How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! mitú and SUMA Wealth: Beatriz Acevedo

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

It was a love for Ricky Martin that started it all...Beatriz Acevedo thought that if she could only become a DJ, she could get his attention and marry him. While marriage to Ricky was not in the cards, an illustrious career in radio, TV, and eventually digital media was. Beatriz is now a serial entrepreneur: her first venture, mitú, is published content for a growing young Latino market. Soon after selling mitú in 2020, she launched Suma Wealth to help young Latinos build wealth and navigate the complex American financial system.This week on How I Built This Lab, Beatriz takes Guy on a journey through her career in media production and her more recent pivot to financial services. She also discusses the importance of a culture-first approach to serving Latino customers, and the interactive and educational approach her new company is taking to close the Latino wealth gap. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Americans with roots in Latin America account for more than 18% of the population.

And this year, the collective purchasing power of Latinos is estimated to hit big. $2.8 trillion. And yet a significant number of young Latinos are considered underbanked, meaning they don't have easy access to financial institutions and things like savings accounts or loans. So Banffre's Acevedo started a financial technology company to see if she could solve the problem. It's called Sumo Wealth and it was founded in the middle of a pandemic. The platform offers up educational tools to help young Latinos figure out how to become

financially literate. Before she launched Summa, Beatriz was the founder of Me Too, a multi-channel media company that was designed to serve Latinos in the U.S. Beatriz was born and raised mainly in Mexico, and she got her start as a kid, co-hosting a show on her local radio station in Mexico City. So I was in love with this kid from a boy band called Menudo, and this kid was Ricky Martin. And I thought that if I got into being a radio DJ one day when Menudo came to my small hometown, I could eventually meet the band and fall in love with Ricky and get married. So I had my whole life planned ahead of me at 8. So that's how I got into radio.

And did you ever get to meet Ricky? Yes, I did. I got to meet Ricky and interview Ricky, not marry him, obviously. He's happily married. You missed the boat on that one. But so am I, so it's all good. It's all good. It all worked out for the better.

Yeah. And you were doing like, I guess you started kind of reading ads on this kids channel. Then you did like a kids show, right? Like a kids news show? Yes, that is right. So the show is called Laura Menuda, like the Menudo Hour. Yep, yep. And it was a daily show in the afternoons, 4 to 5.

So I would ride my bike after school to the radio station. And it was an older guy who was a co-host called Superman. I never knew what his real name was, but he was super cool. So Superman and I hosted this show, Laura Menuda, and I would get to say the name of the song and what time it was and, you know, some sort of commentary of what was happening with the band and their tour. So it was great. So I did that every day, five days a week after school when I was around third grade.

Do you know when I was a kid, they did commercial, or maybe at a show, I think it was ABC, because I remember, Menudo on ABC. It was like Saturday morning cartoons. They're like a special show. So, yeah, Menudo was huge. Menudo was like the BTS of their era. Well, listen, it was a very big deal, particularly for the Latino community, because before Menudo, really Latino artists were pretty invisible in the U.S. And here this was this boy group from Puerto Rico that was so, so big. So it was a big sense of pride.

You know, you could like their music and everything. But I think for the entire community, it was like, you know, if they made it, we can do it. And it gave us that opportunity, that permission to dream bigger. So I think what they represented as a whole for the community was very, very important. Yeah. And I guess you eventually started doing some TV too, right? Like, again, like hosting local TV shows for kids. Yeah, so it wasn't kids anymore because I was 15 at the time and I felt like I was a very cool teenager, not a kid.

But yes, I was a kid. And, you know, it was a local news. It wasn't anything extraordinary. And I got to, you know, be a reporter first on anything that was related to entertainment, arts and culture. And then after that, I launched my own TV show locally, which because it aired in the U.S., I was able to get nominated for a few Emmys. So they were the first Emmys that Mexico won, I guess, as a country. So that was a very big deal. And that's when I made the move to Mexico City right after college.

