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In 1998, Mart Green took a transformational trip to Guatemala that changed the way he thought about return on investment. Since then, he has been involved in Bible translation and distribution efforts from the launch of the YouVersion Bible app to the establishment of a collaborative partnership among 10 of the world’s largest Bible translation organizations, called illumiNations. 

In today’s conversation, Mart shares where his passion for Bible translation started, the encouraging steps he’s seen in the effort to eliminate Bible poverty, and the power of what happens when competitors become collaborators.

Episode Transcript

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Mart Green: So in that one moment in time, I went from why to how why do we translate the Bibles for small people groups to how are we going to make sure that everybody on planet Earth has God’s word in their heart language?

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with William William. Good afternoon.

William Norvell: It is good to be here, as always. Good to see you.

Henry Kaestner: It’s great to have you discontinuing this segment, this series, I should say, of course, on other ways to think about doing Faith Driven Investor. And I’ve been thinking about Mark Green, who’s our guest. Welcome to the program, by the way.

Mart Green: Thank you, Henry. Look forward to having this time with you.

Henry Kaestner: When I think about alternate ways to think about Faith Driven Investor and different ways to think about guys economy and how to measure the success of our investments, I keep on coming back to one story that I’ve heard, Martelle, time and time again. That’s really made an impact on me and it’s made an impact on me because I really think that my thought about what a return on investment look like was probably pretty much in sync with Marte’s way up until this time he had this trip to Guatemala, which we’re going to hear about. And so I’m eager for Mark to tell a story and we’re going to get into that and we’re going to be unpacking together. What does it look like to think about investment return in light of what God tells us through his scripture and tells us through his spirit in a way that I hope will stretch us all? And I hope that in the course of doing that will bring us closer to knowing God and then just helps us to understand how to steward the resources he’s entrusted us with under his power for his glory. So hopefully that’s what success looks like. At the end of this podcast. You’ll have that much more of a closer sense as to what that what that means for you and the assets you’ve been entrusted with. So, Mark, thank you for being on the show. Let’s start off, as we do with all of our guests. Tell us a bit about your personal background. Many people will probably know of your family, but pretend like we don’t.

Mart Green: Yeah, I was born in Oklahoma. My family gravitated to Oklahoma City because of a retail company called TGen Y where my dad worked. And so when I was nine, my dad decided that he want to get work life balance. And so he borrowed six hundred dollars and started what became Hobby Lobby in our home. So we glued frames. I was nine, my brother was a seven, and then I have a sister, she was three. So she got out of the child labor and just saw the business grow in her home. And my mom ran the business for the first five years without pay. My dad finally quit his job, selling half to see if he could make a go of it. Then I went to school. I was at college. I decided I heard my dad talk about Christian bookstores, will actually quit in nineteen eighty one, came home and started a company called Mortdale. We have thirty seven Christian bookstores and then ninth grade. I found a young lady that I liked and I chased her for six years and finally she agreed to marry me and we’ve had four children and our twenty second grandchild is due today. So if I run off this podcast you’ll know that I got the call and I’m sorry, but the family comes first. But anyway, somehow the two have become twenty two. And so God’s blessings, that incredible family.

Henry Kaestner: Wow, that is awesome. You’re a very rich man and the most meaningful sense

William Norvell: in a beautiful way to end the podcast. I don’t think we’ve ever had that happen. That would just be hey, what is beautiful.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, I would be super cool. OK, so get back to it because you gloss over that a little bit and you’re an entrepreneur. We have this sister series that we do called the Faith Driven Entrepreneur where we’ve done, I don’t know, maybe one hundred and eighty hundred and ninety segments. We’re not going to tell so much of the Mardell story today, but I want to look at it just a little bit. You grew up in an entrepreneurial home. You were glowing picture frames when you’re nine years old, and then you went and started your internal venture. What did it look like growing up in that house that made you want to be an entrepreneur? And were there ever a time, though, when you saw what was going on in the business? You said, no, I don’t want to do that. How did it all just growing up in an entrepreneurial home impact in shape, how you ended up seizing and lean into your own entrepreneurial career?

Mart Green: Yeah, what I saw probably were a couple of things. One was hard work because it was a lot of hard work. We started a business in your home, your mom not getting paid, all those kind of things. And then I also knew that it was a way to provide for family was also a way to give. You know, my family has always wanted to give and be generous. And so by being entrepreneurial, the more you can do, the more you can give. And so we kind of see it now as a prosperity gospel or the poverty gospel, but the plentiful gospel. So I use a symbol of a funnel. I have a coin in my pocket, has our family a love that intimately has a heart that was easy, live, extravagant generosity. I wanted to put a curtain being torn because I think that’s the most generous thing that ever happened visually. When Jesus died on the cross, the tartan was torn. This is hard to do that. So I chose a funnel. So on my coin in my pocket, I carry is a funnel in the back. And so that’s what I saw just kind of lived, you know, the more you get, just give. So when I was at college, I was nineteen years old. My dad, he want to do a barbecue stand. He want to do all these different things. And I wasn’t interested. But he said, Christian bookstore. I thought, oh no, that’s kind of cool because the entrepreneurial what you’re doing, you know, there’s not a lot of people go to Hobby Lobby, buy so flower and their life is transformed for eternity. Now they have incredible experience. It makes their home better and all that stuff. But a Christian bookstore, I’m thinking, oh, because usually you give to ministries and you make money, you’re entrepreneurial. Well, that’s kind of the deal. The Christian bookstore you kind of get to take. Both of those, and so, again, 19 not smart enough to ask all the big questions, you know, that I should have I probably would have never done it. So I quit school and my dad would pay for school kind of work. His measure goes, well, if I come over and I bust, I’ll make enough money to go back to school again. So that was my plan.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us also a little bit about family business, because Mardell is co-located with Hobby Lobby. You’re all together. What’s it like working in a multigenerational family business altogether?

Mart Green: Yeah, for me, it’s a huge benefit, as you can imagine, because my dad already had banking things, relationships. They had lawyers worked up. And all this is good news. I’d have to worry about a lot of heavy things. Now, obviously, Christian bookstore and at that time is off supply. Now, we’ve kind of evolved into education supplies. That was all different. So that’s what I had to do. Lots of learning. But the advantage of having a family business here together is my dad had already cut down lots of trees and lots of weeds that were in my way. And so I had huge advantage in that way. What I had to go do is say, hey, can I be a merchant in different categories? Then obviously Hobby Lobby has lots of different categories and they’re world class, what they do. And so it was just fun to go and do it there at the same time, have those advantages. But, you know, my dad kind of let me do it. You know, he didn’t come in. He only had seven hobby lobbies, I think, in nineteen eighty one when I opened. So he’s still trying to get his. And so the nice thing was my dad could have saved me from a lot of mistakes. He probably watched me walk right in that wall and get a bloody nose. When he stopped me I probably have done it again. Right. But since he didn’t stop me, I didn’t do it again. Right. And so I had a father that would empower me and not help me lots. You see what I’m saying? But in the decisions I had to make, he never Trumpton never got into the business of why did you do that? Why did you do that? So anyway, it was an incredible, incredible I guess I just assumed everybody had the same upbringing. I guess we all do. Right. I guess I assume everybody’s trying to figure something out on their house or working at home and working. Mother, nine years old. I didn’t find out later that I was I wasn’t under the child labor laws.

Henry Kaestner: So did your kids. The next generation, the tilers and and that generation start off the same way,

Mart Green: not at nine. We let them go to school and get a little bit older and stuff like that. But some of that same philosophy that, you know, your first car you have to pay for part of that college. We matched their funds, you know, so we got a little bit better than my parents. They were zero, you know, and stuff, because, again, they didn’t have the funds to help me at that time. So that’s what we try to figure that out. You know, that’s not a science. That’s an art stuff. How do you help your kids? You don’t want them to feel entitled. That’s always been a concern that we’ve had as a family. How do you do that? How do you be generous if your family seems to love got intimately and little extravagant generosity? What’s extravagant generosity to look like within a family member that’s also healthy? Right. I give my kids lots of money. That wouldn’t be extravagant generosity, really. I’d actually be killing their work, desire and all that. So it’s a it’s something you have to work through.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so that’s give me another Panksepp. So we’re going to come back to it because I’ve gotten to know Tyler and Derrick well over the course the last couple of years. And I know that you’re actually very, very intentional with the way you do that. I think that there’s a lot there to unpack. We won’t go there on this episode. But I actually want to go backwards. Just a second. You pulled a coin out of your pocket and you just said what it was. Just briefly, because I want to talk about that coin and then I want to talk about another thing that you always do as a matter of habit that’s really made an impression on me. But tell us again about the coin and then I’ll tell people about what the other habit that you have that’s made an impression on me.

Mart Green: Yeah. About twelve years ago, our family decided, you know what, we have a vision statement, a mission statement, a core values for the business. But we don’t have it for our family. And our family is more important than our business. So why don’t we do that? So at that point, Gen three object to my parents be Gen one, we’re younger. So Gen one, my parents, my brother and sister and their spouses, those eight of us sit down in a hotel room with a facilitator just to kind of put down who are we, what’s the Greens all about? So we have our core values, but we got an interest in a real simple one. So the real simple, little memorable and so is love got intimately the extravagant generosity. So I like symbols. I like things that I can look at and say, oh, that’s what that means. So as I showed earlier, that love got intimately extravagant, generous. So every morning when I get up here, I gave one to all the family members. Now I’m not ten. They kept theirs. They may have lost it. I have extras. They can have one because I’m a simple guy. But once a year we have a big family. Celebration is so at that meeting of a new family member. Then they’ll get a copy of this as well as that. We have a custom Bible for our family that when a new family member marries, then they get that Bible and we all bring us back to the meeting and they sign our Bible. We send their Bible just as a commitment to each other. Now, I can’t force my kids to love. Got into me a little extra generosity. All I’m saying is that’s where the river’s going. So if you want to go up river, you can jump out of the river. You can. But we’re kind of going this way, what we feel God’s given us. And so it’s been fun and our kids have embraced that. And just some of those little things you do as a family,

Henry Kaestner: it’s not one of those little things is a very big thing that you do as a family. Okay, here’s the other thing that you’ve done that’s really made an impression on me. You have the same way of signing off on your email every time. What is that? What quote do you put down and what does that mean to you? Because that’s a bridge. To an area, the conversation that Williams can take us through

Mart Green: now, back in the day, we were trying to do a full page ad for the newspaper about God’s word, very important to us. So I hired a firm that came back with a little tagline. I didn’t like it. So I sent him back to the drawing board and they came back with four words. I said, that’s it. That’s it. That’s it. So the last twenty three years I’ve had all my emails with these four words. This book is alive. And then I have a script that I put under that and hope most people understand because it’s the only book that’s alive. I mean, I’m watching it. There’s 6000 languages on planet Earth and every time it gets translated a new language, it speaks to the people. There is no book that does that. And so this book is alive is kind of what I love, being sure that I put on other people as much as I can.

William Norvell: So many beautiful things, so many beautiful things. I love symbols. I wrote down Quoin with family motto. I’m going in, I’m going have to get your tips. That just speaks to me.

Mart Green: I love

William Norvell: that. But one of the things we do want to dove into is Henry said, is your personal journey with God’s word and why you think it’s alive and why you think it’s so alive that you want to tell everybody about it. Every time you send an email, which I imagine is quite often, from what I understand, Guatamala is a big place for this started for you back in the late 90s. Could you tell us a little bit about that story?

Mart Green: Yeah, it’s a moment in time story, William, so thanks for asking. Nineteen ninety eight, because we had Christian bookstores and we sold Bibles, we thought and I didn’t know there were 6000 languages that people don’t have God’s word in our language. And so when I learned that, I said, oh, maybe we could be apart. So maybe Mardell could sell Bibles that helped pay for Bible translators. Well, the Bible translation process is kind of long, so that didn’t work so fine. I said, well, how do you pay for the printing, the Bibles? Because typically a new people groups, they will sell the Bibles to subsidized price. So maybe they charge them a quarter or fifty cents, but they may not be able to four or five dollars. So we started paying for first edition Bibles. So they said, well, ma, you paying these first edition Bibles, you got to come to a dedication. We dedicate the Bibles and you know how it is. You’re busy, you get your business, you’re trying to get it. You got four kids. And finally, the date worked February of nineteen ninety eight. So February 5th, I get on an airplane and I’m headed down there. And so now I’m getting some information about the translation. I don’t know much about this thing. You know, always the Asian heart attack people and there’s only thirty thousand of that. Speak this language like I’m new to this. I’m saying if you got a language, you got lots of people. My football stadium here, Norman holds one hundred thousand people. You know, all these people are going to fill up and get a little bit like an empty stadium, you know. Oh, and then only eight thousand of those people can read. A thousand of them are believers. Only four hundred believers can read. And I’m like, this is not a good hour. Oh, I you know, that’s the language I speak. I’ve got to go back to a family who all business minded. They’ll go on no good stories and I’ll come back. Oh, I went all the way down to Guatemala and four hundred people can read this Bible that this couple spent forty years translating because of warfare down there and all that stuff. They were nineteen fifty eight before I’m born to nineteen ninety eight forty years translating the Bible for people. Well for me it’s real simple. I’m not doing this again now. The forty years that the people I have no idea how to console them because they spent forty years of life. There were seventy years old when I got down. There will be one hundred ten when they get the next one done you know. So anyway so we got the ceremony and it’s ten hours out so I’m two days on the oral question. This is not working. Why do we do this then. I just ah forget it. It’s over. I’m not doing anymore. And then got the ceremony and they actually have, there was an American couple down there and for each and all the tech they give me a Bible for free. The translators get a free Bible and gas for one of the local isn’t huddle walk up to get his Bible. It’s something I’ve never seen before. In a Mortdale, we carry over a thousand different Bibles. We you take every language, every color, all that. There’s a thousand different choices. And I’ve helped people find the one, but I’ve never had them do a guest for doing Gaspar got God’s word. It’s hard language. Hinduja the first time he wept. Then he wiped his tears away and he wept. And I was stunned by that moment, watching a guy weep over a Bible. And so at that moment, the gods never spoke to me audibly. But the Holy Spirit has prompted me at different times in my life. That moment is a prompting was a simple question. Maat, why don’t you go tell Gaspar he’s not a good ahli? And that was like a spear going right to my heart sink, right, because I have been arguing that exact point for two days and I’m really not comfortable going up and telling the guy who’s weeping over his Bible he’s not a good return on investment. So in that one moment in time, I went from why to hell why do we translate the Bibles for small people groups to how are we going to make sure that everybody on planet Earth has God’s word in their heart language?

William Norvell: Let’s get it. And I’ve heard you talk before about, you know, you went from Oraibi to EROI. Could you tell us about what that metric means to you and how you put that into practice today?

Mart Green: Yeah, so I had a process. That’s what I’ve been arguing ahli the whole way down here. You know, that’s my heart language, right? That’s my language are a lie. And so I thought, well, what happened here? Then I realized, you know, I’m in charge of potent seed. I want to plant a seed that’s potent. So what? I plant potency. God’s in charge of the fruit. Now, right, I can take a scene put in right place and all that stuff, but now I understand God’s word is very potent. I have no idea what God is going to do among that group of four hundred or the thirty thousand. I mean, obviously, more people learn to read all that kind of stuff. So what I’m more concerned about now is in my planning potency and I just happen to believe that God’s word there’s only two things that last forever souls of men and women in God’s word. And so this is something I’m going to get to talk about for a long, long time. In heaven, we have all these 6000 names on our guys are going to figure all that out. He’ll figure all that out. But it’ll be fun to talk about your Bible and my Bible and all that stuff. And maybe we will instantly be able to speak six thousand languages. I don’t know. I mean, heaven is going to blow our brains out. Right. And so I can’t wait to get there because every tribe, every nation, every language is in heaven. That’s what it tells us. I love a picture that a guy does. He’s got the Last Supper, Elstein, the last supper. He took up an indigenous people around the table and I like call him at the next supper. The next time we go, they’re all going to be different indigenous people and all that stuff. So it’s beautiful. Heaven is an exciting thing and I think God’s word lasts forever. So that’s my EROI is to invest in things that last past, my lifetime.

William Norvell: That’s great. And so obviously a big point in time. Guatamala gasp Are these moments when you came back, you’re on the plane home. What do you think it did you immediately jump into how to solve this problem? What eventually led you into going really deep into the Bible translation world?

Mart Green: Before I took it home, I had one more experience and that was two o’clock in the morning. So, yeah, but it leads to that. So at two o’clock in the morning, I’m going to One Dollar Hotel and I lost the Arawa again. I didn’t get a return on investment on that Rodwin Dollar Hotel. And so I didn’t mind the hotel.

Henry Kaestner: The service at the hotel supplied you was not as good as one dollar that you paid.

