Kristen Thomas: Building Marble Collective and the Future of Women’s Legacy

Welcome to the Wisdom of Women Show.

We are dedicated to amplifying the voice of women in business.

A new model of leadership is emerging and we are here to amplify the voices of women leading the way.

I am your host, Coco Selman, five time founder, impact investor and creator of the Force for Good system.

Thank you for joining us today as we illuminate the path to unlocking opportunities and prosperity for women led enterprises by amplifying the voice and wisdom of women.

Today.

Folks, we have a legacy building visionary in our midst and a dear friend.

Kristin Thomas is the founder and CEO of Marble Collective, an AI powered platform redefining how women's leadership is preserved, amplified and discovered.

Backed by more than 300 women leaders, including over 70 founding investors, Marble centralizes the media and life's work of extraordinary women into dynamic portfolios and curated feeds, creating enduring visibility and connection at scale.

Before Marble, Kristin built a two decade career in real estate and leadership, launching an investment business straight out of college, founding a luxury brokerage, later acquired by a top New York firm and becoming one of the first 50 agents at Compass.

She now serves on the advisory board of New York's top residential team and the board of Cold Spring Harvard Laboratory, home to eight Nobel laureates.

Bringing uncommon perspective to the future of leadership, legacy and impact.

Welcome, Kristin.

Wow, Coco, that was such a wonderful invitation.

Thank you so much for having me here.

What a full circle moment.

You're one of our founding members.

You're a leader that we have built Marble to amplify and connect your legacy.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, it's a treat.

And as I always start, Kristin, what is a book written by a woman that has significantly influenced your life?

So the book Raising an Entrepreneur by Margo Bisnow.

Her son is the founder.

Elliot Bisnow is the founder of Summit Series Summit.

They're one of the most iconic entrepreneurial gatherings ever.

He started by gathering some peers who went on to be some of the most famous entrepreneurs of our time.

His mother, after creating this community, said, I have all of these, you know, top world class entrepreneurs and started talking to them to try to find a pattern in what is the recipe.

What patterns from childhood and growing up makes an entrepreneur.

In raising an Entrepreneur, she flags four qualities that are common in almost all of the 70 that she interviewed.

One is a great idea.

One is incredible confidence.

Another is the ability to work really, really hard.

But the most profound one is having a mother who gave you unwavering love and support.

And believed in their child above all, no matter what path they chose.

And there were other caring, support, supportive caregivers that, that were in the picture that all played a big part, but the most consistent was the mother and almost all of them.

And I thought that was just profound.

And it's really shaped my thinking about parenthood as a working mom, as an entrepreneur, I have tremendous mom guilt about not being with my kids enough.

And I always try to remind myself that I just have to love them and believe in them and support them and everything's going to be okay.

I love the hat.

It makes so much sense, right when you're distilled in that whole time of nurturing and growing up where the world is safe because somebody loves and nurtures you and there's somebody having that unconditional support is really, really quite profound.

It really is the unconditional support and it can be from anybody.

And we all have different stories, but it was just fascinating and it feels good as a mother to know that our love is really important.

And so the book is Raising an Entrepreneur.

Would you tell me the name of the author again?

Margot Bisnow.

B I S N O W. Wonderful.

So, Kristin, I'd love for you to tell us about three moments in your life that have shaped the human being, the mother, the friend, the partner, the entrepreneur that you are.

I do look back and think of my life in moments that shifted trajectories.

And I think as a founder, when you start reflecting on this and talking about it, it all starts to make sense.

So I grew up, I was on a farm in Vermont for four years, independent, drove a tractor from the time I was in second grade.

Would drive through the cornfield into this little stream we had in the back of our house.

And I would just sit and be by myself and very independent.

And we happened to live near a ski mountain, a little ski mountain, and we happened to have a gold medalist cross country skier who was there coaching cross country ski.

Tim.

So my mom signed us all up and it turned out to be an incredibly competitive team and we trained every single day.

After a couple of years of training with this incredible cross country ski instructor, I competed against all of the top racers in all of New England.

And I remember this race and I remember being at a point where my body was about to give out.

I couldn't breathe.

I was, I think I was nine, nine years old.