All right. So you get to Mexico City after college, and you're working for a television network there. And then I guess something happened that totally changed the trajectory of your career. Tell me more about that. Yes, that is right. So I moved to Mexico City for work right after college. And I worked at the only TV network that existed at the time. And I had an entertainment news show.

So think about like entertainment tonight, but the Mexican version of that. And I did that for a very long time until I got pretty much fired from my job. But the height of my career, I had just won my three Emmys, my MTV Award as a director and a media correspondent award. And I still got sort of canned. And at that time, you know, it was tough being a woman. And it was tough being a woman with an opinion. So if you had that combination going on for you, you tend to be sort of put in a place to cool you off. Right.

So I was put in something that they called the refrigerator. So that was sort of that mystical place, the refrigerator. You would still get your salary. but you would be put there to be cooled off. And today I would take that deal in a second and do philanthropy. But being 23, 24 years old at the time, I was just younger and more arrogant. And I was like, absolutely not. I quit and I'm moving to the U.S.

And that's how I came to the U.S. It was at a really perfect time when American networks were launching their signals into Latin America, Spain, Portugal, you name it. Yeah. All right. So you eventually, you know, decide to move to the United States back, I guess, permanently live in the U.S. in 1995. And I guess when you get there, you become a producer or you start to produce these shows. Yes. So I came to the U.S. because Robert Rodriguez, who was a very unknown film director at the time,

encouraged me to sell my car and with the proceeds of that sale to shoot some pilots and come to a place in the U.S. called Natby, which is a big, you know, know, convention place where people go and try to sell their TV shows. And I did that. So I went with my three Emmys under my arm, my MTV Award, and a VHS tape with some sort of, you know, demos to try to get my career going in the U.S. And as luck would have it, I sold my first series to Discovery Channel. And that's how I started my career as an independent producer in, in L.A. And what kind of shows would you produce? All kinds of shows. I mean, from sports, documentaries, to entertainment shows, to food and lifestyle, music, documentaries. So I think a little of everything.

I had to become an expert, although my career had been much more in entertainment. Once you're an independent producer and you're hustling, you're like, I can take on any job, any gig. So, yes, even things that I was definitely not an expert like sports, I became one. So you were, I mean, you were essentially running a production company, a small, I think a fairly small to medium-sized production company, but you would basically go and pitch a show to the Travel Channel or Nickelodeon or Entertainment, or they might come to you and say,

hey, can you produce this series for us? Yes, I think it was more me going to pitch to them than them coming to me, especially since, you know, nobody knew me at the time. And, you know, it was a really great run for many years, but it was also that same time where I felt incredibly, frustrated with seeing how few people like me were able to produce shows that portrayed Latinos in an authentic way. So, you know, that's when digital came about. And I started to get

incredibly interested with that democratization of who gets to tell stories and how if you have a phone, you absolutely have an opportunity. And that's how I sort of started thinking about my next company that went beyond the production company. that company was Me Too, which I'm assuming means me and you or me you. Yes, that's perfect. Exactly. A place for me and you. And this is 2012. I mean, you've got all of these media companies, you know, just kind of exploding, right, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post had been around for a while. And tell me about the idea behind B2. What was the vision behind it? What was going to be? Yeah, it was exactly that time. It was the time of the MCNs, the famous multi-channel networks.

And there was a multi-channel network for everything, if you can remember, right? For people who love video games, for people who loved makeup, for people who loved food. And it was a little bit mind-boggling to see that there was nothing for Latinos. And even back then, the census numbers would really show how this was a very thriving and very young demographic. And the fact that nobody thought that that was an important growth market was sort of head-scratching to a way. us. So at that time, it was a combination of that, the opportunity that all these multi-channel networks were exploding. And also that I could see every day in my work as a producer how things were never going to change in Hollywood, even if heads of networks

in studios would say, we can't find the Latinos and you would bring them to them. They would still not hire them. So I felt that this was my big opportunity to sort of change Hollywood or hack Hollywood in a way and be able to incubate. ideas and stories and characters and show and prove to Hollywood that there was an audience for them and that they should be hiring more people like me to have their stories told. This was, I mean, imagine, right, like, as you say, multi-channel, you go to, like, the Huffington Post right at the time, and I think still today, I haven't checked it recently, but there would be like these different verticals, as you mentioned, like makeup, fitness, beauty, food, politics, news.