Mart Green: No, it was a barn and the bed wasn’t made. And there’s no running water, just the bucket downstairs tin roof. So at two o’clock in the morning that actually there were cats, Latin reporters, jaguars, the four drunks singing out here. So that was a no sleep night. So at two o’clock in the morning, I’m not sleeping. And the most of the day I just watched as many people revival got pierced my heart. So I get out of book. Arthur being in God’s word and knowing it for yourself as a key being as well known as the key. Well, now the Lord gave me another prompting and it’s what kind of ahli is Mark Green? Fifth generation Christian, my mom’s side through my dad’s side, I own Christian bookstores, I paid for the printing that Bible, that man was over. I have 50 Bibles to my name and I read the Bible every great once in a while, maybe on Sundays when pastor opens it up and says to go somewhere. So all of a sudden I realized the oral question in Guatemala was not Gaspar, it was Mark Green. So I made a vow. February 8th, 1998, two o’clock in the morning, I get up first thing and read God’s word for the rest of my life. And so I get to gasp are weeping for me to appreciate what I took for granted. I’ve had in my English language for hundreds of years and hundreds of translations, but it took him for me to understand what I had taken for granted. So that started my journey of doing translation. But it really it took a few more years before I understood how to do that collaboratively. I went back and said, Hey guys, we got to sell more Bibles. Somebody else we can pay for more printing of Bibles. And so that was my first deal, is let’s just continue to pay for more printing of Bibles that get them done.

Henry Kaestner: So let’s talk about collaboration. Illuminations is a big project. You’re bringing together a whole bunch of different folks that might not ordinarily play well in the sandbox together. We’ve looked at this a little bit before in prior podcast with Peter Grear Rooting for Rivals. It’s just we live in a sinful fallen world and everybody’s got their own way. We know how many denominations there are. We know that we’re living in this post Tower of Babel reality. I’ve got that painting right behind me that’s kind of given birth to what you’re doing. Illuminations, right. But you’re bringing people together and you’re working on collaboration across a whole bunch of different sectors, different organizations that have different histories, and yet they’re all coming together. How are you making it happen?

Mart Green: Well, I’m not making it happen, but I’m trying to facilitate it happen. Of course, I think the Lord did it. So, yeah, back in ninety eight, right after my Gaspare experience, I was in Chicago and I just felt like someday there’ll be a project, so be the nominee to protect themselves. They would come together. No doubt I could do it. They would come together and both would come together. So that’s set my heart for 12 years. And then I went back to Guatemala because I talk about Guatemala all the time. So Todd Peterson, a good friend of yours, and see me say, hey, Mark, we’re going down to Guatemala City, I’m sure, Guatemala story in Guatemala. So I went down there when I was down there. So I’m not going back to Guatemala for about another ten or twelve years. And every time I go down there, my world gets rocked. You know, I said, oh, almost. If I get all these people to come together. And another unique thing was happening, and that’s called you Verson. So your version is a ministry based here out of Oklahoma City that has the Bible app that many people will be familiar with. Incredible entrepreneurial story. You won’t be surprised if you’ve already had him or we won’t have him on. We have, of course. Yeah. And so but he was doing these text digitized at the same time print on demand was saying, hey, green family, will you digitize these texts. Well that’s fifteen hundred dollars times two thousand languages for two different people. So I’m like no, no, no, I’m not digitizing these texts for everybody down river. I’m going back up river to who owns the intellectual property rights because bibles are intellectual property, you have to get the rights to do that. So we started by building a digital Bible library, so it kind of gave us a mutual reinforcing activity is what’s called the Collective Impact World, something we can all do together? Let’s centralize, digitize and standardize all these Bible text of the world. But my real goal was to finalize. We built this beautiful library that’s got two thousand books in it and there’s four thousand missing. So that was kind of a way to bring everybody together. And because it was called by the resource, we had four other resource partners like myself, a resource partner. You have ten Bible translation agencies that do most the translation in the world. You have five resource partners all meeting once a month, just strategizing. And so because it’s kind of cool by the resource partner now, we can be obnoxious as a resource partner and you can be a step too far. So it’s a it’s a dance. It’s a relationship of trust. You have to trust me very deeply that I’m working with you and I have to trust that you’re going to share. So I’ll build your tool as long as you’ll share with these other nine ministries, which actually represent there’s one hundred and fifty Bible societies that all have their own boards. So technically we’re coordinating probably one hundred fifty two hundred organizations all together. Now there’s a United Bible society, but they’re not over the Bible society. So they can say, hey, guys, please do this. But one hundred fifty boards could vote different way. So that took a trust, takes a long time. You get trust by the drop and you lose it by the buckets. And so we’re just trying to continue to build trust. So that’s what a collective impact really, really at the bottom line is about trust. But you know what? We all want to eradicate battle poverty. And nobody can say that by themselves. No donor can say I’m going to eradicate Bible poverty. No ministry party can say I can read. So that’s what keeps us whenever we get kind of shuffled down here and fighting with each other, all that stuff, we can keep looking up, guys. We’re going to eradicate poverty. There are people dying without scripture. We have the oxygen there underwater. We got to get them the oxygen. They’re going to die under there.

Henry Kaestner: So I’m fascinated by a collective impact. I’m actually not going to take us there because I’m a guy who saw t shirts at the University of Delaware. But William did go to Stanford Business School, which is where I think collective impact came out of. When you’re there, did you study collective impact and if so? Walk us through with Martje as he understands just the general principles of collective impact, because I think that they apply to limitations. And I think if this is an intro and an invitation for others to participate in illuminations, I hope they will. As people are motivated by the eradication of biblical poverty, I hope that they’ll find more about illuminations. But another thing that might happen from this is just the value of collective impact. Is that something, William, you’re familiar with? Did you ever study that there?

William Norvell: They didn’t let the Alabama guy into that class. Now, they were like, too heady, too much. You know, we’ve got sails for you, but so didn’t study it. I believe you that it started there. But I guess and Mark can illuminate us a little bit.

Mart Green: Yeah, it’s kind of wild because we started 2010 and in 2011, this Stanford comes out with this new concept called collective impact. And it was just so great because it gave language to what I was doing. Then as you’re doing something, you can explain it to people, but they did it. So there’s really what they call five steps ones, a common agenda. We just talked about that to eradicate child poverty. We all agree that’s a common agenda. Then you have a shared measurement system. How are we going to measure what we’re doing? Well, fortunately, in Bible translation, you can get it down to chapters in the Bible. So we have a goal that ninety five percent this world will have the full Bible, ninety nine point nine six will have at least the New Testament. And that last point zero four, which will be about three million people out of eight billion that we may have in twenty thirty three, we’ll all have scripture by twenty, thirty three. So that’s a shared measurement system. And then you’ve got mutually reinforcing activities. We talked about that, the digital Bible and let’s do some stuff together. Let’s go do something. So that’s one thing. We do lots of other things together now. Continuous communication. You’ve got to be talking. We meet every month. Typically, Dallas has the largest admiral’s club in the country, C twenty one in the Dallas airport. We all fly in for four hours. We fly back out. And so that’s the way we see each other. Now, obviously, the last year we’ve been doing that by Zoome because we can’t meet in person, but we’re about ready to get that going again. So we’ve met one hundred and three times, I think over the last ten years and then about three times. Wow. Yeah, trust takes

Henry Kaestner: time, you know, at C twenty one if you’ve been there a hundred and three times, you know the

Mart Green: gate. I know. I know so. And there’s a backbone about memorization and almost like the chief operating officer of it because all the CEOs come right, all the donors come, large donors all have businesses or things we got to go back to. So it’s not like we get full time to this. So we stir up all this trouble. I resisted it for the longest time. Then I realized no. So we have a staff of probably four or five that we helped fund that. Just follow up with all the details. Museum of the Bible, you said? Yeah, my brother on here, the Museum of the Bible want to make a room and put all 6000 languages in it. So they want to collect all two thousand Bibles. You know how hard it is to get one each of two thousand Bibles. It’s so hard that you would not do it unless you call one person called the backbone of Illuminations. And we did all that work with one hundred ninety organizations getting them to send to and from Germany, from Afghanistan, the whole world. These Bibles are not all sitting somewhere. And so now those are there. But they are now. Yeah, but we didn’t know that we started, but that’s the power of coming together. So those are the five points. The one that’s missing. Stanford missed one, the most important one, and that’s prayer. And so we have made this thing with a prayer from the very beginning. We actually have a translation prayer. It’s a six line prayer. And if we have time, maybe we’ll get to say at the end of it or something like that. But it’s just a six line prayer that I just hope maybe someday there’s so many people praying everywhere I go. I handed out my little card, a little magnet, two versions of it, because I’m a simple guy, right? So I want to leave somebody with something. I got to say to the Angels guys that prayer, I’m getting tired of hearing that we just go get that one solved, go answer that prayer. And so now, of course, people can pray what they want, but we’re also collectively having a prayer. And we just had an illuminations gathering. Three hundred people there. And every morning over one hundred people came early morning because we don’t let them out till 10:00 at night. They came up early morning to pray because we made a high priority is guys, we are operating the prayers of the people. And so that’s how you get people together, is to pray together

William Norvell: as a major. They I love symbols, too, and I’ve actually become fascinated over the last four or five years with collective prayer, praying the same thing. Right. I used to go against and of course, the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve never gone against that one, but I say, no, let’s not read prayers like God wants to hear our original thought, you know, but I love the power of it. Would you mind sharing that sixth line prayer with our audience? I would love if you would just pray that overall our audience over this moment.

Mart Green: Absolutely. God, your word is more precious than all that I possess. Your scripture gives light to my path and directs my steps. Through your will alone, lives are transformed, the mind’s made new, so I now pray for all people that do not yet know you, for you’ve promised that your voice by every tribe and nation will be heard. So equip us by your breath to provide every heart language with your word. Amen Amen.

Henry Kaestner: That’s awesome. And William, I love that you ask that question. William has authored the Sovereign’s Capital prayer and then also the faith driven movement prayer. And there is something really beautiful when everybody present together some. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Mart Green: Yeah. Thank you for allowing me to share.

William Norvell: And the last question I’d love to ask Martis, you’ve worked on this collective impact. You know, we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs and investors that have, you know, shared high level goals. Right. They really do. But they also have their own business to run. How have you seen entrepreneurs work? Well, with that also, are there roadblocks that they should be looking out for? I mean, you do have to watch out for your own organization at some point. How does that tension play itself out and in this organization? And I would imagine others.

Mart Green: Yeah, the good news is, like we just came from this Illuminations event. We had one hundred and forty four giving units. So that’s lots of families. Now, some of those families, all they do is they come visit once a year and that’s it. We have thirty what we call co-host couples that give a little bit more their time and then there’s the five who give up their time. So some of those are in situations like Tai Peterson, former NFL football player. So he has a situation. They can give him more of his time. He still has to get some income and do some stuff like that. I also have in the way that I’ve been able to free up my time to do this. Now, not everybody can get the same amount of time. So I’m generous with my time and my talent and my treasure. Some might give us their talent and their treasure. Some might give us time and treasure. So you just try to get people, you find out what they’re getting are how can you help us? How can you do different things? And so but the five all have unique situations that they had enough time that they could give us that, because if they can’t, they won’t. There’s other people that love to be a part of our meetings every month, but they can’t because their time. So but when you get to a big enough audience, then you can have enough people that can come together to solve the issues that we have to come together with.

William Norvell: Well, as we do come to a close, this may be a little bit of pressure from someone who spent a good portion of their life translating different Bibles. So, you know, I know you hold the Bible dear and the Bible is alive as your as your sign off. But what we love to ask at the end of ours is we also hold God’s word very dear. And we love to see how God’s word can transcend your lives. Our guest lives with our listeners lives. And so we would love to invite our guest to do at the end to share something that God’s telling them through his word could be something this morning, could be something the season, could be something he’s told you his whole life that you think our audience should hear. But we’d love to invite you to do that here with our audience today.

Mart Green: Man, I wish we could take whole forty minutes on that question. I got lots of good answers there, but I’m all Jeremiah nine and twenty three in the message version. And it says, don’t let the wise regular wisdom. Don’t let the heroes brag of their exploits. Don’t let the rich brag of the riches. If you brag, brag of this and this only that you understand and know me. And so I’m really not a Bible guy on an intimacy with God guy. I just feel like the number one way to get into the God is through his word. And so that’s what I’m about. Intimacy with God.

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Before starting Access Ventures, Bryce Butler was the Executive Director of the BlueSky Network, a venture philanthropy family office in Southern Indiana with activities around the world in microfinance, clean energy, sustainable agriculture, mobile payments, and entrepreneurship/innovation. 

Bryce was also the Executive Producer of a documentary about poverty, gang violence, and those trying to chart a new path through dance set in Guatemala City that premiered at the United Nations in April 2014 called BBOY for Life.

Today, he joined us to talk about one pocket investing, solving access problems, and defining what Faith Driven Investing really means…

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back. Live to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with my great friend and partner in Sovereign’s Capital, Luke Roush.

Luke, welcome. And it’s good to see you, brother. We are doing this on both audio and video. We’ve got Bryce Butler in the house and we’re just coming in as we’re getting live online. We’ve got Bryce, who is sharing with us right before we went live, about what it looks like for him to have four daughters who are learning about Faith Driven Entrepreneurship and doing that out on a farm and some really neat e-commerce businesses. And we’re going to put some links up there and in the show notes. But we wanted to go ahead and talk with Bryce about what he uniquely does and some of the gifts he has and some experiences he has with Access Ventures. This is, of course, a podcast for an audience of people that are getting really intentional about storing their investment capital for the glory of God. And as we do that, we like to have stories. Luke and I like to get out and interview people that are being faithful and being innovative with the way that they’re deploying capital in a way that they are loving on their communities and looking for investment returns. And Bryce has done just that, and he’s done it for a long time. We oftentimes think about Faith Driven Investing and being in three buckets with the funds we look at. We think about funds that have existed with some level of spiritual integration in them. We think about the funds that are starting up and there’s a great new group of men and women that feel called by God that have operating or investment experience, that are launching new funds. And then also there’s a fair number of funds that are being retrofitted, funds that have been run by Christ followers and have had great success and are getting more and more intentional about how they love on their portfolio companies by bringing in things like chaplaincy and faith driven employee resource groups, et cetera. Bryce is very squarely in that first camp. He’s been very serious about his faith and investing for a long time. And one of the people that we look to and talk in at the conferences that were involved in and so we’re grateful that he’d spend time with us today, sharing with us what God has done through his life and Praxis ventures, what he does, why he does it, where he does it. You’ll get a sense that place is really important to him. So, Bryce, super glad to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Bryce Butler: My pleasure. Thank you.

Henry Kaestner: We love to open by hearing how our guests have their stories, what your origin story is, who you are, where do you come from to tell us a bit about who you are and and how you got here and how God and in your faith has led you to Access Ventures.

Bryce Butler: So my journey a little circuitous. I’m the son of an Army officer. My dad actually this summer retired after 45 years of federal service. Twenty three with the army, sixteen or so with the US attorney’s office and and recently as a judge. So I moved around a lot, actually, when I was growing up. I moved eight times in twelve years and so lived all over the place, lived six of my years overseas. And really the military is a big part of my life. My great great great grandfather was a sergeant in the union cavalry. And so ever since, as far back as I can track, there have been members of the military in my family. So it was one of those things where that’s what I did. So when I graduated from college, I got an undergraduate degree in economics. I went into the army. That’s what paid for my school. And so the timing was like 2003. So the ground war started in April of 2003 in Iraq. And I was commissioned in May of 2003 as an Army officer. So I was on tanks and I actually found myself being deployed to Korea. And so I spent two years on the DMZ in Korea before being reassigned to Fort Knox in Kentucky. And that’s what brought me here. So I actually live in Louisville, Kentucky. I’ve been here for about fifteen years now. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere. But I married a Kentucky in I am deeply planted here. I actually inevitably got out of the military after four years on active duty and went to seminary. Are calling from the Lord to step into ministry, didn’t know what that was. Didn’t really know if it was pastoral ministry, international missions, but really at heart for just learning more and applying my faith more deeply. And so I went to seminary, but I wanted to work in a church while I was doing that to actually put that into practice. And so I found myself at a church plant and this was two thousand seven. That was really on a pretty steep cliff trajectory of growth. They went from 400 to three thousand in my time there in about two years, one campus to four church called Sojourned Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky. And I just honestly, it was more I was in the right place at the right time. The more I use the gifts of strategy and logistics and operations that I had. But I became the executive pastor for about five years and kind of in that process learned a lot about church, church dynamics, church growth. And that brought me into kind of like, OK, Lord, I’m here at seminary. I enjoy preaching, I like teaching. But it’s not that doesn’t drive me like a lot of the students that I see around me. I really get jazzed by working on these complex problems of organizational dynamics and leadership. I started working with the Entrepreneurship Initiative at Redeemer, got involved in their effort as a judge, spoke at a couple of their conferences and just really got turned on to business for the common good.

This was probably two thousand, ten or so.

And just really it activated a lot of just my own gifting and desire. And it was then that I was like, I really feel like the Lord is leading me back to the marketplace. So I finished up my masters. I do a master’s in theology, and then I ended up leaving the pastoral ministry and working at a family office and so worked with a family that was doing pretty innovative microfinance internationally, also investing in India and East Africa and also their foundation. And kind of through that work, I learned a ton and kind of over the course of four years, kind of took those learnings and built what has become Access Ventures.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us about Access Ventures. Tell us about what uniquely does.

Bryce Butler: So Access Ventures is, you know, so technically it’s a 501c3. It’s a private operating foundation. So we’re not like it when you hear the word foundation. A lot of times people immediately jump to grant writer that, you know, just this endowed capital that is investing its resources to maximize financial return and then turning around and writing grants to organizations that align with their charitable purpose. We don’t do that. We are an operating private foundation. So we actually kind of are a hybrid. We function much more like a public charity. We run programs. We’re strategically looking at things like program related investments, things that are aligned with our mission. So we don’t write grants. We do activities as a charitable entity, but we also are endowed. So over the course of the last seven years, I went from kind of this idea on the back of a napkin to what is now a fully endowed private operating foundation with about fifty million dollars. And then what we do is we look to take all of those resources that we talk about this idea of a one pocket mindset. And so we really have been since the beginning saying like it’s not the charitable dollars that should be achieving our values and purpose. But how can we align all of these investment dollars across a multi asset strategy, whether it’s real estate, whether it’s private equity venture? How can we take these tools, i.e. capital tools, resources and identify fund managers, identify entrepreneurs, identify real estate opportunities, identify partnerships that are in line with our mission and that get us across that board a blended strategy, a blended portfolio, a blended return. And so we do charitable work. We do a low market lending. We do non concessionary direct investments. We have a block change strategy. We have a lot of other asset classes as well. So we look to take that entire portfolio and invest it in line with our purpose. And it’s a lot of fun.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s really interesting. I love this idea and I hope that we’re going to be able to unpack this a lot more during our time together of this one pocket mindset. And I think that many of us can kind of understand it intellectually at one level, which is that we have bifurcated our giving from our investments and maybe there’s an opportunity to bring them both together. But that’s hard work. And even though I obviously are maybe not so obviously, but I obviously believe in that. Just understanding how to do that is something I really want to understand more. And so tell me if I’m getting this right. Traditionally, Christians have thought of I want to make as much money as I possibly can over here in my left pocket. And then to the degree that I understand the biblical message of generosity, I want to give away as much as I possibly can over here with my right hand or my right pocket. And you’re suggesting that the very process of investing capital might accomplish the same mission’s goals that we had over there on the giving side. And so we need to be thinking about storing that capital in the same way. And yet it goes. Backwards, too, which is that sometimes when we might otherwise think about investing, maybe we should be giving. So how do you think so? You stored a large sum of capital. How do you go ahead and say, gosh, I need to have a certain return on this? What’s a framework you use to be able to process all of this? Is it just the impact now?

Luke Roush: How do you create buckets and you decide kind of what goes and what bucket?

Bryce Butler: Well, I think you have to start by asking yourself a lot of questions like what is the purpose of capital? What is the purpose of this capital? What do I need as a return? I think we need to be unapologetic about what we’re trying to accomplish. And so if it is outsized returns or market returns, that’s fine. Put it on the table and let’s talk about that and then say to what you’re saying, Henry, I think the old adage of like, make all you can save, all you can give, all you can. I do think there is a notion like make all you can so that you can give all you can. So we still need to do charitable work. We still need to do philanthropic activities. We need to support local churches, ministries that are sharing the gospel in places that are unreached. But in the course of making all you can, how do we align our values and who we are as people and our understanding of God and his universe and our responsibility in that universe? How do we align that with the making? Because I do believe that there are unbelievable fund managers, there’s Sovereign’s Capital and others that are intentionally trying to align various return profiles with Kingdom or impact orientation. And so as you think about your own personal net worth or your own organizational purpose, make all you can. But in the making, the one pocket mindset is thinking through. It’s really fundamentally. Do you believe that money is a tool? It’s a resource. And so how do we deploy resources? Right. When you’re building a house, you don’t use a screwdriver where you should use a hammer. And so you fundamentally do have to ask your question, what is the purpose? What is the purpose of this capital? Do I need this to be non concessionary? OK, great. In the pursuit of a manager or an entrepreneur that’s going to help me achieve that financial outcome. Can I. Is there a way that I can work to align that with someone also pursuing a business model or intentionally leading their company in a way that honors the Lord? And so I think your point on chaplaincy or the way we lead our companies, the way we think about resources and the stewardship of those resources or time off, or when you start to unpack what it means to really understand the dignity of the person and how that’s manifest in our companies and how we care for people, it gets really exciting. And then you get to work with these entrepreneurs, these fund managers that are really trying to think creatively about things, you know, like the tent making. Right, T1-T4. I think sometimes people look at like the ones that are the business models in unreached people, groups that aren’t financially sustainable as lesser businesses. I like to put it up and say, well, if that was their intention, it’s not necessarily bad. There are places where we should go into those countries and the business model may just be sustainable, i.e. we’re covering our costs, but it’s allowing that missionary to be in a place that they otherwise wouldn’t be. If we’re achieving our intended goal, our intended outcome with the financial return and we’re able to bring about human flourishing, the Imago Dei know that’s a beautiful thing. If the goal is outsized returns and also to invest in Kingdom-oriented entrepreneurs, great, let’s do that. But I think what we’ve got to do is start to look at what was the financial goal, what is the impact, and to look at that and not compare a nonprofit return on community activity that’s charitable and supported through grants against a technology company that’s scalable and looking for venture rate returns.

Luke Roush: So I think that’s good. And, you know, I always love examples when you talk about Access being inclusive and creative and resilient. You know, we recently had Jewel Burks on the show and she talked a little bit about less of a pipeline problem, more of an access problem. How have you kind of seen that playing out within Access in the mission that you serve and then maybe just elucidated some of what you’re pointing to there, Bryce, with a couple of examples of how you’ve seen that play?

Bryce Butler: Yeah, Jewel’s great. And it is an access problem. So, I mean, our name Access Ventures, I think at the end of the day, as Christians, I’m not surprised by inequality or Jesus as the poor will always be among you. So the issues of inequality that exist aren’t surprising because they’re products of the fall. It’s not as God intended, it’s not as it was to be. And so in our role as his created image bearers, like what does it look like to participate in rolling back right. To roll back these injustices? And so I think the notion of an access issue is true. There are things in our world that are unjust. And so I think as Christians, what does it look like to right the wrongs? And so I think for entrepreneurs of color specifically, they have an access issue like less than two percent of venture capital goes to founders of color. When you have white families in America, that average over one hundred thousand dollars in net worth and the average black family is seventy six dollars in net worth. When you talk about who has access to financing, that’s an access issue, right? There’s a capital I as a white man in America, I can go to my family and friend network. And more often than not, it’s the first place an entrepreneur goes. And I’m not going to have of a time finding capital to support my business. Whereas a black founder, they may have great social networks. Oftentimes communities of color have unbelievable networks. But when those networks, because of wealth inequality has existed for centuries, when that network doesn’t have financial capacity, it makes it very, very difficult. And you look at issues of redlining around housing and the modern day redlining around business financing and access to just debt through traditional means. It is an access issue. So I think as Christians, we’ve got to look at solutions, i.e. companies that are solving for problems, i.e. one of our portfolio companies is a company called SoLo Funds. So SoLo Funds is a technology company venture makeable. Just close the series a based out of L.A. and they’re a marketplace as an alternative to payday lending. So by nature, the product itself is helping to solve for a community issue, which is the crazy payday lending system that we have in America where people are paying two or three hundred percent to access a loan that you used to get at a community bank on a signatory. Right. You can get a signature loan for less than a thousand dollars. You can’t do that anymore. And so what happens is low income people are pushed to these check into cash places and it’s just this vicious cycle. So SoLo is creating a marketplace where the borrower can actually set the terms on the loan and then the lender, individual, peer to peer, can go on and accept that term and in two weeks. So it’s a great win win. And so that product itself is doing an amazing thing in solving for some of the injustice that exists. But then on the capital side, we’ve got to say there is an access issue related to capital. So Jewel, for example, with Collab, is looking at how do we get more money into the hands of black founders, female founders, because historically they haven’t had the same opportunities with regular mom and pop businesses, not your impact oriented one, like a solo funds, but a great company where there’s a decision bias because most of the people on the investment committee look like me or look like you and don’t understand perhaps the business models that they’re bringing forward or the type of capital they need to scale is different than traditional venture. So I think it’s our responsibility then to reimagine what it looks like for the capital itself, to meet the needs and to help solve for some of that injustice as well. We need both. And new models. New businesses.

Luke Roush: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And as you think about the capital that you guys are in charge of shepherding. Fifty million dollars, a lot of money, but the access problem is certainly a lot bigger than what’s going to be solved by 50 million dollars. How do you think about catalyzing others to step into that gap, particularly in secondary market cities, not the big three or four or five that capture 80 percent of the private equity?

Bryce Butler: Yeah, so this kind of hits a little bit of Louisville, Kentucky. So Louisville is one of those cities. And I think what we’re trying to do, we created a new regional fund called Render Capital that sits under Access Ventures. And really, it’s a strategy. It’s not a fund, even though it’s about 15 million dollars. We have portions of it that are managed traditionally like a traditional venture fund, because that’s what some entrepreneurs need, but actually trying to create the capital structure in a way that meets the needs of the entrepreneurs. So we actually have a portion that’s focused on partnering with banks, because what we found in our market is banks aren’t lending. And, you know, especially with what’s happened this year with covid and what’s just happened over the last 10 years since the housing crunch of 2008. So what we’ve seen is banks have retracted from startups. And so if you don’t have collateral, don’t have a personal guarantee. Good luck getting access to capital from a bank, even though they’ll tell you all day long. Yeah, we’ll work with you. And so what we’re trying to do is actually create guaranteed pools. We have a guaranteed pool that we created to try to attract local banks. Where you do the underwriting, you help them build credit. You build this relationship with the traditional bank and we’ll guarantee that loan because we believe that the entrepreneur is good for it. You know, it’s really an access issue. It’s a capital access issue. So can we put our money at risk and help support that entrepreneur by parking it at that bank and working through the bank to lend to that entrepreneur? So we have that going, looking at alternatives to equity, profit sharing or revenue based financing, which are some new kind of creative models on how to deploy capital. But then also because it’s a strategy, looking at a market like Louisville, we have to acknowledge we’ve got to be on some level as a market builder. So I’ve got to look at below market lending. I’ve got to look at even some philanthropic work through universities to spur innovation for future next gen entrepreneurs. And so what we’ve done is we’ve built a actually a pretty robust blended strategy that has philanthropic work, traditional equity, alternatives to equity guarantees with banks, main street lending. Because the other thing we found, too, in a place like Louisville, as you do work literally in a grassroots community like that, Main Street supports high growth, tech enabled companies. Talk to any high growth company. We were just talking about it before we jumped on the podcast. Austin, Denver, these entrepreneurs are attracted to. Places where there is a thriving cultural scene, they want local food, they want something to do with the outdoors, they want their people, their talent to have a place to go and be excited outside of work. And so if we only solve for the capital access issue of this high growth, tech enabled company, i.e. venture, and we ignore the issue going on in Main Street, how are we going to create an environment where that tech enabled entrepreneur sees this as an opportunity to grow and thrive? If the local coffee shop, the local ice cream store or the local brewery, whatever, is struggling to find capital, nobody wants to go where there’s, you know, tons of fast food chain restaurants. So we need all of that. And so we we’ve got to get really created around the structure of capital.

Henry Kaestner: So when you talk about the structure of capital and you’re talking about the different sources and different purposes, you alluded to something there that I want to look at a little bit more, which is that you find out that as compelling as some of these opportunities for impact investing are or more market return investing might be, there’s this third area, which is grant capital, that’s also part of the battery or the areas that you have in your quiver to address a particular societal need. So tell us about know Faith Driven Investor in a lot of people think, well, guess we’re going to be focused on impact investing, we’re going to be focused on market return investing. And yet what makes us unique in this podcast is that we’re all Christ followers. We’re trying to understand how God might have us allocate his capital, and that absolutely needs to include grant capital. So if you’ve got a large sum of money, you may be called to writing a large check where you don’t get any return back because of the ultimate return. In addressing the particular issue, you feel called to say, how did you do that in this instance? Because you talked about a number of really compelling investment opportunities. And yet at the end of the day, you said it’s probably not enough. We also need to invest in the next generation. How do you decide which programs to support, how to decide how much to put in that program versus what you would otherwise put in the investment pocket?

Bryce Butler: It’s a great question. I think some of it’s driven by the strategy, some of us driven by what you’re trying to accomplish. So for us, I’ll give you an example. I was talking with some folks recently about opportunity zones. So we’re part of an opportunity zone fund. We help incubate one call blueprint local that is now in Texas and Maryland and across the southeast. And it was kind of incubated off of some of the real estate strategy we’ve deployed in Louisville. But what I was sharing with this group was they were really interested in attracted to this idea of the opportunity zone funds. Right. This equity investment predominantly in real estate, in under invested communities. And this is a great financial opportunity. And it is it is a great way to grow wealth. But the real intended purpose of the opportunity zones is to reinvest and to build wealth, not just for the investors, but also for the community. And so what I was trying to help them see in which a light bulb finally went off with them, I said, what are you doing philanthropically? As if because if you look at the communities in which you’re deploying your opportunities zone fund, they’re all below market neighborhoods, they’re all low income neighborhoods. By definition, they are an opportunity zone. And so as you look at your donor advised fund, as you look at your own foundation, as you look at your own charity, who in that community is already doing good work that would support the work that you’re doing on the real estate side? You know, think about like the businesses, right? The Opportunity Zone Fund doesn’t allow for debt financing, but every single business that you want to go into that brick and mortar shop is going to need tenant improvement financing. Well, if the banks aren’t lending, what are you going to do? Can you create some sort of debt vehicle that supports businesses that might be willing to establish their presence in that community? Who’s doing early childhood education? What churches are in that area? What other local ministries are there that are supporting the needs of those neighbors so that as you’re doing the work in the opportunity zone, you’re working philanthropically or in other creative ways to support that work. But ultimately, the community wins because that’s the goal. The goal is to build wealth for you, but also to build the wealth of that community and the the flourishing of that area. And so leveraging that tool, but then wrapping around it some other ways that you can bring about some shalom that doesn’t exist or hasn’t existed there for a while. So, you know, as an example of a way that we try to think about it on the investing side, the render capital side, we’re just looking at and saying, look, we’re trying to solve for this problem. The issue is access to capital, regional entrepreneurship. And in order for us to do that, it has to be a longer vision. And so how do we create opportunities for the entrepreneurs that exist today? But if we want a thriving economy, thriving community, how are we setting the stage for next gen?

And so it got us kind of focused earlier and looking at high schools, universities and saying, OK, for us to be successful five years from now, 10 years now, we’ve got to be thinking about that. And that’s not something we’re going to get a financial return from. So we kind of start to build back. Into kind of how much capital, what type of capital, that kind of stuff.

Luke Roush: Yeah, so, you know, as you’re talking about Eco-System, which really resonates with me and it’s mirrors some of what we’ve seen in markets where we’ve invested, it’s not just sort of one thing that needs to get done. It’s actually a whole ecosystem of things that need to get done. Love to understand just how you think about sequencing. When you were first starting access, how did you think about what do you do first? You’ve been really active in real estate. You’ve done some other things that are exotic, like Bitcoin.

Bryce Butler: Well, I think I would like to at least start by saying we kind of made up a lot of it as we were going along. I mean, to be to be frank, like when I started Access Ventures, it was a side car project. I was working in a family office. I was working at a manufacturing company. I kind of had this idea to take some of the lessons learned that we were doing in India and East Africa and say, look, there’s some problems here. Could we just get creative around the financial structure? So I built this real estate holding company, basically borrowed patient debt from a couple of high net worth individuals that caught the vision and started putting it to work, worked with some homeless shelters to create jobs in the renovation of those projects. And so it just started working. And then like a year later, we had to ask ourselves the question, like, OK, what is this? And that’s when it started to become a thing. But even as it became a thing, we realized that much like ecosystem building, the real thing is these problems and these solutions are so connected. Housing is connected to capital, is connected to jobs, is connected to transportation. I mean, so when we started working on housing, we realized very, very quickly, I can give somebody a better home, a more stable home.

But if they don’t have a job, if they don’t have any education, you know, so we found ourselves in other areas, we started doing micro lending because the banks aren’t lending.

And so we just kind of as problems emerged, we tried to think creatively about how to solve for that. And then over time, as the capital grew, we were able to kind of build more of a cohesive, cohesive strategy. But, you know, it’s been the last six years journey to kind of learn some of those hard lessons and try to figure it out.

