in 2017, Gabe and Patrick took a deep academic dive into the levers available to investors to actually create impact. They co-founded an impact certification system for fund managers, called Real Impact Tracker, alongside Gabe's former professor Cary Krosinsky.

In the summer 2018, based on feedback about people wanting to interact with information rather than take their word, Gabe and Patrick started and launched YourStake.org, as a collaboration platform for any investor to participate in shareholder engagement.

After listening to many sustainable financial advisors about the needs for personalized and tangible impact reporting, we built and launched our impact reporting features in fall 2019.

Driven by user feedback, we've expanded to address more and more problems felt by sustainable wealth managers. By fall 2020, YourStake expanded to cover the full steps on a sustainable investing client's journey, from intake questionnaire to portfolio construction to personalized impact reporting.

To motivate investors to shift to sustainable investing, data must resonate emotionally as part of a narrative. The biggest hesitations that non-experts have with ESG were transparency, trust, and contextualizing information intuitively.

When Gabe and Patrick set out to build impact reporting in 2019, there was already a saturation of ESG data providers. That said, none of them solved the impact motivation problem for non-experts. We quickly realized that to accomplish our goal, we would have to build our own data collection and communication systems.

With the perspectives gleaned from previous experiences, we built a fresh, tech-empowered approach that leveraged publicly-available data, sidestepping quality and cost issues associated with legacy approaches.