And essentially what you kind of realize or you, knew that there was nothing like this directed towards Latinos. I mean, you could probably go to, you know, Huffington Post at the time or something. There might be like something like in Spanish. It was called like, Ola with an exclamation point or something. I think it was called like Voses or Somos or something like this. There was, right. It did exist.

Yes. But, you know, on one hand, you applaud the effort for having that. On the other one, it's always an afterthought. It's never the main focus. You know, even BuzzFeed. Busfeed had a really good vertical for a while. But it wasn't their main business. It wasn't their sole focus.

And, you know, when you look at the demographics of this country, you think, oh, wow, like, that's definitely the growth demo. Why is nobody thinking that this is a big enough demographic to pay attention to? We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back more from Beatrice Acevedo, the founder of Me Too and Sumo Wealth, I'm Guy Raz. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Beatriz Acevedo, founder of Me Too and Sumo Wealth.

All right, so you have this concept, Me Too, and I know that it grew into something quite significant, still is still around. But how did you start this thing? It's 2012. I mean, to start something like this was going to cost a lot of money, how did you get it off the ground? Well, we started organically. So we got it off the ground really within the same office of our production company, and it was my husband and I. And we just thought, listen, let's just see where it goes. Let's start talking to all these.

Because at the time, the multi-channel networks were made up of a lot of talent. So it was really that you were curating different YouTubers at the time, particularly for the YouTube MCN. And then you would aggregate them with a promise that you would, you know, bring them advertising dollars. At that time, they could monetize on their own. They had to be a part of a network. So we started it just, you know, us making phone calls to the biggest names at the moment. And, you know, once we had some scale, I remember our goal was like, let's have 30 million views a month at the time. Views was a metric.

And because there was nobody else in the space, it was very, very quick and easy to reach our number and to aggregate the top talent at the time. And then after that, we decided to raise capital. And that's a whole other story, which I never raised capital before, venture capital, which is a whole other beast than what I was used to. Right, because to start a content company like this, you literally need human beings, a lot of them to make the content. I mean, I know people have tried this with AI. It doesn't work, not yet. But you need human beings to write articles. You need editors.

You need, I mean, this is why BuzzFeed and HuffPost and. all these places like have, you know, have had to raise tons of money and have had challenges along the way because that's their biggest expense, right? Yeah. So, I would say our biggest expense was not the content creation because we started as an aggregator. So we had the content from all these independent talent. Right.

So that was great. That was not our biggest expense. But our biggest expense was a sales team and a sales team is not cheap. Yeah. Because you would bring them into the network, all the talent, with that promise of, listen, we're going to bring you these great deals that you don't have today. And you'll be able to monetize all these millions of views that you have every month in your channel. So building the sales team was important, building the tech behind it to really be able to optimize

when should they be posting at what time, what hashtags, who should they be collaborating with for growth. Because also you promise to help them optimize their channels and their businesses. So, you know, we had 7,000 of the top Latino creators in our network. And how did you identify them? How did you find them? Well, online. It was super easy. You know, there's lists of like, okay, who are the top 100, 100, 1,000, 5,000.

Yeah. And then, you know, you would contact them. That was definitely not hard. But this is 2012. I mean, this is still before the influencer kind of explosion, right? This is, I mean, it's like 10 years ago. It's almost ancient history, right, in the Internet age. And you're basically talking about aggregating content.

