About Me — Mariko

Money is not mysterious

I built a $2.5B money management firm from scratch, flying my freak flag high. It had a weird name, a non-Wall Street culture, and a quirky communication style. For years, we crushed it.

In 1995, when I founded Daruma, only a handful of women of color owned their firms. I had to noodle out running a business, while duking it out with Mr. Market daily and raising a family. It wasn’t easy.

In 2014, I pitched investment ideas before 5,000 people at Lincoln Center. I was a speaker at the Ira Sohn conference, a charitable fundraiser that is a marquee event in the investing world. Daruma was at its peak.

I was also suffering from burnout, about to get divorced, and on the brink of menopause. In 2019 I closed my business. I learned a lot from that too.

I now help people develop a healthy relationship with money. Whether it’s mentoring the launch of their business, helping them get their finances in order, or run their businesses better.

I grew up in the middle of my parents’ small businesses in the French Caribbean and Hawai‘i. I have analyzed thousands of companies and interviewed hundreds of company managements over my 30-year career as a bottom-up small-cap stock picker. Business is in my bones.

My mother’s parents came from Okinawa to work in the plantations, bought themselves out of indentured servitude, and owned a pig farm. From them, I learned about perseverance, grit, and endurance. I fight the lessons they passed on to me about silence and women’s place in society.

My father’s parents moved to New York from Tennessee and South Carolina. My grandfather was a self-made man, and my grandmother ruled the household in only the way a woman with thwarted ambition can. From them, I learned the virtues of prudent investing and the cost of stifling a woman’s drive.

I am also a poet, hypnotist, hula dancer, and serve as Treasurer on the Board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

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