The ROAR Podcast: Everett Sands, Lendistry

# ROAR Podcast: Everett Sands
**Guest:** Everett Sands
**Date:** 2025-10-29
**YouTube URL:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeOl4d5Le54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeOl4d5Le54)

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Caroline Valvardi (00:01.319)
Welcome to the Roar Podcast. I'm your host, Caroline Valbardi. And with me today is Everett Sands, founder and CEO of Lendistry. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Carolina. Yes. Great. Likewise, super excited to have you on the show to kind of talk about a little bit different angle than maybe what some of the listeners are used to with the Roar podcast. So we can jump right in with one of the questions that we typically kind of start with. So can you tell us a bit about your career journey and how you ended up where you are now?

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (00:10.84)
Thanks, Carolyn. Happy to be here.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (00:31.938)
Yeah, so I started in DC, where I'm from and went to boarding school in New Hampshire, ended up going to Penn in Philadelphia, and really got fascinated with finance and with money and partly because I didn't have it and partly because it just seemed like that's what made the world go around. ended up working for a couple of different banks, one a minority bank, one a large national player, and then founded Lindistry because I saw I'll just say the landscape changing.

Caroline Valvardi (00:32.211)
Yeah, so

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (01:00.352)
In terms of access to capital, you know, not to get too much in the weeds, but there was a moment after the great financial crisis where banks were allowed to say what was operationally efficient. And the way to think about that is every business says, hey, this client is too large, too small, different things like that. But when the banking industry or the financial sector starts to say that, that's a little bit dangerous, because we've always told people have good credit, have good income, you can get a loan.

If you were to have an 800 credit score and you'd have great income, but you walked into a bank and they didn't offer that loan amount, that could be fairly discouraging. and so Landistry was started to help solve for that problem. One to support the banks in terms of their operational efficiency, and two to help the communities in terms of lending. but the answer to your question is through a variety of different financial institutions and and and being a nerd about you know access to capital.

in finance brought me to where I'm at today.

Caroline Valvardi (02:00.479)
Amazing. Thank you. And so yeah, the connection to sports, we'll get there. is I think super powerful and fascinating and why I wanted to bring you on the show. But before we jump in, can you just talk a little bit just to give kind of grounding for the audience of what does Lindustry do?

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (02:04.386)
Yeah.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (02:16.216)
Sure. So Lendistry, we have roughly about 300 team members, six officers across the US. we're a capital deployer. So we partner with banks and financial institutions, so think of insurance companies and non-bank lenders, to deploy capital. we partner with governments to deploy capital, and then we partner with Fortune 500s. So to give you some examples, there's programs like Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business, 10,000 women. Goldman Sachs is an investment bank.

So that business might come to Goldman and say, hey, I just learned XYZ at 10,000 small business and I'd like to borrow a million dollars. well, Linnershoe is one of their partners, and you might come to us, or you'd have an opportunity to come to us to be able to borrow that million or a hundred thousand or some other number. Let's say the government wants to deploy money. So a lot of times what's a little bit more familiar to us is disaster recovery. So I'll bring up a recent one, LA wildfires.

we supported the county of Los Angeles in terms of distributing grants to those who had lost their home. We also supported the Los Angeles Chamber Commerce that wanted to support small businesses that lost their business or their businesses were impacted by the fire. And then when you think about Fortune 500s, we have partners like Visa, we have partners like Amazon, we have partners like Walmart. So if you get a package to your home that is a small business likely delivering you that that package.

Well, that business needs access to capital. And we built Amazon community lending to support some of the small businesses on Amazon's seller network.

Caroline Valvardi (03:51.271)
Awesome. Cool. And now is where we kind of take it into this shift of how does this all connect to women's sports? So Lendistry has made some notable moves in women's sports partnerships over the, I don't know, you can tell us however many years, but something I was following very closely. just seeing this opportunity to connect more the sports and community development and small business, all all of those kind of elements. And so

Can you just walk us through how those partnerships came about or kind of where the origins of, you know, why partnering with in women's sports?

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (04:24.792)
Yeah, sure. So every decision we make when it comes to marketing, it's part mission and part business. We'll go mission first and then we'll go into the business because probably we can we can get carried away in the business side of it. but the mission is because we help underserved communities and because we're trying to think about how to provide access to capital, the numbers are a little daunting, but as you can imagine, women are not getting the access to capital that comparable to men.

