Promote Giving – A New Model for Performance-Driven Giving (EP.496)

My guest on today's special episode is Joel Holsinger, Co-head of Ares' $50 billion Alternative Credit strategy. In addition to his long and stellar career in the credit markets, Joel spearheaded the launch of Promote Giving, a philanthropic initiative similar to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates' Giving Pledge, designed for alternative asset managers. Our conversation covers Joel's path to engaging in philanthropy, starting from humble beginnings to now making grants of $5 million in 2025 through Ares and launching Promote Giving in October. The proposition of Promote Giving is simple – GPs commit up to 5% of their promote on at least one fund to give to a charity of their choice. With ten signatories and more than $35 billion in AUM pledged to participate already, Promote Giving is quickly growing the movement to managers across asset classes. It's the Giving Pledge applied to investment firms, and I can't imagine a better use of this space than to spread the word. Learn more and pledge to give at promotegiving.org https://www.promotegiving.org/ Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides https://twitter.com/tseides?lang=en or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedseides/ Subscribe to the mailing list https://capitalallocators.com/ Access Transcript with Premium Membership https://capitalallocators.com/signup Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com/https://thepodcastconsultant.com https://thepodcastconsultant.com/⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com/)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The idea is that simple. You're agreeing to give at least 5% of your promote of a fund or fund series, it doesn't even have to be the entire firm, to philanthropy, whether it's housing, whether it's health, whether it's education, whether it's homelessness, whether it's climate, whatever the passion is from that particular group.

• 0:24Ted Seides?

  I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's special episode is Joel Holsinger, co-head of Ares' $50 billion alternative credit strategy. In addition to his long and stellar career in the credit markets, Joel spearheaded the launch of Promote Giving, a philanthropic initiative similar to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates' Giving Pledge, designed for alternative asset managers. Our conversation covers Joel's path to engaging in philanthropy, starting from humble beginnings to now making grants of $5 million in 2025 through Ares and launching Promote Giving

• 1:04Ted Seides?

  in October. The proposition of Promote Giving is simple. GPs commit up to 5% of their promote on at least one fund to give to a charity of their choice. With 10 signatories and more than $35 billion in AUM pledged to participate already, Promote Giving is quickly growing the movement to managers across asset classes. It's the Giving Pledge, applied to investment firms, and I can't imagine a better use of this space than to spread the word. Learn more and pledge to give at PromoteGiving.org. Before we get going, it's travel season. Partner meetings, board meetings, the Capital

• 1:45Ted Seides?

  Allocators CIO Summit, Omaha for Berkshire, and Milken. Across planes, trains, and automobiles, you're bound to run into a few snacks. When they're unavoidable, I try to remember Will Gadero's story of the pilot who lifted everyone's spirits by bringing families into the cockpit. But it's not always easy, which leads to my most recent pet peeve.

• 2:10Ted Seides?

  I was on a flight with some unfortunate delays. We were scheduled to land from a cross-country journey at 11:30 PM, but got diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather at just the wrong time. After a gas-and-go stop that took about an hour, we finally landed at 3 AM. And at that time, there's only a scant crew working at hangars, so we waited another hour on the tarmac. None of that was anyone's fault. But after a long flight, an equally long day, you can imagine everyone was ready to go home. All the passengers queued up to depart one by one in an orderly fashion. It's actually uncanny how respectful people are when getting off planes.

• 2:54Ted Seides?

  But there's a moment when it's your turn to get moving. And on this particular flight, after eight and a half hours, the person in the row in front of me seemed oblivious to the cadence of the queue. When it was his turn, he arose, seemingly clueless, and forced everyone behind him to wait. Of course, this wasn't just a grab-your-bag-and-go. Two bags, maybe three, come down from above. Then he pauses to put on his jacket, then reorganizes his bags to put a backpack on top of his wheelbag. And then, without as much as "I'm sorry", he slowly started walking off the plane. Not a single movement in his deplaning occurred

• 3:36Ted Seides?

  until after the person in front of him had started walking. So there you have it, my new recent pet peeve. Don't be that person who isn't ready to deboard a plane when it's your turn. It's just not that hard. And thank you for spreading the word about my most recent pet peeve, which you'll only hear by tuning in to Capital Allocators. Please enjoy this conversation about promote giving with Joel Holsinger.

• 4:06Ted Seides?

  Joel, great to see you.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  Great to see you too.

• 4:08Ted Seides?

