Jason Illian: Listen, I grew up in Nebraska, and it used to be it just jumped on your tractor and now the tractor drives itself right now. The soil is monitoring itself. And now we’re using next generation technology to fertilize it and keep track of it and measure it. And so technology and breakthroughs are happening everywhere. And we believe as part of it is we want to be part of that. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Silicon Valley, if you’re in Israel or if you’re in Cincinnati. You know, we want to back those best entrepreneurs and learn from them, be a true partner.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast, this is the podcast for you as you endeavor to understand what’s a community of believers talking about, thinking about what’s going on as people come to understand how they might stored the wealth that God has entrusted them with. And every week we talk to somebody else that has a new perspective, a different story about how God is using them. And the hope, of course, is that you’ll come away from this time understanding and knowing God a little bit more fully by talking to somebody else that shares your faith and is intentional understanding how to bring faith into the investment world as you are and that you’ll just be encouraged by the broader community of people that are looking at this space. And we’ve got a great guest today. We’ve got Jason Elián, who’s got such a really, really cool background that I hope that he’ll share with us, but then also great perspectives and experience and what he does right now as he allocates capital and is driven by his faith as he does so. So, Jason, welcome to the program.

Jason Illian: Hey, thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Henry Kaestner: So with every guest, we like to understand a bit of their background, who they are. A quick autobiographical sketch. I know enough about your background to think that this rather than just kind of just doing a quick flyover of 90 seconds, that this is worth spending a little bit more time on. So do that. Who are you where do you come from now that I’ve intrigued our audience like that?

Jason Illian: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. You know, it’s interesting during the day, right? It’s Jason Allen, one of the managing directors at Koch. But most of the day I’m being known as either Alicia’s husband. Right. Or dad to my three kids, rogue, rain and sage. And so my three kiddos, they’re almost 13, 11 and 10. Their names are all biblical names like Rain Comes from Isaiah. Forty five. We’re talking about how the Lord reigns and how he’s going to tear down mountains and do things in his name. So that’s where his name comes from. And Sage is for the Lord’s wisdom comes from Zephaniah. And then my youngest is named Roeg. And Roeg is as is set apart for the Lord. Before I knew you in the womb, I set you apart. And his name’s Roeg and so is really important from us, my wife and I, from just the word go to say, hey, they’re dedicated to the Lord. This is what our family is going to be about. And and most of the time, like I said, I’m known as Alicia’s husband. And if you’ve met my wife, you realize you have the wrong one on the podcast. Right now, I’ve clearly outputted my wife. We could switch you. She really should. Lifeline a lifeline. Yes. This is where you phone a friend and get her on the line and you get much more interesting biblical insights than you get from her husband. But I met my wife speaking actually at a church about fifteen years ago, and she just finished writing a book called Chasing Perfect, which is helping Christian women get through the noise to really have a personal relationship with Jesus. And so we met fifteen years ago, kind of taking a step back to hear just a little bit more from me as I ended up going to school at TCU and Fort Worth, Texas, came to know the Lord when I was 17 years old at an NCAA football camp. I thought I was going to the camp so that I could show my great athletic prowess. And they were giving an award for somebody that exemplified the most Christlike behavior. And I was thinking, well, that must be me. And if you’re thinking it’s you, it’s definitely not you. Right? And so they had this kid come out and pray for us. And as he was praying, I realized he had something I didn’t. He had this relationship with the creator, God Almighty, and it was real and it was authentic. And he had this piece about him. And I based a lot of my identity on what I could do right. And playing football and doing well in school. And that just shifted it completely and came to know the Lord there. And then I went off TCU played college football, Texas Christian University go Frogs’. I know we have some other Bama and Baylor guys around. That’s OK.

William Norvell: I’ll speak slowly for you guys in North Carolina this year. Let’s not leave him. Yeah that’s true. They showed up this year.

Henry Kaestner: Thank you, William. The essay did Mack Brown.

