut. I think the community she created around motherhood is incredible, removing the shame that has been placed on women around that time. She is our reference point when we speak about the sort of safe space we want to create for women to speak about their finances. I would love to understand how she did what she did!