  Well, this is gonna be fun to dive into what you've created with PromoteGiving. To start, why don't you give a little perspective on your background and path into this charitable endeavor?

• 4:20Speaker 00

  I love the use of the word path from that standpoint. Whenever I interview anybody, the question I always ask people is, where did you grow up? What did your parents do? Because I find that you can learn so much about somebody by answering of those questions and seeing where it goes. For myself, I was born in Eugene, Oregon. I went to high school in Boise, Idaho. We moved over there when I was 13. My dad was a pastor. Not only was my dad a pastor, but my grandpa was a pastor and his dad was a pastor. So I broke the chain. My mom, in her early 30s, went to college to get a degree and she went into nursing. She ended up doing open heart and OR nursing. I had four or five aunts that are nurses and both of my grandmas were nurses. I grew up within that world.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  My sister is CEO of a division of Adventis Health, which is a healthcare company out in California. So that part of the family kept going there. We always drove to our holidays. We always drove to our vacations. We went to the K O I campgrounds. We did all those other things out west. I never went east of Mississippi until after college. The first flight I ever went on in my life, I was 15 years old. I went to visit my sister, who was five years older, who was at college in California. When I went to visit Tammy, I got off the plane and I said, I'm going to college in California.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Why have you kept this from me? I ended up going to college in California and all of us kids, we paid for our own college. I worked through college at Sears, but I fully planned on being an engineer. I was gonna get a job at MyCron in Boise, Idaho. That was literally the life plan. That's how big my dreams were. After I'd gotten through all of the physics and calculus classes, we got to the application side. And by halfway through, I said, yeah, one, I don't want to do this the rest of my life. And two, I'm gonna be a very average engineer. So I changed to finance, mainly because I was good at math and science. No idea what I wanted to do. I ended up doing an internship, if you remember. Dean Witter and they had me cold calling people to go and say some seminar.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  I was like, I am not doing this. Then I ended up getting an internship with Citigroup. I was there not even two weeks and I said, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. I absolutely love the puzzles of investing. Even to this day, I swear to everybody, I will never retire. I absolutely and totally love investing. I'm still the deal junkie of deal junkies. If you fast forward, I ended up with Citi, I thought I was going to retire at Citi. I was making more money in my first year than my dad had ever made. They promoted me a whole bunch of times. I loved it. I was in the rotation program across some of those groups. And I got heavily recruited by a guy who left our group. I said no three times and I eventually took an interview.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  I was young and dumb, but I was smart enough to say, this is another level. It was some ex Goldman Sachs partners and others that were starting especially finance group. I ended up deciding to join. Well, if you fast forward a number of years after that, four of the top five of us at Fortress Investment Group were in that room. Dean Nicolaus, Mark Firstin, who was our COO, Josh Pack, who sadly passed away last year, as well as John Shrewsbury, who stayed at that group once we sold it to Wells Fargo in 2000. He ended up becoming the CFO of Wells Fargo years later. Small group, but crazy talent and amazing experience going through that. Well, if you look through your career, fast forward a couple of things.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  I rejoined the band with Fortress over the years and I was there a little over a decade. I ended up being co-head of credit with Josh on everything at Liquid Credit. There was myself and Josh Pack and Drew McKnight were named successors in 13 or 14. My only reason for deciding to leave was we were acquired by SoftBank. And I decided it was time to do something else. I was 42 at the time and I went through this self-evaluation on what I wanted to do next. I was a poor kid who had done well and didn't need to do it anymore. So you should do what you want to do for the right reasons. Along the way, probably about 20 years ago now, my wife and I, her dad was originally from Peru. Had set everything up to go to charity. We'd set it up initially to global health,

• 8:30Speaker 00

  partly inspired by my mom and my grandma's, partly inspired by my dad, who was going to India in the 70s and doing trips there in South Sudan until about three or four years ago, and Ukraine and Russia when the walls came down. I realized purchasing power parity, your dollars have huge impact. And the ability to save a life, even today for $3,500 in global health, is pretty amazing. The greatest ROI. So I did a trip. I joined the board of PATH Global Health, which is one of the largest INGOs tied to vaccination programs in the third world. This trip I did was to India. It was the first time I'd been in a country in India. I'd been involved with PATH at that point for five or six years, only as a donor. I'd just joined the board. We went all over India on a whole bunch of programs on malaria and tuberculosis,

