Meet Minyoung Sohn '98 P'27, Founder, CEO, CIO of Blue Room

Introduce us to Blue Room and share what sets your firm apart from the rest? 

Blue Room was founded in 2020. Emily Philpott and I believed in creating a company which would benefit our local community as part of its business model, a philosophy we call Togetherism. Blue Room Investing offers traditional and alternative U.S. equity strategies, as well as international small-cap strategies. We return ten percent of our adviser revenues back to the community. As we grow, our local impact grows. 

Blue Room Impact deploys time, capital, and talent to develop our businesses in Colorado- based regenerative agriculture and affordable housing. 
 

After a successful career with leading investment firms, what inspired you to take the entrepreneurial leap and launch Blue Room? As a founder, what have been your most significant challenges, surprises, and triumphs along the way? 

I view finance as a lens and language in itself to allocate resources. However, in the final analysis, society suffers suboptimal outcomes when relying on outcomes based solely on generally accepted accounting principles, which ignores intangible value and enables persistence of under-measured negative externalities. 

I wanted to prove, for the third time in my career, that I could employ methodical active stock picking to generate alpha, significant alpha, and that I could build an investment firm around it. 

I also wanted to create a company whose business model would incorporate community well- being into its business model, in hopes of inspiring a new generation of for-profit companies which value all aspects of stakeholders. 
 

Blue Room emphasizes impact investing in art, housing, and agriculture. How do you balance investor returns with driving meaningful societal impact in these areas? What measurable changes have you brought to your community and beyond? 

As mentioned earlier, there is a gap in how GAAP measures real-world externalities, both positive and negative. Therefore, society tolerates distributed cost, such as environmental destruction, while being ignorant to universally enjoyed benefits, such as happiness and goodwill. 

Blue Room led local angel investors to fund a Colorado-based regenerative agriculture business. We believe that soil health contributes to human health, while also wielding a profoundly positive impact on the environment through healthy soil’s ability to retain moisture and carbon. Blue Room, in partnership with ID EST, an award-winning restaurant hospitality group based in Boulder, Colorado, built the leading regenerative flour milling company called Dry Storage. We launched the business in 2019, survived the pandemic, and today sell our flour and Colorado grown grains to over 100 restaurants, bakeries, and beverage makers. 

Blue Room is deeply committed to solving the affordable housing crisis in our country. Last year, we purchased land situated ideally in the historic Art District on Santa Fe in Denver, Colorado. We desire to serve the artists, dancers, and teachers who work in this very community. We propose to build 54 units in a 5-story mixed-use building using volumetric modular construction, which we believe can disrupt the development industry with fundamentally lower construction costs. We received our site development permit in August 2024. We have selected our factory and general contractor. We are impact first, which means, as we scale, we intend to pass through the savings from lower manufacturing costs as well as lower financing costs. 

Blue Room worked with Eduardo Sarabia, an artist based in Guadalajara, Mexico. During the pandemic, we renovated an historic building and established a salon-style teaching studio which grew to over 20 artists producing original works for the artist, whose marquee exhibitions included Desert X in March 2021, Dallas Contemporary Art Fair in April 2023, Zona Maco in February 2024, and a special solar-eclipse-themed exhibition at the artist's hometown of Mazatlán, Mexico in May 2024. 
 

What aspect of your Dartmouth experience do you rely on most as an entrepreneur and leader? 

I struggled academically during freshman fall. I was passing up golden opportunities to socialize, in fear of not excelling in the same way academically that I did in high school. Math 12 was an honors-level multivariable calculus class with overwhelming exams. Growing up, I listened to sermons about social justice, so I took Geography 22, a seminar on food and hunger, whose urgency I did not fully appreciate at the time, and English 5, taught by the great Professor William Spengemann, who drilled grammatical precision into our essays on Paradise Lost, the only book we read the entire term. I learned that life went on after a 3.0. 

I am grateful for the intellectual foundation established by Dartmouth’s liberal arts education. I loved my double major in government and economics, but my intellectual foundation was enriched and solidified by courses such as Women and Politics, Modern Islam, and Classical Economic Philosophy. 
 

What advice do you have for students about using their time, relationships, and opportunities at Dartmouth to prepare for a career as an entrepreneur? 

I would emphasize the value of time, how time is capital, and it must be guarded and managed. Relationships are invaluable, invest your time in them. 
 

Even before you were a member of the DFP, you were supportive of Dartmouth students and graduates through internships and employment opportunities. Why is this a priority for you? 

Since we launched Blue Room in 2020, we have provided internships to over 100 students across 20 different colleges and universities, including over 40 from Dartmouth! I love working with Dartmouth students because it makes me nostalgic for my own days as an undergraduate student. During the pandemic, it felt like we were doing our part to invest in the future by offering introductory finance learning opportunities to so many bright students from around the country while creating an environment for them to know each other as people. 
 

As a member of the Dartmouth Founders Project, you have signaled your intent to support the College philanthropically. Why is giving back important to you? What area/s have you been inspired to support and why? 

My parents worked long hours for many years running our family Chinese restaurant business, but my Dartmouth education could not have been possible without financial aid. Dartmouth was my first choice, and the College offered much more aid than my second-choice school. I am forever grateful and want to repay this generosity. I’ve started giving back in honor of the Major John Wilfred Findlay Memorial Scholarship Fund, which was the largest scholarship in my aid package. I plan to continue to support our financial aid program to the best of my ability, on an ongoing basis. 

I am excited by the many opportunities to fund awesome programs. For example, friends in the administration introduced me to opportunities to help first-year financial aid students buy clothes and shoes to be well-dressed for job interviews. It was a modest amount, which I thought could make a difference during a pivotal point in a student’s life. 

During the summer of 2019, I met Dartmouth Forensic Union Coach John Cameron Turner '03, and have been impressed by the resurrection of Dartmouth Debate to championship-levels, which made me proud and happy to invest in the future success of the team. 
 

What is your favorite Dartmouth memory or most transformative Dartmouth experience? 

During my sophomore year, I was one of three UGAs in the Wheeler-Richardson residential cluster, and they gave me 206 Richardson, the absolute best dorm room on campus. I postponed my participation in the fall fraternity rush so that I could focus on getting to know the 18 first-year students in my care. I am glad that I did. That investment in time helped build relationships which have also blossomed into friendships, which I carry still. 
 

What else would you like to share with us? 

Thank you for this incredible opportunity to share my Dartmouth story from student to alum and now a member of the Founders Project. 

Until 2020, my entire professional career had centered around the financial markets, with my personal superpower being able to build a financial model to analyze public companies. While I have used my financial analysis tools to develop (what I hope will be) disruptive business models in regenerative agriculture and affordable housing, there is a lot of room for your advice on how we can be successful in our endeavors. 

I would love to talk to you about your priorities and see if we can work together to better our world.