Todd shares his insight on how Vanguard became a leading global investment management firm known for its low-cost index funds, diverse offerings, and commitment to long-term, client-focused financial solutions.

Ren Makino: This is Ren from Next Gen Personal Finance, and you're listening to the NGPF podcast. Today on the show, Tim speaks to Todd Schlanger, who is a Senior Investment Strategist at Vanguard. Todd shares with us Vanguard's history and values, his own career path within the company including his experience taking the CFA exams, and how Vanguard continues to offer low fee and investment options. This is an episode I will be sharing with my friends and I really hope you'll enjoy too. 

Tim Ranzetta: So this session specifically is focused on investing. We know that's one of the most challenging areas for educators, and so I can't imagine having a better guest to help us make sense of it all than Todd Schlanger, who's from Vanguard. Welcome, Todd. 

Todd Schlanger: Thank you for having me, Tim. 

[00:00:45] Vanguard's Background and Structure of the Company 

Tim Ranzetta: We'll start with kind of the company you work for. Tell us a little bit about Vanguard. The structure of the company itself is very unique and hasn't really been replicated within financial services. 

Todd Schlanger: Yeah. So our founder, Mr. Bogle, that many on the call probably have heard of, founded the company in 1975. And I would say today it's one of the largest asset management firms. We manage about 8 trillion in assets. But it actually started as a small firm, but based on Mr. Bogle's thesis when he was at Princeton University. You know, he talked about the idea of a mutually owned company. So what's interesting about Vanguard is that the actual funds themselves that we offer for folks to save with own the company. So there's a sole alignment of interest between the owners and our clients. Everyone that invests in the company owns the funds and the firm itself. So what's great about working at Vanguard is everything we do is to benefit our investors. It's all aligned because the clients are the owners. So that gives us the mutual alignment. And that's really what's grown the company to the size it is today, is that. 

What's interesting is that costs are a critical factor in investing and it's actually counter to most products. Usually you pay more, you get more. With investing actually, the costs come out of the return. And so typically lower cost products will outperform higher cost products. So what we do, because we're mutually owned, as we grow, we can pass on those economies as scales to our owners in the form of lower fund fund fees, which actually increases the long-term performance of the funds. So it's what we actually call the flywheel at Vanguard where we offer great products, great service, educate our clients on the importance investing, saving, and education. Over time, the firm grows and then we pass on that savings to lower fees and increase performance. And it's what they call the hedgehog or the unstoppable. Flywheel is basically the operating model of the company. So it's completely aligned with investors. 

Tim Ranzetta: All right. If you didn't catch that reference folks, the flywheel and the hedgehog, that came from Jim Collins, who's written quite a few books about Management from Good to Great. I think that may have been where that reference was from. 

Just to give folks a little bit of context, Todd, if I invest a hundred dollars, say in your S&P 500 fund, how much are you guys keeping of my money in terms of expenses? 

[00:03:32] How Expense Ratios Work

Todd Schlanger: So we have all different shared classes. If you use the ETF, I think it's a couple basis points. It might be three basis points, something like that. But very, very low. Another thing Vanguard does is the more folks invest, let's say an employer-sponsored plan that is investing hundreds of millions, you might actually be able to get that for one basis point or in some cases a half a basis point.

So it really depends. But anyway, we actually have a chart that shows the expense ratio of the funds and it's just come down dramatically. I think when the company was founded, it was north of 50 basis points. A basis point is one 100th of 1%. So if we talk about three basis points, it's three 100ths of 1% is what we charge to invest in some of our core products. 

Tim Ranzetta: So three basis points would be, do I have the math right? It would be 3 cents on a hundred dollars invested, right?

Todd Schlanger: That would be it right around there. 

[00:04:34] Todd's Path to Vanguard

Tim Ranzetta: That's low cost folks. Let's back up a step., Todd. Give us a little bit about your background. I think this is instructive for educators who may have students who are interested in investing and I think Todd can speak to his career path. You don't have to be a financial advisor, you don't have to pick stocks with a mutual fund company. There's different roles within an investment firm. So let me have you talk a little bit about your career, Todd. 

Todd Schlanger: Sure. So I started with the firm right outta college like many folks do. And I started in our client service area, answering calls from investors. I was actually working with 401 participants and 403 participants. I did that for about a year. Then I moved over to the institutional side, joined a group where we were managing endowment and foundation and pension assets. So that was a really great learning experience. During that time, I went through the CFA program, which is really specific to investment management. It's kind of a master's level type material that's kind of standard within the institutional side of investment management. 