And it was in English. I mean, most of what it was and is on me too is it was in English. Maybe there was some Spanish here and there. But it was like English language content for Latino audience. So it is now. And that's a big learning. So I made the mistake and we all made the mistake as co-founders to think that if you were starting any sort of media company for Latinos, it should be in Spanish.

And I'm an immigrant, right? So I came in straight from Mexico City to open this company here thinking, okay, if it's on the internet, if it's on YouTube, even if it's in Spanish, it's going to attract young Latinos. And it didn't. I remember our first born meeting, our investors were like, why is your audience so old? Right. And our audience was 50 plus when we said we're the alternative to Univision when we were raising capital. And it was because of that. Young Latinos in the U.S. speak English and prefer to consume their content in English. So very quickly, we sort of had the problem of thinking, well, if our contents in English, how are we going to differentiate ourselves from the bus feeds of the world, from the Huffington Posts of the world? Yeah. They already have this content in English. They already have the, you know, makeup tutorials in English or the food recipes or whatever it

might be. So we learned that the secret sauce, and I apply this to this day on any company that I built, was doing in culture more than in language. Yeah. So, yes, now all the content is. primarily in English, but we like to say it's in culture. So if there's a grandmother who, you know, normally would speak Spanish, that's perfectly okay. But if somebody doesn't speak Spanish, like the youngest generation tend to not do in this country now, we let that be organic

too. So, yeah, that was a big learning moment when we had to pivot to in culture versus in language. And as you say, like it was sort of, you were trying to touch the culture. So, like, give me example. You'd have, like, let's say this was something about food. and it was a video. There would be Spanish words in the video, but it would be almost entirely in English. Yes, I'll give you a perfect example. And we actually had this in our Me Too sales deck, right? So, for example, TastMaid would have a video on how to make Arroscoen Leche, rice pudding.

And so would we. Yeah. Their video would be beautiful, beautifully lit, pristine recipe. It was all good. And it was fine. It was for the general audience. Our video would have the typical table. table cloth that you would see in a Hispanic, without us saying this is for a Latino, it had so many

visual cues. Yeah. We did ours differently. We had somebody call the mom or the grandma on the phone to give them the recipe. And she'd be like, miho or something, right, on the phone? Right. Yeah. So that was the voiceover, right?

It's like, miho, you know, I was taking out the laundry or I was cleaning this. You know, it's just very in culture. You felt that emotional connection immediately. Now, the recipe was identical. There wasn't really anything different on the recipe from TastMate and Art recipe, but there was a lot of cultural emotional connections there, from the images that you saw, from the way the mom spoke to the kid or the grandma, to the pictures on the wall.

There was just something from the pot that they use. And everything that you do has that emotional connection, everything that we do had that emotional connection. So it didn't matter if it was food or if it was beauty or if it was. it was voting, right? It always had sort of like, what is at stake for us? What is different from us? If you open a jar of butter in a Latino household, we always make the joke, it'll never have butter. It will always have beans. So those little things that were like just you grow up, but you never see in media, there was a place where you would see yourself and your family represented,

and that was very, very powerful. I think that's the big. biggest accomplishment we had with Me Too. It was that our community really felt that they belonged. And the questions that we get all the time was like, Me Too, where have you been all my life? Or finally a brand that gets me, right? And that's just very, very powerful. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually, I mean, you did a bunch of licensing deals, right? Even with Huffington Post, AOL, the AOL properties, right? And I've seen, maybe a bit different now, but I'm assuming you also did a lot of brand partnerships. Yes, we did a lot of brand partnerships. You know, it was a very different concept for a lot of the brands to think about in culture. You know, they would always think in language, always, always, always. And in language worked maybe 20, 30 years ago when the majority of the U.S. population was pretty much an immigrant population, right? Now the growth is nativity, is U.S. born. And we know we are super, super young. And that's a very,

different demographic than the one agencies or brands were targeting 20, 30 years ago. So we were sort of like the go-to media company for them to really understand this demo. And we also did a lot of research around who is this demo. What are they like? Why are they such a big influence on older family members and their communities? You know, why that ROI is never one-to-one but one-to-men in our community. So it was, yes, they would come to us for the creativity. for sure, but also for the thought leadership. And, you know, we loved doing that. We loved showing that there was a different type of Latino to target in our country.