• 9:15Speaker 00

  as well as HIV and other things. You're sitting there in Dravi in the slums of Mumbai. You get a lot of perspective on life, on what you want to do. I decided it's probably time to do something else. Whatever I do next, once I got back from that trip, I decided I was going to tie into charity. I even considered impact investing. Eight years ago, after I resigned, one of my first calls was to Aries and Mike Arigetti, our CEO. And I said, I'm yours if I want to run TAC Ops or Assets. I wanted to do my favorite part of the investing. But I wanted to have the ability to rotate across asset classes. I want to have the ability to do large deals in relative value. But I wanted to have a charitable tie in. I run today, alternative credit, which, for those who aren't familiar at Aries,

• 9:59Speaker 00

  is everything asset-based finance, which we've grown from $5, $6 billion to around $50 billion in the last seven years. But what's amazing is what we've been able to do with that.

• 10:10Ted Seides?

  What was the charity tie-in that you required when you were going to join?

• 10:15Speaker 00

  We played around with different options. There was even this idea of maybe we do an impact sleeve. A lot of people that know some about impact and a lot that know some about investing and not a lot that know a lot about both. I also came around going, I've been doing this for a long time. This is my skill set. This is my 10,000 hours. I don't want to have an impact-type direct tie-in. But what if I just do what I know how to do, but have it indirectly? Mike Arigetti's been a friend for 20 years. So it was a lot of back and forth and, hey, what if we did this? What if we did this? And whiteboarding. I said, I'll do 5% of the promote if you get Ares to do 5% of the promote for what we call our Pathfinder flagship of Family of Funds, which is a little bit of a tip of

• 10:58Speaker 00

  the hat to Path and a tip of the hat to Ares for any space geeks. I was driving along with my son and I said, oh yeah, we're actually thinking of naming it Pathfinder. He was 11 at the time. Then he goes, oh, I get it. Like the Mars Rover Pathfinder. I'm like, well, no, but that makes sense. He goes, no, that makes sense because it's Ares. It's Mars, which is Ares. And I was like, oh, you're smarter than me. But we named it Pathfinder and that one, it's 10%. And now, close to half of our capital is under the Pathfinder Family of Funds. It's been amazing to be think of the growth we've had where we've already accrued over $50 million that will go to global health and education. I met Sal

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Khan along the way from Khan Academy, who inspired me not just on global health, but education.

• 11:46Ted Seides?

  What was Ares' initial impression, other than, hey, Joel, we'd love you to come? Sure, I guess we'll do this for you?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Mike, when I asked that question, said, done. Literally, that was his first words out of his mouth. And we'll figure it out later. He was very supportive and Mike Arigetti and Kip Devere and Mitch and Schmitty, I'd known them all during that time period. We'd done deals together. I'd lent to them. We'd done other things. So it was a known quantity on both sides. That part was not a problem. I met with some other people. Tony Wrestler is our chairman today. I'll embarrass him a little bit. Tony initially didn't love it. He's very philanthropic. He looked at it as, well, we didn't want it to just look like marketing. We're a public asset management. What's the expectation for all other funds going forward? What happens when other, other group says, wait a minute, can we do that too? We went back and forth debating it. And in the end, the advantage of being a free

• 12:39Speaker 00

  agent, I was basically in the cards of, hey, that's my ask. If we want to do this, let's do this. As well as it was a percentage of zero. There was no fund. If I went in today, they'd probably look at me like, what are you talking about? What's more interesting is three years ago, I was having drinks with Tony. We were talking about the business and the growth of the business and we've been the fastest organically growing group inside of Ares. So obviously he's very happy with what we've been able to do across all those things. And I said, Tony, do you remember that conversation? He goes, yeah, I do. I said, you didn't really like it. He goes, yeah, I remember that. I said, so what do you think now? And Tony took a little bit, thought about it. And he goes, I was a hundred percent wrong.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  It got me emotionally because it looked right at me and said, not only did it help change the way we think about philanthropy at Ares, but now there's a whole bunch of funds that give one to 5% of their promote to help fund the Ares Charitable Foundation, which I co-chair with Mike Arigetti, separate and apart from what we did at Pathfinder. He said, not only did it change, it started effectively at the beginning of what became the foundation, but it changed the way I think philanthropic giving. He looked at it as always being a personal thing. What he saw was the ability to have that much more impact when you tie it into your business and you make it seamless. We see that with our team, which is you're doing a deal. It's easy to talk about the $50 million accrued and last year we did $4 million

• 14:06Speaker 00

  of grants and we're very early in the ramp up of this. It's amazing when you talk about those, but what's more amazing was when you talk about one single deal and you're talking to a 25 year old or a 35 year old and you're saying that particular deal, if it does what we modeled to, it's going to be $300,000 to $2.5 million that will go to charity. You did that. That's part of your legacy for the rest of your life. That's the amazing thing about tying it in.

