A Message from Matt Cole

Chief Executive Officer

Matt Cole

Chief Executive Officer

From our CEO

I am pleased to present Strive’s 2023-2024 Stewardship Report, which reflects how we’ve voted and engaged with companies to create long-term financial value for our clients.

Since our founding, Strive has remained steadfast in its belief that:

Corporations exist to serve their owners, the shareholders.
Shareholders are best served when corporations are focused on being an excellent business by providing excellent products and services, hiring meritocratically, embracing innovation, and being stewards of their finances.
We at Strive can help organizations get back to the core of their mission and away from distractions that cost shareholders like ESG and DEI.

That’s where our corporate governance team comes in. As a fiduciary for our clients, our team has engaged with dozens of companies, urging them to focus exclusively on business goals and deliver financial returns for shareholders. We’ve backed up these conversations with our votes, refusing to support resolutions or board members who have placed a social agenda over their duty to shareholders. And we’ve spoken out via articles, white papers, newsletters, and speaking engagements to share our views with America as a whole.

Looking back on this past year, we’ve seen tremendous success.

Companies are shuttering their value-destroying DEI programs, which prioritize demographic diversity at the expense of merit.¹ They’re beginning to acknowledge China risk as a very real threat and mitigating it where possible.² And they’re increasingly recognizing that self-imposed net-zero climate goals often come at the expense of business success and are slowly backing away.³

But there’s much more work to be done.

Most S&P 500^® companies still tie executive compensation to non-financial social goals.⁴ 87% have emissions reductions targets.⁵ Nearly all of them remain committed to a variety of ESG and DEI practices. It wasn’t always this way. It took over a decade for stakeholder capitalism to embed itself in corporate boardrooms; and it will take a continued effort by principled investors like Strive to both root it out and keep it out.

But before we press on to 2025, we’re taking a moment to reflect on the 2023-2024 season. To that end, I’m proud of the tremendous work our corporate governance team has done to advance our clients’ financial interests and am excited to share our 2023-2024 Stewardship Report.