And I kept on going and I ended up placing ninth in New England.

And it was, I mean, that was very young to accomplish something like that.

That I had no idea that I could do.

I really think that stuck with me.

I was like, I just did something really hard, and I think it just taught me to work really hard and just keep on going.

Because if you keep on going, you'll get to the finish line, even though there's more finish lines after that.

But that was a.

That was a real pivotal moment in my life that I think gave me a new sense of confidence, and I think it established this work ethic in me going forward.

Yeah.

The other thing that just comes to me as you talk about this is to have high expectations too.

Someone empowers you to stretch and see beyond yourself when we're around people.

Like a gold medalist.

Yes, absolutely.

So that was a gift that really set the tone going forward through school.

And as I got older, the next moment that I really remember, that was absolutely pivotal for me.

I had a role model.

He was my grandfather.

He was one of the most prolific voiceover narrators of all time.

And he had this incredible worth.

By the time he walked into the recording studio, there was no practicing.

He delivered it right perfectly the first time because of the hours and hours and days of practice that led up to that moment.

He was somebody that I always looked up to.

And he started with nothing.

He was the son of a minister in Florida, and he built this incredible career and wealth, and he was so proud to be able to create a trust for all of his grandkids to give them something to start out in.

This is a sad story, but it's one that ended up with a positive ending.

So my mom got a divorce when I was late high school.

And we had unfortunately a fraudulent stockbroker show up on her step and tell her that the market was going to crash.

And it convinced all of us because we're helping mom manage her money, that we had to get all of it and give it to him to protect it.

This guy ended up on 60 Minutes.

And unfortunately, within one year, like 80% of my mom's personal state, she was an heir of Avon.

So that was a substantial loss.

And a hundred percent of these trusts that my grandfather was so proud to give us was gone.

And I had moved a lot when I was young.

And I went from Greenwich, Connecticut, preppy to Vermont to farm girl to Texas to purse hair curling makeup.

And I learned to be a chameleon and change.

And I became fascinated with people.

I studied psychology.

That's what I went to school for.

And that was my plan.

And when this happened, I snapped out of that.

My Whole career changed and I dove right into reading every book I could find about real estate investing.

I think I saw a tv, something on TV about it.

I dove into real estate investing.

I was very young, I was in my early 20s.

I was riding a Vespa from New York City over to New Jersey and I was putting foreclosed houses into contract and flipping them to negotiating with six year old investors.

And I, so I, I, this is like a way, a big trajectory shift from, from where I was going and I got into real estate and I grew up a little more and got into luxury real estate and became a broker in New York City.

But that was my big pivot moment.

Uh huh.

I mean that, that's a, what a, that's sort of like, you know, you're not your worst nightmare.

I mean it doesn't involve your health but like it's, that's awful like for to, I mean just to think of the legacy and I know legacy is important to you.

Yeah.

The legacy of your grandfather and of your mother's family and all of that was, oh, and how your poor mother must have felt.

And she was, this was on my dad's side and they had just gotten a divorce so that was even more so.

But you know, I think I can, I'm grateful that I had, I had the DNA that made me like it lit a fire that didn't exist before and that fire propelled me into this new career.

And that kind of leads me to my third moment.

I, you know, for 20 years I worked so hard in real estate, building a very big career in real estate.

And you know, in, in a, in the real estate world and entrepreneurial world, there really is no downtime like you are working through the weekend.

I worked constantly and that also makes time fly.

And then Covid hit and the real estate market was shut down.

And at no point before did I have the space to stop.

I don't think I ever would have stopped myself.

And in having that space and being forced to stop, it was a, a relief and a freedom that I hadn't experienced since childhood.

And it gave me this space to think and the creative juices came out flowing again and some ideas that had been swirling around in there just started pouring out of me.

And I want to say literally within a couple of days, Marvel Collective flew out of me.

And I haven't looked back since.

You just saw a vision on the horizon and it pulled you straight into,.

Pulled me straight into it.

And it's just a reminder that, you know, if you're grinding all the time.

You don't.

You're missing an opportunity for your creative juices to really come out and to reflect and to create and to expand.

I love that.

Wow.

Thank you for sharing those incredible moments.

I love thinking about you in Vermont, living near a ski mountain, driving tractors, skiing with a gold medalist.

I mean, I think there's something profound about that.

Right.

Like to have that exposure of what greatness looks like and how greatness is, is, is earned.

Right.

Greatness is something you keep focusing on.

It's not because you were born with it.

Like, it's something you have to pull out of yourself.

And I love your grandfather, the work ethic, the legacy, and really the moment that I've lost.

Right.

That, that incredible loss.

And you decided to make it into your strength.

You decided to turn it into your ability to transform and alchemize into something even better.

That says so much about you.

Yeah.

I mean, sometimes the most painful things in life, you know, it creates the most empathy and positive outcomes and pivots.

Yeah, well, and I also think that there is a resilience and even a safety that comes from having crushing moments like that.

Because then as an entrepreneur, every time you start anew, you face the possibility of certainly failure and trials and tribulations like.

And I think so much of why people don't go into creating their businesses is because they're afraid to fail.

And here you are, you've sort of experienced what you thought, okay, I have this trust and I'm going to be safe.

And now I don't.

And on the other side I'm okay.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

You know, that fearlessness that you kind of have to have a little bit up as an entrepreneur.

So, so.

All right, so tell us more about you seeing the horizon and what was it about?

Marvel, what drew you in?

What was the dream that you had?

What's the brighter, better future that you want to create with it?

And what makes it so important for you to work so hard as you do every day to make this vision come to life?

Thank you.

I think that throughout my career and just the nature of doing luxury real estate in New York City, I had the opportunity to build deep relationships with really successful, high net worth, high profile individuals just because the nature of New York City real estate, and I got to hear their stories and understand the way they tech and, and look at life and how their view of the world might be different from mine.

And I just, I found it really fascinating as a service professional, you are focused on your client and Service and understanding them, building trust quickly, making them feel safe, showing them that you are absolutely honest and trustworthy and there to.

To serve them, really.

And so I just built this affinity with hearing stories of greats, and one thing led to the other.

I became obsessed with listening to founder stories on podcasts like this one.

I wanted to hear stories of individuals who had remarkable lives, who had worked really hard, gone through incredible pain and hardship, and came out the other side, producing, accomplishing, creating something remarkable.

I found myself trying to find new stories.

I could never get enough.

I love watching documentaries about stories.

I would go to events just to see them up on stage because I noticed that when I hear the stories of these remarkable people, it made me think, relate to my life.

And it got my creative juices flowing.

And I just noticed that my thinking expanded when I listened to them.

I really wanted, selfishly wanted, to build a platform that made it easier to cut through the noise of news, of social media, of media inundation, of all of these platforms fighting for every minute of our time that spend millions and millions to understand our thinking so that they can keep us on their platforms for another minute.

And I loved Masterclass and I loved platforms like that, where I could go and just get immersed in great thinkers and great minds.

So I had this idea of getting.

Building something that centralized all of the interviews and talks and media about greats, about really remarkable human beings.

And as I became an entrepreneur, I started learning about the inequities that women faced.

I learned what great leaders women are and, and how they're paid less, they get a fraction of rent, venture capital, funding to help fuel innovation, women founders and I thought to myself, women's minds, we're all in some sort of spectrum, but women's minds are very unique and we are great leaders and we have great stories.

But from the Internet to the history books, men dominate, right?

Totally.

So it became very clear that I wanted this to be capturing the legacies, the minds, the stories, the insights, the media surrounding women leaders, so that anybody in the world that's interested in them, and I think more and more of the world is going to become more and more interested in learning about and following women leaders because they're so good, because the data supports it, and because we are moving into the period where women will control the majority of wealth in the United States.

I just love what you're building.

We all have a desire as women to.

We have a desire to create that equity and to have a bigger space where women's wisdom is at the TABLE I feel like Marble Collective is structurally designed to influence how the world sees women.

And that's really important.

I've watched you build and how thoughtful you are about the building process and what goes in and what stays out and how you've curated your community.

First of all, tell us what it is so people can understand it.

Let's understand what that is so that people can go and visit it because it's a brand new platform and, and then how they can participate in it.

And then I want to later get into how you're funding it.

Great.

So Marble is a centralized access point for anybody in the world.

From a student in a third world country, to a recent graduate of an Ivy League school, to an ambitious, successful professional, to a venture capitalist, to an event coordinator.

Anybody in the world can come to Marble to discover, explore the life's work of, and follow the world's most remarkable women leaders right now of today.

And we're eventually going to expand into remarkable women in history.

So the way we built Marble is we had to build a tool and a service that benefited women leaders, a way to get them onto our platform and centralize their work without taking any of their time.

Because women leaders are very busy.

We wanted to make it really easy and compelling and we wanted to make it about legacy.

Women work 10 times harder than their counterparts to get where they are.

And I think we all know this because we've experienced it.

So they've worked really hard, they have negative time, they've built big careers, they have media that's scattered across the Internet.

When they're in a podcast, the only way for it to be visible is to go self promote on all the platforms.

And that takes time or else nobody sees it.

They have all of these, I call them digital assets that are scattered across the Internet from podcasts, interviews to lectures, to authored books, to press blogs, podcasts, any work that's been put out, any stories.

So.

So when a woman leader is invited to Marvel, within about 60 seconds, it's all gathered from across the Internet and centralized into this design forward public facing profile that serves like a personal website that other people can follow and is connected to your audiences and then tracks it going forward.

Women leaders get this kind of magical moment of being onboarded on a marble and then seeing everything in front of them.

Wow.

Maybe for the first time, I interviewed hundreds of women leaders in building this, which has been such a gift.

And some say, yes, I have my website and I update it, but it's, it's such a pain and it's so time consuming and nobody sees it.

So they get to see everything in one place.

Really beautifully put together and searchable.

So it's this great tool that kind of has captured everything they've done and it's been put out into the world and they can use it as a public facing access point that has all of their social handles, all of their websites, all of their links and all of their media tracked going forward.

This actually is a big problem and nobody else is doing it.

There's nothing out there that's been built for the individual at an access point in price that makes it worthwhile for a woman leader to do this.

Yeah.

And then we've opened up access.

It's public.

So anybody in the world can come to Marble and explore their life's work, listen to their interviews, know when they're going to be in an interview again.

You find somebody that you love listening to and you're like, they are so amazing.

Or you see them up on stage and you're like, I want to follow them.

But there's no way to do that unless they're posting on social media and the algorithm happens to show you.

So this is a tool that anybody in the world can use to be like, I really like that person.

I want to surround myself with her and people, other women leaders like her and know when they're up on stage again, know when they're in that podcast interview.

It benefits the audience.

Because now I have this connection to this role model that I can follow the career of going forward in whatever direction it goes.

And then for the leader, they invest their time in recording a podcast and then it can be discovered because people are interested in them.

Not I follow your show, I follow many shows, but you can't follow the individual.

So this is a way to do that.

It's sort of groundbreaking.

And like you say, for the price to have somebody build this for you would be a very heavy lift.

Right.

So right now it's open access to anybody in the world.

So anybody in the world can come to Marble.

Sign in at no cost.

That's amazing.

And explore the life's work of the 300 plus and growing women leaders on Marble.

I like to think of it as thousand role models in your pocket.

Choose Marble, which is an inspiration.

Learning feed over 60 social media's, you know, time suck and delivering you content that might not be good for your mental health might waste your time.

The higher that you climb, especially as a woman, as a woman, actually the lonelier you get because you find yourself Often as the only in the room, you know you're surrounded by your counterparts.

One of the most consistent things that every woman leader that I interviewed said is the most valuable thing in their life is highly curated in person and events and gatherings and dinners and rums and drinks, whatever it is, because that's where that, that spark of connection happens.

You can't quite get that same spark on Zoom or on the phone or on email.

So once that spark of connection happens, right now you're in a room full of 12amazing women leaders and what happens the next day?

There's too much to do.

It's really hard to stay connected to them, to follow.

They have to self promote on social media just so you know what they're doing and the algorithm might not even show you.

So it's not easy.

So this is equally built for the woman leader and that network to know, to be able to know what all the other women leaders out there building, working really hard in their own industries and spheres are doing and building.

Because I want to know what she's thinking.

I know I want to know what she's doing, I want to know what she's building.