• 14:31Ted Seides?

  How did you come up with the idea of extending this beyond Ares?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  About a year ago, we have about, call it a third of our team that volunteers time for what we do for the different grants under the Pathfinder family of funds. A couple of people from that team came with this idea of, we'd been talking for years of how do we get others to do it? I've talked to a number of GPs and said, you should do this. This is amazing for culture. It's amazing for your ability to drive the underlying philanthries. They said, what if we kept it simple? What if we just made it like the giving pledge? Where you agree to give 5%, you get to direct where that goes. It's just a pledge that you're going to do that. And I said, that's actually brilliant. I use other words that I'm not allowed to cuss anymore.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  I said, that's brilliant, just because of the simplicity of it. So what we did behind the scenes is we worked with our internal teams on PR as IR. We worked with an external term on building a brand piece. But what we came up with is what we call promote giving. The idea is that simple. You're agreeing to give at least 5% of your promote of a fund or fund series. It doesn't even have to be the entire firm to philanthropy. Whether it's housing, whether it's health, whether it's education, whether it's homelessness, whether it's climate, whatever the passion is from that particular group. We launched that October 15th of last year. Really did come from that idea and saying, what if we got others to do the same thing that we've been doing for the last seven years?

• 16:05Ted Seides?

  Since you started doing that, I'd love to hear a story from one of the charities that you chose of the impact you can have with the dollars that you're giving.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  We're helping co-develop a surgical center with Mount Sinai in Zimbabwe, where we agreed to pay for half if they agreed to get matched funding for the other half. They've already done this in Ghana. It's amazing what you can do. It's about 6,000 surgeries per year. It's all done with teams and staffs that are on the ground with some telemedicine for higher risk type cases. But if you thought of what that surgical center would cost in the US, you're probably talking 50 to 100 million dollars. You're able to truly save lives and do something that has that kind of impact just from one single grant. We also did a project with Educate Girls, where they're effectively through a mentor program going door to door in rural parts of India. We toured with them in Uttar Pradesh, where they're talking both about how to get girls

• 16:57Speaker 00

  back into school and the value of the education. At the same time, helping them with the paperwork to get them back into school. Their success rate is amazing. Our small grant will end up impacting probably about 150,000 on the expansion that they can do on the villages that they're going into and countering that across all parts of India. That's just two grants we did last year. We did a little over $4 million in seven grants and we're just getting started.

• 17:22Ted Seides?

  What's the uptake been in the initial six months?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  We had eight founding signatories. So it included groups like Silverpoint and Robert O'Shea has been an amazing supporter of this. Jeremy Coller and Coller, same thing. Some groups that are newer because they've just launched funds, but people have been in the industry for a long time. Chad Pike, Ed MacRora, Adam Pierkowski, Derby Lane. We also have some smaller groups that are more impact or others related. Venture like Ascend. We have Pantheon on the secondary side and then Predium, which makes all the sense in the world. And Ted over there became that person who said, this is what I want to do and the internal rabbi. The coolest part is the last of the eight founding signatories was related to management. So Jeff Blau and others. We've now done deals with most

• 18:09Speaker 00

  of the groups because in this whole process of putting this together, you're all talking to each other at the top of the house level. And part of the conversation is, we should be partnering with you on this. We've already done a couple billion dollars of deals with those that are in it because you've created this unique community that are all like-minded. As you know, half the getting deals done is who do I want to trust and who I want to partner. You've been able to do that. The uptake has been amazing and we've had some snowballs since then.

• 18:36Ted Seides?

  How's that snowball worked? How'd you go from the initial eight to whoever else is involved today?

