Behind Her Empire: Beyond Capital CEO Eva Yazhari on Investing With Purpose

Yasmin Nouri

Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.

Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.

Behind Her Empire: Beyond Capital CEO Eva Yazhari on Investing With Purpose

This week, I sat down with Eva Yazhari, and CEO of Beyond Capital, an early-stage impact investment fund focused on education equity and global investments. Yazhari started her career on Wall Street, working alongside top investors. She loved investing, but felt driven by her strong values to do financial work with more of a social justice impact.


Yazhari said she was inspired particularly by her grandfather — who moved to Tanzania to work as a doctor — to look outside common narratives and find opportunity to invest in innovation both in Africa and India. This is what drew her to leave Wall Street behind.

"I wasn't seeking meaning and purpose in my work at that point," Yazhari said. "And so once I did, I realized that creativity, using your skills for good and social justice, which was a pretty core theme in my upbringing…all three of those, I would call them core attributes comprise what I'm doing right now."

The core of her business is shifting Wall Street's paradigms to focus on women and people of color, and prioritizing leadership, justice and innovation. Her goal is to have a direct impact on those she classified as "very low income," surviving on $15 or less per day. To do so, she says she has to have an abundance mindset, meaning that she believes in mutual benefit for the most parties possible over maximizing capital by any means.

To Yazhari, the abundance mindset is the future of investment as innovation trends towards environmental and social returns. We also discussed her work as an author, how to find meaning in your work and her personal business insights as an investor.

"But the reason I think the abundance mindset is so critical is because if investors were to shift to that mindset, things would look really different. And it's essentially what we need when we're transitioning to an economy where social and environmental returns or risks are valued in the same way that financial risks are evaluated by investors."—Eva Yazhari

Eva Yazhari is the co-founder and CEO of Beyond Capital, a seasoned investor and the author of "The Good Your Money Can Do."

Want to hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast? Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radioor wherever you get your podcasts.

dot.LA Engagement Intern Colleen Tufts contributed to this post.

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Mullen Automotive Pays Nearly $20 Million to Settle Lawsuit with Qiantu

David Shultz

David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.

Mullen Automotive Pays Nearly $20 Million to Settle Lawsuit with Qiantu
Image Courtesy of Mullen Automotive

Like a zombie from the grave, Mullen Automotive’s electric sports car grift lives once more. Earlier this week, the Southern Californian company announced that it had resolved its contract disputes with Chinese manufacturer Qiantu and would begin to “re-design” and “re-engineer” the DragonFLY K50 platform for sale in the United States.

On the surface (or if you just read the press release) this would seem to be excellent news for the bedraggled Californian EV startup. But the saga of the Mullen/Qiantu partnership is long, and in the context of their shared history, the deal’s terms look considerably less favorable for Mullen.

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“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

At Super Bowl LVII, advertisers paid at least $7 million for 30–second ad spots, and even more if they didn’t have a favorable relationship with Fox. But the pricey commercials didn’t persuade everyone.

A recent report from advertising agency Kern and neuroscience marketing research outfit SalesBrain is attempting to answer that question using facial recognition and eye-tracking software.

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