So rather than having to schedule a coffee or Zoom, like tell me about your life, catch me up like this allows you to do it automatically and doesn't take self promotion.

It does it automatically.

So we can stay focused on our work and our wide, broad networks and customers and investors can stay plugged into what we're doing and we can also stay plugged into other women leaders to build those relationships that will help us move faster and do more.

It's amazing.

And you've had some beautiful events.

You did south by Southwest, the event here in New York with Veuve Clicquot flowing.

I've wanted to gather the first women who said, yes, I care about my legacy.

I care about future generations being able to find role models.

I don't have the time to mentor a hundred young women.

I love the idea of role modeling at scale and I feel lonely.

And I want connection with professional peers who understand what, what I've done and what I've had to do to get here.

Because they often find themselves in rooms where everybody of course, wants to talk to them and ask them questions and be around them.

They find themselves as a magnet and that's very much them giving themselves in rooms everywhere and inspiring others.

But having real connection with peers, it's very, very important.

It's the thing they value most.

So I really wanted to create gatherings that celebrated them, allowed them to mingle with each other, walk into a room and not feel that feeling like everybody in this room wants to come and talk to me and just to let them take off that coat and relax and just connect.

Yeah.

And we partnered with Beuve Clicquot because the founding story of Madame Clicquot is amazing.

And at that time, if you remarried, the business went to the husband.

So she said, I am never getting married.

And then she grew it into the Vaucli Clicquot we know today.

So they're very great.

They're a perfect partner for what we're building, and we plan on continuing to do things with them.

So tell us how you raised money for this.

So it's one of my favorite stories to tell because I think it's very insightful in how women think and how I think female entrepreneurs need to start thinking about how we're going to raise capital.

I don't think it's a sexist thing, per se, that the VC world is run by men and they only invest in men.

I think it's unconscious bias.

You know, if the tables were turned and we controlled all the money, there's a good chance we would be investing in women.

We'd invest 98% of our capital in women.

Right.

I think it's just the nature of how the world was built.

So I had this group of women leaders who were successful and interested in investing and impact, cared about their legacy, cared about women, want to change the narrative and want to make impact.

So what we were.

What we are building at Marble kind of hits on all of those things.

And after learning about the negative data around how much money goes to women founders, I was like, why would I go to VCs?

Why would I waste time doing that when I have this?

So I launched a raise.

It was a private raise.

I only invited the women leaders that were building marble to amplify and serve, to invest in marble.

And it was really scary because I had built this thing and gathered all these women, and they were enthusiastic, and I was like, but they're not going to give me money.

And.

And within a week, I had 15 checks, and then it grew to 40, and then it grew to 50.

We ended up with over 75 checks from women leaders.

We oversubscribed our target by 50%, and I had to close the round because I was like, this is really beautiful.

And it showed me that women really want to do this.

And one of the strategies that I used is I could show people who's invested.

These are the women who are with us who are investing.

And it makes it much easier to do it if you know who else is investing.

And when you do things together and you can talk about it and you can analyze an investment together, it makes it that type of community around investing.

It makes it that much easier.

And that's very much how the male VC world works.

You know, it's, you know, everybody's investing in this company, so everybody throws money at it.

Well, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It shows that we trust each other.

At the end of the day, if the idea is good and there's enough people around you that want it to succeed and are there to help you, you can really build anything and do anything.

And sometimes it takes a little bit of faith and belief and coming together to get things done.

Yeah, well, you could write like a whole case study on it, on what you did, how you pulled together the right people, how you got that initial list together and then those people invited other people.

That's how I learned about it.

And you gave us options in how we could invest, how much we could invest, where you got perks and service sector.

It's launched.

I know you put a bunch of your own money in to get to a certain place and you did the beta trial with a small group.

Right.

I Talked to over 300 women, got a lot of women around it.

It's an AI powered platform that was human run for more than two years and it validated the problem and our customers who are testing it like this is a problem and you're solving it.

And before building out this entire complex AI platform, we validated the problem, we got people to test drive it and then we launched the raise and it was funded by the women we're building it for.

So it's really a powerful story.

Many women wrote their first checks ever and my hope is that they've written five more since.