And then I moved over to the research side. So around 2011, I joined what's called our investment strategy group, which is really our centralized research and thought leadership group. And I primarily have focused on portfolio construction in my research over that time. So I was in the US for about two years when I first joined the group. Then we were really trying to build up the UK business, so I got an opportunity to go there for three years, helping build up the research, essentially help poured a lot of what I was working on in the US and the research team in the US was doing for the UK audience. And then at the end of that, I got the opportunity to do essentially the same thing for Canada. I spent four years in Canada, came back to the US around three years ago. Even though I've done the same job for 13 years at least I've done it in three different countries. So kind of mixed things up. But primarily asset allocation portfolio construction is what I've focused on from a research research standpoint.

[00:06:51] The CFA Exam

Tim Ranzetta: So CFA is really a rigorous process, right? I did level one CFA and I just remember getting a big box of books and there might have been seven or eight books and you had to read them and then sit for, I don't know, a three or four hour exam and it's three levels, right? You gotta make it through three levels in order to earn that CFA.

Todd Schlanger: Yeah. So it's three. You have to pass each exam, they have about a 30% pass rate for each one. Then you need four years work experience after you complete all three. And one of the interesting things about the CFA charter is it's a CFA charter you hold as a designation, which is kind of an ongoing commitment to a set of ethical standards and conduct that CFA charter holders should abide by. But yeah, they certainly don't make, make the process easy, that's for sure. 

Tim Ranzetta: And that's Chartered Financial Analyst? Correct? 

Todd Schlanger: Chartered Financial Analysts, yeah.

[00:07:53] Suprising Facts About Asset Allocaiton

Tim Ranzetta: All right, perfect. So since your focus has been on research, particularly around asset allocation, maybe share some of the work that you've done that might Surprise people when it comes to investing. I think there's oftentimes research, some of it falls in the category of "Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I would've expected that. Nice to know. The research confirms what my beliefs are." But then there's others where you kind of scratch your head and say, "oh, that's, that's a surprise." Any research you've done in the past that kind of fits into that latter category? 

Todd Schlanger: I think what we talked about is the cost element, I think can be contrary and it really cuts through a lot of the research we've done over the years. If you look at, for example, what are the predictors of better performance within a mutual fund. So the expense ratio that we talked about would be one of them. Turnover within the fund, right? Because when you're turning over the fund, you're incurring costs. And there can be taxes and other costs that you incur within the fund.

Tim Ranzetta: For folks to understand is that's just the frequency with which that mutual fund manager is trading in and out of stocks. There's a transaction costs, the difference between the buy and sell, the spread, which is kind of pennies now, it used to be a lot broader, but then there's taxes because if they're selling and show gains, then there's capital gains that go to investors. What did I miss, Todd? 

Todd Schlanger: Yeah, that's certainly a big part of it there. Those are kind of the most predictive. So you wouldn't necessarily think that because you turn on the financial news and you would think that you need to be paying close attention to what's happening on a daily basis, et cetera. And actually, holding a diversified portfolio at a low cost and keeping your trading low is actually what a lot of the research we've done found actually increases your performance, which is a bit contrary. I would say the other one is just on the behavioral side is so important too when you're investing is we have a set of investment principles that we try and simplify, put them out about 10 years ago. Just kinda simplify a lot of our messaging around these, which is have a clear goal, build a balanced diversified portfolio, keep your costs low, and be disciplined in your implementation.

As far as my advice for folks on the call and investing, in terms of building a portfolio, you don't have to overcomplicate things. And this is coming from the person that does a lot of research. We certainly have more complex ways of investing if you have a specific goal. But I would say if you're just saving for retirement, wanna get started, keeping it simple is probably one of the best advice. So I'd say, starting early too, I think one of the surprising things I learned early in my career, I think it was actually at the orientation at Vanguard. So I was 22 years old coming right outta college, and they sent in somebody to talk to us about the 401(k) plan and signing up and they said, here's a stat for you. I wanted to say it on this call, so I actually checked the numbers right before I jumped on. But if you start saving at age 22 and you save to age 30, so you save those nine years and then you, let's say start at 31 and you save all the way to 65. If you earn around a seven and a half percent return, which is kind of an average rate of return, you'll accumulate in both strategies $500,000, assuming you invest 3000 each year. So it's a, it's a simple example. We're not counting inflation, we're keeping the savings the same, but basically saving for nine years early, versus 35 years, just starting nine years later, and you end up in the same place. And when I heard that, I just thought, I need to start with this 401(k) right now. Cause I think coming right outta school year thinking, okay, maybe I'll start the 401(k) next year. And you know, just that it's the old time in the market. That would be another, I think, surprising one is just how important the compounding of your returns can be and getting that to work for you.