Luke Roush: Yeah, well, the idea of kind of making it up as you go along or at least kind of doing the right next thing is certainly not unfamiliar territory for us. So that resonates. And, you know, just the idea of not having to necessarily have a grand master plan on day one of how the next 10 years are going to roll. But you’ve got a vision and a calling and a mission that God put on your heart to sort of do one thing and then you do that one thing that leads to others.

Henry Kaestner: So it resonates with me as you’ve proceeded, as you’ve done this, though, and done the right next thing. What are some lessons you’ve learned along the way? And I know enough about you and your story and what actually adventures has done and how God has worked through that, to know that it’s been really successful and you serve as such a great model for people to be intentional about the local communities. But you probably have learned some lessons along the way. Like, for instance, in the early days of Sovereign’s Capital looking, I learned that you really actually should have a cap for every convertible debt loan that you set out. Right. And so we won’t make that mistake twice. But what are some of the things you’ve learned as you’ve gone out there and kind of just rolled up your sleeves?

Bryce Butler: Yeah, I think so. We used to be heavily invested in real estate. We’re not so much anymore. So that’s one of the things that we learned rather quickly. One, it’s like, what are you good at? What are you not good at? And I think we were successful in what we set out to accomplish financially. We got better returns than we had anticipated. And I’m very proud of the work that we did. But we’re not a real estate development company. You know, we worked with a general contractor. We worked with different partners. But a couple of years ago, we looked around and said, where is this going? And are we uniquely gifted in order to do this at scale? Or are there better ways for us to apply our team and our talents to address some of these community issues and what are those underlying issues? And so as much as we did a lot of real estate early on, we actually don’t do that as much anymore. You know, that’s what Genesis to the opportunities own fund and different things. So those are some lessons, I think.

Another one is being flexible, especially this year with covid, one of the things one of the passages I love is like we planned to God determines our steps, Proverbs 16:9.

And so I think there’s an important like we do need to plan the God term. So we need to hold these with open hands. But like, I didn’t plan any I mean, I had plans for twenty twenty, but the things I planned haven’t manifested in the way that I thought they would. And so how were we flexible? How are we looking at the impacts of the market and saying, look, what are we not doing now because it just doesn’t make any sense. And instead of being dogmatic and pressing forward on something that’s just not going to work, we’ve got to be flexible and adjust in order to meet the needs of our community. Ultimately, what’s the mission? What are our values? And the path might be different and circuitous. But ultimately, if those are the things that are forefront, then I think then we can get pretty creative. So I’ve learned a lot. I think evaluation is an interesting thing. We’ve talked about this before, Henry, and can I just run? I think defining at the outset what you’re trying to do and then how you’re measuring towards that, because I think in this exciting world of impact and Faith Driven Investor and Faith Driven Entrepreneur ship, it gets pretty sexy, but it also gets pretty squishy. And so we’ve got to get real about what we mean by that.

Henry Kaestner: Give us an example. What does that look like as you look to measure success and understand that indeed we’re making the progress that we think we’re capable of or that needs to happen? What is success look like for you?

Bryce Butler: Yeah, I think it’s having a conversation at the beginning so that it’s not assumed. You know what else Faith Driven Investor mean for you? And I think because the unfortunate thing is, if we don’t have these conversations, what happens is sometimes it can become unbelievably tribal. And so I have a conversation with my faith tribe, my denominational tribe, about what Kingdom impact means. And so that might be chaplaincy, that might be conversions or church attendance or, you know, dollars donated to homeless shelters or whatever it might be. But how do we expand that and make it more of an accessible conversation for Christians of all stripes to come to it and say, well, here’s my faith, here’s my values, here’s how I think about Shalom, human flourishing Imago Dei people, planet profit and how that’s reflected. And I think what happens is you have a more you have a more full conversation. You help an entrepreneur understand, maybe expand their understanding around what it means to be a gospel centered entrepreneur or Faith Driven Entrepreneur because they’re thinking as well. I need chaplains. Well, that’s great. That’s a great first step. But like, how are you paying your people? How much time off are you giving? Are you allowing for them? Do you have adoption services to help support families? Do you have I think as we start to imagine what this could be, it gets really, really exciting child care on site services for women to be able to work and to grow in their profession, but not have to sacrifice their profession for families. They start to make those choices, like what does that mean for you? And then once you define that as an entrepreneur, having those honest conversations with your aligned investors to make sure, because I think what happens sometimes where I’ve seen it go kind of squishy is one, it’s not defined. And on the other side, it might be defined, but there wasn’t a conversation and so there was an expectation that was unmet. And so the investor might get frustrated, like, I thought you were going to do this or why aren’t you doing this? This is what it means to be kingdom oriented. And I think where those conversations can be thoughtful, consciously determined, collectively understood, I think we’re going to see a lot more, I think, exciting future for both the entrepreneurs and the investors.

Luke Roush: And, yeah, the idea of the conversation up front and being clear about how do we want to think about impact. Otherwise you can kind of become whatever we want it to be over time. And we’ve seen investments that started out being for profit, investments at market that become concessionary investments.

You know, it’s could be on the financial return. Yeah, it could be like I’m just the definition of what it means to be Christian. Right. So I think because even in our modern world, it’s like a lot of people culturally are Christian. What does that look like? And so defining that and ultimately, what does that mean for you? What does that mean for me? Are we aligned? Yeah.

Luke Roush: How can we have that as a conversation that you and I have had, I think in the past, is this idea of how do we invite people in? You know, and you and I and Robert Kim had this conversation at some point about how do we engage within even SOCAP, which is a decidedly secular environment. And yet there are some common ground points that we can kind of reach with people. And so this idea of having a conversation up front and also being open minded about what impact is, it’s not one size fits all.

It’s one size fits one. Maybe just one thing I’d love for you to share for two minutes. And then Henry’s going to wrap us is if you could just maybe just offer an encouragement to the other Bryce butlers who are out there who are thinking about really wanting to have an effect and be used by God to effect change in their city, but are unsure kind of how do they get going? How would you encourage them to kind of lean in and start down this road that God’s taking you on over the last eight or ten years?

Bryce Butler: It’s a great question, a verse that I’m reminded of often is 1 Thessalonians 4, the goal of a Christian life is to lead a quiet life. And I think sometimes in scripture, God is this interesting, awesome, awesome thing, you know. So he has passages in the Bible about ambition. Right. And he has passages in there about patience and rest and waiting on the Lord.

And on some level, you could think, well, those are you know, there’s a paradox. But I think what I love about, like First Thessalonians four is like let’s pursue again, much like the planning and God determining our steps. I’m always asking myself, what’s the difference between complacency and contentment? And am I being complacent with the prayer that I have oftentimes is am I being complacent, i.e. burying my talents, not doing the things that I should be doing as a follower of Jesus, or am I truly just living into, like, resting, you know, be still and know that I am God? What does that look like to be still? And so I think as people are working in local communities, they’re going to have to wrestle in that tension. And because it’s hard work, it does require persistence. And so where I’ve seen people go awry oftentimes is they press into these ambitious goals and they forget to rest or they get a little complacent because they’re comfortable in the work that they’re doing and they don’t take some of the opportunities that they might.

So what does it look like to live in that tension of saying that I love is like how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I think some people hear my story and it becomes overwhelming because I hear it sometimes like, oh, my gosh, I don’t have 50 million dollars, so I can’t go do that. And what I would say is like, what small incremental steps can you take? You know, I started with a half a million dollars. It didn’t have to be that. It could have been far less. It could have been one home and just partnerships. And so what is a very small step that someone can take in investing in a strategic fund manager that cares deeply about the kingdom, adjusting their allocations, looking for real estate investments that have some value alignment, aligning their charitable dollars with something that’s different than just traditional philanthropy. So I think what are some of those small steps instead of getting overwhelmed by the enormity of it?

Henry Kaestner: That’s very good. And then you also touched on some of the things I wanted to ask in our final question. We like to finish off every one of the podcasts that we do across Faith Driven Entrepreneur Faith Driven Investor by asking our guests what they’re hearing from God through his word. And then also something we can pray for you about. Our hope is that this will be a podcast that will be an inspiration and encouragement to many, and it will be passed along and shared with other people that want to be intentional about loving people in their local communities and that people will listen to this and be able to lift up a prayer for you and Access Ventures and what you’re doing. But tell us what you’re hearing from God and his word. And yes, of course, let us know how to pray for you.

Bryce Butler: Well, I think I hit on a little bit, but just this notion of rest, I mean, 20, 20 has been this crazy year. And I would say 80 percent of the plans that I had, the things I’m doing are not the things that I had planned to do this year. I am unbelievably excited about the future. I’m resolute on the work that we’re doing and love it. But I think for me, the complacency and contentment, resting, trusting in the Lord, patience, balancing that, though, with this push for doing as much as I can. And so I want to be faithful. So the prayer is kind of tied to some of my own. Wrestling with First Thessalonians four. And this notion of proverbs and planning and God’s direction is I don’t want to be so content in what I’m doing that I miss out on something that the Lord might have for me.

So I do covet prayers that relate it to just wisdom for myself and for the work that we’re doing that we are pressing forward and the things we should be pressing forward into. We didn’t talk about it much, but I have four daughters, married 14 years and four kids, and they’re getting into that age of just curiosity and maturity and that I would lead them well, give them good direction as they venture out into this crazy world.

Henry Kaestner: And for you, too, buddy, not north. That’s right. Good good byes, Baker into divinity and beyond. That’s right.

Outstanding. Well, thank you very much for your friendship and encouragement and partnership in the Movement and Access Ventures.org is a great website that goes through what you are doing and what God is doing through you. And may God bless you and everything that’s going on in Louisville and and beyond.

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Derrick Morgan, former Tennessee Titans linebacker and founding partner of KNGDM Group, believes that community roots are incredibly important. 

That’s why after retiring from his career in the NFL and beginning an impact-focused fund, Derrick Morgan and KNGDM Group sought to be an example of giving back and building resilient communities. 

Hear him describe the importance of hope and resilience for life as a faith driven entrepreneur and investor.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Derrick Morgan: I would like a year for year five, twenty five, twenty six years old and already getting my MBA. But I was like, OK, I’ve got to really start being way more intentional about how I’m set myself up for after the game. And so moments like that in conversations like that, like really helped propel me and position me and like really helped shape my thinking on how I was going to do just that. And so I’m thankful for those words from Takeo and I feel like I took advantage of my time in the NFL and a really good way.

Henry Kaestner: Hey, everybody, welcome to a very special crossover podcast between the Faith Driven Athlete and the Faith Driven Investor. Our guest today is Derrick Morgan. He’s the managing partner of KMG, D.M. Group, just like you think, the Kingdom Group. Before his career as an investor, Derrick played nine years in the NFL as a linebacker. During that time, he kept his sights on life after football and he was inspired by the idea of impact investing. Now he’s leading the charge and opportunity zone investments while also encouraging professional athletes to begin to think long term about their use of capital. You may have heard him speak at the Faith Driven Investor conference, but you’re going to love the full conversation that we had with him.

Henry Kaestner: Let’s listen in now to Derek. We’re so glad to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Derrick Morgan: Yeah, I appreciate you guys. Glad to be here.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, we’re going to talk football. We can talk, invest in and excited about all that. Before we do that, though, as we do with all of our guests. Love to hear about your early life. What was it like growing up in the Morgan family? And when was faith introduced into your life?

Derrick Morgan: Yeah, I was actually a part of the Swiger family growing up. Yeah. My mom and my dad, they split pretty early on and was raised primarily by my mother, then my grandparents and talking before we jumped online here. That about my upbringing the first couple of years was primarily with my grandparents and they lived in Amish country Pennsylvania. Right. So right outside of like Lancaster area, you know, I used to get babysat by an Amish family, so I was riding in the horse and buggy and like on the farm. And so pretty unique, you know, a couple first couple of years.

Henry Kaestner: It’s not like they just parked in front of the TV and just tell you to be quiet.

Derrick Morgan: Oh, no, you’re out there with the animals and you’re actually, you know, in nature. And so then we transition to a different, very different environment where it was more like in the city. So public housing and it was a very underserved community. And so I kind of like seeing both sides and have a unique perspective on different walks of life that I’ve been encountered with. And so, you know, my mom, my grandparents really instilled faith in me from an early age. My granddad was a minister. And so I grew up in church. I used to catch a bus to church. Sometimes my mom couldn’t make it, so I was always searched. So I had that foundation that was set for me and modeled for me from an early age.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. So tell us, when did you start playing football and when did it transition into something you knew that you loved and you had a future in it?

Derrick Morgan: I started playing football when I was nine, and I remember it because I was bigger than most the other kids and there was weight classes, right? So I remember it was like one hundred and twenty pound weight class and maybe I was 10 or 11 at the time, but then I would never make my weight. And so I had like this weight anxiety at like 10, 11 years old because I knew it every game you’re gonna weigh it. And so we decided, you know what, I’m just going to start playing up right now.

At 19, I was playing with like 11 and 12, 13 year olds we thought that’d help me. Right. And so that’s when I started. And really, I would say like sophomore year high school is when I really start focusing on, you know, getting a scholarship from the game of football. Like, to me that was like the Holy Grail. Like, if I could go Division one and get a scholarship, like I made it right. So that’s where I put all my focus. I stopped playing baseball, stopped playing basketball, and I just went all the way in football. And so it worked out. God blessed me with a great high school career, ended up being the number one player in the state my senior year and a lot of offers on the table ended up going to Georgia Tech. And so from there, really the rest is history. And I was able to play nine years with the Titans, same team throughout my whole career, which was a blessing in and of itself. But I just feel very fortunate, man, that I was able to live out a childhood dream and have the experiences of which I did.

Henry Kaestner: So I want to talk a little bit more about football before we get into the investing, which is something that’s really important to a lot of our audience, all of our audience. You are in the fourth game of your rookie season. You blow out your ACL and all of a sudden life is completely turned upside down. So you’ve been working on this, as you just talked about it, from high school through to college, get a Division One scholarship. You’re in now. You’re in the NFL. It’s the fourth game, your rookie season, and suddenly all that you’ve worked for is turned upside down. What was that like? What was the emotions of heaven? Just orient yourself towards this rookie season being in the NFL and then all of a sudden just turn upside down.

Derrick Morgan: It was heavy, it was very devastating to me, I had staked a lot of my identity, if not all of it, in being a football player, and up until that point, I had really experienced no real adversity.

And so I was out of the way. Right. This has worked so far. Got me to the NFL and everything else is gravy. And when I injured myself, I was in complete denial for literally almost a week. I was like, you know, the MRI is wrong. You know, I can still walk. I ran off the field. So, like, I think I can just get through, put a brace on. I was in straight up denial. And it wasn’t until, like, I was sitting there reviewing with the doctor and he was pointing out like, look, this is where your ACL is supposed to be connected and it’s no longer connected. At that moment the severity of it really kind of like fell on top of me. And from that moment was probably one of my lowest moments.

And I had to, like, really crawl out of that pit. But a lot of the way out was really as a direct result of my faith in God, given me the awareness of my identity and how false of an identity I had built up and being an athlete and how fragile and how fleeting that was. And so I had to really dig deep and really resolidify my relationship with God, because what I had been so afraid to do my whole life up until that point was to say the prayer of “God, not my will, but your will be done”. I was terrified of that prayer because in my mind, all that meant to me was, oh, man, like the complete opposite of what I want to happen is going to happen. Right. So I would avoid it. And I was like, nah, like God. Like I got my own plan. So come on, get on board. Right. Yeah, we all know it doesn’t work like that. And it took that shake up and that wake up call really to reorient me and change my trajectory in life because I was headed down a path of really just self-destruction. And so from that moment on, you know, it wasn’t a instant overnight transformation like I saw in the Bible, like it wasn’t like that.

But it was like man like that was the Genesis moment of restructuring and reshaping my identity. And so while it was a tragedy in the natural, in the spiritual, it was really a miracle because I feel like I’ve always had a lot of people praying for me. Yeah. And God knew what I needed. And when I look back 10 years, it’s actually ten years now.

I look back and it’s like I was like, what would my life have been if I didn’t have that moment? Right. And so I feel actually very grateful for that adversity that hit an early age.

Henry Kaestner: You know, it seems really interesting to me because I think you’re well known within the league and there’s a great we’re going to have a video clip that James Brown had done talking about the work that you’re doing in Coatesville that just talks about the work that you started to do while you’re still in the NFL. So many professional athletes that we hear about just hit this retirement place. And just like, well, what do I do next? Their identity being so wrapped up. So what I’m hearing you say is that before your NFL career even really started, God sent you on this identity and reset your identity and then allowed you to kind of get a head start because it feels like you’ve retired now. You spent a great decade in the NFL, but you’ve got this momentum coming out of the NFL into your next career and how you think about life that seem to have started well before, obviously, your NFL career ended. Tell us about that. And did that kind of come out of that experience when you had the ACL tear?

Derrick Morgan: Yeah, you encapsulated it very well. It was a sequence of events, right? That was the starting point.

And that led to like the next iteration and refinement.

So it was like a series of events from the ACL to having my son when I was twenty two to losing money with a financial adviser to like taking a hold of my financial destiny in my own hands and like going and getting my MBA. So it was a string of events that they played off of each other and it was like the next step to the next steps, the next step. So it was a constant evolution. Right. And so what I would agree with is the moment where you feel like you lost it all, which is where I was when I tore my ACL. It jolted me to reckon with the idea of not being an athlete and not having football. So when I was in that moment of thinking that my career was over, I was like, oh, shoot, I have a son on the way. My career could be over, like, what am I going to do? I don’t really know who I was. And I had to find out who I was A and what my interests were, what I like. What I didn’t like, I had to really understand who I was, and then that kind of naturally led me into different opportunities that really afforded me the idea of like thinking about life after football and how could I leverage the platform while I have it to, like you said, create that momentum for when I do hang them up, what’s going to be my legacy? What’s going to be my future off the field? Right. And so I remember to this day being in my MBA program and there’s this guy named Takeo Spikes, you may have heard of him. He’s a perennial pro bowler, probably has a shot at the Hall of Fame and was a real, real big voice in my life through just our brief relationship with the NBA program that we both were attending. And I remember I’ll never forget, he said, hey D, I just gotten like my second contract. He’s like, Look, man, I know you poppin right now, but just understand that it’s a little bit different on this side. And I was like, What? You mean like, look, you know, you ain’t going to have a shield, which you write. People know who you are, but it’s going to be a lot easier for you to get a meeting right now. There may be one, two or three years removed from the league. I was like, dang, even for you, you played 15 years in the league, but you’re Takeo Spikes for him to say that and other guys of that caliber to echo that sentiment. I was like, whoa, like this thing really does come to an end very abruptly. And so that always stood out to me and always resonated. I was like, OK, I was like a year for year five, twenty five, twenty six years old and already getting my MBA. But I was like, OK, I’ve got to really start being way more intentional about how I’m set myself up for after the game. And so moments like that and conversations like that, like really helped propel me and position me and like really helped shape my thinking on how I was going to do just that. And so I’m thankful for those words from Takeo and I feel like I took advantage of my time in the NFL and a really good way.

Henry Kaestner: So talk to us about what you’re doing now. Talk to us about what you started to think about and just the genesis of it all. So obviously, you’ve got this, Terry. You’ve got a great mentor. You’re getting your MBA. And how do you think about applying it? One of the idea of real estate investing start to occur to you.

Derrick Morgan: So it’s interesting how it all kind of transpired. We originally were like, hey, look, we’re going to raise this large fund. You know, we’re going to just kind of use our network for deal flow and we’re going to carry this investment pipeline and we’re going to invest in projects that fit our thesis. Great. Let’s go start a fund. What we quickly realized was that especially in the opportunity’s own space, there was a very big, very large appetite for projects, specific deals. Right. So instead of saying, hey, I have this project pipeline of 200 billion dollars over the next couple of years, give me your capital gains like it was more so like now, like, I want to see specific returns. I want to see specific metrics and outcomes and exits. And so for us as first time fund managers without a huge amount of track record, what we essentially pivoted towards is to develop role. Right. And so when we first started, that was we went back to my hometown and Coatesville. I look like there’s a lot of issues here. Let’s try to find some consensus on what the issues are. And we started talking to everybody from state senators to state reps to city officials to nonprofits, churches, the whole litany of stakeholders.

And we started putting together a plan and about two or three months into it, one of our consultants at the time we were having a conversation about we got to bring in a developer. And she was like, well, you’re the developer. And I was like, well, I am like, yeah, you’re bringing this vision to fruition. Now. I’m a developer. So obviously we needed to partner with people who have experience and understand how to manage projects and all that. But at the same time, a large chunk of the developer role is bringing together the necessary pieces of orchestrating all of those things. And so that’s essentially what we had been doing. And so from that moment, we’re like, yeah, like I like this situation better. I like being a direct influence over the deal in the project. And I feel way more comfortable going out to my network of potential employees to say, look, I know what this deal is going to return like. Not no, but I have a good understanding of the deal parameters. And this is your return profile. This is your risk profile. And I have a direct influence over the deal. And so that’s essentially the role in which we’ve kind of settled in, is being project developers and then obviously bringing in the necessary pieces to the team to fill any voids and experience or expertize. And so that’s essentially the role we can play. And we’ve done it in my hometown of Coatesville. We’re doing that out here in Nashville. We’re forming a venture with the housing authority to do this thing and wrapping amenities in our community. And so that’s essentially what came to me, is we have our construction operation that’s based in the southeast as well, and then we’re bringing projects to light and together, essentially, we’re bringing the actual equity to the deals on a project by project basis.

Henry Kaestner: So walk us through some of the projects that you’re working on in Coatesville. What’s it look like? What’s the opportunity? You see, just take us through the actual deals that you’re doing.

Derrick Morgan: Yes, so Coatesville, we have a twenty two acre parcel in the direct main and main of that town. And so twenty two acres, the one thing that we found to our conversations with the community is like there’s nothing for the youth to do. There’s no there’s no youth engagement.

There’s significant gang activity because there’s just nothing for the youth of Coatesville to do is actually eerie. Like I went back a couple months ago and it was actually a day off school and there were no kids in the streets that was like, this is very odd. Right. And so all the kids were either playing video games, watch TV, whatever. And so what we’ve essentially done is like, OK, we hear that problem. What assets does the community of Coatesville already have? What are the valuable assets that Coatesville already possesses? And the one thing that community development. Exactly. Exactly. One of my pastors sent me to a book a few years ago. So looking at the assets. Right. And understanding, OK, you know what? Coatesville doesn’t have the best reputation. Right. However, one thing that we are known for is sports. So how can we leverage that as an asset to bring people into Coatesville to increase the economy, to spend their dollar in Coatesville, which then results in other businesses, winning as a whole ecosystem effect? And so what we’ve essentially put together is a sports complex which has basketball courts and indoor turf field, outdoor turf, field programing, space for classroom, and non-profits and educational services, and then a food and retail hall that is adjacent to the actual sports complex. And so we see this as being a very inclusive development that is going to spawn other economic activity in the actual core of Coatesville. And so that’s one project that’s about one hundred and fourteen thousand square feet. All in project cost is around twenty three million. And we’re looking to leverage things like the opportunity zone as well as new market tax credits to fill up the capital stack.

Henry Kaestner: And how about leveraging the whole move to youth sports in America? As a dad of three teenage boys, the sports industry is just taking off. And if you’re that close to Philadelphia and you’ve got field space, that’s a big deal.

Derrick Morgan: Absolutely. Absolutely. On the head, the sports tourism market is exploding. And in the geography of Coatesville, we’re very centrally located within like a 60 mile radius. We’re touching a population of almost 12 million people. So it’s like very centrally located. Right. And so we’re looking to leverage that and leverage the increasing demand of sports tourism. Right. And so, like, obviously, the current environment is tied up in the air, but we’re hoping that by the time this thing opens, we’ll be back in somewhat of a normal environment for that. And so that’s the coastal project. The project in Nashville is a hundred and three unit mixed income development in conjunction with the housing authority. So what they’re doing is this part of a grander master plan where they’re redeveloping twenty five hundred units across the largest public housing project in Nashville. And so the good the actually unique thing about what they’re doing is a mixed income. But the other piece of this is that they’re actually not displacing one resident. So they’re actually transitioning the existing low income housing residents to the new town homes market looking like apartments and condos. They’re just transitioning them. And then, oh, by the way, your next door neighbor might be a lawyer, right? Or a teacher or a fireman saying so this is inclusive type of model that I was really drawn to. And we found a way to strike a partnership that is very mutually beneficial. So that is a hundred and three unit mixed income and as well as an activity center that’s immersed within the development. So football, football and outdoor field basketball court, very similar to Coatesville, but a little bit smaller scale and then a daycare and different programing space based on what the needs of the community are. And so we feel like we’re addressing a lot of different things and a lot of a lot of boxes.

Henry Kaestner: So, Derek, tell us about I know you’ve talked about being motivated by your faith and seeing these opportunities both in your hometown and also in Nashville. Talk to us about how your faith plays itself out in these different investment projects.

Derrick Morgan: Yes, there’s a couple of different ways to model it. I strongly believe in you shouldn’t have to tell people that you’re a Christian. They should just recognize you by your works and how you walk and how you model your life after Christ. So a big part of what we do is really modeling and like showing up in the nature of Christ. Obviously, we’re all flawed. I’m not perfect, but I’m very intentional about how I do business, the ethics and the morality in which govern my life and the values which govern the way we invest in the projects and our approach.

Right. So I’m hoping that we stand apart in some regards from a traditional. Way of doing business just by how we conduct ourselves in the actual developments and projects. Our goal is to partner with faith based organizations. So push out content and curriculum and programing that is faith based and able to easily get implemented within the developments of which we’re doing so. If we have facilities and recreational spaces, there will be programing space, available classroom setups, different ways for people to congregate, whether it’s through Bible study, Life groups and overall just good mentorship. And so that’s how we see faith being activated and being intentional about spreading the gospel within the actual developments.

Henry Kaestner: Awesome. We like to ask every guest that’s on our program if there’s something that they’ve been hearing from God through the Bible recently that’s impacted your life. Do you have something that’s top of mind?

Derrick Morgan: I don’t know if it’s like a specific verse, but the one thing that’s been on my spirit is like I’ve been feeling like a heaviness on my spirit as of late. And I think a lot of it is related to a lot of unknown. With real estate development. There’s always a lot of unknown factors. And, you know, sometimes doubt can start to seep in. And so I’ve been feeling like this opposition and this heaviness on me. And through that, you know, very recently as a couple of days ago, and we’re kind of hearing God say like push through it, push through that adversity and that opposition that you feel. Because if that is the enemy, if that is negative energy, negative spirits coming towards you or strongholds like you have been set here to penetrate that and push through it. And, you know, God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of sound mind and strength and discipline. And I probably messed up that verse. But like, that’s the essence of how it speaks to me. Right.

And so that is something that I’ve been kind of meditating on as of late. And I’ve just been here and got to say, like, keep pushing, keep pushing and pushing.

Henry Kaestner: Heavenly Father, we lift up Derek and we ask that you would give him indeed the spirit of peace and have courage and perseverance and that he would feel your peace in your guidance and that you give him favor in this season of life. Derrick, I’m going to ask you one last question. You got a 10 year old boy and a lot of people are going to be knowing that his dad’s a famous person. And so tell me, do you think that he feels undue pressure to go out there and be a real estate developer?

Derrick Morgan: No, he feels undue. I would say that he probably feels pressure to be a football player. I know. I know was partially kidding you. But we got an audience of real estate investors and they think, of course, that theirs is a really important vacation.

Derrick Morgan: You know, he actually he’s like, Dad, you’re a developer, right? I’m like, yeah. He’s like, OK. Does that mean you just buy buildings come? Yeah, basically. And so, you know, for my son, I always tell them, like, look, man, like guys made you unique. Like, you know, I know when you see people come up to me in public or ask for a picture or something like that, he actually loves it. My son is like an extrovert, so like he loves the attention. I don’t even, like, encourage him to play football. Right. And that’s something he wants to do. Maybe I’ll let him play contact football at 13, 14. But like, I’m not really pushing that right. I know how my body feels after nine surgeries. And so for him, it’s like, son, you’re unique. Right. I’m here to support you. Whatever you want to do to help guide you. Well, you got to ask God what your unique gifts are that you’re going to give to the world. So it’s going to it may look different than what Dad’s doing. Right. So I just try to encourage them in that way.

Henry Kaestner: Derek, thank you very much for your time. It’s been great being with you. Thank you for sharing your story. Awesome. Thanks for having me on.

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Jewel Burks Solomon is the Founder of PartPic, which raised over $2million before being acquired by Amazon. And that was just the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey. 

Now, she’s a managing partner at Collab Capital—a group working to provide a viable pathway to sustained wealth for the black community. She’s an incredible story, a fascinating entrepreneur and investor, and someone we can’t wait for you to hear from…

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Henry Kaestner: Very, very glad to have you on the show today.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

Henry Kaestner: So we’re going to talk all things Collab and the things that God has uniquely equipped you to do going forward. Really excited about the journey that you’re on as you start with Collab Capital. But as we’re trying to do with anybody we talked to on the show, as we’re trying to understand a little bit about your background and who you are and where do you come from. And how is God worked in your life from the very beginning. So tell us a bit about your story, please.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Sure. So I was born in Mobile, Alabama, which you may be able to pick up on a little bit of a Southern drawl. And raised primarily in Nashville, Tennessee, and was fortunate to be born into a family of great people, entrepreneurs, both my parents. And so I always tell people I got that part on this because that’s what I grew up around, but was born into a family that was a really faithful family. And so I started my faith journey at a very early age and can remember, you know, Sunday mornings were spent in church. My grandmother, I’m sure, will listen to this podcast. And she made sure that I was in Sunday school and always right there, you know, front row for a service. So that was a great foundation for me. And then I think, you know, speaking about the faith journey, I was in a routine growing up of being in church. I grew up in First Baptist Church, Capital Hill in Nashville, Tennessee, which is important because there was a lot of history in that church. It was. Training ground for a lot of the civil rights leaders during the 60s working on the national sit. And so I think that growing up in that church planted the seeds in me that I didn’t even know were being planted. But it actually was not until I went to Howard University and started getting involved in the chapel at Howard that I really sort of developed my faith. So that’s little background.

Henry Kaestner: That’s good background. So, you know, this is one of these unique times where we actually do a interview that is going to be released on both Faith Driven Entrepreneur and faith driven investors. So much of your background is on the entrepreneurial side. And then also, what you going to be doing now, What you are doing now is on the investor side. But bring us into the Faith Driven Entrepreneur part. Talk to us about Partpic. Tell us about the problem or actually the opportunity that you saw and how that worked out.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yeah. So set that foundation to kind of let you know about my background and growing up. But as I mentioned, I grew up in a house where asprin ownership was seen as a great thing. And so I always knew that I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I didn’t know what the path would be to get there, but it was on 12, 12 twelve that I had. What would be the idea for what would become part pick? And I sent my mom in an email on that day and told her, you know, I want to create a technology solution for part search. And the idea came to me because I was working at a company called Amen McMaster Car, where I was managing in the call center. And I was the person who received escalation. And so basically that yell that she so for the majority of the day and wanted to find a better way to help customers. And so I was experiencing the problem of people being frustrated with searching for replacement parts, industrial part everyday. And then I also had a personal connection where my grandfather, who was running our family farm in Reston, Alabama. He was in the middle of a harvest and his tractor broke down and he called me to help him find a part for the tractor. And I could not find this part. And so that was, for me, sort of a sign to say I actually need to pursue a better way for people to find parts, because it was one thing for it to be my customers who were having the problem, but it was another thing for my grandfather to be also having that same problem. And so I sort of thought about, OK, what would be a better way to allow people to search for part? And the idea just kind of hit me that you could do it with a camera search and leverage, you know, computer vision technology, which I didn’t understand fully what that meant at the time, but learned a lot about it and set out on our journey to build this technology and build a company around the technology, which became part Picon. We had a really interesting journey in building that business, ultimately selling it to Amazon into 2016 and integrating the technology into the Amazon mobile app.

Henry Kaestner: That must’ve been really exciting. Tell us about the journey up through that and maybe just take a second before we end up talking about more on the investment side. Take us through some of the lessons that you learned at Partpic. And I’m going to presume that is called Partpic was you probably didn’t go toe to toe across the negotiating table with Jeff Bezos. But if you did, I want to hear that story. But tell us about some of the lessons learned.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yeah, I mean, there were so many lessons learned during my Partpic journey. One thing to point out is that I was 23 years old when I came up with the idea and started the company. And so I was very young entrepreneur and was learning a time during that time. And I would say, you know, the top things that I was able to work with and perfect with. Really circulated around building relationships and trusting that even when things were difficult and they were often very difficult given the fact that we were building this kind of novel, new technology and particularly building it in an industry that is pretty old school, I would say pretty archaic as it relates to technology, or at least it was at that time.

And so trying to convince, you know, decision makers that large companies that they should trust a young CEO and also a CEO, that look quite different than probably most of the folks that they were. You saw receiving pitches from them, a little intimidating. But for me, it was a huge learning experience and one where I would really have to rely on my faith to kind of push through some of the obstacles that I was in channeling along the way. So obstacles, everything from, you know, how do I attract the right team to help me in building this and how do I want it? The white investors that actually believe in the vision and believe that I can execute the vision. And then even now to the point of showing the company, is that the right decision? Is this the right company? You know, Amazon is a huge menace. And going through that process of having to sell across the table from a more powerful and mighty entity was obviously daunting for me.

