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Stephen Goodfellow

Stephen Godofellow began his career at U.S. Bank, where he learned early that finance is not merely arithmetic but temperament. As an analyst working on Collateralized Debt Obligations and Collateralized Loan Obligations—those elaborate contraptions of faith and forecasting, assembled from optimism, caution, and the stubborn hope that correlations would behave themselves—he encountered the sober fact that abstraction, when mishandled, has a habit of becoming very real trouble. It was exacting work, serious work, and it impressed upon him how quickly theory insists on consequences.

From there he moved south and outward, into the more improvisational world of entrepreneurship, serving as a Financial Advisor with the Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program, a division of the BRF. The assignment was simple in description and intricate in execution: persuade high-growth entrepreneurs to put down roots in Northern Louisiana. This required spreadsheets, certainly, but also attention—attention to ambition, to anxiety, to the unspoken question of whether a place could plausibly become a future. He learned, as one does, that capital follows confidence, and that confidence, more often than not, follows explanation.

Since 2020, he has been with SBCC, where the work continues in a steadier register. Alongside this, he maintains a second life as an adjunct professor of finance at Centenary College of Louisiana, explaining to students—some eager, some skeptical, some merely awake—that markets are human inventions and therefore inherit, without exception, the virtues and defects of their makers.

His education arrived in installments, scattered geographically and temperamentally. He earned an MBA from Loyola University Chicago, concentrating in Finance and Economics, after completing an MS in Global Entrepreneurship through Purdue University’s Global Entrepreneurship Program. France enters the account at Emlyon Business School, where he received a diplôme de master, and China at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, whose scale and velocity cured him of any lingering provincialism. Before all of this—before the travel, before the instruments and incentives—his bachelor’s degrees were awarded by the University of South Dakota, where the habit of going onward first took hold.