It's that easy once you just go out and do it.

Yeah.

And this ladies, is how we're going to get things done, how we're going to get women funded and how all of the innovation, incredible innovation that's locked up because lack of capital, that's how we're going to unlock it.

You know, whether it's a small check or a big check.

I've made angel investments over the past couple of years and they feel really good and just being able to be a part of these founders stories is really meaningful and I feel like Your.

Investors, as you said, are your customers.

And so for our listeners, that's the distinction.

Like, go find your customers that will want this and want to be a part of that journey.

And I think that's what's made your particular case so powerful.

You're not just going out and raising from random people, random investors, but people who really, truly want the product in the world for themselves and see the personal value and will make the investment because they want the thing, they want the service, they want the product.

So where does this all go?

What is the world look like in 10 years?

Kristy?

Yeah, the idea came to be before this AI era came upon us.

And I think with a little bit of luck, Marble was perfectly positioned for this AI world because we are centralizing all the digital assets and we're now in a world of language learning models, which is every AI model out there that's trained on the Internet, or a body of work or a body of information.

So we're in a really unique position because we are automatically tracking all of the media by, about and featuring women leaders of the top echelon of success and accomplishment and just being remarkable human beings in one place.

So it's this pure collective of media information.

And I haven't talked about this, but one of the things I'm most excited about is that we're also making it easy for the women leaders to save and recommend the media that they're consuming.

What books are they reading?

What podcasts do they think are interesting?

What articles are they investing those 30 minutes in the morning on, you know, reading?

So we have this collective of all of this information and media that's coming from the minds of some of this, the hardest working and most remarkable women of our time.

So there is a lot that we can do with that collective of media information as we head into this AI world to create a pure database of women leadership.

And as women start winding down from their careers, as they should, their life's work begins to fade.

They're not posting on social media.

They're beginning to feel invisible.

And that's a tremendous missed opportunity for them and for future generations.

So we really want to keep that alive so that they can wind down in their likes and start using these LLM, these AI models.

We want to build them for each of you.

We want you to own it because it's your mind, it's your work, and there's a lot that we can do with that so that it continues to give back and teach and inspire as time goes on.

And hopefully Start shifting the narrative around women leadership.

I love it.

Bring out the voice and wisdom of women.

And Marble is in fact doing that.

So extraordinary.

Thank you so much.

Let's have a fast fire round.

Are you ready?

Five questions in five words or less.

Okay.

Okay.

So we're going to fill in the blank.

Real estate taught you blank about leadership.

Real estate taught me how important trust is.

What does Marble demand that your previous careers develop?

I think marble demands swapping paths a hundred times a day.

It's using every little part of my brain on any given day.

A lot of brain exercise.

Love that.

A system every purpose led company needs earlier than they think.

Systems documentation.

Systems documentation.

And I know you know that very well and that's something you've lived by.

Yeah.

No, it's true.

What surprised you most about building with 70 founding investors?

We modified that.

70 Founding women.

Surprised me just how much they want to help.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

When Marvel succeeds at the highest level, the world will be different because women's leadership will finally be.

Will finally be celebrated.

Celebrated.

Yes.

I love that.

So for all of our listeners, Kristen, how can they learn more about marble?

Www.marvelcollective.com that is the access point we'll be launching with a mobile app soon.

But until then, if you are a remarkable woman leader who cares about legacy and has worked really hard to get where you are, come to Marvel.

Click apply.

We want to know about you.

We want to connect.

And for everybody else in the world who wants to get plugged into really smart women and get inspired, sign up for our newsletter.

Sign Stay plugged in.

Come to Marvel and explore.

Oh, thank you.

Kristin, thank you for coming today and joining us on the Wisdom of Women show.

Thank you for illuminating the path for unlocking possibilities and prosperity for women led enterprises.

And we value you.

I appreciate you as my friend.

Thank you so much.

Coco.

You are a bright light that shines in every room you're in and I'm so honored to be in your world and for you to be a core part of Marvel's foundation.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm just delighted.

And for all of you that are listening, be sure to like, follow, share the wisdom of women show on whatever your favorite listening or viewing platform is.

And remember that the world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world a better place.

Yay.

Yay.

Thank you.