So I had to really rely on my faith through all of that. And I was fortunate that that worked out, that I did not leave me at any point in the journey. So I’m really thankful for that. And I know that my faith was certainly increased through my entrepreneurship journey.

Rusty Rueff: So what’s really cool about your your background is, is that, you know, you go through the sale of the company and then, you know, you find your way not only to Google as the head of Google startups, but you also, you know, have been involved in venture capital yourself. And we’ve shared about CoLab capital. But I want you to talk a little bit about Google startups and what you do there. But then I want to go into CoLab capital because the problem that you’re trying to solve there is we know is an important one and we want to make sure that we dove into that. But tell us about Google startups.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Sure. So I think about my role as head of Google for startups, for the U.S. as a really big full circle moment for me. I started my career at Google. Eleven years ago as an intern, you know, summer of 2009. And at that time, I could only imagine that, you know, at this point I would be leading a team that’s focused in an area where I’m deeply passionate, which is around leveling the playing field for underrepresented startup founders across the country. And this year, we have a special focus in Atlanta, which is where I’m based. And I was led to this role really because it was a bit serendipitous that I came into this role. I actually just went to the Google office to have lunch with a friend, and I ran into a member of this Google started team and started talking to her about, you know, how she was doing, what was going on. And she let me know that this role was going to be coming open. And when she called me about it and I continued to talk to other people and learn more about it, I thought, wow, this is exactly what I would be doing. Even if I didn’t have this job, I would be working with startups and early stage companies and trying to help them get the resources that they need anyway. So it’s really a blessing for me to be able to do it as my day job. I would say and we’ll talk about collabs, which is my second day job, but it does allow me to leverage, you know, all of the resources of Google and make sure that they are adequately distributed to early stage startup founders. And particularly we focused on working with black lab mix and veteran founded companies, helping them make inroads and grow their businesses so that they can impact the communities that they reside in.

Rusty Rueff: And then I know a lot of our listeners know Google Ventures, right, because they want to raise money from Google Ventures. Just distinguish a little bit between Google startups and Google Ventures.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Sure, we will. Ventures, which is now known as G.V., is one of the investing arms of Google. There’s actually a few investing teams, but G.V. is probably the most well-known. And they actually sit outside of Google proper for their part of Alphabet, which is the parent company, but are completely separate from Google, whereas Google for Startups sits inside of Google and it’s not an investing team. So it is really about getting resources, connections, you know, connections to the right product and people, mentorship, working with partners throughout the country. So we do a lot of work with organizations and coworking spaces that serve entrepreneurs in markets throughout the U.S. and actually globally. The team is a global team. And prior to me joining in. Back in December, the focus actually was in emerging markets outside the U.S.. So there are campus locations that serve as kind of startup hubs in places like Sao Paolo, Brazil and Televisa and London. And so when I joined, this was actually the first time that there has been this concentrated effort in a whole team focused on the U.S. based startups and particularly looking at what we consider to be an emerging startup ecosystems within the US. So the role that I had is not an investing role, but I do get to get resources to founders that are in need of them the most.

Rusty Rueff: That’s fantastic. I mean, here we are on a Faith Driven Entrepreneur faith driven investor podcast trying to equip both entrepreneurs and investors. And we have a Faith Driven Entrepreneur who’s equipping a lot of investors and entrepreneurs through Google. And it’s great work that you do there. But you get the investment side on CoLab Capital. So take us through that.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yes. So we started Collab Capital because we felt that there was a pretty wide gap in need as it relates particularly to black entrepreneurs. I’m sure you all have seen the statistics, but it said that less than one percent of venture capital funding goes to black founders and black founded companies. And we know that particularly black founders and black women founders are some of the largest growing segment of astronauts. So there’s a disparity there that we thought needed to be addressed. And instead of just saying, OK, we’re going to invest in black founders, we really wanted to explore, you know, what is happening. Why is it that. Black founders are not receiving the same rate of funding in relation to how many of them are starting businesses. And so when we thought about that and we really explored our own journeys and also took the data from all of the conversations and meetings and mentorship sessions that we’ve had with black founders over the years, what we came to see is that actually we think there is a need to create a new vehicle and a new structure that is designed with black entrepreneurs in mind. So we created what we consider to be sort of an alternative capital structure that really thinks about the alignment between the entrepreneur and their goals. And as as the investors and also considers this kind of macro problem around the wealth gap in this country. And so we think that is very important for entrepreneurs, particularly black entrepreneurs, to maintain equity and ownership in the businesses they start, because that is one way that we can start to counteract this gaping wealth gap that we have in this country. And so we built this model so that black entrepreneurs don’t have to raise a lot of rounds of funding and therefore potentially give up quite a bit of equity and perhaps lose control of the companies they start. But instead, they can have an option to maintain ownership in those companies, pass them on in their families if they so choose, and then start to create real wealth in the black community, which we think can kickstart a lot of other solutions to the problems that we see in those communities.

Rusty Rueff: That may be one of the most fascinating and impacting insights that I had never thought about around investing in black and minority owned businesses, that when traditional venture capital goes and invests, it’s one round after another, another, and it’s just dilution, dilution, dilution. And by the time you’re done, that equity could be little to nothing. And there’s nothing to carry on. That’s awesome. That’s just awesome. So if you look ahead 10, 15 years, if we can look that far. What do you hope is true for black entrepreneurs and investors in America? And what would it take to make what you see as a vision, a reality?

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yes. So I think about this a lot. I want there to be access and options for black entrepreneurs. And what we present at collab, we’ve considered to be an option. We don’t think that it is an all encompassing solution. But we do think that it will help jump start and hopefully there will be many more funds and people who are thinking about sintering the communities that need the resources the most. So that’s a vision for 10 years from now, I think about what the change will be and the impact will be on the communities where the businesses that we invest in are located. I think about something that we’re already seeing happening just with our first investment. We invested in a company just a few months ago and the asprin were recently posted, a picture that showed her and five of her family members in her warehouse where she’s shipping out her orders. And she said that, you know, this is really changing her family dynamic because she’s now in a position to hire the people that she knows and trusts. But also that may not have had that type of opportunity. And so we’re already seeing it. And we just think that in ten or fifteen years, we will be able to showcase a whole plethora of entrepreneurs that have done the same things in their communities and in their families. And we really are excited about the fact that, you know, in our mind, this is all for the kingdom and offer glory of God in the end and thinking about that society that we want to live in, where people have access, they have opportunity. They’re able to realize their potential. So that’s the vision that I have was in the 15 years down the line. And I think to get there, it’s going to require people to think differently and to invest in different ways and to be open to new ideas and new models that would break the norm of what we’ve seen up until this point.

William Norvell: Jewel, William here. Thank you so much for sharing that story. I’ve gotten to hear parts of it from you before. And it’s just it’s encouraging every time. It’s exciting every single time. And it brings something new as you think through your faith. It sounds like a little bit all encompassing for you and your founders. Did you think through your faith and the work you all are doing at CoLab Capital? How do you see those intersecting each other in your investments? You do and the way you’re raising money right now? All the different facets of how you’re going to run that organization.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yeah, I mean, I think that because of how we’ve started in. I can share a little bit about our origin story as it’s myself and two other partners. And because of the fact that we started in a way one that was kind of driven by conversations that we had outside of church. And when my partner Barry and I shared with each other sort of the experiences that we had starting companies and actually being depressed after we finished our startup journey and then using that moment to come up with this new idea. And really, the idea is steeped in the notion that we don’t want founders to go through some of the same things that we went through. And we want to think about how do we make it so that they can achieve their goals and achieve whatever success looks like for them in a way that is well supported and where they have safe haven as they are going through all of it. And so the fact that we started with that kind of central idea, I think has blessed the journey so far. And, you know, we think about how do we continue with where we started? And how do we grow it? And as we bring new people in, how do we make sure that they have that same conviction and passion about what we’re doing? That’s the challenge that we have today, is thinking about the growth of this and how do we just continue on this path that we’re on. But that’s where we bring in great folks. Like I know you all have Lecrae on the podcast and other people that we are surrounding ourselves with who we think share our vision and share our faith as well. And we think that by doing that and bringing the right people into what we’re doing and finding entrepreneurs who also have a passion and conviction for doing the right thing for their communities, that for us is really what wakes up every morning and helps us to continue on doing this work.

William Norvell: I mean, that’s amazing. And as our listeners are here from both communities, how best can we support the work you all are doing right now? What are some ideas?

Jewel Burks Solomon: Well, I think one of the things that we are really big about is access to networks. We believe that access to capital is incredibly important, but it’s actually being able to walk in to a customer that we’ve been trying to land for a long time or have someone we can call who knows the right decision maker. That for us is a huge part of our model as well. So we really invite people, and particularly folks that are faith driven in these corporations who understand the vision and see the benefit of maybe taking a risk on an early stage entrepreneur or, you know, putting their neck out for someone who is building something great. We invite people to let us know if they’re looking for solutions, technology, solutions to problems that their organization is facing or if they would be willing to mentor a founder if they have expertize that they can win. We’re open to talking to folks about how they can get involved with what we do and also, more importantly, with what our founders are doing, because we think that there is so much that can develop and grow from these legal fees that we’re planning. And we just want to continue that growth as we go march toward that bigger vision that we talked about in 10 to 15 years.

William Norvell: That’s amazing. Well, as everybody is listening, we’ll obviously be posting links to what they’re up to. So just hopefully we can rally around them. One thing I want to jump back to. I know we’re kind of come to a close here, but I want to jump back to use a big word. Earlier when you talked about selling, your company used the word depression and you said one of your co-founders shared a similar sentiment and he may have gone through that. Did you go through that journey of selling a little bit in the emotions that you went through? I think it will give our audience an amazing idea, both just how they can approach something like that, how they can live with someone who may be going through that, and then also just further empathize with founders and how they go through these varying sets of emotions that maybe someone like me who’s never founded an operation like that maybe can’t quite figure out.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yes, it is a big word. And I will tell you, I was afraid of the word for a while. And it wasn’t until I sold my company and found myself in a situation where, you know, the day that I was supposed to go and sign and the next day and the next day, I really had a hard time getting. Bed and I was crying, and it was just such a emotional time for me. And I did not understand what was happening and I had to go to the doctor because it was weighing so heavily on me. And I did not have the language or the tools to deal with it at that time. And it wasn’t until the doctors said, you are clinically depressed and encourage you, me to go to a therapist. And you think about my diet and my exercise and really examine what did self care look like. And for me at that time, I didn’t even know what that meant because I had spent so much of my life, my time, my energy, everything pouring into this company. And I did not know how to look at myself without having this title, you know, Feo of Perpich attached to my name. I just didn’t know how to deal with all of those emotions. And so I had to do a lot of things. I had to pray. Of course I had to pray about it. I had to ask God, who am I? Who am I to see you? What is my life about now? What am I here for? I had to ask these really big questions and seek guidance on how to step forward and realize that actually I’m purpose for life as you know what I built and that I was, you know, that that first year going from this bell and then my first year at Amazon, I was a really challenging year for me, but I just had faith through it. And I use the tools that God gave me, as well as the tools that the doctor gave me. And I was able to get into a much better place and so much so that I could be in a place where I could actually recognize it in someone else. So when I had the conversation with Barry without a partner in the lab, it came about because I recognized that something wasn’t going right with him. I knew that there was something a little bit all. And so I just asked him a simple question of how are you? And that’s what started him sharing and me sharing. And I think for everyone who’s listening.

If you have people around you, and especially if you are in the presence of entrepreneurs or in a relationship with an entrepreneur, I think that periodic check in just to ask, how are you? Is there anything that I can do to relieve some of the pressure that you may be feeling? That is a great thing that you can do. And also, just checking in with yourself if you are the entrepreneur who’s listening. Really trying to understand. Are you OK? What is happening with you? Have you checked in on yourself recently? So these are all things that I learned and unfortunately, I learned it when I hit a pretty big wall. But I’m just grateful that I had that experience. But now I think it’s powerful to talk about it and also just to have the tools to deal with it, especially in a time like we’re in right now where there are so many things happening. You know, we’re having so much loss and we’re having to deal with things that we’ve never had to deal with before. I think it’s very important for us to talk more about what does it mean to be depressed, to go through emotional turmoil, to feel lonely, to feel lost? I think it’s important for us to, in the Bible, talk about women things. And that is that is something that is actually encouraged. And I think we shy away from it a lot. So I’m very open to having this conversation. I thank you for asking the question. And I hope that it encourages the listeners to talk, to seek guidance, to seek help and to not be afraid of having these types of conversations.

Henry Kaestner: That’s such a powerful aspect and one that we haven’t explored as much as we should on the podcast. We did have a really neat interview with Max Anderson in which he talked about mental illness in the life of an entrepreneur. And it was all start to a different editions with time, but it really hasn’t gotten this concept. I think it’s really it’s a postpartum type of depression. I’ve had two questions come after that. And he partially answered one of them already, which is the part about limitations. But you mention the fact that you did seek professional help. You didn’t look at things like diet, but also that there is an aspect of your relationship with God and maybe his word that walked you through it. Once you speak a little bit, then I’ve got a follow up question as well.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yes. I really had to dive deep in to a word, I had to dive deep in to my practice of spending time with God because I had gotten away from it, even though I was faithful throughout the astronaut ship journey. I was not spending the right amount of time on my relationship with God. And so one of the things that helped me to get to a better place as far as my mental health was making it a daily practice to spend time with God, to spend time in the world. And it really did work on that relationship. I think that sometimes I know in my life I’ve taken it for granted and I’ve always known that God will be there. But I haven’t necessarily been the person that I should be for him. And so one of the things that has helped me and to this day still helps me and has helped me honestly through the time that we’re in right now is just making sure that every single day I am spending time with God and and thanking God and being full of gratitude for the fact that, you know, I’m waking up each day. I’m getting to do the things that I want to do and live in what I think is my purpose here and be helpful to people. And all of these things that is just amazing to me are the blessing. But that for me has been really, really critical as far as my journey is concerned. The whole thing has been recognizing when I am not spending the right amount of time in trying to get back on track and then having people that can hold me accountable to that as well.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s really important. The accountability part and bridges into actually the follow up question, too, is that as you’re invited into relationship with entrepreneurs, that you invest in entering a community with them and have some level of accountability. And investor holds the entrepreneur accountable for things like keeping them in the loop with how things are going on in the business, among other things. What does it look like for you? Having had that experience to be able to talk about things like identity and mental illness? Have you and your partners at Collab talked about what it might look like to be able to love on your entrepreneurs, knowing that these are things to watch out for and knowing that an entrepreneur, his life is full of anxiety and I’ve told it to somebody the other day, feels like an eye opener is always selling something to somebody. You’re selling to your customers, you’re selling to your investors. You’re selling to people who are going to join the team. You’re selling people to stay on the team. And then when you think you’re finished with sound for the day, you come home and then you talk to your spouse and they’re asking how to go because they’re wondering why you left a really good job at Google or Apple or fill in the blanks and you feel like you have to tell them about things through a glass half full type of lens. And that really just weighs on somebody having come out of that experience yourself as an astronaut. How are you all thinking about loving on your entrepreneurs and being really conscious of that and looking out for that?

Jewel Burks Solomon: Yes. I think this is one of the things that I enjoy the most about the seat that I’m in, where I have a chance to spend time with both the entrepreneur that we have invested in, as well as the entrepreneurs that I meet through the various roles that I hold. And one of the things that I’ve really spent a lot of time with over the past six months is checking in on those entrepreneurs were our Google program. We’ve even made therapy available and free for the entrepreneurs in the program that we run. So it’s something that I’m very open to talking to them about. And I know because I’ve experienced that way can look like to just pour everything into the business and not care for yourself, lose connection to God or whatever higher power you believe in. And so I make it a point to make sure that I’m checking in on entrepreneurs regularly and probably more so right now, because I know that it’s very tempting to just pour everything into the work and leave and forget about yourself. But for me, it’s very important to look on the entrepreneurs and make sure that they are OK, because, you know, the business can’t be successful if the founder is not operating from a space of wholeness. And so that’s something that I’m really committed to. And I think my partners are as well. And we practice it with each other. You know, we’ve all had some level of personal pain over the past several months. And so it’s really been stepping up when one person is down or going through something, you know, taking the reins and carrying a bit of the load. And so we do the same thing with the entrepreneurs that we work with as well.

William Norvell: Thanks so much for walking us through that as we come to a close. We’ll highlight one of the pieces you mentioned, how we loved to always ask our guests whether they are God’s word and what God may be telling them today. And the season could be something you read this morning, could be something you’ve been meditating on for a while. Would you mind just letting our audience into where God has you and a scripture and how it’s taking you further on the journey?