And so when we look at that in totality, and you can insert any type of capital, VC capital, private credit, SBA loans, whatever you want to do, look at as a category, we feel like we could be part of the solution to that. when we think about part being part of the solution in terms of access to capital, we also have to think about are we part of the problem? So where are we spending our marketing dollars? Where are we spending our resources? Where are we having our company outings? and and so that

Is where the WNBA and also women's soccer came into play where we started to say, okay, we need to think about this with a little bit more intentionality. And then the last part of the mission, maybe not the last, but one of the other major parts is equal pay and and other things, right? So somewhat cyclical, right? If you want to loan someone money, then you gotta make sure they can pay you back. And and to help them pay you back, you spend the money, right? And then it comes full circle because if we spend the money.

hopefully we can become a trailblazer leader for other institutions to spend the money and then revenue grows. And when revenue grows, compensation grows and everything else along with it. That's the mission side of it. The business side of it is when we look at the numbers, and you look at you could say the popularity of school sure.

Caroline Valvardi (06:01.033)
Can pause for one second? 'Cause it's cutting hold on. Hold on for one second. Cause it's cutting out. We can edit it. Hold on.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (06:07.352)
Okay.

Caroline Valvardi (06:11.391)
Hold on one second.

Caroline Valvardi (06:20.831)
Wait, hold on. I think it might be my internet. Hold on. Let me see.

Caroline Valvardi (06:39.262)
It just.

Caroline Valvardi (06:43.133)
Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Can you still hear me or no?

Caroline Valvardi (11:56.348)
Okay. Actually we can use the same.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (12:08.088)
Sorry, I took a call when you were off. Life of the student.

Caroline Valvardi (12:09.512)
No. Sorry, I I like asked a little chat bo I have no idea. Yeah, all of a sudden it was telling me that my s connection was unstable. but everything looks okay now. Sorry about that. But it says I'll upload what yeah, it's uploading what we already recorded, so hopefully it should be okay.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (12:28.28)
Okay, so you wanna restart at one that question, last one?

Caroline Valvardi (12:30.404)
yeah, I mean we got through most of like the mission part of it. So if you prefer just to restart, and it still is yeah, it's still recording, it looks like. So I think we're okay.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (12:37.198)
The business part.

Yeah, it is. Well, at least on my side. Okay. you ready?

Caroline Valvardi (12:46.026)
All right, one, two, three. Okay.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (12:48.27)
All right. So on the business side, when we started to think about women's sports, we really started to pay attention to a couple of different factors. One, probably the most obvious, which is the popularity of the players. So whether that be their social media views, the amount of context they have, different things like that. two, we started to pay attention to the business overall. where is it going? How

It so this could be everything from the valuations of the WNBA teams to the T V deals and different things like that. And then three, we started to pay attention to the market forces. So the way I tend to think of if you take the WNBA for an example, I would equate it to Formula One before the Netflix Drive to Survive special. And if you actually pay attention to, you know, Formula One, what happened after Drive to Survive, you know, it it really went through the roof.

And I think the same thing is is happening and will happen. I think we'll look back five, ten years from now at the WNBA and I think not us, but a lot of companies are gonna say should have, would have, could have. and you know, it will it'll be what it is.

Caroline Valvardi (13:53.79)
Yes. Yeah, there's so many elements of that that are yeah, are so interesting. And I mean, one, I think just the parallels of women's sports and we talk about underinvested communities, it's that, you know, switching the mindset from philanthropy and charity to investment that, you know, these you know, people are worth investing in. It doesn't it it it's I think it kind of reframes the whole thing and a lot of times in sports it's you know, there's a lot of talk about community impact, but it's often this

kind of more philanthropic charitable mindset. And there's just this whole world of you know looking at it more as an investment that I think is so much more powerful and creates real change that is good for everyone. and so so yeah it's cool to hear about that. and can you talk about so w where was the origins of like your first partnership in women's sports and because now you have a bunch so if you can just talk through some of them and yeah where is that something that you

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (14:32.99)
Yeah.

Caroline Valvardi (14:49.982)
came up with or either team or, you know, how how did you go about kind of thinking about

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (14:53.75)
I I wish I was that smart. no. I I the my my genius isn't hiring the smart people to figure this type of stuff out. But it started with the LA Sparks. we wanted to start at home for a variety of different reasons. One, it allowed us to be more present. two, when we started to think about the you know, call it the the development of the partnership, whether we needed to show up in a high quality way, whether we need to think about the businesses that we were going to

represent or present at the the halftime shows or different things like that and just really connecting with the organization, the Sparks organization. We wanted it to be fairly close. So from the office that I sit in and some of the senior leaders sit in literally the LA Live is about two miles away. So we were like, okay, this is gonna be close. We can we can learn a lot. And then as you can imagine, it started to develop from there. Second partnership was FC Gotham. And that was really a couple of different things. one,

Similar to the WNBA. we have started studying the numbers of FIFA. And I'm gonna mess this that up. So please put the asterisk or whatever you need to do. But I think five million people watch the Super Bowl, and I think it's 500 million people watch the World Cup championship. So it's because it's worldly, obviously. So and and when you start to think about that hundred X or 10X or whatever the number is, you know, again, taking back that investment mindset, you start to say, where are the places that we want?

Be. I'll mix that a little bit in a bit some more business. Majority of transactions happen within six states: New York, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and California. So we started to map out where do we want our strategic partnerships. Not that we won't partner in other states, we obviously do, but we really want to be very intentional as we started to think about our kind of first partnerships. And so FC Gotham was just amazing because they actually won the soccer championship the first year we were partners.

so whether it be their version of the terrible Tau, or just being in that New York, New Jersey, you know, market, which is an amazing market, it just had a lot of benefits for us. so hopefully that answers your question. But yeah.

Caroline Valvardi (17:00.574)
Yes, yes. and one sec I'm going to just wanna make sure it's telling me to close these other browsers that I have open. So I just wanna make sure.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (17:08.088)
Yeah.

Taking your bandwidth away.

Caroline Valvardi (17:12.734)
I it's it's just like there is a like it but then what I go says leave site changes may not be safe. So I'm like, but this is telling me the recording is telling me to exit them. So I'm like afraid to exit them so it doesn't it's not. Hold on one second. I just want to make sure. this is what's a my hair's

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (17:29.025)
Yeah.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (17:34.05)
Your editors laughing at us.

Your editor's cracking up.

Caroline Valvardi (17:40.314)
Yeah, this happened on the first my very first one too. I was like, I just wanna s so one of them says it's like eighty t 'cause this might

B from the

Caroline Valvardi (18:00.872)
Just don't want it to exit out and then it tells us we have to redo

Caroline Valvardi (18:08.164)
this recording now is saying eight does it say eighteen minutes I think it's says eighteen minutes from so that's probably for this round so we might just just says this can cause recording issues but it looks like it's still recording so I'm gonna take my chances. I don't want to waste your time though so like what's keep going that decision and then yeah hopefully we get enough good content that yes we can splice through.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (18:12.587)
Yeah.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (18:29.621)
Okay.

Caroline Valvardi (18:37.768)
So I'm so sorry though. I don't yeah, I just don't know whether yeah it's better to ex out or just keep but but I'm gonna say keep going. yeah, 'cause it still says I mean it still says it's recording, so Okay. All right. So let's keep going. Okay, so all right, let me see what was gonna where I was gonna go with this next. yeah, I think just

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (18:47.67)
Okay. You sure?

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (18:52.8)
I see it. I see the

Caroline Valvardi (19:07.688)
When we cut back in here, I think I'm gonna go kind of transition to the sports and entertainment districts now. So cool. All right. So let's we'll start again. Okay. All right, one, two, three. All right, so now transitioning a bit. Surge, we're focused on developing and investing in large scale sports and entertainment districts around stadiums and arenas. And so that's you know, all the different types of mixes of uses. So it's hospitality, housing.

retail, all of these things, and there are so many opportunities you know, for new businesses to come in. but of course, when you're building these sports and entertainment districts, it's not always easy for you know smaller independent businesses and historically financially underserved businesses to take advantage of those opportunities. And so can you talk a little bit about I don't know, advice that you would give as sports teams and other partners are planning out these districts and ways to

make them more inclusive and making sure there's more equitable economic opportunity for, you know, small businesses and local businesses that are already existing, kind of in those areas to be able to benefit.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (20:18.846)
Yeah. Sure. So I I'll start from the the perspective of the business and then I'll come to, you know, kind of the larger institution like a surgeon, how you can help. So the perspective of the business should be the the most successful generally businesses, not by size and not necessarily by revenue, but just in terms of percentage of success are franchises. And the reason why they're successful are one, there's a blueprint, and two, they're attached to what we call an anchor institution.

So if you were to buy a franchise, you know, generally there's a big name attached to it or something like that. I think the the small business should think about it as they get that benefit of being attached to the anchor institution. And so what does that mean? That means there's already customer flow. So less marketing needs to be done. There's already an attachment to a a sports team. So you can really kind of calendar whether it be your events, your happy hours, or different things like that.

and then I think the third thing is that you're already attached to something that the local municipality, city, whatever, cares about, right? And I think that's really, really important because now you have the people, you've got the government, and then again, you've got one of your largest expenses in terms of marketing kind of cover for you. Now moving over to the larger sports development, you know, companies, et cetera, I think they should do a couple of different things. One, they should recognize that they're gonna have this small business that's gonna wanna participate in the transaction.

And so whether they think about things like tax credits, whether they think about discounted rent, whether they think about other opportunities that they might get as part of a what I call a government solicitation exercise. So whether that be from the bonding to obviously the the the financial structuring, I think they should consider those small businesses. And we've seen things like this. We've seen businesses get a discount or grant. we've seen them get a variety of different things in an effort to ramp up.

insert two years, three years, or however long it might take them to get started. discounted rent is is a is a tricky thing, but one of the things that we've seen be successful is a revenue play versus a rent play. And so what does that mean? That means as opposed to saying look there's this fixed costs that you're going to have as this new business owner, I'm going to give you a variable I'm going to give you a fixed cost. So there's some portion it's rent, but I'm also going to attach myself to the variable costs of the institution.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (22:41.004)
said differently, you know, if you do well, we do well. And if you have a, you know, kind of a slower time frame or day, then we have a slower time frame a day. But there's a way to kind of make all those numbers work. I hope that makes sense. But we've seen this play out in, you know, our airport concessions business, some of our other sports businesses in a variety of different organizations kind of across the US. it's a play on the franchise model. and so that's why I started with

Caroline Valvardi (23:06.738)
Awesome. Yeah, that's great. and then going back a bit to some of the women's sports partnerships. So this is the Roar podcast. And so Roar is our data platform. And so we acquired a company called Roar a few months back, led by Adam Grossman. And so that's kind of collecting all these data sets, customer data sets from all over the place and you know, fan data sets from teams and you know, as we think about districts, that's not just the fan data that's much

broader the people that are going to be living, working, and playing there. And so obviously Lendustry is very innovative in your you know use of AI and data and and all these things. So feel free to weave that in. But when we think specifically about partnerships and we actually had the Chicago Sky on the podcast I think last week. And so that's I think one of your more recent partners and just talked about using data to how do you establish partners and pick partners. So can you talk from your perspective of you know how do you evaluate

you know, which teams that you've worked with so far, like how do you, you know, evalu are and you know, do you have other targets of are you gonna continue across, you know, all of the WMBA or N W S L or, you know, what yeah, the ambitions beyond that. But but yeah, a little bit about how you use data to kind of evaluate memberships and things.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (24:20.226)
Yeah. So I'll start backwards. I mean, yes, the game plan is to take on as many partnerships as we can, both in terms of being able to be present as well as obviously the economics associated with it. so the data says that she's running her business from nine to five, she's taking care of her home from five to nine, and then she's applying for loans or doing things that are related to the business generally later in the evening.

And and how are we doing? How do we know that? Because we're tracking when she applies, when she's uploading documents, when she's communicating with us. So then when you start to kind of think about that and you start to think of what is the approach that you want for that customer. This is not, hey, the office is open, come in at midnight. This is a much more soft sell non transactional moment that we need to embrace and we need to find ourselves in. So what is a soft sell non transactional moment? It's it's meeting her where she's at, where she's kind of most comfortable.

And believe it or not, those sports games are a a portion of that. Now, there's literally the as actual game she's going to, there's whether or not she's watching ION or ESPN or something else in terms of, you know, kind of how she's receiving that information. But the punchline is what we're trying to do is we're trying to essentially say Linistry is a brand that you recognize, that is where you are, and that, you know, when we go to the finance side is obviously a responsible deployer of capital.

And so we're though that's we're leveraging the data to say, okay, when is she transacting? What's happening when she's transacting, right? What's what could possibly be in the background? Like what could she be listening to, watching? What else could she be doing? where is she showing up? Whether that be a family exercise, non family exercise, a business exercise, anything like that. And then how do we have that soft sell? And then to go further into the data, where is that happening? And so that's why we created a partnership with the Chicago Sky and Atlanta Dream this year, because again.

As we start to build this out, very clear that she's in major metropolitan markets. So insert again, Los Angeles, New York, New Jersey, New York City, and northern New Jersey, as well as obviously Atlanta and Chicago. And then there's tangents to that too. So another tangent is we are in capital, the capital business as well. Some of the maps shows $85 trillion in the baby boomers. 70% of that 85 trillion will go to women.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (26:44.6)
The obvious stat is women live longer than men. and so she will inherit that capital. And when you start to look at what she cares about in terms of investing, impact investing becomes kind of top of mind. You can see this in several of what I'll call, you know, whether they be billionaires or 100 millionaires or millionaires and where they're spending their money. So we're tracking all different types of things. and if you get into that investor's mind, if she does care about impact, then obviously she's gonna care about women.

small businesses. The last that I'll tell you, you probably know this already, which is that women are creating more businesses than men over the last couple of years. And so naturally you kind of want to, you know, to use a sports analogy, you want to go to where the where the where the puck is going, so to speak. So if you know that women are about to be the largest segment of investors, if you know that they're about to be the largest segment of business owners, you don't want to start, you know, five years from now. You want to start now.

So that you can either capture the data, build the brand, or all the different things that are important to a business like ours that wants to be able to, you know, deploy that capital.

Caroline Valvardi (27:48.85)
Yeah, and I I think the also the other kind of alignment with all this, which is really interesting, is just the athletes themselves and the players and how I mean on the men's side too, but particularly for women, you know, the shorter season and all that have, you know, really been kind of almost forced to be very entrepreneurial thinking and there's so many cool stories of the athletes, you know, WMBA and WSL, all of them really, you know, be being so entrepreneurial and

but also need access to capital. So yeah, I just think the alignment is so strong and powerful in in what you guys are doing. and you know

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (28:24.76)
Yeah, well if you if you j if you just, you know, kind of double click on that, there's a couple of things to think about. One, it doesn't matter gender, like athletes' career is very short. So you get this large sum of capital and then you have to live in I don't know, thirty to fifty years after it, right? So so you better invest or think about investing like immediately, literally, right? And and and obviously with NIL, some of that money's coming a little bit earlier, right?

So that's one thing. The second thing is if you take something like what's happening with the new recent CBA agreement and shout out to you know the WNBA and their governing board that were able to, you know, work that through with the players association. But there's gonna be a lot of athletes that are gonna make a big chunk of money. And, you know, whether it be the lottery or whether it be you know that transition from kind of college to pro, maybe now high school to college or NIL is probably disrupting that a little bit. But the punchline is, you know, if you if you start making four X or five X amount of money.

Again, you need to very quickly think about where that money's gonna go to build sustainability and investments. And then to the other point that you made, they have this brand power, whether it be their followers, whether it be, you know, where their what their interests are, whether it be just the respect that they have in the community. How are they gonna leverage that, you know, beyond, you know, the pro sports? And so business is an easy way, I think, to think about how to leverage that, whether they're an investor.

And they're leveraging their brand to support that investment, or they're the actual business owner. And then we're like oxygen, like capital, there's no like try to live without capital, you might as well just like not try to live without oxygen, right? Especially to a business. And so when you can kind of get all those things right and combine those things together, then you really see the athletes and quite frankly, the professionals who you know live abundant lives kind of pro post pro sports.

and even pro their career. So we hope that we can play a role in that while, you know, the athletes are are kind of going through that transitional moment of making a lot of money, figuring out what to do with it, how to invest, and then obviously living beyond the you know, the pro career.

Caroline Valvardi (30:33.758)
Yep. Yeah. And then the other piece of it too, just the the trend towards the kind of impact investing side of it too has been kind of cool and interesting to see. And it was really where I realized just this huge intersection between sports and community development and kind of the mission driven finance and just where all those can really yeah just drive drive a lot of impact. And when we talk about the sports entertainment districts, back to that, I mean it's like mission driven financial institutions are such a powerful kind of partnership as we think about these very large scale kind of

centrally real estate developments and all the different components and yeah as we talked about before just making them, you know, the oper echo economic opportunities accessible and all that. but but I wanted to ask as you're you know we've talked about a lot of about what Lendishree does and and all the things behind it, but can you talk about some I don't know if you're you're probably not able to share favorite businesses or stories, but if you can just give some kind of

flavor, real feel, or maybe some of the businesses that have been featured through some of these partnerships just to kind of give people just that really you know, human element of who who these people are, what what some of these businesses do. would love to hear, yeah, a bit about, yeah, just highlights of of a few or where they're based and what they do.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (31:46.572)
Yeah, sure. So I mean we j just to take a step back. So what we do is we give businesses an opportunity to compete in contests. these are local contests where they effectively, you know, put their name in the hat for lack of a better term. And then you know, winners are chosen on a variety of different things. Some are chosen by us, some are chosen by the teams. we give businesses an opportunity to show up generally outside the stadium. So for example, with FC Gotham, we did a food truck night.

