Best Of: Everett Sands, Lendistry

Capital is like oxygen. Try to live without it. That's how Everett Sands frames the stakes for small businesses. It's a useful frame for what we're getting to in today's episode. Everett is the founder and CEO of Lindustry, a mission-driven capital deployer that's become one of the most active partners to small businesses in the country. They work with Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Visa, and Walmart, and most recently helped deploy disaster recovery funds in the wake of the LA wildfires. Over the last few years, Lendistry has also done something that might not look obvious for a CDFI-aligned lender. They've gone deep into women's sports. The LA Sparks, Gotham FC, the Chicago Sky, the Atlanta Dream. In this conversation, Caroline sits down with Everett to unpack the strategy behind those partnerships. Everett compares the WNBA today to Formula One before Drive to Survive. He breaks down how the industry uses data, down to the hour a small business owner is uploading loan documents at night after kids are in bed to decide where to show up. And he makes the case for why women's sports isn't a marketing checkbox. It's a thesis. One built on $85 trillion in baby boomer wealth set to transfer, 70% of which is projected to land with women. And on the conviction that you go where the puck is going. For the Roar podcast, where sports real estate and revenue converge, this interview hits a vein we don't always cover directly. The financing layer that makes sports and entertainment districts actually accessible to the businesses they're supposed to serve. Everett gets into how mixed-use developments around stadiums and arenas can be designed so independent operators can compete inside them, not just exist beside them. There's also a lot in here on leadership, on how the short window for athletes have to build long-term wealth. I'm Bryce Clinton, and this is The Roar Podcast.

Welcome to The Roar Podcast. I'm your host, Caroline Balbardi, and with me today is Everett Sands, founder and CEO of Lendistry. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Caroline. Happy to be here.

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?

Yeah, so I started in D.C., 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, 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 Lendistry because I saw... I'll just say the landscape changing 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