For entrepreneurs whose business is also their family inheritance.
Articles and guides curated for founders on building a lasting family legacy.
Browse all LegacyPot Journal articles
In 1971, a fifteen-year-old boy named Lev Leviev arrived in Israel from Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan, and went to work polishing diamonds in a cutting plant. Over the next three decades he did something almost nobody...
In March 1900, on Mengo hill in what is today Kampala, three regents ruling Buganda on behalf of a four-year-old king signed an agreement with a British special commissioner named Harry Johnston. Buried among its...
Around the year 120 of the common era, in the Roman province of Judea, the most sought-after teacher of his generation presided over a circle of students that the tradition would later count at twenty-four thousand. The...
In Brooklyn, in the decades when Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson led the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, conversation with him had a reputation for turning suddenly personal. He led the movement from 1951 until his death in...
Somewhere around the turn of the second century, in the assembly of sages that led the Jewish world of learning after the destruction of the Temple, the highest office fell vacant. The tradition relates that the sages...
Jean Brunel spent thirty-eight years managing money for wealthy families before he wrote Goals-Based Wealth Management (Wiley Finance, 2015), and the story he places in his opening chapter is not about investing at all....
In March 1952, the Journal of Finance published a fourteen-page paper by a University of Chicago graduate student in his twenties named Harry Markowitz. The paper was called Portfolio Selection, and it changed how the...
On the 15th of August, 1248, the Archbishop of Cologne, Konrad von Hochstaden, laid the foundation stone of what was meant to become the greatest church in northern Europe. The city had recently acquired relics believed...
In January 1997, in the central Angolan city of Huambo, Diana, Princess of Wales put on a protective visor and a flak jacket and walked a narrow cleared corridor through a live minefield. The deminers walking with her...
In the last days of January 1896, in a greenhouse in the village of Sérignan in Provence, the French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre watched a line of caterpillars climb the side of a large clay vase that held a palm tree.
On Friday afternoons in midtown Manhattan, one of the largest photography retailers on earth begins switching itself off. B&H Photo Video, the superstore on Ninth Avenue that has served professional photographers since...
On the second of February, 1832, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky stood on the floor of the United States Senate to defend his tariff program, and in the middle of a long speech about manufacturing he reached for a phrase...
The awkward question came on live television.
In 2003, the parliament of Denmark tried to do by law what every serious family tries to do by instinct. The Danish Financial Statement Act made Denmark, in the accountant Ronald Baker's account, "the first country to...
In April 2008, August Busch IV stood in front of a hall full of the wholesalers who sold his family's beer and gave them his word. Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis brewer his family had controlled for more than a century...
In 2016, the Bloomberg financial press published a three-hundred-page guide to family trusts written by three of the most senior people in that field: Hartley Goldstone, a former trust officer; Keith Whitaker, a...
In 2015, two estate attorneys in Salt Lake City, Andrew L. Howell and David R. York, published a book called Entrusted: Building a Legacy That Lasts through their own imprint, YH Publishing. It runs to roughly 48,600...
In 1973, the United States Army adopted a habit that had nothing to do with weapons and everything to do with memory. After every significant training event, the people who had just lived through it would sit down...
On the night of 21 August 2008, inside Beijing's National Stadium, the United States put four of the fastest men alive into the qualifying round of the 4 x 100 metres relay. For three and a half laps of running, they...
Hartley Goldstone used to be the person on the other side of the desk. Before he wrote about family money, he administered it, as a trust officer, the professional inside an institution who holds a family's shared...
On the morning of October 30, 1935, at Wright Field outside Dayton, Ohio, the United States Army Air Corps assembled to watch the most advanced aircraft in the world take off. Boeing had flown its Model 299 in from...
In the years before 2016, in meeting rooms across the United States, three veterans of the American trust industry kept running the same informal poll. Hartley Goldstone, a former trust officer. James E. Hughes Jr., a...
In September 1963, a 46-year-old mother of four named Katharine Graham was elected president of The Washington Post Company. She owned the controlling interest in one of the most important newspapers in the United...
On page 71 of a 2014 book called The Voice of the Rising Generation, a man in his forties says something that stops the page cold. He is talking about his own children, and about the question every parent gets asked at...