so food truck vendors were there. They were outside of the stadium, they were serving food, the fans came a couple of hours earlier. They had a lot of different a lot of other sponsors there too. So imagine everything from games to food to, you know, other things that they could participate in pre game. and then sometimes we're actually leveraging the vendors to support in terms of some of the paraphernalia that we're

associated with the teams and different things like that. So a lot of different ways that businesses participate. But specifically going to the answer to question, we've had a variety of different businesses. I'll just give you a couple of highlights. So one was actually a pie company and started making pies and kind of took it to the next level kind of post the pandemic. and this is just because of the the the growth in e commerce and different things to that ended up in Whole Foods and now is like one of the the biggest distributors of pies kind of in the

Right. But she happened to win. She happened to be in front of the sparks and and really got to, you know, talk about her business. Another was a pet place. So this is kind of a different. This is a a pet farm. this is LA Wildfire. And, you know, so think of everything from saving the animals to then being a place where people who are in kind of a distress moment can can kind of take a step back and animals have a way of kind of, you know, calming us down and cleansing us and and helping us to kind of return to norm.

and then kind of everything in between. I mean, we've had literally those who are petitions and stylists that have come forward. We've had those who are involved in in weddings and and whether that be like making the dressed or or different things like that. So a variety of different winners all across the board have been able to to just you know have that moment and and and I think what's important for both the players to know and the community to know is

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (33:57.474)
This is all these are also businesses that might be looking for investments. These are businesses that might be looking to grow. And you know, one of the things we encourage some of the players to do is you don't always have to run the business just because you like that product or you like that industry. You can actually become an investor or an influencer or other things. So that there's so many things that are out there and we're trying to connect those dots on both sides. One, the business owners sometimes they're so far ahead down, they don't think about marketing, right? Or they're not able to market. Maybe they can't afford it. So you got

different factors there. And then on the other side, the players get to say, okay, I see this business. I have this interest. Maybe I'll maybe I'll try to dig a little bit deeper into that in n immediately or kind of post career. So again, trying to have that soft kind of non-transactional moment for everybody. and the stadiums and the audiences and the followers are are a great way to do it.

Caroline Valvardi (34:50.184)
Awesome. And so somewhat I guess along that vein, I mean what has brought you the most joy in your career and can be sports related or or not, but but ideally something related to kind of the women's sports partnerships. But but yeah, we'd love to hear. Yeah, just kind of

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (35:03.802)
I mean, there's it's it's priceless to see one of those businesses present at halftime or you know, during one of the commercial breaks. I mean, they are so excited. So it brings me back to like, I mean, Linnistry is is a small, big business, right? We don't we don't we're not as as scrappy as we used to be. We need to get scrappier. but you know, it it's just great. Like that moment, it's I don't know. It's like I guess your your kid opening a holiday gift or you know, a present or something. I don't know.

But it's just there's just something about the purity of it mixed with the excitement, mixed with like the, you know, seeing their name in the lights. You know, I remember the first time our name was in the lights. So I think that's that's pretty exciting. I think the other thing I can't deny is seeing the Lindershire logo on like Sports Center or doing on someone's Instagram clip. I mean that that just you know, that's beyond my wildest dreams. So I feel like I'm that kid now all of a sudden opening a present.

Caroline Valvardi (35:57.14)
Well that's I mean, that's what I was gonna say. I mean, you're entrepreneur and founder of Lindisher yourself, I think. I think I f I remember first maybe it was a CFI coalition event or something that you spoke at and I was like, wow, that's yeah, super cool just to hear your story and that was probably twenty nineteen or something like that, I think when I started Open

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (36:06.744)
Yeah.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (36:14.796)
Yeah. Yeah. And and and as you can also imagine doing something like showing your peers in the CDFI industry, which just for your audience is, you know, kind of non a group of non bank lenders, about fourteen hundred of them across the US that focus on responsible lending and access to capital, you know, showing them a different path too, right? It's like and and I respect obviously all the different things that we do. It's just a lender we decided that sports was a path we wanted to take. And so I

I like when I get calls from other organizations saying, you know, why'd you guys do that? or tell me more about it and I think that's great.