• 18:41Speaker 00

  We've had two Cs, which is a hedge fund who signed on since that. We have four or five others that are in different forms of documentation or others that have verbally said and gone through. As you can imagine, two Cs, it was a credit, it was a quick process because he loved it and he said, I'm absolutely in. And very quickly we moved it forward. When you get the very large organizations, it's about 17 meetings and formal approvals and boards and others to go through it just to make sure you're thinking through all those pieces and how that will work out. The interest has been amazing. We've had inbounds from Asia that are reaching out and saying, hey, I run this hedge fund. I love what you guys are doing. Can you tell me more? The goal long-term is you want private equity, you want private credit, you want venture, you

• 19:25Speaker 00

  want real estate, you want hedge funds, you want fund to funds, you want secondaries. And we're getting pretty close to that. We pretty much have almost every type of alts because it really is this mechanism for more, we call it compounding purpose. You're compounding purpose, but you're also building permanent type funding models for philanthropy as opposed to them starting from scratch every year.

• 19:47Ted Seides?

  When you get an inbound or you're reaching out to someone to tell them about it, what's your elevator pitch for promote giving?

• 19:54Speaker 00

  First, I tell the origin story. I do believe karma is real. I do believe a lot of our success and our progress has been because you put good things into the universe and good things happen. It helps who you are as an organization when you've said, this is our true north. This is what we stand for. This is what we're doing. This is what we're driving going forward. I've even had transactions. We did something with Mike Lowell-Milken on their family office. Mike absolutely loved that we had this alignment and we had this transaction. When a deal where it's a tie with three or four people, it's like, I think I'd rather partner with this person. He's been an amazing sum order ever since across that. It is walking through the simplicity of it where people can get hung up as they can say, well, wait a minute,

• 20:37Speaker 00

  is it the whole firm? And what's the timing? There was even some misperception upfront of, oh, it all goes into promote giving and then we give the money away to the different charities. No, everybody directs their own. In our quarterly calls and others, what we're doing is we're saying, okay, you're focused on housing. You're focused on help. You guys should be talking to each other though, because there's great stuff you guys could be doing together, like investing. There's people who have never really done it. There's people that have DAFs and have done some individual donor advice funds things. There's people that have full blown foundations that have huge infrastructures. It's trying to figure out where people are in their cycle in telling them the backstory.

• 21:16Ted Seides?

  What are you hoping to achieve with promote giving?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  I jokingly said to Arigetti at dinner a couple of years ago, when we started talking about this idea and I said, I've decided I want to be a billionaire. I'd let that sit for a little bit because you know, when your boss, you're telling them you want to be a billionaire. I just wanted to scare him a little bit with that comment. And he's like, hey, let's talk. I said, but I've decided my definition of billionaire is being able to give billions to philanthropy, whether through personal, whether through Pathfinder, family of funds, whether through promote giving. I'm sitting here today, pretty confident that's going to happen because it's just logical. It fully aligns the culture of teams at full. Fully aligns the dual purpose because you're driving the highest returns to your investors,

• 22:02Speaker 00

  which are generally pensions and insurance and endowments and others for health and education and their programs. And you're driving the highest dollars to philanthropy when you do that out of your pocket, not out of their pocket. So you're not giving anything up. You're not sitting there saying, I'm taking less returns in order to drive that. The simplicity of it is something that will grow. And I do think that this can build permanent funding models for philanthropy. If you look at some of our initial grants we've done, it's amazing what you can do through this. I also think that your turnover, your culture, your purpose, and the reason you're doing this are all dramatically better. That's the goal. I decided a long time ago, I'm never retiring. And as long as I can tie the investing with the philanthropy, I have a reason I'm doing it. I'm very excited to

• 22:46Speaker 00

  see what this will do. One thing I'd say in closing, Ted, and I'll quote Jeremy Coller, I used to say, there's only three things that really matter when you're in your 80s. Your close friends, close family, your experience, and did you give back mentoring, teaching, parenting, or philanthropy? Jeremy has a better version of that, which is, is your 13-year-old self proud of what you've done? Is your 85 or 90-year-old self proud looking back at what the life you've done? Those are the things that really matter. I never dreamed this big when I was 13. I was just trying to go back to work at Micron. Part of it excites me about all this is seeing where this can go. In the end, you want to be able to look back and say, hey, we did everything we could to improve this. And the

• 23:30Speaker 00

  dollars and the impact that come out of this are absolutely amazing at what you can do.

• 23:34Ted Seides?

  Well, Joel, I'm super excited to help you spread the word about this because it is an incontrovertible good for everyone involved. Thanks for the initiative and thanks for telling us about it.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Thank you, Ted.

• 23:47Ted Seides?

  Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  All opinions expressed by TED and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Capital Allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast.