4 hours ago
Giorgos Tsetis, cofounder and former CEO of Nutrafol.
Courtesy of Great Things
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC's Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
After struggling with hair loss in his 20s, Giorgos Tsetis co-founded Nutrafol in 2014 to make supplements that address hair growth. Early this year, Tsetis sold his remaining equity at a valuation of $3.5 billion to Unilever and stepped down as Nutrafol's CEO.
The 41-year-old told Inside Wealth he had two goals for his next chapter: to leave a better world for his young children and invest in companies with an eye toward social good.
"Early on, I had investors who made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars by essentially doing nothing. I just made wealthier people wealthier, and there's nothing wrong with that," he said in an interview. However, as a founder, he said he would have appreciated knowing that his success was also supporting causes like food access and mental health.
Six months ago, Tsetis launched his family office, Great Things, with the goal of using his investment profits to fund his philanthropy. He represents a growing class of ultra-wealthy millennials such as Walmart heir Lukas Walton who are setting up family offices early in life to promote causes like sustainability over sheer wealth preservation. And while many corporate asset managers have dialed back their impact investing, family offices largely haven't, and next-generation principals are expected to double down on environmentally or socially conscious investing.
"I think the last thing you want to hand over to your children is wealth. I don't necessarily think that is beneficial, even though we may think that that's true," Tsetis said. "I want to make impact now, and what I am excited about is to involve my children in those processes so they can see what's happening in the world."
Tsetis designed Great Things with a for-profit and a nonprofit arm, with the goal of using investment returns to fund charities that support causes like mental health and crisis response. Tsetis said a "significant portion" of the venture unit's returns would go to philanthropy but declined to specify a percentage.
Tsetis started early-stage startup investing in earnest after Nutrafol's Series B funding in 2019 and ramped it up after Unilever bought a majority stake in 2022. His portfolio includes artificial intelligence-driven companies focused on health care, like longevity startup NewLimit and BreakBio, a developer of personalized cancer vaccines.
His investment lens isn't squarely focused on impact, having backed Anthropic, xAI and SpaceX. Tsetis acknowledged he has concerns about the ramifications of AI. "ChatGPT knows more about me than I know about myself, and that's a problem," he added. But he said early-stage investing makes it easier for him to get a seat at the table.
"You don't know where the future is going to go," he said. "I'd rather participate than be a spectator, and, wherever I can, drive and steer those conversations, because I do think that we need to prioritize human well being."
Tsetis' ultimate goal is to give his portfolio companies a voice in how Great Things' investment returns are donated.
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"Imagine if Nutrafol was able to deploy a million dollars at their choice," he said. "That could have been quite interesting."
Great Things has six full-time employees thus far, and Tsetis's wife, Cerelina Proesl, advises on philanthropy. The family office has backed nonprofits including Every Cure, which uses artificial intelligence to identify existing drugs to treat rare diseases, and Ubuntu Pathways, a provider of education and HIV treatment in South Africa.
Tsetis said he hopes that other investors strategize on how to give back rather than doing so as an afterthought.
Social responsibility "should be something that people can get very excited about," he said. "I'm hopeful that that people want to do something about this problem that we currently experience, which is wealth concentration."
