MEANINGFUL RETURNS

Amy Rosenow was giving a talk on International Women’s Day and opened with a question for her mostly female audience.

“Who here wants to be wealthy?” Rosenow, an entrepreneur, financial industry veteran, hedge fund and angel investor, working mom, and philanthropist asked. “I heard crickets. Nothing. Nada. So, I decided to share my personal definition of wealth. To me, being wealthy is being able to buy everything my family needs, a lot of what we want, and still be able to save for the future, and help other people. I then asked the group to consider that when we have more money, we have more power and more flexibility. With that said, I re-asked the question ‘Who here wants to be wealthy?’ and everyone’s hands went up in the air.”

But leaving the lecture that day, Rosenow had a lingering feeling that if she had asked the same question about wealth in a room filled with men, the response would have been very different.

“I’m passionate about helping women step into their financial knowledge and their financial power because we need to do that,” says Rosenow, founder of Fearless Financial Planning, President of RUOK Management investment partnership, and the Kaplan Rosenow Family Foundation. “I thought I was asking a rhetorical question. Now, over time, I’ve learned that there’s this feeling of discomfort about women asking for money.”

Rosenow shared this concern with her colleague from the investment and entrepreneurial sphere, Desiree Vargas Wrigley, a two-time Latina founder, the executive director of TechRise, an offshoot of P33, an innovation nonprofit started by Penny Pritzker for which Wrigley is Chief Information Officer. Wrigley had been thinking about women and money as well, and she shared with Rosenow an idea for an angel investing group focused on bringing women into the asset class. Wrigley is committed to investing early in big ideas, especially in consumer arenas. She serves on the Chicago Steering Committee for All Raise and is on advisory boards for GET Cities, mHUB, and Chicago:Blend.

Together, the women founded The Josephine Collective. “One of the most powerful things about women is their ability to see problems and build solutions to solve them,” Wrigley says. “And that’s really what we’ve done with The Josephine Collective. We could all be individually investing, but by coming together in this collaborative effort we’re able to have a much larger impact.”

The Josephine Collective is a women-led group of angel investors co-investing small amounts (as little as $1,000 per angel per deal) in early-stage startups in Chicago and across the United States. The Collective helps make angel investing accessible for all, but especially women and people of color. They do this by using a unique structure that allows the group to invest in high-potential startups with the lowest possible fee structure.

“People can dip their toes into the water of angel investing with The Josephine Collective,” explains Wrigley. “Traditionally with angel investing, you would be asked to write at least one check for $25,000 or $50,000. A big financial commitment like this can scare people away. And if you invest in something that doesn’t work out, you’re even more inclined to feel this way. But with the Collective, we present deals each month and investors can develop their own pattern for investing and what they’re interested in funding. It’s a nice way of placing a lot of bets without exposing yourself to too much risk.”

The Josephine Collective looks at deals on a rolling basis, and founders can be considered at any time. In part due to Wrigley’s 15 years of building and mentoring startups, The Josephine Collective looks at hundreds of businesses and brings the top three or four opportunities to its angels each month. Startups meet with the Collective’s managers via Zoom and the conversation is recorded to share with the Collective to help aid in the decision to invest or not. The goal is to have the entire process take no more than three weeks from presentation to payment.

“We’re not making investment decisions on behalf of our members,” Rosenow says. “We do screening and quality control at the top of the funnel but we present the deals to our members. If we get enough members interested in a specific deal, then we move forward and fund. In an advisory model, we’d be registered investment advisors and we’d make decisions on behalf of our clients. That is not what is happening here. This is a collaborative effort with our members. There’s no judgment. No stupid questions. That sets us apart and makes it a very enjoyable experience for our members.”

It’s an effort that the namesake of The Josephine Collective would be proud of.

“We named our angel group after the unsung Chicago hero, Josephine Garis Cochrane,” Wrigley says. “She invented the first commercial dishwasher in 1886 that was originally installed in hotels and hospitals, saving hours of back-breaking work for women around the world. Her company eventually became KitchenAid. The fact that she built this company, and no one ever talks about her, the wealth it created for her family, or the impact that it had on women around the world—we wanted to elevate her story by naming our collective after her. Josephine was famous for saying, ‘If someone won’t build it, I will.’ We feel the same way.”

People do need to be accredited investors to be a part of The Josephine Collective. A person who has $200,000 of income on their own, $300,000 with their spouse or family, or at least $1 million in net worth outside of their home is considered an accredited investor. Legally this is required as accredited investors can afford to evaluate and manage the risk involved with angel investing.

To date, The Josephine Collective is the most active angel fund in Chicago, having distributed 25 checks since its founding in Both Rosenow and Wrigley agree that support from the North Shore and Chicago is critical to the future growth of The Josephine Collective.

Wrigley, who will be leaving her current post at TechRise at the end of the year to head Velocity Catalyst, a new $50 million fund that will transform Chicago’s venture economy, explains “We hope women will consider venture as part of their philanthropic or impact strategy that will ultimately produce great returns for them and their families.”

To learn more about The Josephine Collective, visit joinjosephine.com.