Zoe Schlag is a Co-founder and Managing Partner at Common Trust, and has spent her career as an entrepreneur and investor. Prior to Common Trust, Zoe served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Eric Schmidt’s family office, where she designed and led their Shared Ownership investing, and as a Managing Director at Techstars, a global venture capital financing platform. Before Techstars, Zoe founded and served as CEO of UnLtd USA, an impact investment organization, which she led to join forces with Techstars in 2017 to launch Techstars Impact. Zoe began her career in international development, working with ex-guerrilla fighters on an organic coffee farm in Guatemala and later with child laborers and their families in rural Argentina before transitioning into impact investing in India. Over Zoe’s career, she has worked with mission-driven founders and investors from seed through growth and exit. Zoe serves on the board of JUST, a leading US-based microfinance organization, and MDaaS, the fastest-growing medical diagnostic care provider. Zoe is a published co-author of Assets in Common, a new strategy for the US economy to scale shared ownership, an Executive Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, an Aspen Ideas Scholar at the Aspen Institute, a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and holds a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University.
Common Trust is an employee ownership buyout platform that supports the three in five small business owners that will seek a sale over the next decade to exit to their employees. Working hand in hand with founders, operators, and investors, we support selling business owners to unlock liquidity with competitive pricing, transition the business to a long term ownership structure built to endure, and set up employees to benefit from the company’s long term success.
As the nation’s leader structuring and executing employee ownership trust (EOT) buyouts, Common Trust also oversees Groundwork, the nation’s first dedicated financing vehicle to support these transitions, and has overseen the transition of over $250 million in assets into shared ownership models.