Tim Ranzetta: Yeah, we hear that all the time from educators. You wanna get kids to open their eyes. You show that compound interest calculator. So just to confirm what you said, starting to save at the age of 22, saving for nine years, investing, I should say investing, not saving. Investing for nine years and stopping versus starting nine years later and investing for 35 years, investing the same amount, $3,000 a year, you're gonna be even at the age of 65. 

Todd Schlanger: Right. 

[00:12:41] The Predictive Power of Fees

Tim Ranzetta: Wow. Okay. I also wanna highlight the other point you made, which is the predictive power of fees. Because I remember when I started investing in mutual funds, like what do you focus on? You focus on past performance and you project that into the future. And I started investing, unfortunately, there had been a bull market for a period of years. So you're like, oh my gosh, five year return of 22%, like. And you extrapolate, right? There's a little bit of optimism built in there. There's a little bit of recency effect and you project that in the future when what you're saying is a much better predictor performance is look at the darn expense ratio and that's gonna tell you all you need to know. \

Todd Schlanger: Right. And I would say, start with an index fund, as kind of a starting place. So an index fund is gonna invest in the securities that make up the stock market or the bond market in the proportion that they're represented. So, you know, the largest company is gonna be the, the largest weight, et cetera. But, for example, the US equity market, there's more than 5,000 stocks. And so you're going to be very diversified among all those securities. It's gonna be a low cost, low turnover, like we were talking about before, start there. 

You can also use active. At Vanguard we offer index funds and active funds. The active funds are also very low cost for active funds. And they do well relative to peers and many of them beat their benchmarks. So that's there as well for folks who wanna kind of opt into the active, that can be great. But, just starting, like I said, saving in a low cost fund early. That would be my biggest advice. And, another thing that folks can use to help would be like a target date fund. There's a few academic studies from the eighties that are often referenced that say, depending on the market, but let's say upwards of 90% of the variability of your portfolio, basically the risk, the variation in your return, is attributed to just the amount you invest in equities. That's gonna be a big driver for you. And what the target date fund does is it varies that equity bond mix over your life cycle. So when you're younger, you wanna be predominantly in equities, kind of approaching retirement, more balanced. And then as you retire into retirement, you're gonna wanna be more fixed income than equity. And so that's is what's called a glide path within an industry. And a lot of folks they know I focus on asset allocation as my full-time job and they asked me for advice and I said, if you're just starting out, definitely look at a target date fund. This is gonna be a great option for you. And that's because behind that target date fund is folks like myself and my colleagues who are working on this full-time, working on the due diligence to make sure the glide path is setting folks up for retirement. And we're stress testing it and so forth. So there's a lot behind it, but it's a very simple tool for folks to use. 

[00:15:45] Popularity of Target Date Funds

Tim Ranzetta: Vanguard does a study how Americans invest. And you shared with me when we spoke earlier, kind of how popular these target date funds are. Can you give folks a sense of what percentage of assets going into 401k retirement plans, find their way into target date funds?

Todd Schlanger: Yeah. The most recent study we have, so one of the great things about Vanguard, we have millions of clients where we can study investor behavior. So looking at our institutional business, 401k, 403b type accounts today, around 80% of participants within those plans are using a target date fund. It's really the majority now, that's been increasing. There was a law called the Pension Protection Act that went into effect right about the time actually I started working at Vanguard. And really what they were trying to address there is that, prior to this there was what's called a default option within a retirement plan where folks would just be defaulted into a money market or a simple balance fund. And they saw that actually if they're defaulted into an option, they wouldn't likely exchange out of it because there's a bit of inertia and so forth in not knowing exactly where to invest the funds. And so they said, let's just try and take advantage of that if we allow for these default investment vehicles that evolve as somebody's life cycle evolves and you default participants into it, it's likely they're gonna stay with it. And with that, they're gonna be much better off than had the money just sat there in cash or kind of on the sidelines like that. So that's setting folks up. Also, today we offer things like low cost advice, managed accounts. Those are also being used as well. I think increasingly you'll see more of that in the future. So, technology really allowed us to scale and provide, through technology, a little bit more personalized offer, we're also seeing adoption there. 