Caroline Valvardi (36:49.938)
All right. I do and then I wanna jump into a bit you having started Lindustry and I just have been fascinated over my own career, just kind of looking at leadership and within my, you know, my own positions that I've had and becoming a leader myself and, you know, out in the world what leadership looks like. So I would love to hear from you just what you prioritize as a leader and have seen be effective or not so effective. but yeah, if you could just talk a bit about that, 'cause that at the end of the day is what what makes the world go for for better or for worse. And

makes these things possible or not. So especially business or small business. So

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (37:20.173)
Yeah.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (37:23.81)
I think you have to have a North Star. and you have to be very focused on the North Star every day. So for me, it's helping small businesses, which is might come a cost a little strange 'cause the lunch actually has a mortgage company and we have an insurance company and different things like that. But I connect all the dots together. So sometimes people will say, Well, why'd you create the mortgage company? And I'm like, Well, I can give the small business the best loan, the best business loan in the world, but if they come home and there's disruption, financial disruption 'cause they got a bad mortgage, guess what?

My business loan is at risk, so to speak, right? when we start to think about insurance and how people care about themselves, there's there's some stats out there about funeral expenses and how disruptive it is to underserved communities. So you know, getting a term policy and having access to knowing where to get it is is just as important as insurance companies being leveraged for capital market structures and different things like that. So I I think the basic the the first answer to your question is having that north star.

And then having everything involved in the day, literally every day, being related to the North Star. So that means choosing the right leaders. I draw I try my best to choose leaders that are smarter than me. I try to choose people that could replace me if if necessary. and it might not necessarily be replacing in the company that that's kind of the obvious one, but replacing in the subject matter expertise might be the little less obvious. I think the second thing is really trying to think about how to be transformative.

Like how to get the word out and and then as we talked about already in the conversation, how to leverage data and technology. I think technology is the great equalizer. I've been very, very focused on that. And the data is what brought me there, right? The data is has said to me, like, okay, like how do you meet this customer where they're at? Like, whether it be on their phone, whether it be, you know, they're applying for loans at eleven o'clock or midnight at night. Like, you know, how do you how do you make these things easier? Access to capital has been fairly elusive.

For a long time. and that kind of perturbs me, if I'm just being honest with you. It's kind of it's kinda like annoying. Like, why can't why can't we solve this? Like, why is it such a big problem? and so the last thing I'll just say is that I'm I'm very much I'm very competitive, right? So that's my own kind of sports upbringing. And so this access to capital is kind of like a like a s like a sport for me that I feel like I gotta conquer. So I think it's the North Star and having that like what what

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (39:48.834)
What gives you that edge or what what kind of somewhere between pisses you off and like get you gets you sparked? I think you need that.

Caroline Valvardi (39:54.206)
Yep. Yeah. No, I love that 'cause it everyone has that drive to do something. So might as well use it for something. Yeah, positive. Yeah. no, that's great. all right. Well we can close on that. I think we have covered quite a number of topics here and I yeah, super appreciate you coming on the show and talking about all the women's partnerships and alignment with yeah, equitable access to capital and and all of these really powerful things that I think

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (40:00.792)
Yeah. Right.

Caroline Valvardi (40:23.86)
can be infused much more kind of across the sports world and thank you for yeah setting kind of the example and and way to do these things. So yeah, super excited to see see you guys continue continued trajectory. So thank you.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (40:37.396)
Thanks. Thanks, Carolyn. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.

Caroline Valvardi (40:39.658)
Yes, of course. All right. I'm gonna I so I think we're good. I just do you mind just recording just so just in case if you have a couple of another minute, like just the first 'cause we could just do a first like I'll just do the welcome to the podcast again just in case. So then hopefully I don't have to bother you again. Like it's saying everything's recorded, but I just really don't

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (40:59.96)
Yeah. If you need to, I've got some flexibility after four PM PC. Where I don't know where where are you located at Carol?

Caroline Valvardi (41:05.012)
Okay. I'm DC. Yeah, I've been here. Yeah. So that's yeah. I also went to Penn too. So I like, there's all these. Yeah. Funny. I did the s school social policy and practice. Like it was like a one year program in two thousand thirteen. Twelve to thirteen. Yeah. So

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (41:11.93)
really? What year?

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (41:18.776)
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm I'm class in ninety-nine and then I sit on one of the boards, it's the Institute for Urban Research. It it used to have global poverty issues, now it's more local poverty issues, but all the schools roll up to it. We have fellowships and different things, but it it's leveraging it's similar to what you're discussing, it's leveraging real estate mixed with business, mixed with insurance to try to solve.

poverty issues nationally. so very interesting kind of group of, you know, obviously highly specialized people and very smart people. Yeah.

