On Jannick Malling and the Future of Public Markets
Companion piece to “The New Rules of Investing: AI, Capitalism & Wealth Creation”
I met Jannick Malling in a green room.
Neither of us knew the other. We both had handlers whose job, frankly, is to keep people like us from talking to strangers — to risk-manage the moment instead of living in it. But Jannick and I are both nosy. We’re both curious. And curious people find each other. We got into each other’s business, in the best sense of that phrase, and by the time we sat down across from the cameras at CNBC, something had already clicked.
That is how good friendships start. Not with a pitch. With a vibe you can’t fake.
So when I sat down with him for this episode of Money & Wealth, I wasn’t interviewing a stranger. I was talking to my new friend and brother from another mother — a man who, it turns out, has walked a version of my own story, just starting from Copenhagen instead of Compton.
The Parallel Lives
Jannick built his first website at twelve. I was doing my version of that at ten, in the inner city. He joined Saxo Bank at seventeen and went on to co-found and sell a fintech company, Tradable, for $120 million. I sold a company for $121 million around the same point in my own career. We didn’t plan that symmetry. Life arranged it for us, I think, so that when we finally sat in the same room, we’d recognize each other immediately.
But it’s not the money that made me want him on this podcast. It’s what he did with what came next.
Why Public Exists
Jannick could have taken the exit money and disappeared into the version of success that stops mattering to anyone but the person living it. Instead, he co-founded Public — a platform built on a simple, almost stubborn belief: that the greatest wealth-creation engine in the history of mankind, the U.S. stock market, should actually be open to the public.
Not open in theory. Open in practice. Public was first to offer fractional shares, so a person without $10,000 saved up could still own a piece of Amazon or Google with a few dollars. And when I heard the platform’s user base is roughly 40% women and 40% people of color — numbers that run against the grain of an industry historically built by and for wealthy white men — I told him on air I might have to make him an honorary black man. I meant it as the highest compliment I know how to give.
The GameStop Test
Here’s where I really started to respect him. In 2021, when GameStop turned the market into a casino overnight and other platforms shut off the buy button to protect themselves, Public did something almost nobody in their position does: they walked away from money. They stopped taking payment for order flow — the standard, quietly lucrative practice where brokers get paid to route your trade to a market maker instead of the open exchange — and they routed orders straight to the exchanges instead. That cost them revenue in the short term. It built something worth more: trust.
That’s the whole argument of my book Capitalism for All in a single business decision. You can be a capitalist and a good person at the same time. In fact, I’d argue you’re not fully either one until you’ve proven you can be both — until you’ve made the choice that costs you something in the short run because it’s right in the long run.
Dick Parsons, and Standing on Someone’s Shoulders
I also have to lift up something Jannick didn’t have to say, but did anyway, unprompted: he owes part of his early belief in this business to Dick Parsons. Rest his soul. A lot of successful people work hard to make you believe they did it alone. Jannick didn’t do that. He named the man who backed him early, who happened to be one of the most respected Black executives on Wall Street, and he gave him full credit. That kind of honesty about your own path is rare, and it tells you something true about a man’s character.
The AI Chapter
Public’s first chapter was access — tearing down the price barrier so anyone could own a piece of the market. Its second chapter, which Jannick was building before most of the industry admitted AI belonged in finance at all, is about closing the resource gap — giving an everyday investor the same research horsepower that used to belong exclusively to family offices and hedge funds. That’s the Investors Mindset argument in software form: leveling the playing field isn’t charity, it’s good business, and it’s good for the country.
I opened a Public account live, on air, while we were talking. I don’t do that. I’m about as objective an interviewer as you’ll find. But I believe in what this young man is building, and I believe in how he’s building it.
Why This Matters To You
We are standing at the front edge of the largest generational wealth transfer in American history — somewhere near $84 trillion moving over the next decade — at the exact moment that ten thousand baby boomers are leaving the economy every single day. Somebody has to teach the next generation, and especially the 40% of this country that is Black and Brown and the third of the economy that is women, how to move from earning and spending to owning.
Jannick said something in this conversation I won’t stop repeating: freedom isn’t a number, it’s an identity shift. It’s the difference between someone who only earns and spends, and someone who owns.
That’s the whole mission of Operation HOPE. That’s the whole mission of this podcast. And it’s why the Investors Mindset partnership between Operation HOPE and the NASDAQ Foundation matters — and why I’m already talking to Jannick about how Public can help us bring fractional ownership to a generation we’re preparing to become investors, not just spenders.
A Thank You
So thank you, Jannick, for building something with backbone. Thank you for walking away from short-term money to protect long-term trust. Thank you for naming Dick Parsons instead of pretending you did it by yourself. And thank you for being exactly who you are in a business that too often rewards people for being someone else.
You told me your dad has a saying: we are who we are, so why try to be anyone else. That’s not just a nice line from Copenhagen. That’s a business strategy, a leadership philosophy, and — if enough of us practice it — a better version of capitalism.
Welcome to the family, brother. Come back soon.
— John Hope Bryant
Listen to the full conversation, “The New Rules of Investing: AI, Capitalism & Wealth Creation,” on Money & Wealth with John Hope Bryant, on the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. And remember: your bank account should have the same information as your brain — get your free credit score and financial coaching at Operation HOPE.
John Hope Bryant — founder of Bryant Group Ventures, Operation HOPE, Inc, publisher of the Bryant Journal and author of his 7th book Capitalism for All: Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America, now a bestseller. Bryant was recently named a member of the Forbes 250.