Jewel Burks Solomon: Sure. So I have been doing morning devotion around anxiety because it’s something that is still very real for me. And so I wanted to share a scripture that was just in. I think maybe this week I wrote it down and have been meditating on it. And it’s John, 16, 33. And it’s hard. I’m not really alone. Or the fathers with me. I said these things to you so that you will have peace and me in the world. You have to stress but be encouraged. I have conquered the world. And for me, that scripture is encouraging. It’s especially helpful right now. The notion that as lonely as things may feel, I can’t sink into that concept because God is with me. And that, for me, has been a big comfort.

William Norvell: It’s great words. Great advice. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for spending time out of your day to come tell our listeners the story that God has you on and the ones you’re trying to encourage. And I always really appreciate it.

Henry Kaestner: Jewel. Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing your story. Excited to see what God will do through you and Collab.

Jewel Burks Solomon: Thank you so much.

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Hear Aimee Minnich, CIO, Founder, and General Counsel for Impact Foundation, share about how her personal history led her to a career dedicated to helping families steward resources for the glory of God. 

In this episode, she challenges the common understandings of risk, reward, and time horizon in investing and posits “the only meaningful risk we can take is to disobey God’s commands or ignore His invitations.”

To hear more talks like this, join us this year at the 2021 Faith Driven Investor Conference on September 9th.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Aimee Minnich: I was 17 when my dad died. My inheritance was a baby blue plastic trash bin full of quarters. My dad seven years sobriety coin from AA and his prayers. My parents marriage had dissolved when I was seven and I lived with my mom after that. But my dad had done his best to share with us five kids the faith that he discovered on his journey to sobriety. By the grace of God, I went to college and law school on a full ride scholarship, and while I was in my first year of school, first year of law school, my mom and stepdad took their company public. It was a fast, wild ride from nothing to IPO. And since then I’ve sat through family meetings with wealth helpers to discuss the portfolio, and I’ve suffered through the painful estate planning meetings. I tell you this to say that I have seen and personally lived through both ends of the wealth spectrum and it’s given me a lot of opportunity to think about what it means to live a successful life. Is it being able to buy a Lamborghini or a yacht so that I can demonstrate to the world that I made it that I was a success? Is it being able to leave as much as possible to my family and pay as little as possible on estate taxes? You might be wondering what in the world this has to do with the conference for investors. You see, I’ve decided that the best way I can spend my working life is to help families like mine steward their resources, financial, spiritual and social to the best of their abilities and to the glory of God. For families with significant wealth, a lot of it looks like investing. It’s what compels the work that I do now at Impact Foundation, where we help families invest charitable capital in businesses that create jobs, share the gospel and contribute to human flourishing. So what’s the measure of success? I think we all want to get to the end of days and here. Well done, my beloved child. And we’re just doing our best to figure out what that means. We want to be excellent in the craft of investing, but I’m afraid sometimes I and other Faith Driven Investor used the wrong definition of excellence, just as the kingdom of this world misses what it means to live a successful life, so too it gives us an inadequate definition of what makes a successful investment portfolio. The world says, minimize the risk of losing your capital, maximize financial return and invest for the time horizon of your own life and maybe the life of your kids. But risk reward and time horizon have very different meanings in the kingdom of God. Jesus says if anybody wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross and follow me. It’s pretty risky on its face, but God’s omnipotent and good, his time horizon is eternal and we’re really just his money managers, which means the only meaningful risk we can encounter is to disobey his commands or ignore his invitations. So let’s ask then whether his word gives us any indication of how we should invest in scripture. We see at least four uses of capital commended. We’re familiar with the first three charity tithing and traditional investing for return. And to be clear, those are all worthy of our time, effort and money. But I want to focus on gleaning. It’s the most misunderstood and unaddressed but really important uses of capital. Remember how Ruth gathered around the edges of Boaz’ field in the Book of Ruth? Boaz was following the command from Leviticus 19 and 23 to allow for gleaning. The Theology Work Project explains gleaning is a process in which landowners have an obligation to provide the poor and marginalized access to the means of production, which in Leviticus was the land. And to work it themselves, unlike charity, does not depend on the generosity of landowners. Also, unlike charity, it was not given to the poor as a transfer payment. Through gleaning, the poor earned their living the same way as the landowners did by working the fields with their own neighbors. It was simply a command that everyone had a right to access the means of provision created by God. Our economies may not be agrarian anymore, but gleaning nevertheless is instructive for all of us because it has to do with provision rather than harvesting crops. I’ve observed sometimes it’s easier to practice gleaning within our own companies than it is to understand how to do it as investors. I think many of us are afraid to consider investment gleaning because it seems that accepting less than full market rate returns is the purview of the unsophisticated. If I lend money at eight percent and somebody else gets 15 percent. Doesn’t that make me the chump? Plus, people fear that it provides an excuse for lack of excellence from an entrepreneur. Those things certainly could be the causes of poor returns, but that’s not what gleaning entails. True gleaning involves excellence, access, work and sacrifice. In ancient times, a farmer there was leaving some of those fields and unharvested. It meant that he had to be even more efficient, more effective with the portions he was working in order to make enough to feed his own household and follow the command to allow room around the edges. A follower of God had to be the very best farmer around. Excellence is always a hallmark of gleaning. David Simms and John Halverson, at Talanton, are doing an amazing job as they back small and medium sized companies in Kenya and other parts of Africa. They’re demonstrating excellence in their company selection and management, even as they expect less than market rate returns. The next two parts of gleaning access and work, they go together gleaning access to the poor and marginalized for the poor and marginalized. And it’s not the same thing as a handout. Access to the means of production means work for wages. I wouldn’t ever, ever advocate eliminating charity, but I do fear that if we aren’t creating pathways to employment through our philanthropic capital, then we may be doing more harm than good. If you’ve been to Haiti, you’ve seen this firsthand. There are instances where aid given to the poor and marginalized can create access. Scholarships for education or career training are great examples. So as aid in the context of a natural disaster or mass displacement. But at some point we have to begin asking ourselves when does access and helping me find a job rather than another handout for Garfield Produce in Chicago, Access looks like employing former gang members from Chicago’s South Side to grow micro greens, which they sell to restaurants or they used to before covid. Their investors are expecting maybe to get their original loan back, but with no interest. That’s investment gleaning. Sacrifice is the last hallmark of gleaning, and it’s also the scariest until we actually do it. Gleaning means the difference between an eight percent return that creates 100 jobs or a 15 percent return that creates 50 jobs. What looks like sacrifice to others often feels like simple obedience to the person making the sacrifice. If the God of Heaven instructs us to do something, following in obedience is probably the safest bet when we get to the pearly gates. I don’t think he’s going to ask us whether we got a 15 percent IRR or beat our benchmarks. But I am confident that what we do for the least of these, the ways in which we take care of his children who are poor and marginalized will be remembered. So next time you’re looking at an eight percent return that creates a hundred jobs, how might you respond?

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Money is a fact of everyday life. We earn it, spend it and save it. We’re tempted to worship it and to trust it to provide for our needs. While much has been written about the power, danger, and stewardship of money, little has been said about what money actually is and whether or not money itself is moral. 

Today’s guest is here to change that. Jimmy Song is a bitcoin advocate, developer and author who has been contributing to open-source bitcoin projects since 2013. 

On today’s episode he explores the ways in which the current monetary system is broken, what can be done to fix it, and how the ongoing transition to sound money may be a source of hope for a broken world.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Jimmy Song: So Esau had what we would call in between high time preference, right, like he was very impatient, didn’t have much prudence. Jacob had low time preference. He was willing to wait. He was patient. He was prudent. He was wise. And that’s what I wanted to point out about Bitcoin is there’s an ethic of being willing to wait because Bitcoin is very volatile. It does sort of like turn your stomach. There’s a lot of emotional disturbance in the price going up and down that you kind of have to go through that a lot of people simply can’t take. So for a lot of people, they would rather live for tomorrow and be more like Esau, who cares about my estate? That’s like 30 years from now. I’d rather have the suit now rather than being like Jacob. OK, I’ll forgo the suit now, but that means that I get this huge treasure later on. And to me, that’s at the heart of what both Bitcoin is about and what Christianity is about. Our God promises us treasures in heaven for doing the things that aren’t necessarily rewarded in this life. And that’s for me, what the ultimate in low time preference behavior looks like.

Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone. You found us once again at the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Money, money is a fact of everyday life. We earn it, we spend it, we save it. Sometimes we give it away. We’re tempted to worship it and to trust it, to provide for our needs. And while much has been written about the power, the danger and the stewardship of money, little has been said about what money actually is and whether or not money itself is moral. Today’s guest is here to change that. Jimi Song is a Bitcoin advocate, a developer and an author who has been contributing to open source Bitcoin projects since 2013. On today’s episode, he explores the ways in which the current monetary system is broken, what can be done to fix it, and how the ongoing transition to sound money may be the source of hope for a broken world. We can’t wait to hear what you think of this, but let’s go mine this subject right now.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’ve got a really special episode. I say that at the beginning of every one of these look and at some point in time that’s going to ring hollow, but it’s not going to ring hollow today because today is actually super cool. We have our first ever Asian cowboy on the podcast. We’ve never had that before. We never had anybody who was wearing a cowboy hat to a podcast interview. And we may even be able to do a video clip of this in the promo reel. But Jimmy’s song is a really special guest because he’s going to take us through an asset class, Luke, that we actually participated in a little bit, but we don’t know very much about, right?

Luke Roush: That’s right. And it’s a hot asset class, right? It’s garnered a lot of notoriety and a lot of interest in the last few months. So never had an episode on Bitcoin been more appropriate.

Henry Kaestner: I agree. We’ve got Jimmy Song on the podcast today. Jimmy, welcome.

Jimmy Song: Thank you for having me. It’s very exciting for me to be on this podcast. I’ve done a lot of Bitcoin podcast. I haven’t done that many Christian ones. So I am super excited to talk about my faith and how Bitcoin relates to our faith.

Henry Kaestner: So it’s great having a is a real treat before we get going. One of the things that we like to do with every one of our guests is to understand who they are and where they come from and just share with us a bit, you know, who are you? Where do you come from? Where did faith enter into your journey? And then, yes, absolutely. We can tell about all things talking about the money system. We going to talk about greed and corruption and government and crypto and it being a force for good, all those different things. But who are you? Where you come from?

Jimmy Song: Sure. I was born in South Korea and I immigrated to the United States back in nineteen eighty five as an eight year old. So my dad was transferred to an office in New York because at the time he worked for a textile manufacturer and back in the eighties that was where a lot of clothing was made in Korea. But of course the designers were in New York and they wanted to see what materials factory could make and so on. So he was the representative for that company. He worked in the Empire State Building. I still remember going to his office, you know, on the sixty sixth floor next to the diamond exchange and everything. Anyway, we immigrated in nineteen eighty five and one of the things that happened when we came was my parents just kind of missed Korea and though they weren’t religious at the time, they decided to go to church as a way to meet other Korean people. And we started attending church maybe a month after we came to the US and part of that was me growing in faith and learning about God. I went to a summer overnight Christian camp called Word of Life in upstate New York. That was where I was saved. And it’s been a journey since then. Also, around that time I got into computers, I didn’t really even know what they were, but I had like this natural affinity towards them. And I begged my dad to get me one. He got me one from Toys R US as a fourth grader. It was a Commodore sixteen, not the sixty four that everyone knows was a sixteen, which only had like three games. So I learned a lot of programing on that thing, mostly because I wanted to play with this machine and I’ve been programing ever since. So I’ve been a programmer all my life and I went to a startup right out of college. I’ve been doing startups for a long time, pretty much since I graduated college, which was back in ninety eight. And I learned about Bitcoin back in 2011 when I was reading tech news site that said Bitcoin has reached parity with the dollar and I couldn’t even pass that sentence. I was like, what does that mean? How do you get parity with the dollar? And then I found out that it was a digital currency and so on. And yeah, I’ve been doing stuff in the Bitcoin space, contributing to open source projects, writing various books, speaking at conferences, teaching people I’m also a Bitcoin fellow at a venture capital firm and things like that. So. Yeah, it’s been quite a journey, and I’m excited about this podcast because it is sort of talking about two things that got integrated into my life and it’s something that only God can do.

Luke Roush: Jimmy, some of our listeners don’t have a ton of exposure to Bitcoin, maybe they haven’t actually spent the time that you have to really understand the currency and kind of how it works. But pretend we know nothing about Bitcoin, would you mind just kind of walking us through kind of a crash course for dummies, myself included, on how Bitcoin functions and what our listeners might want to know or pay attention to as we’re watching this universe unfold before our eyes?

Jimmy Song: Sure. The easiest way I can describe Bitcoin is as digital gold, and it’s digital, I think, which most people understand. But it’s also like gold in the sense that it requires no permission to go and gather it. So gold has always been like that. If you own some land, you can go dig in your backyard or whatever to go search for gold. That is everyone’s right to do. You don’t need permission from anybody. So in that way, Bitcoin is what we call decentralized. There’s no central authority that determines whether or not you are allowed to create that or find that particular commodity. This is unlike the US dollar, for example, which is centrally controlled. If I tried to produce a one hundred dollar bill and managed to make it look very realistic, I would get arrested by the Secret Service because the production of US dollars is controlled by, well, at least the physical notes by the Treasury, but really most of it by the Federal Reserve. So a lot of things are centralized, including concert tickets, coupons for online stores or whatever. What’s unique about Bitcoin is that it’s digital and decentralized and this usually blows people’s minds. And honestly, most of us in the computer science field didn’t think that that was actually possible until Satoshi Nakamoto showed that it could in 2008. And that was a big breakthrough in Bitcoin was the fact that it was both decentralized and digital. That is, it had no central authority, but it was also digital. When most people think of digital things, they think like MP3 files or Web pages or e-books or something like that, something that can essentially be infinitely copied with perfect fidelity. But with Bitcoin, you have something that’s decentralized, not infinitely copyable because there’s a ledger and this is what’s called the block chain. And that block chain holds essentially every transaction that’s ever been done on Bitcoin. It’s not very different than, say, the ledger at your bank, which for them has the record of every single transaction that’s ever been done by their customers of that bank, except that block chain is completely distributed. Everyone that runs the software can check exactly that. The ledger balances, for example, that no one’s overspending that noone’s overdrafting, that the rules of the ledger are being kept up and not violated and so on. And that’s essentially what it is. We also call it digital gold because of this process called mining with gold. I’m told that you need to scour something like 40 tons of dirt and rock before you find about one ounce of gold. So there’s a lot of dirt and rock that you have to process. You use chemicals on before you find that one ounce of gold. Bitcoin also has that same process for bringing new Bitcoin into existence, except instead of dirt and rock, what you have lots and lots of numbers. So you process as many numbers as possible and you’ll find that sort of one ounce of gold, if you will. And much like gold, that process of finding that gold is much more difficult than verifying that ounce of gold is genuine. The chemical test is much cheaper than actually digging up an ounce of gold in the ground. Similarly with Bitcoin, the process of finding a number that satisfies a particular property is very, very difficult. You just have to brute force lots and lots of numbers, the equivalent of 40 tons of dirt and rock. But when you find it, it is very easy to verify. In fact, your cell phone can go verify that it’s been done, whereas the actual process of finding it requires many, many thousands of thousands of machines.

Luke Roush: Yeah, that’s fascinating. And a whole bunch of other questions you go off in terms of who the miners are, where they live, how they mined. But now I want to go over actually to an argument that you make in your book that it could be really interesting to our listeners, maybe resonant given the environment that we’re currently living in. It’s around the moral argument for Bitcoin versus currencies that can be printed more readily. Could you just kind of articulate that view on the merits of Bitcoin relative to fiat currency?

Jimmy Song: Sure. The thing about the current monetary system, which is central bank backed fiat money, it is extremely corrupt for the lack of a better word. There’s a lot of theft in it. There is what we would call huge moral hazard within the fiat money system. And this is because there exists a money printer. Unfortunately, not that many people know how money works. I’ll just briefly describe it. When the government has a budget of 4 trillion and their tax revenue is three trillion, you have a one trillion dollar deficit. So where do they get that money in the past before central bank back fiat money? What? The government had to do was to go borrow that money from people that actually had it. So King John, for instance, wanted to borrow a ton of money to fund the war that he wanted to do as a part of England. The merchants that lent to him charge them two hundred fourteen percent interest because they were pretty sure that they wouldn’t get the money back. So at least after six months, they’d get some of it back and interest and then go from there. So that’s how money used to be nowadays. That one trillion dollar gap, it sold US Treasuries. There are other central banks that buy it. There are people in the public that buy it. They’re hedge funds and various pension funds that will buy it. But there’s usually some left over. So say they sell five hundred billion to various parties, but they have five hundred billion left. What happens? Well, the central bank is called the lender of last resort. For that reason, they will buy up the other five hundred billion dollars through money that they created then. Er so it’s essentially monetary expansion through debt insurance and that’s how the monetary system currently works. And it’s not just at the government level, it’s also at the corporate level and it’s also at the consumer level. So if you think about corporate bonds and whatever bond buyers know, you can get tremendous leverage. You can actually just get the spread. There’s questions about, OK, who’s buying these like one and a half percent bonds. Right. Like that pay like nothing. Well, it’s because you can go get loans for one hundred percent of that amount. It just becomes sort of like a money generating machine. And even if you’re getting paid like 20 basis points, if you’re getting loans at five basis points to 15 basis point spread is all profit and you can leverage the heck out of it. So you borrow a billion and you get 15 basis points on a billion dollars. That’s still a significant amount of money. So that’s how the current system works. It’s based on that. It’s based on money printing. It’s based on monetary expansion that can be sort of like game by the people that are in control. And that means that there is a huge moral hazard or the people that are printing the money because they can use it to benefit themselves and their friends and their family at the expense of everybody else. Every time you expand the money supply, you are essentially stealing from everyone that has saved in that currency. So if you have money saved in the dollar and the dollar expands and supply, then your dollar has a little less purchasing power. And you could kind of see that in the asset inflation bubble that we’re in with stocks and even bonds and real estate and maybe even gold to some degree. But every time the money expands, you are stealing from everybody else that’s holding the dollar. And this isn’t just people in the United States. A lot of those people are in third world countries. They use the dollar as their store of value because their own currency is even worse than the dollar. So in essence, every time money is being expanded through debt creation, we are essentially stealing from everybody else that has money stored in that fiat currency. So from a biblical perspective, it is immoral and it is doing something that God detests.