That was very, very valuable as you think about future-proofing any brand into the future. BAT3, so let me ask you about the business side, because running a media company is really, I mean, extremely hard. You know, I remember I interviewed Jonah Prady, the founder of BuzzFeed, and, you know, you look at the company's market cap today, and it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, It's a shadow of what it once was valued at. It's a very, very challenging. New companies are really hard. Some of them work, right? I mean, Axio sold, Politico sold, The New York Times is profitable, but they're rare. What was the biggest challenge for you in trying to, you know, in trying to create a company that you wanted to make profitable? I think the biggest challenge was staying stuck in thinking that our revenue should be advertisers,

driven only. You know, doing advertising and handholding for brands, particularly with a demo that they knew, but now it was so different trying to convince him that the way they've been doing things should progress as well as a community had. That was tough. It took a lot of time. It's very unscailable. Every day it was a challenge of why we matter as a community. So that over-explanation to those CMOs of why they should not be underinvesting in us and why not only they should be looking into a Univision or a Telemundo when they were targeting young audiences. I think the other thing was venture capital at the time, and we were venture back like all of the other digital media companies, they really put a premium on views, as we were talking about earlier, right?

Yes, yes. And the more billions of views you had, even if those views were, like I call them, empty calorie views. Yeah, just nonsense. robots. Yes, that was it. And there was no way you could touch that, right? So whenever I would bring up to my board, hey, should we be doing direct-to-consumer anything? Should we be charging $1 for premium content that people could not get enough of? The answer immediately was absolutely not. You cannot disturb those numbers. That's how you're going to be valued in the next round and in the next round. Yeah.

And as concerning as it was for a lot of us to say, well, well, no one ever ask us when we're going to be profitable, the board would laugh of like, profitable. Nobody's profitable was the answer I would get, right? And I was like, wow, like I've always been profitable. So it was definitely challenging to wrap my head around that. And then obviously, you know, we raised up to a series D before we sold the company. Yeah.

And in a series D, the first question everyone asked was, what's your path to profitability, right? Yeah. That's the point at which they asked that question. Of course. And we saw how many of the companies that did make it to your point started to charge for subscription fees, right? Started to go direct to consumer. Because the model of an MCN or the model when you are on rented territory, for the lack of a better word, you're on YouTube, you're on Facebook.

Those algorithms change. Those rules change. And then it messes everything up. Messes all your viewers up. Everything. Also, your economics. talking about business model, because when we launched, these YouTubers could not monetize on their own. They needed to be a part of a network.

Then one day, without any warning, YouTube decided to let them monetize on their own. So it's like, oh, great. Now that I have everything set up for me, now I have the relationships with the brand that, you know, the METUS of the world or the BuzzFeeds brought to me. I can go directly to them. I don't need to give any cut to anybody. Yeah. And thank you very much for your service. So that was tough.

Yeah. It's interesting because the incentives are totally misaligned, right? Like on the one hand, you've got these venture firms saying grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, views, views, views, views. But on the other hand, the quality of those views aren't always good. And also, it becomes much harder to circle back and kind of retroactively figure out a profitable path. I think about like BuzzFeed is still around and Huff Post is still around. But, I mean, they probably were under incredible pressure for views, views, views. Absolutely. I mean, views were the metric, even if you had no relationship with that audience. You know, we had at some point at the height of Me Too, a hundred million uniques. So a hundred million uniques, think about it. There's not a hundred million Latinos in the U.S., right? But we had a lot of crossover with African American audiences, Asian, white kids as well. But if you told me, do you have the phone number, the email, you know, how do you contact them again? And no, I mean, that was controlled by the networks because, again, we were on that sort of rented platform territory. So you had the scale, but you did not have direct relationship with them. And I think that's what made it very hard for a lot of these digital media companies. We're going to take another short break. But when we come back more from Sumo Wealth, CEO and co-founder Banffres, Asavado, and how she's helping people build financial literacy through her digital platform.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz. and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. And I'm talking with Beatriz Asavado, founder of Me Too, the English Language Latino Media Company, and more recently, the co-founder of Sumo Wealth, which is reimagining financial inclusion for young American Latinos. All right.