Tim Ranzetta: Yeah. Let's go back to target date funds, cause again, I think this is one of the things that probably surprises a lot of people. You mentioned this earlier, that sometimes the simplest plan is the best and it might be hard for people to reconcile. So you're telling me, there is a fund out there that I can buy in my twenties and I can continue to invest in, and it can be literally this one fund, a target date fund. And there's a term people use, set it and forget it. Is that, is that true? 

Todd Schlanger: Yeah, I think in a simple way, yes. There are funds out there that are designed where you start working and you sign up for the 401k plan, you're gonna be defaulted into likely some form. If you have a DC plan, if you have a DB plan, it's a little bit different. But if you have a DC plan where you're saving into the plan, you're gonna be defaulted likely into a target date fund. And the idea is that that fund is gonna really evolve over your life cycle and become more conservative as you age through your working years at retirement and then into retirement. So, when you get to retirement, you might actually have a little bit more complex situation where you're drawing down, et cetera. So that's where that maybe low cost advice can help bridge people into retirement. But as far as the accumulation, that's the primary vehicle that we see now being used and it's really, like I said, been a great evolution for, for the average participant.

Tim Ranzetta: And so again, these target date funds come with a date attached to them. So it might be Target Date 2030, Target Date 2040, Target Date 2050. What do those dates correspond to? 

Todd Schlanger: So those dates correspond to your expected retirement date. I'm targeting, let's say for myself somewhere around 2050. So I would invest in the 2050 target date fund. It's gonna start around 90% in inequities up until age 40. Then it glides down at the point of retirement. So at age 65. It's around 50-50, so 50% equities, 50% fixed income, and then it glides down into retirement to the end point, which is seven years after retirement to 30% in inequity. So it's what's called a through glide path, which means it's what we offer, which really means that it be, you know, continues to de-risk even after you retire. And that's based on research. So really shows that, on average folks don't actually start taking withdrawals until they're actually a few years into retirement. So you wanted to keep that money investing cause that's actually when you have the largest account balance and you factoring in the average life expectancy now, you're likely have 20, 30 years that you should be planning for even after you retire. So it's still a relatively long time horizon. 

Tim Ranzetta: Yeah, that's a great point cause people will often feel like, oh, you know, am I starting too late? But isn't is it true to say, I mean life expectancy when you're 55 is probably another 30 years? Is that what the actuaries say? 

Todd Schlanger: Absolutely. I think the median right now life expectancy is your mid eighties in the United States. Women, I think it's a few years longer than that actually as well. And that's just the median so that means half of folks are actually gonna live longer than that. 

[00:21:33] Comparing Taret DateFunds

Tim Ranzetta: Help folks out because you know that the folks, the competitors of yours in the investment management world, they know a good thing when they see it. They know the popularity of target date funds. If I am comparing target date funds, tell me three things I ought to be looking at. 

Todd Schlanger: So I think you wanna look at first the fund fees that we talked about. You're gonna wanna look at the the glide path. A lot of them are gonna be similar. To be honest with you, I was kind of stumbling on that question a little bit there because most folks actually don't have an option. So their plan is gonna choose for them actually within the 403 space. So if you're working for a nonprofit, sometimes you can choose your provider. But a lot of times you don't get to choose. So a lot of those decisions are gonna be made by your plan sponsor if it's, let's say, an IRA account where you're establishing something on your own. Say, look at your fund fees, look at the account fees, things like that. Look at what kind of education, advice, guidance are you getting from, from the provider? We kind of stress at Vanguard plain talk, communication, kind of not over complicating things. And so that's something we think is important. And then of course, the firm itself, so talked about Vanguard, the client ownership. You're gonna wanna look and make sure that the interests of the firm are aligned with your own as well.

Tim Ranzetta: Yeah. And ultimately the fees are gonna tell you a lot about how it's managed too, right? Because I think I've seen target date funds a hundred basis points, right? 1%. And what, when you look under the hood, those are gonna be actively managed funds, right? So you're gonna have actively managed equity funds, equity, actively managed bond funds. And because those are high costs to begin with, and then you layer on top of that another account fee, suddenly you get to 1%. 

You mentioned something else that I wanted to make sure we got back to also, which is this idea of Vanguard giving advice. So the model typically has been, to date, you have financial advisors, they're gonna provide you with advice and they might take all of the assets that they're helping, give you advice on and charge you 1%. I think that's kind of typically the going rate. And I think what you were talking about is Vanguard's trying to use their scale, the size of their customer base, the assets under management to say, okay, what we did in really transforming and reducing costs in the mutual fund business, we're gonna attack financial advice cause we think people are probably paying too much. Is that a fair characterization and are the numbers right that you're talking about advice at the level of 0.25% on top of assets that they're helping a manage.

