Family offices have traditionally kept investing and philanthropy in separate lanes. Zoma Lab, the family office of Ben and Lucy Ana Walton, takes a more integrated approach, deliberately connecting the two so they complement one another.
The name Zoma Lab — formed from the names of the Waltons and their two teenage daughters — “captures our approach to all the different work we do: being experimental, trying new approaches and taking risks to help push systems forward,” says Ben Walton, co-founder of Zoma Lab.
Zoma Lab, which started under the umbrella of the broader Walton family office, Walton Enterprises, and became independent three years ago, is the umbrella group for three areas of work:
- Zoma Holdings is the back office, with operations, accounting, taxes, property management — everything that isn’t investments or the foundation.
- Zoma Foundation does philanthropic work in the U.S. focused on workforce, early childhood and community economic development, with a current focus on increasing housing supply.
- Zoma Capital is the investment team, which works on investment allocation in areas such as energy (specifically grid modernization), community economic development and workforce — the final two sharing strategic overlap with some of the foundation’s work.
Most of their work in the U.S. is in Colorado and the West, though one of the focus areas, energy, tends to be more regional.
“Our focus is on analyzing the issues and needs in Colorado,” Walton says. “We’ll invest anywhere — philanthropically or through capital — if we can help spur on a pilot or an idea, with the plan being that eventually it can be developed and brought back to Colorado.”
One of Zoma Lab’s key focus areas is workforce development.
“We decided that workforce is where we felt like we could really lean in and create more of a connection between the market and the education system,” Walton says. “It’s really about opportunities in life for students and the up-and-coming generations.”
Zoma Lab formed Sync Up Colorado through the launch of a Challenge in 2021, an initiative focused on helping organize the workforce ecosystem in Colorado with the goal of creating greater access to fulfilling, quality careers.
“We often encounter that it’s nobody’s day job to coordinate in the middle: helping create relationships, pulling together convenings, finding out what the missing elements in the markets are,” Walton says. “That’s the role of Sync Up: to be a connector and help organize and foster collaboration across the areas that are missing.”
Zoma Lab also works in Chile, where Lucy Ana Walton is from and where the family lives part of the year. They started out applying the same overall strategies in Chile as they did in Colorado.
“Over time, we have adapted our strategy in Chile, which is far more focused around relationships, communications and system development,” Walton says. “Chile is just a different ecosystem than the U.S. Communities in Chile tend to rely on the government to resolve local issues rather than develop their own local solutions; as a result, we have fewer partners across our focus areas in Chile.”
Connecting philanthropy and investing
Walton says that while most family offices function like an investment office, Zoma Lab’s investment team is focused on programmatic investing.
“We’ve tried to stay away from that intentionally. Our investment meetings can feel a little more like foundation meetings at times,” he says. “I keep the majority of our capital investments outside of our investment team. They specifically do programmatic investing — not always related to the foundation but focused on energy, workforce and community economic development.”
Some mission-related investments support the foundation’s programmatic work more directly. For example, the foundation’s early childhood work includes maternal mental health, and Zoma Capital has invested in SonderMind, a technology-driven behavioral health company whose work could benefit maternal mental health.
Community economic development is another area of strategic overlap between Zoma Lab’s investments and foundation.
“We come at the problem from both sides: On the philanthropic side, how can we support communities in setting up their economic strategy?” Walton says. “And are there tools that we can help develop that offer a replicable and scalable approach to key economic inputs like workforce development and access to housing?”
Zoma Lab’s mission-aligned investment goals are more about helping solve problems than about growing the wealth.
“We’re not trying to specifically gain or maintain wealth,” he says. “If you make a losing investment, that probably wasn’t a good solution for the challenge you’re trying to help solve. If you make a profit, it means you supported a company that is in demand and improving opportunities for the communities within which they work.”
Zoma Lab’s structure allows flexibility to pursue projects that don’t directly align with their immediate goals. One such area is outcomes-based financing, where funding is tied to results.
“We have been part of that conversation in Colorado and Chile for a while,” Walton says. “Sometimes it’s aligned with our focus areas, sometimes not — but if we can improve upon and normalize that tool, then we can use it more in our own work. We are always looking to add to the available ‘toolbox’ of possible approaches to a best-fit solution.”
A structure that matches the goals
Zoma Lab’s staffing is designed to support its structure and goals.
For example, to allow for some overlap between the work of Zoma Capital and Zoma Foundation, all employees are part of Zoma Holdings. This gives them the flexibility to advise and assist with investments without running afoul of tax regulations for foundations.
“We want to make sure that our investment team is informed about the information our programmatic team is developing. But if our foundation team is helping us think about a housing investment, I don’t want to cross that line. So, none of them are paid out of the foundation,” Walton says.
They have kept the in-house team small, with 15 employees in the U.S. and five in Chile.
“Our goal has always been to keep the team small so that we know everybody’s names, their kids’ names, their spouses’,” Walton says. “We want to be engaged with the team intimately, to really confide in and have trust both ways — us with our team, and them with us.”
Outsourcing has worked well to fill the gaps.
“Relationships that are really focused on our North Star targets are the ones that we keep in house. We work with third parties to manage the long list of other workstreams that are important to us,” Walton says. “Outsourcing has been a fantastic approach for us. A lot of family offices have this idea that you save so much by having everything in house. Our experience has been the opposite.”