|
A first-generation immigrant from Brooklyn, Ariel Nurieli rose from humble beginnings to a successful career in finance. After overcoming significant challenges and leveraging educational opportunities, he built a career in investment banking and real estate. Driven by a deep commitment to giving back, he founded Trailblazers Advisory, a non-profit dedicated to empowering first-generation students through financial literacy.
From Working Class Brooklyn to Wall Street to Financial Guidance for First Gen: Meet Ariel Nurieli
What is your personal/professional story?
I arrived as an immigrant to the US at the age of 4. I grew up in a low-income, working-class family in Brooklyn. My parents were uneducated - my dad finished 8th grade and my mom finished 2nd grade because they needed to work to support their families.
Growing up, my siblings and I helped our parents with their valiant efforts to earn a living. We worked at the family store after school, on weekends and on our breaks. For a couple of years, starting when I was about 10, I helped my parents every Saturday at their flea market stand where they sold discount sneakers and shoes.
My parents were not versed in basic financial literacy, and their command of English was quite minimal, so my siblings and I handled everything related to family finances. From check-writing to sorting out utility deposits to paying the invoices at the store and flea market, we took care of it all.
Home life was definitely challenging (including often dealing with no hot water to bathe in the winter and needing to resort to boiling water on the stovetop).
But, due to a lot of hard work AND a tremendous amount of luck, I have been blessed with some incredible breaks in life.
First, I received a major scholarship to attend a top-notch, private high school, which was a feeder to the Ivy League. From there, I received a generous scholarship to attend Yale for college. So I was a “first-gen” before “first-gen” was even a thing.
While my world opened up in college, I struggled to get through it, dealing with many of the typical first-gen challenges, including no support at home and a lot of survivor guilt. And because of family obligations, especially related to earning a living, I spent my breaks from college back with the family, helping with the various efforts to put food on the table, instead of building my resume through internships, travel fellowships, etc.
As college graduation was approaching, I did not have a post-college plan. I really did not want to leave the cocoon of college. Ultimately, I spent the first five years after college struggling both professionally and personally.
When I hit rock bottom after five years, I knew I needed to make a material change. I tapped my college alumni network in earnest and was able to secure a job as an investment banker at a large Wall Street firm. This was another incredibly lucky break, especially considering my age at the time (27) given that the position was generally filled by 22-year olds. In my role, I underwrote municipal bond transactions for state and local governments and their instrumentalities to provide capital for the construction of public use facilities such as airports, highways, schools, and hospitals. It was in this role that I was exposed to global finance and the world of investments.
After a few years of working in municipal finance, I made a career transition to the institutional real estate investment space and have been on the capital side of the real estate business ever since in a variety of positions.
What key moments in your life led you to where you are today?
The opportunity to attend Yale was a major turning point in my life. During my college years, I was able to experience “how the other half lives” from a class perspective and I liked what I saw (although emotionally it brought up a lot of feelings given my first-gen background). More importantly for the long-term, I developed a social network of upper-middle-class people who were on track to do extraordinary things in life, be it professionally or through volunteer commitments. These people were both inspirations as well as sources of opportunity since my college days. Undoubtedly, my aspirational drive to join the upper-middle class coupled with the network I developed in and through my college brought me to where I am today.
Where does your passion to serve come from?
Growing up in a low-income family, I witnessed firsthand my parents struggles to put food on the table and keep the hot water on at home. And I was intimately involved in helping with these efforts, including during college when I came home for my breaks to continue helping the family. In many fundamental ways, my life has been about helping others, serving others for a long time.
Additionally, our family has been the beneficiary of incredible service from others since 2012 due to physical health challenges with one of my kids. Specifically, for many years our five kids attended a free summer camp dedicated to kids with life-threatening diseases and their siblings. This camp (https://www.sunriseassociation.org/) is fully funded by individual and corporate donors and is run by an incredible staff that will do anything to bring some joy & happiness to families that have gone through challenging times. They are inspirations to me and a key component of my passion to serve.
How can GlobalMindED help you reach your goals?
I recently launched an educational non-profit (https://trailblazersadvisory.org/) to provide investment literacy around wealth creation to the First-Gen community (current students and alums). My non-profit’s vision is a wealth creation playing field that is materially more level between First-Gens and Continuing-Gens.
GlobalMindED can help in many ways, but most importantly, by making introductions to people and organizations to hear our pitch and potentially provide resources and/or channels for getting in front of First-Gens.
| 