Jason Illian: They brought their game so I wouldn’t play ball out there. And my goal had always been to go play NFL football, but had some injuries there. But really what I found is when I got there, I became part of the FCA. I’d never really led any Christian ministry before, but the FCA grew from about 40 or 50 kids to at the time when I left about five hundred and fifty. And that guy just blessed it. Right. And God gave me this amazing opportunity at TCU to grow athletically. Intellectually, my background is international finance as well as spiritually. Just put amazing godly men around me to help form the type of man I am today. I owe a lot of that to my time at TCU. My degree was finance. So I went to the London School of Economics, got recruited at Strong Capital Management. They did investment management had about forty five billion in assets under management.

And when I was there, this was late 90s, early 2000s. We were tracking all these companies in this tech space and some of my friends were like the first non founding member of Napster. We’re building a company called Friendster. One of my friends had their distribution rights to this small company called the Amazon, and I was watching these things in my real interest was the Internet back in the day, used to just be flat. You just went there for information. And what was happening is it started to become transactional and even more importantly, started becoming relational. And when I saw that you could start to build relationships potentially over, this became really intriguing to me. And so I ended up being in finance for four or five years, moved back to Dallas and ran a company called Gadhia, which was the first Christian video site. And one month we had twenty thousand users. In the next month we had two million and it really grew that fast.

Henry Kaestner: One that feels like kind of like how our podcast is exploded with with our listener base.

William Norvell: I mean, you know, it’s it’s a little bit I mean, I think we’ve eclipsed most of that at this point, but yeah.

Jason Illian: That those are small for you guys.

Henry Kaestner: Twenty thousand to two million. That’s unbelievable.

Jason Illian: Yeah. I want to say in the early 2000s, for a couple of months, we on the fastest growing websites on the planet, we just grew tremendously and would love to take credit for that. But the reality was, is it was content that people were really hungry for. Right. They really wanted to have the Google centered content that was safe for their kids. And, you know, we had a few videos that just went viral. And as they went viral, it just grew and grew the site. And we later ended up selling the site to Salem Communications, started another company called Bookshop, which was an e-book company. And then I ran that until twenty seventeen and sold that to a private equity group and then decided that I was going to take some time off. So my wife in her wisdom said, hey, you’ve been running hard. And as you guys know from the type of people you interview and work with this building companies and building startups is hard, right? It wears you out physically, emotionally, spiritually. And my wife said you should just pray about this and take a year off. And so I was at my home in Dallas just playing with my kids, you know, swimming, mowing the lawn, doing Bible studies and driving back and forth between Wichita to see my wife’s family from time to time. And through those connections and some other God ordained introductions 10 years earlier, I got to know the team at Coach and Chase Koch, who is the president of our division and the son of Charles, our founder. So he was getting ready to start a growth and venture arm for Koch Industries and asked if I want to be part of it. And so my wife and I prayed about it and we thought about it and decided this is where God would have us be. So we sold our home that we’d lived in for less than a year and moved to Wichita, Kansas, which is where I am today.

Henry Kaestner: So this is the faith of investors, most definitely not the faith driven reality show participant, but some of our listeners are going to know a little bit about that story. And presumably, as you’re coming out of FCA, motivated by your faith, you see that there’s an opportunity to live that out in a way that actually made quite an impression on a lot of people because it was a great witness and testimony. You were on The Bachelorette in your faith, came to play to spend just a second on that. What that looked like. As you know, you’re in an environment now where you’re doing something that’s unexpected is countercultural. And I think that maybe there are aspects that shouldn’t be presumptuous or prescriptive, but there’s things that you might have an opportunity as an investor to be countercultural. But this won’t be the first time that you’ve been countercultural. You’ve done that before. Just speak briefly to that.