So, 2020, MeToo is acquired by a company called Go Digital Media Group. And this is sort of the beginning of your next phase in your career, which becomes Summa wealth. This is a new sort of concept that you developed, which also was designed to reach young Latinos. And I guess for lack of a better description for people who aren't familiar with Summa, it's similar to like NerdWallet or these kinds of financial advice websites that, you know, are designed to help young people make good financial decisions, but really targeting Latinos in the United States. Is that fair to say? Yes, that's absolutely fair to say, and it was definitely not my intention to do another startup in my 50s. It's

very unorthodox for anyone to do that. So, you know, it was the pandemic and looking at the stats and looking at the numbers on how Latinos were the hardest hit, not just with deaths, but also with economic hardship. There was just too many signs every day pointing me to do this. And you started this in the pandemic, right? Oh, yes, in the middle of the pandemic. I mean, I had employees that I met a year after I had hired them. I raised capital with people to this day I've never met in my life. So this was total lockdown, no vaccines, no meetings. So it was a very interesting time, but it was also the perfect time to start a company

to help Latinos understand their finances. And there's so much there when it comes to wealth building in our community. there's so much distrust in financial institutions. I would say that's something that cuts across all generations because we come from a lot of financial trauma from our countries of origin. You know, some of us still remember the day our parents lost it all in a devaluation.

Or one day the president would announce there's no more U.S. dollars in the country, so all your U.S. dollars were gone, like out of nowhere. So it's very, very hard for Latinos in the U.S. to fully trust financial institutions. And just like at Me Too, the top two questions or statements where finally a brand that gets me or where have you been all my life, at Summa, the two statements are, or the two comments are, you know, who do you trust Summa and who can I trust, right? And that definitely speaks volumes of

why this demographic is just so behind when it comes to wealth building and just really getting a grip on their finances. It's kind of odd because when you look at spend, it is Latinos spending the most, but saving the least and investing the least. So I really wanted to be able to change that. So tell me how you, so for people aren't familiar with Summa, how does it work, basically? So Summa is a platform where you're able to come on and get a financial chuckup, whether it's via an app or web-based, and it tells you where you stand. So you can't improve what you can't measure. So that's the first place of business. After that, we're able to coach you on your phone on what are the everyday changes you should be

making to improve your initial measurement, whether that is upping your credit score or paying off debt or getting your emergency savings account in a better stage or start investing. So it depends. It's very personalized. It's AI enabled. So the more you use it, the more it learns from you. and it's literally able to have a personal coach on your phone 24 hours a day. But it's very in culture.

So it has the voice of your grandma or of your mom or somebody, a beloved family member, if they would have been knowledgeable in finances, coaching you along the way. So it's not dry, it's not boring, it's not hard to understand. It's very fun and it's very engaging. So we wanted to build that, particularly for young Latin. because they're the ones who are managing the financial accounts for older family members. So empowering them would empower an entire family and community.

Yeah, I mean, I read that a fairly significant percentage of young Latinos are not even part of the U.S. financial system. So what's crazy is, if you look at the latest GDP report, right, Latinos contributed $2.8 trillion to the American economy. So when we say, why aren't Latinos fully, fully banked, it's not because of lack of economic power by any, any means. It is by that lack of trust. So even when Latinos are in the workforce, even when they have college degrees, they're still 60% not fully banked or not fully utilizing the financial services of this country. And it comes to trust. And I talk to a lot of my colleagues from the big fintech companies who say we don't understand why we can acquire young Latinos at scale. We've done everything.