Henry Kaestner: Hold on saying this is the almighty dollar. If this is the greenback, you’re saying that there’s something just wrong with the system and then maybe you’d even suggest that because we are all transacting in dollars that we may even, by extension, be morally complicit in this.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, yeah. I mean, every time we take out a mortgage, for example, I mean, think about this. You take out a mortgage for, say, a quarter million dollars, two hundred fifty thousand dollars, and you get three percent, 30 years or something like that when most people think with that mortgage is OK, some that is on the other side of that trade that’s lending out two hundred fifty thousand dollars for three percent for 30 years. And that’s simply not true. If you were an investor, you would never take back 30 years, three percent with some credit risk. And so, like, nobody would do that. The only reason that happens is because they print that money into existence. And that mortgage in turn is actually insured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So really, there’s no risk for the bank at all. And the government’s the one that takes the risk and they print the money for your benefit. So we’re all complicit in this. And I’m speaking as a person that has a mortgage, so I’m complicit in this as well, and that we are expanding the money supply. Clearly, the borrower is benefiting because they’re getting access to a lot of money at once. The bank is benefiting. They’re getting paid interest. So who’s it actually hurting? Well, it’s hurting everyone else that’s holding the dollar, including people in Nigeria that are holding dollars because the Niros inflating very quickly. So how do you even for them, I mean, we’re stealing from everybody through this monetary expansion. And the US is the most guilty of all because we got first access to that dollar, whereas people in Nigeria, for example, get last access as a result of what’s called the Cantillon effect. They get screwed more than everybody else being convicted.

Luke Roush: And my guess is that many of our listeners are also being convicted based on that last 60 second report, which is good. I think it goes over a lot of people’s heads and just kind of passed us. But we don’t. Realize that we’re living in it, so I appreciate you shedding light on that, one of the things that Indonesia, where I used to live is known for is having the most expensive coffee in the world, which is Kopi Luwak coffee and I won’t go into all the details of it. But my understanding is that you may be an expert on some of the most expensive beef jerky in the world. And switching gears, I got to ask the man we need to hear the beef jerky story, most expensive beef jerky ever produced in the world. Jimmy Fallon on the show today.

Jimmy Song: Yeah. So 2013, there were a lot of different companies that were allowing came in and bitcoin. And this is sort of the mistake that I made. I want to support this company that’s now taking Bitcoin. And it was online and I decided to order some beef jerky from that company. At the time, Bitcoin was about four hundred dollars. So I bought one hundred dollars worth of beef jerky and I was like, OK, it’s a quarter bitcoin. It’s not that much. I’ll buy it. They shipped it to me. It was delicious. I don’t think it was like twelve thousand dollars delicious though because currently Bitcoin is up forty eight thousand. And this is kind of what happens with a lot of store of value assets is that I’ve known people that worked at Dell or something early on and they had stock options. They decided to sell them for a couch and it turns out that the stock kept going up or whatever, and that couch is now ten thousand dollars or something instead of eight hundred or something like that. So you know this. I regret spending Bitcoin on that beef jerky. Yeah, there was also a sewing machine I got from my wife, which costs like a tenth of a bitcoin that’s now like five thousand bucks. So, yeah, some regrets.

Henry Kaestner: So when you’re referring to store value, you’re referring to beef jerky as a store value. So tell us you’ve written a book on this. Tell us about the book.

Jimmy Song: Thank God for Bitcoin. Yeah, it’s all about the moral case for money. And it comes from a Christian perspective. I got to write this during covid as a result of Bible study that we started doing on Zoom. So basically I had gone to this conference that Russell Cohen put together. He’s the left tackle for the Carolina Panthers and he also wrote the foreword for our book. And his brother in law, George was one of my coauthors, is a Christian, and we started talking about it and we decided, OK, you know what, let’s do a Bible study of just some verses in the Bible that talk about money and oh, my goodness, there are so many verses in the Bible that talk about money. So we started doing that. And as we finished, he expressed some interest in learning more about the economic aspect of it. And I come from the Austrian school and I’ve read a lot of stuff on it. And we decided to open it up to some more people. And we had about ten different Bitcoin ers that have known through conferences and so on that I knew were Christian. And we got together. We studied two books, The Ethics of Money Production by Guido Huelsmann and Honest Money by Garry North. And both of them treat the monetary system from an ethical perspective. And we ended up doing studies of both books. And at the end we were dissatisfied because both of them ended with, hey, we need to go back on the gold standard and we need to get a political action committee together and convince enough people so that the dollar can go back to being backed by gold. And, you know, I mean, we’re reading this and thinking, OK, this is completely unrealistic and this is never going to happen. But we have this thing called Bitcoin where each individual can opt out. We need to write a book to lay that out. And that’s how the book started. We wanted to make the moral case for Bitcoin and we wanted to do it from a Christian perspective. So there’s a lot of verses in there. We definitely take the Christian world view in this book, and the hope is to give that moral perspective, because for a lot of Christians, I think what they think of when they think of Bitcoin is OK. It’s like the money used by drug dealers and traders that just gambled their money or something like that. And for us, it’s very much not. It’s a more moral money. And that’s the argument that we wanted to make in the book, and that’s what it covers.

Henry Kaestner: So it’s very interesting. I want to get more into the rifts that you’ve had with friends in Bible studies about faith as it comes through. And I just you got one of the most entertaining Twitter feeds of all time. And the other day you talk about Esau and Jacob and their take on Bitcoin. Selling Bitcoin: Esau’s soup, buying Bitcoin: jacob Father’s estate. Please explain.

Jimmy Song: Yeah. So Esau had what we would call in Bitcoin high time preference. Right. Like, he was very impatient, didn’t have much prudence. Jacob had low time preference. He was willing to wait. He was patient. He was prudent. He was wise. And that’s what I wanted to point out about Bitcoin is there’s an ethic of being willing to wait because Bitcoin is very volatile. It does sort of like turn your stomach. There’s a lot of emotional disturbance in the price going up and down that you kind of have to go through that a lot of people simply can’t take. So for a lot of people, they would rather live for tomorrow and be more like Esau. Who? Cares about my estate, that’s like 30 years from now. I’d rather have the suit now rather than being like Jacob, OK, I’ll forgo the suit now, but that means that I get this huge treasure later on. And to me, that’s at the heart of what both Bitcoin is about and what Christianity is about. Our God promises us treasures in heaven for doing the things that aren’t necessarily rewarded in this life. And that’s for me, what the ultimate in low time preference behavior looks like.

Henry Kaestner: So I want to do a slight pivot here because I’m thinking through this. I’m going beyond the moral implications of the monetary supply and I’m going to be thinking about that for a long time. I know our listeners are, too, but one of the things that has stuck with me is when you talked about the Nigerians being the last people kind of in the stream, so to speak, what is Bitcoin mean? And maybe I’m reading too much into your comment or just this general thought, but what is Bitcoin mean for people in places like Zimbabwe where they’ve got to take wheelbarrows of cash just to buy food? You know, is their role here for Bitcoin and poverty alleviation? Can that happen or or do those governments shut it down? Because that’s their last stranglehold on the people. Just riff about what that means a little bit in developing economies.

Jimmy Song: Yeah, and it’s been a tremendous in developing economies. In fact, one of my coauthors is Jordan Bush, and he actually inspired that Esau tweet. He is a missionary in Uruguay and his congregation is actually largely Venezuelan and they love Bitcoin. They think it’s something that is very important to them and in part because they can actually send money back home. A lot of these regimes, when they get in power, what they do is they impose strict capital controls and so on to make it very difficult to do anything monetary because they are spending their own money in hyperinflation. That the previous book that I wrote is the little Bitcoin book. And one of my coauthors there is Alex Gladstein, who’s the chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, and he’s really interested in Bitcoin, in large part because a lot of human rights activists in these countries, the first thing that happens to them, once the government finds out that they’re doing something against the government’s interests, is they get their bank accounts seized, they get financial, they get their financial access sort of cut off. And Bitcoin for them is a life saver. So there’s that aspect to it. But there’s also that other aspect that you are talking about, which is, you know, being able to store value. So one anecdote that I like to share is that one hundred dollar bill, a crisp one in a lot of third world countries, will trade at a premium to a wrinkled one. And you might be wondering, why would that be? Why is the crisp one trading at a premium to a wrinkled one? Well, the crisp one is more valuable because they’re given as gifts at weddings and so on. So when you’re presenting a gift to the bride and groom or something like that, you want a nice crisp bill. So the wrinkled one trades at a discount because these people are using these as stores of value. This is you’re starting off your new life. Here’s some money and that’s how they store it. So for a lot of those people in Third World countries, the US dollar and so on is a lifeline to being able to store their wealth. And if we’re thinking about like what’s happened to the US dollar in the last year, then two money supply, for example, has expanded by thirty five percent or something crazy. For a lot of people in Third World countries, it’s even worse. So they have their own currencies, which through legal tender laws and monetary injustice of all kinds, they’re forced to use. But it’s inflating at such a high rate that they need something else. They want to store value in something else. And if you go to like the black market in Venezuela, for example, you know, no one takes bolivars or if they do, they have a quick way of getting rid of it because no one wants to hold on to them, because an hour from now, it’s going to be worth less than what it is right now. So that whole process is very detrimental to their living and it makes all sorts of economic calculation crazy. It generally devalues labor and so on. So Bitcoin definitely has a role. The country where Bitcoin is most popular besides the United States is Nigeria right now. And it’s because the Naira is expanding fairly quickly. They have a pretty technical population. One of my coauthors from the previous book runs an exchange there, and he’s trying to comply with the central bank of Nigeria’s mandates and so on. But yeah, it’s a life saver for a lot of them because they can actually store value instead of having it just sort of like frittered away. And a lot of the injustice that we see in the world is actually monetary injustice. And honestly, a lot of that is because of the dollar hegemony that is over the entire world. And this is something that I think as Americans, much more so than, quote on quote, social justice or whatever that we have to think about as a nation. There’s a monetary imperialism that is over the entire globe. The US can more or less unilaterally enforce sanctions on Iran because of the dollar, all international transactions. These are settled in the dollar and so on, so. You know, that level of control, that level of ability to affect people in Third World countries, this is something that we need to really face up to as a nation because we’ve been abusing it for the last 70 years or so since Bretton Woods.

Luke Roush: So the concept of monetary imperialism is a powerful word, picture that I’ve never thought through that before. But this is really, I think, brought that to light for me and will be impactful for others, too. I’ve got one more question and then a closing question. But one more question is, we all have friends who have waded into Bitcoin more recently trying to make a quick buck. What counsel would you give the folks who are seeing this more sort of short term trading opportunity rather than a long term?

Jimmy Song: Yeah, I know a lot of people that have been like that, and those people have existed since 2010. So there were people that got into Bitcoin at a dollar and sold at eight dollars and said, you know what, I made eight times my money. I am out. And they have never come back since. So my counsel to those people would be understand what Bitcoin is. It could be a trade thing, a plaything, a gambling thing. In which case, I think as a Christian, you should really look into whether or not that is something that is corrupting your soul or not otherwise. Once you’ve learned what that really is, whether it is this incorruptible unsensible store of value that we argue in the book, then you’ll understand like just how much it means to have that store of value available so that we can build a better civilization instead of one that’s leaking all over the place with the current fiat monetary system that we’re in. So for those people, learn what it is before you keep going with this sort of like speculation. A lot of people do come in for no go up, as we say, in our space. But a lot of people end up staying because they learn what it is and read books like mine or say things the Bitcoin standard or many others and learn, OK, all right. This really is a better money. And it is in many ways incorruptible by human beings because it’s run by computer code. And as a result, they become convinced, OK, this really is superior to the current monetary system. And I want to opt out of the current monetary system into this thing. And that’s what brings a lot of people in. So, you know, learning about that is not easy. I’ve seen people take many years before they got into it or understood it or realized this implications. And like we’ve been talking about, the implications are enormous and they are global. And it is no small thing to be changing out money. It seems to be one of the base layers of civilization. If you change that out, you affect absolutely everything above it, including governments, including trade, including companies, including our lifestyles, including our how we view debt and things like that. And all of those things will need to be changed as we transition more to a Bitcoin standard. In my opinion, that’s inevitable because fiat currencies are just sort of temporary by nature. I think a study of all fiat currencies that have ever existed, like the average life span, is like twenty three years. The US dollar is about 50 years old in fiat terms. And so it’s fairly old, but we’ll see where it goes. But that’s what I would implore your listeners to go and understand.

Luke Roush: Most impactful episode for me and I think for all of us. But let’s just close out with the way we always close out. So I’d love to hear, Jimmy, how God is speaking to you and teaching you. Now, what have you found in his words that has stuck out to you recently?

Jimmy Song: Yeah. So the verse that I’ll go to is in the book as well, but it’s Ephesians 4:28. He who steals my steal no longer, but rather he must labor performing with his own hands. What is good so that he will have something to share with one who has need. And I love that verse first of all, because it says don’t steal. And I think at least in the fiat economy, I think we’re all guilty of that, whether we know it or not. And stopping from that and working with our own hands, creating something that is good. So he will have something to share with one who has need. That to me sometimes is interpreted as go and make money so you can give alms to the poor. For me it means go make something with your hands so that you can contribute something to civilization, to someone else in the market that can get value from whatever it is that you create. And the verse is really about money and the role of money, which from a spiritual sense is a signal to you, to each individual to know how it is that you can provide most value to other people. And when the money is not corrupt, it’s the purest sort of signal for what we should be doing because it tells other people, I find what you’re doing, your goods or services more valuable than the money that I am willing to give it up for. So for me, that’s what it is. The other thing I’ll share is that this book for me is sort of like, as I mentioned before, the merging of two huge passions in my life, Christianity and Bitcoin. And I was at a conference last year, a big block boom. It was Bitcoin conference and it was in Dallas. And I gave a talk and somebody asked a question and I revealed that I was a Christian at that conference. And I also told the audience at the end, hey, I’m writing a book about this, if you’re interested, please. Talk to me afterwards, no less than 30 people throughout the next two days came up to me and told me that they are Christian, that they are Bitcoin. They were afraid of saying something. And for me, that was a huge validation of what God was doing, because it was clear that there are a lot of Christians that don’t want to be known as Christians. And a thing for me when I think about that is, wow, how sad is that? Because according to the Bible, these are Jesus’s words. He says, if you are ashamed of me, I will be ashamed of you before my father. And my hope for your listeners is that they learn to be bold with their faith. And, you know, we tend to think, OK, God doesn’t want me to be ashamed of him, but then I’m going to get embarrassed. That’s not the way it is, at least for me. My experience has been that God has blessed me, that he wants me to be bold so that he can bless me and what I am doing. And this book has come out as a result of that. We’ve got a lot of reviewers from that conference that were able to chime in on Bitcoin and Christianity and give us some really good feedback that we incorporated. But for all your listeners that are thinking about investing better in these industries where, you know, it might not be cool to talk about Jesus, take a chance people about it, because God wants to bless you.

Henry Kaestner: Amen. Wow, that was really, really awesome. I love what you’re talking about in terms of being able to deliver value. We should be about being used by God under his power for his glory to bring about his kingdom on Earth as it is in heaven. And we need to be creative and adding value to the marketplace, creating goods and services to bring about his kingdom and to love our neighbor, and in that process, superimportant. So that’s a great word to leave us on. And then the admonition, of course, to be always ready, willing and able to be able to boldly and yet with gentleness and respect to share the reason for the hope we have. So great word for me, a great word for Luke, Justin and the entire FDE team and our listeners. Jimmy, we’re really grateful for you. Thank you very much.

Jimmy Song: Thank you for having me.