Jason Illian: Yeah. You know, one of the things that’s really interesting about life and how God has it is our paths aren’t linear. Right. And his ways are greater than our ways. His thoughts are greater than our thoughts. And he’s just asking us to be faithful in whatever moment that we’re in, in whatever situation that we’re in and how do we live that out. And so that’s certainly played out in my life many ways. And one of those was through being on this reality television show, The Bachelorette, which was it was like the second season I was on. So it was still relatively new to this. And how it came about was even throughout this story that I just told you, this narrative of my life, I’ve continued to be involved in ministry. And I came home one night from speaking at church and I flipped on the TV and The Bachelor was on. And while I was making dinner, Jesse Palmer, who is now on ESPN, he was on the show and one of the girls asked him, why are you here? And he said, well, you know, I get tired of waking up every morning with a different girl, not knowing her name where I am.

And I just stopped and said, where do they find these idiots? Like he’s doing more damage in ten seconds on television than all of the things that we’re trying to talk about our faith and how do we should live out purity and how do we push towards traditional family and marriage? And I was telling one of my friends about it and he said, well, if you think you can do better, why don’t you send your application in and almost out of a dare? I just did. So I sent it and I didn’t think much of it. About three or four weeks later, I get this call and it was so and so from ABC’s The Bachelorette. And I thought it was my friend. That is give me a tough time, so I just gave them a tough time, I gave this person a tough time for like 10 minutes on the phone. And I’m like, yeah, sure you are. And I’m the pope. How can I help you? And I just kept going on and on until I finally realized that it was them. And I said, I’m really not a fit for your show. I’m like, I’ve seen the type of people on your show. That’s not the life that I live. It’s not a lot of the things that I believe in from a faith perspective. And they said, listen, just come on the show and just interview. There’s like five rounds of interviews and you may not make it through anyways, but we’d love to talk to you. So I did. And, you know, you do on camera interview and do in person interview. And there’s one where you fill out, I don’t know, an inch thick of background paperwork. And in there they asked, you know, all the people you’ve slept with. Well, it was a virgin at the time, right? I was saving myself for marriage, so I just left it blank and I turned it in and they brought it back and said, you missed the section. And I said, no, I just hadn’t slept with anyone. And when I said that, you could have heard a pin drop in the room, right. It was like they just cast a serial killer on the show or something. Right. They just couldn’t fathom why anybody would do this. And so it just started this ongoing conversation of my time throughout this television show, just saying, listen, what I believe and what God has for us and at the highest level of intimacy is matched at the highest level of commitment marriage. I said that’s how God has designed our family structure. And so I got a chance in front of ten million of my closest friends to have this conversation on national TV with Gen Sheft, who was The Bachelorette at the time. And it was because of that conversation that I got voted off. Right, because she didn’t believe that was very lovable. But what most people don’t know is I got thousands, hundreds of thousands of emails and calls from people that just said thank you. I said we need more examples of this and said I didn’t go on the show necessarily to make a point. Right. I didn’t go there saying, hey, I’m going to pound my hand on the table and here’s what I’m standing for. I’m just honestly just living my life as I feel like God’s called me to that. And, you know, God’s provides those opportunities. Right? He did that with The Bachelorette.

You know, I wrote a book early on called MySpace My Kids, when MySpace was just roughly a million users that was helping Christian families just understand this thing called social networking. It seems so basic today, but back in the day, we didn’t know what we were about to embark upon. And so when God opens those doors, I just try to be faithful. It’s not that I had this master plan. I’m sure God does, but I don’t see it clearly. And just take those moments to be faithful and try to have an impact.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s and an obvious question. And maybe we’ll go there, which is that was, as I said before, it’s countercultural for you to talk about celibacy on a show like The Bachelorette. Do you see opportunities to be countercultural and what’s going on right now in the world through what you do right now? So you’re managing director of Koch Industries for Disruptive Technologies. Yeah, and I’m going to ask a two part question. One is, some people are going to say, what in the world is disruptive technologies? But then also, why don’t you riff a little bit about how your faith in your worldview impacts the way that you see your job?