And they always say, including translating our app or our website. And I think, oh my gosh, that's the last thing you need to be doing because that sends a very powerful message that that's not for them, that that's for their parents or grandparents. So for us, we launch this company in a very unorthodox way. Nobody launches a fintech company with no product. And that's exactly what we did. We said we're going to launch a fintech company. But first, we're going to build the brand, the community, the trust. We're going to do a lot of social listening.

And once we learn from that, we're going to build from that our financial products and services. So walk me through the business model because it's free. Like you can go download the app. There's all this free information. You know, there's different tools like a calculator on whether it's better rent-to-home or buy a home or it's gold trackers, their savings trackers. So there are all these tools that are available. So how does, how will Summa eventually make money? Yes. So great question. So it's been free so far. It's a freemium version, like I was saying, to really build the community, the trust, the brand, and the

scale. We think that it's much better to have a big funnel for when you want to convert those super users into a paid version. And that's where we are now. So a lot of the resources are free, but not all of them. We have a membership. that it's a premium wealth building membership that gives you access to the app and the premium coaching. It gives you access to our Sumaverse, which think about a gamified universe

where you're able to do all these different activations. We have a financial gym. We have a credit casino activation where through food recipes, you're able to learn how to up your credit score. We have regettone and money mariachi plaza where you learn about getting off debt from there. We have our sumaversity. So think about masterclasses. We have certifications and we give

you proof of learning on the blockchain, but we also have a deal with Arizona State University where you're able to get a real-life ASU certificate should you want one. So it's almost like a whole ecosystem to help you build wealth, and that has a premium to it. A lot of these activations will continue to be free because we partner with financial institutions. So we've been very much. working with Morgan Stanley, Chase, Wells Fargo, Fidelity. So that's a part of how we make money aside of the subscription model, both on the consumer side and on the B2B side. So we are closing now deals with pretty big names and brands, not just on the financial side, to give this as an employee perk, but also for their customers. And presumably eventually there'll be products that

you'll offer like maybe credit cards that might be through banks, but you would get a cut of that when people signed up. Yes, that's in our roadmap for 2023. Products and services, absolutely, whether we build our own on things that don't exist yet that we think would be well received by our community, or we white label and partner with other financial institutions. So, I mean, tell me what your goal is, ultimately. I mean, you're talking about $2 trillion of economic power, among not all Latinos, just a segment of the Latino population in the U.S.? So, you know, if we took Latinos and said, let that be a different country, right? We'd be the fifth largest economy in the world.

Oh, yeah. You'd be California. Yeah, and we'd be, you know, same as Italy, same as France. So definitely a very, very big economic power that we have in our backyard. It's always very shocking to me when people say, like, where should I be investing next, right? We're in Latin America. We're in Europe. We're in Asia.

I always say in your backyard. It's called young U.S. Latinos. And why I always make this emphasis on youth, it's because, obviously, as you know, Latinos are driving that population growth. It's a very young demo. So there's so much opportunity. But for me, my goal is really, really big. I really want to make sure that I made a substantial contribution to help close the wealth gap in my community.

So as big as our contributions are to GDP, we still are. at 20 cents to the dollar when it comes to closing the wealth gap in our community. And that's not something that we're going to do quickly. That's not something that I'm going to be able to do alone. But that is my big goal with Summa. If my company has a huge valuation, if my company is sold for a lot of money, and I failed to support my community in closing that wealth gap and helping build wealth, I personally will feel like I've failed in my mission of what I'm set out to do.

Beatriz Asavado, thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That's Beatriz Asavado, founder of Me Too and Sumo Wealth. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy and on Instagram I'm at guy. ros.

If you want to contact the team, our email address is H-I-B-T at ID.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arablui. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, and Kerry Thompson. Our intern is Susanna Brown. Eva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.