Caroline Valvardi (41:55.85)
Awesome. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. all right. Well I'll just do so. I'm just gonna do like the Welcome to the Roar podcast and then I'll do the tell us about your career journey and maybe just fold in just to like summarize just like a one minute, two minute response or whatever to to whatever I ask you. So all right. Just like trying to be efficient, hopefully. all right. Welcome to the Roar Pi always mess it up. Okay.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (42:12.65)
Okay, no worries.

Caroline Valvardi (42:23.262)
Welcome to the Roar Podcast. I'm your host, Caroline Valvardi, and with me today is Everett Sands, founder and CEO of Lindustry. Welcome to the podcast.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (42:32.888)
Thank you, Carolyn. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. super excited to talk about blendistry and talk about women's sports and all the different things we have.

Caroline Valvardi (42:35.338)
Yeah.

Caroline Valvardi (42:41.992)
Amazing. Thank you. Yes, super excited to have you. And this is a little bit different outside the box of some of our usual topics and may not be immediately obvious what lendistry in a mission driven financial institution has to do with sports. but but we'll we'll get into that. And so to kick things off, as we do a a lot of these episodes, can you tell us a little bit about your career journey, how you ended up where you are, and maybe weave in a little bit about what lendistry does and and

Just I know we'll talk more about your women's partnerships after that, but maybe just kind of hint at yeah, how how you kind of went about thinking about, you know, sp partnering in the women's sports space.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (43:22.072)
Sure, sure. So kid from DC went to boarding school New Hampshire, then went to Penn. So spent a significant amount of time in Philadelphia. first got into the finance business on the mortgage side of the house. So helping what I call underserved borrowers, underserved communities, being able to finance home mortgages. So think of like grant programs and different things like that to support them. Then ended up getting into small business. small business I got there really because a unit that I was running at a national bank. we started to do both.

consumer lending, home mortgage lending, as well as small business lending. and that was really intriguing because got it got to see an opportunity for what that business owner was looking for and kind of connecting the dots not only on the mortgage side, but on the small business side. saw an opportunity as kind of operational efficiency came to play in the banking sector. it it was a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because every business does have to say what are they good at.

And and where do they get the most value? bad because we had taught communities to have good credit score, have good income, you could always get a loan. but naturally with operational efficiencies, they kind of became this divide in kind of what the bank was willing to do and what the community was obviously requesting. So lunature was created really to fill that gap. And the gap is really a loan size gap as well as a credit gap. So we're a technology company.

And a way to think about us is where the pipes, where the pipes that connect between maybe that borrower and another financial institution, the borrower maybe a government agency that might have a credit enhancement thing like SBA or state guarantee or something like that. And then we're also the pipes sometimes that connect them with the Fortune 500. So to give some examples of that is during the LA wildfire, we supported LA County in terms of supporting homeowners that had lost their home or were displaced.

we should also support our LA Chamber to support businesses that you know lost their business or were displaced. we also support Fortune 500 like Visa, like Walmart, like Amazon. We build Amazon community lending. So if you get a package delivered to your home, that's a small business likely delivering you that package and they need access to capital. And we're generally the ones helping them with that access to capital and financing.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (45:42.666)
And what it allows us to do as a tech company is really, really track a lot of data. And so as you can imagine, data led us into how do we get to this customer. And sports was a great entry point. probably not surprising. Most people see the ads at every game they attend or see on TV. and so we started to kind of track that data and and said this is a good opportunity for us. We should pay more attention to.

Caroline Valvardi (46:07.218)
Great. Yes. Thank you. So many elements and very excited to jump into all of them. So so yeah, keep it going. All right. Hopefully that okay. Thank you for yes, doing the best here. Yeah, so all right. I'm gonna let you go and let the torture be over, but thank you so much. If I fingers crossed, yeah, we have what we need and we can get it edited. but yeah, we'll try to the yeah, goal is to try to get it out tomorrow. So we'll

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (46:18.86)
They got they got two to twos, right?

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (46:24.822)
Yeah.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (46:36.364)
Okay, let me know. I'm around if you need some help.

Caroline Valvardi (46:38.314)
All right. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's great to talk to you. Bye.

Everett K. Sands | Lendistry (46:41.442)
You too, Carolyn. See ya. Bye.