[00:24:17] Offering Advice for Cheaper

Todd Schlanger: Yeah, I think it's in that range. I think around 30 basis points you can get low cost advice from Vanguard. And I think you did did a pretty good job of describing it there. If you think about when Mr. Bogle launched Vanguard as this at cost model , we're often pointed to as cost competitors. You might even see, they'll write in the press at Vanguard's igniting a price war or something like this kind of language. The reality is we're just operating our business model that, that flywheel that we talked about. And that's worked incredibly well. And we've actually seen, we call it the Vanguard effect, that over the last 40 years or so, fund fees have come down. If you look at cash flow within the industry, you see the lowest quartile of fund expense ratios really taking in more than a hundred percent of cash flows. 

It was a study we did a number of years ago, and so what does that mean? That means it's coming from the high cost quartiles. And we view that as, like I said, the Vanguard effect of driving down those fund fees. Whereas you haven't really seen that kind of compression on the, the advisory side where typically fees whereas you said one, 1% or so. And this is really something Vanguard's been building and something say over the last 10 years that, that we've started to get more focused on, and certainly even in the last five really accelerating, is just trying to scale that even more and providing even more advanced options.

So, you know, when our advice business first started, you got, let's say asset allocation and glide path, very similar to what you might find in the target date fund. But importantly, you had somebody to talk to and help with the behavioral side. Now we find that actually we can offer even more investment options and different solutions for clients with different goals. But also that increasingly clients are comfortable with kind of hybrid offer and in some cases fully digital offer of advice. So there's a lot of different ways we can help clients with the advisory side, like I said, at a cost much lower than you would find traditionally. And so I think that's gonna be a trend that continues to accelerate. 

Tim Ranzetta: Yeah, let's talk about some of those psychology things, cause I think that's a really critical aspect. Like the Vanguard investor tends to be a little bit different than the typical retail investor in terms of jumping in and out of the market. But, you know, my theory, and it's probably been proven out and it's probably a duh like yeah, that makes a lot of sense, is, you know, you're a lot less likely to love your index fund than you are when you decide to buy an individual stock. And so all the behavioral elements of holding onto a losing position, I think you're much more likely to make suboptimal decisions when you buy individual stocks because I think you feel loss aversion, you feel a lot of these other psychological triggers versus when you own an index fund, you're just like, Hey, I own the US stock market. It is what it is, my ego's not wrapped up in it. Is there any research behind that? 

[00:27:26] Choosing Active versus Index

Todd Schlanger: You're essentially saying, are you less likely to be behavioral? I don't think we've looked at that particular element. Do you see more trading within index funds versus active, but, some of the things that I think you've already mentioned, like the idea of cash flows tend to follow performance, right? So if you're investing for the future, often people look at, okay, what, what's kind of worked great over the last three years? And you'll see just a ton of cash flow going there. And of course, there is a concept in investing called the zero sum game, which means that half of investors will outperform the index, half will underperform, but at the end, everyone nets out to the index.

 If you just have astounding performance in one year, it's unlikely that that's going to continue for the next year. And in fact, even I mentioned our active funds that on average do outperform, they're gonna outperform over long periods. And you might get a period of outperformance, a period of underperformance, et cetera. And so when you see astounding performance in just a year, often the cash flows can follow that the industry level. And as you said, our investors tend to be a little bit different. We try and educate them like I said and along the lines of what we were talking about, it's kind of starting with the index if you're going into the active, then understanding that, okay, you know, we called the bumpy ride towel performance. Because we know that there are gonna be tough times. And if we're in the advice like we were talking about, if we know that if there's a three year period of underperformance they're likely to wanna get out of that active fund, you know, then we would probably recommend they, they stick with the index. So it's really making sure you know, that we have the right solutions for that client and what they're gonna be comfortable with. Because like I said, being disciplined with it and sticking with it is, you know, just as important as making sure it's set up right to begin with. 

[00:29:21] Keeping Actively Managed Funds Low

Tim Ranzetta: Last question, this might surprise a lot of people, and you've said it several times and I wanna highlight the point, and that is Vanguard sell actively managed funds too. But there's a twist here about first of all, like what percentage of customer assets are in actively managed funds? And then what is the twist that Vanguard has brought to that business too? 