Jason Illian: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good question. So maybe to back up just a little bit, Koch Industries, if most people don’t know. Right, we’re roughly one hundred and twenty dollars billion privately held company and it’s really a number of companies that are put together. So if you have a cell phone, this components in that cell phone from one of our companies called Molex. If you are living in any type of house or building structure, it’s probably has Georgia-Pacific Materials, which is a Kochcompany.

Henry Kaestner: So it doesn’t apply to people living in teepees.

Jason Illian: But if you live in a house where the tea is made of toilet paper, then yes, because that’s also Georgia-Pacific, right? So, yeah. Yeah. So basically, think of it this way. Right. We’re in sixty five countries. We have roughly forty thousand trucks on the road at any time that have Kochmaterial in them. And you know, if you popped open the hood of Koch industries, what you’d really realize is it was built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Right. So one things that Charles has really done is saying I’m going to align incentives, push decision rates down to the bottom and let people create products and services that will make people’s lives better. And we want to do it at an affordable and efficient way. And so as the company continues to grow, they said, hey, we need to build a growth in venture arm so that we don’t get disconnected from those people that make transformative change. And that’s really what birth certificate. And so day one, there was two of us here chased Koch and myself as one of the founding members. And we built a team of about twenty five investment professionals, including three in Israel. And we’re a stage in industry agnostic arm, so we can write a check as small as a couple million and as large as a few. Million dollars per check and it’s a greenfield fund, right? So it’s all of our own cash on balance sheet, we can do 15 investments this year. We can do one investment. You know, we’re only really bound by what we deem to be something that will truly be disruptive. And so what does that mean? I mean, what is disruptive actually mean? Well, I look at it. Is is it a platform? Is it something that is going to make people’s lives better, more efficient, cheaper change the way that they live their life? So I remember the first time I heard a pitch for something like Uber, right? It was people like, hey, one day random strangers are going to pick you up in their car and take you to where you want to go. And people were like, are you crazy? I’m never getting in some stranger’s car. And now that’s just what we do, right? You guys know with grab I mean, you guys are that’s you understand. But this is a lot of the things that sounded crazy back in the day or just the way we do things today. Airbnb is another example, right? You’re going to stay in somebody else’s house on their couch, like who’s going to do that? And so these are transformative companies that change our behavior in the way that we live our lives. And a lot of those came in consumer areas to start with. But they’re also now coming across be to be industrial manufacturing, a number of other areas as well. And so, you know, we invested in a company called Desktop Metal, which prints three D metal parts, which are being used by Jewelleries, like Tiffany’s, are being used by BMW for parts. And so we look at all those types of various technologies and really invest in the people, because at the end of the day, you’re investing in the people who are building those types of technologies. And yeah, we put about a billion dollars to work over the last three years and I think we’re just getting started.

William Norvell: Wow, that’s fantastic. So when I think about the rise of entrepreneurship has just been incredible, I think over the last 10 years, you know, we talk about that our entrepreneurs are cultural change agents. You know what Elon Musk is to our generation? Mickey Mantle was to my dad’s right. And it’s just amazing how that’s continued and continues to spread across the country. You know, Henry and I are here in Silicon Valley or maybe that was a thing 20 years ago and we’re obviously biased. But I grew up in Alabama where when I go back home in my small town of 60000 people, I see, you know, coworking spaces and tech hubs and, you know, of course, in the bigger cities, Birmingham and Huntsville, it’s just it’s all anyone can talk about. And from Wichita, Kansas, I would imagine, you know, that name doesn’t scream innovation and entrepreneurship to most of our listeners, maybe screams fantastic college basketball first. But could you let us in to what you see? So you’re around the world now, but specifically maybe from the Midwest perspective of what do you see happening in entrepreneurship and in sort of how that is part of society and how God could be using that to bring his visions into the workplace?

