Charles Moxley
Bank Street School for Children '11
The lifeblood of a strong career is reinvention. Experimenting, pivoting, and problem-solving in real time are crucial. Know when to become a maverick, and know when to negotiate and give and take.
Growing up at the Bank Street School for Children, Charlie Moxley learned to treat every subject as a system worth taking apart. The school’s exploratory curriculum trained him to break down complex problems while keeping their human dimensions in view. That instinct has followed him across five years in asset management, graduate school, and the co-founding of two ventures connecting American capital markets with the entrepreneurial economies of Eastern Europe.
Charlie earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from NYU and spent five years at Gabelli Funds before completing a Master of International Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2025 (SIPA), where he studied international finance, economic policy, renewable energy project finance, and energy policy.
Noticing a gap between mature American markets and the entrepreneurial ecosystem taking shape in Eastern Europe, Charlie and his twin brother Lenny, also a School for Children alum, co-founded the American Balkan Global Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit, and Prend Capital, a private capital advisory firm.
“The overarching thing connecting everything I’ve done is synthesizing complex information and helping companies achieve their goals,” Charlie said. “It’s a very broad range of skills, from public markets to private markets to entrepreneurship, and that’s what makes it so exciting.”
That breadth extends to language. Charlie grew up speaking English and Macedonian, and at Bank Street, he began studying French and developed a love for the language that has stayed with him. He has since tested at the C1 level, and multilingual communication is now central to his work with chambers of commerce and business leaders across Eastern Europe.
Charlie describes Bank Street’s simulation-based, learning-by-doing approach as something that became clearer to him the further he got from it. Measuring solar radiation levels in science class, analyzing a specific painting in art history, or working with his hands in the woodshop were all early lessons in how to hold a problem and its people at the same time. His class also had the opportunity to meet Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a moment that captured the school’s investment in students as civic participants from a young age.
“Bank Street does a great job of helping you break down complex issues and solve problems,” he said. “And equally importantly, it gives you the empathy to know the people and the groups behind the stories.”
Statistics and econometrics became his favorite subjects in college and graduate school, and he developed a reputation for asking his TAs to explain why formulas worked, not just how to use them.
“I could tell you funny stories about TAs who got exasperated with me because I asked too many questions,” he said. “But the problem-solving approach never left me.”
Charlie’s advice for students heading to high school or college is simple: plan ahead and pair big-picture thinking with concrete steps.
“If you know you’re really interested in statistics or math or history, have a plan for how you’re going to approach it,” he said. “Planning four or five years in advance helps people become more confident in their abilities later on.”
Fifteen years out, Charlie thinks often about the 40 students who grew up together at the School for Children. As a reunion approaches, he wants to honor the memory of classmate Alex Bhak, who passed away in college. For Charlie, how a community holds that kind of loss is part of what defines it.
“Personally, I played soccer with Alex every day for three years with my brother and two other close friends, Sune and Zendon,” he said. “A true community sticks together when things like this happen, and I think that we should be recognizing that and celebrating those friendships.”
View excerpts from our interview with Charlie here.