Todd Schlanger: Yeah, so I think on the, the active side, I wanna say it's around 20%. I would say that the important thing: our active funds are lower cost. They tend to be longer term oriented too, which is a core element in terms of the turnover that I mentioned. They tend to be lower turnover. We have a very rigorous process to oversee. Often too, we will pair managers. So we have an area called the Portfolio Review Group that's responsible for the oversight. And also what we call the multi managed approach that many of the funds have. So if you know that there's an active manager who might be more volatile but has the opportunity to deliver greater excess returns of the long run, then there's that manager that's a little bit more risk control, a little bit more stable, pairing them together can help smooth out the return.

So there's a lot in the design of, of the funds. That's on the equity side. On the fixed income side, we actually do a lot of that in-house. So for the active equity, we do some in-house, but a lot of it is third party. We're actually going out and hiring managers. There's a whole list of reasons why managers will wanna work with Vanguard, cuz we're longer term oriented. We offer low fees, we pay them lower fees, but at a larger scale. It still makes sense and there's even some reputational tailwinds that they can pick up even being selected because it's so, so rigorous to even be selected. So that's on the equity side.

On the fixed income side, like I said, we do most of that, in-house actually. We have a great record there. We do have an advantage in terms of fees, but we have a deep, within my area of the, the company is what we call the investment management group. We have, the majority of that group would be in terms of headcount, would actually be the fixed income group where they manage large scale and do very, very well. So, Vanguard active fixed income funds, I don't have the performance numbers in front of me, but they're top quartile performing funds. 

Tim Ranzetta: So you can imagine, again, they have a rigorous process in picking active managers and then the promise to the managers is that assets Vanguard could bring in, being on the Vanguard list, given the reputational effect, as you mentioned, as well as the 8 trillion of assets that are already have been accumulated are very attractive to managers. And so I know you've had really long-term relationship. I'm thinking about John Neff at the Windsor Fund. I mean there are some funds in the Vanguard stable, actively managed funds that have been there for decades. And I think kind of there's an attractiveness to a fund manager because they want stability because if you have investors jumping in and outta your fund, that makes it really difficult to manage. You have to have extra cash on hand. Well, if you have cash on hand, that's gonna impact your returns cuz it's not invested. And then you're gonna have to trade at a higher level, which is gonna transaction cost taxes and the like. So being associated with Vanguard is very attractive and investors benefit because because of that relationship. Vanguard can go to the investment manager and say, okay, you might charge X percentage for your typical retail account, but we want our investors to pay half that.

Todd Schlanger: Yeah. And there, there are certainly examples of that. And they cite many of the things that you just mentioned, that we take care of the education and keep folks invested and that actually helps them manage the fund, it helps the investor because they're not incurring all the cost of, of trading in and out, et cetera. And as you were talking, I was thinking of the Vanguard Wellington Fund. So Mr. Bogle worked for Wellington Management Company before setting up Vanguard. And so a lot of our early funds are actually Wellington managed, the active equity funds. We still have the relationship. 

The Wellington Fund was started in 1929, so this is a balanced fund. We've had that fund through every cycle you could imagine since then. And it has a great record. So we certainly have a great record on the active side. I think it's just making sure that the investor's going to know that even funds like the Wellington Fund, could go through a period of underperformance. So making sure that it's aligned with their comfort level. 

Tim Ranzetta: All right. I wanna be conscious of timing. It's probably after eight o'clock there, Todd, huh? 

Todd Schlanger: Yeah, just after eight.

Tim Ranzetta: But Todd, thanks. Thanks again, really great couple of conversations here and look forward to sharing this to the broader community also.

All right. 

Todd Schlanger: Thank you so much, Tim. 

Ren Makino: I hope you enjoyed this episode with Tim and Todd. I have a few final housekeeping items before we go. The show notes and full transcript can be found on ngpf.org/podcast. You can also join these sessions live and ask the speaker questions by signing up for the NGPF speaker series sessions that occur on Thursdays at 4:00 PM. Pacific Time. You can sign up to attend on ngpf.org/virtual-pd. Please be sure to subscribe to the NGPF podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Better yet. Please leave us a review. We love hearing from you and it will help us reach a broader audience. On behalf of Tim and Todd, thank you so much for tuning in to this NGPF podcast. 

About the Author

Ren Makino

Ren started interning at NGPF in 2014, and worked part-time through high school and college. With his knowledge growing alongside NGPF, he joined the team to work full-time after graduating from college in 2020. He is also the producer of the NGPF podcast. During his free time, he likes to try out coffees from different roasters across the world.