Jason Illian: It’s a good question. And I think what people in you and Henry can probably speak to this better than I can. But what happened in Silicon Valley didn’t happen overnight. Right? It was decades and decades of building on top of one another with defense and semiconductors, Internet and mobile. It grew into what it has become, right. It became that melting pot of great ideas and ways for people to interact and take new risks in terms of building next generation platforms. And I think what you see happening is that’s starting to happen all over the country and all over the world. Right. So look at what Brad Feld has built in Boulder, Colorado. Right. It used to be you walk down downtown Boulder. Yeah, I maybe grab a bite to eat, but that was about it. Now you walk down there and there’s tech companies and people all over the place building next generation technology. Same things with the Walton family’s done in northwestern Arkansas. That has become a vibrant tech hub where people are wanting to move. They want to raise their families there. They can look at anything from mobility services to next generation data companies. And then I think what you’re seeing in Austin, too, right? I think you and Henry had the way to make a sound in the media. You may be the only thing left in California because our base moved Austin. Right. And so what’s happening is you’re starting to see great entrepreneurship. And it’s one of the reasons we’re friends with Eric Schmidt. And what Steve Case is doing with Rise of the rest is there’s all these ecosystems that are starting to grow up and there can be great entrepreneurs anywhere. Right. Great entrepreneurs don’t want to guarantee. They just want an opportunity. Right. So how do we find those and give them an opportunity? And so, you know, Steve Case made this bet before covid hit. And I think Ovid’s only accelerated that to say, yeah, you can talk about the Austins and you can talk about the boulders. But what you’re starting to see is what’s happening in Cincinnati and Miami and Minneapolis and hopefully Wichita as well, that we can start to think of ourselves as a place where we’re giving people new opportunities and those new opportunities. Without a cap on them in terms of what they want to grow and what they want to build, but with that comes the need for capital, right? Need for community. You have to have the people and the right skill sets around you and also just the knowledge sets that you’re going to need to bring in there because problems become more complex as we break into new areas. But listen, I grew up in Nebraska and it used to be it just jumped on your tractor and now the tractor drives itself. Right now, the soil is monitoring itself. And now we’re using next generation technology to fertilize it and keep track of it and measure it. And so technology and breakthroughs are happening everywhere. And we believe as part of it is we want to be part of that. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Silicon Valley, if you’re in Israel or if you’re in Cincinnati. You know, we want to back those best entrepreneurs and learn from them, be a true partner.

William Norvell: Now, that’s great. And did you give us a sense and I don’t know, you know, do you have a sense for our investments in those areas? I’m trying to play the cynic here. Right. You know, I read a report this morning that, yes. You know, tech hubs are growing, of course. But if you look at the data from last year, you know, the venture capital dollars in San Francisco still outstrip L.A., New York, Seattle, Portland, Austin combined. Right. That’s just a data point, is it today? Right. That’s a balance sheet metric. But I’m interested in what you’re seeing out there in the field as you invest and sort of come alongside rise of the rest. I mean, is it working? You know, are we in inning three and we’re, you know, five innings away or they’re still unknowns out there about whether it’s going to work? Or is it just exactly what you said about San Francisco right now? We just got to keep building layer after layer and it’s clearly working.

Jason Illian: Yeah, I mean, listen, there’s not one answer. That’s a broad brush that works in every community. It’s working in some places better than others, and some are more mature than others. And so at the end of the day, if you go to Austin now versus Austin 10 years ago, it’s working significantly better. Right. Wichita still has some work to do, right? We’re not as far along. But what I would say is what covid really did is kind of lead just five years into the future, 10 years into the future, and you’re starting to see even just the prices and cost of living like living where you live versus living where I live, you know, where your kids can go to school. The other amenities and things that you want to have covered has taught us we can work remote. And so what’s happening is it’s causing people to spread out. And you’re going to have these events where there’s a black swan event or just technology accelerating that creates these communities around. And, you know, people sometimes forget that MailChimp, which is one of the largest privately held tech companies, is in Atlanta. It’s not in the Bay Area. Right. A few of our big investments have happened in Denver because people have said, hey, we’re going to leave the Bay Area, but we want to be in Denver. And I just think there’s great people everywhere. Now, it may not have the concentration of Silicon Valley yet, but that’s not to be expected overnight. We got to continue to build on it. And Chicago’s a good example. You get something like Groupon that’s successful and those founders spread out and create more companies and they invest in other great entrepreneurs and that ecosystem continues to build.

Henry Kaestner: Tell us about Israel. So you’ve got a guy on the ground in Israel. I’ve been to Haifa before. I seen some of the dynamism there listening to this podcast. Are you going to be interested in just what happens in a kind of a special geography that’s politically charged? It’s got a spiritual foundation, but there is something special about what’s going on in Israel. Maybe you can comment on that a little bit.

Jason Illian: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. Israel is a leader in technology, in building platforms. And part of this comes because everybody’s trained in the military over there. Everybody has to be trained and a lot of them have technology backgrounds that they’ve actually been trained in. And I also think you’re willing to take risk goes up when you live, you know, fifty miles from somebody willing to shoot a rocket at you at any time. Right. So you live in an environment that you realize that taking risk building a tech company is not as risky as getting shot by a rocket or by somebody that doesn’t have the same belief system as you do. And so what Israel is built is this really robust ecosystem of great technical entrepreneurs. And they’re coming up with all sorts of great technologies. And you can talk about companies like Mobileye which have help helping autonomous driving. But even our first investment as a company called Tech and we invested over one hundred million dollars in this company, does noninvasive focus ultrasound on people that have essential tremors or Parkinson’s? So the first time I saw this, a gentleman was shaking so bad that he couldn’t write his own name or hold a cup of coffee. So he lays in an ultrasound machine, special helmet, and it uses ultrasound waves to ablate the part of the brain that deals with the shakes. He stands up two and a half hours later in the shakes are gone and it looks like magic, noninvasive, like no cutting the skull open, no peeling your head back. This is hey, what if we use the ultra? Sound waves, and we pinpointed them at a place that we could kill whatever is causing that to happen. We’ll take the next step. What if we can use that for cancer? What if we could use that for blood clots? What if we could use it for all sorts of other things? This is an Israeli company, right? So our thought is like, listen, once again, there’s great entrepreneurs all over the place. How do we help connect to them, help you, that connective tissue? Because we’re in different countries and a big part of our investing mandate is not that we can just deploy capital. I think there’s a lot of really smart investors that do that. But how can we come alongside them as a partner? How can we help them accelerate the growth of their platform and those entrepreneurs that want to do well by doing good. And they need a real partner to do that. That has capital. You know, we may be a good place for them.

Henry Kaestner: So as you talk through this and you talk about technologies that can and maybe I shouldn’t get overly biblical about this, you know, it’s in the Holy Land, Jesus was healing people that had leprosy and others. And there’s kind of a two thousand years on, you know, walking with tremors and you walk out without it. It’s almost miraculous and almost feels that is you’re in this space. And we all have found ourselves kind of in this world of these disruptive technologies and investing in them, that if you have a propensity towards a God complex, you get involved in inventing technologies like that or and financing technologies. You know, there’s a temptation to kind of feel like, you know, Alec Baldwin in the movie Malice, which talks about, you know, you want to know if I’ve got a God complex. Well, who is the person saving your life at 12, 30 am an emergency or operating room for when you talk about the technology you just talked about? I think about Kalikow, which is this initiative to end aging. Right. That’s the final frontier for us to become godlike, immortal. And yet you’re talking to people, entrepreneurs and technologists every day that see that aging might end. Right. How does your faith come to bear in all of that?

Jason Illian: Yeah, I think you’re asking a really important question that we haven’t asked ourselves enough in the technology space is we often ask what we can do and we don’t ask why or what are our boundaries are on this like. So why do we want to stop aging, right? Or why do we want to change the financial system and what are the repercussions? So we’re seeing the repercussions of social media right now. We wanted a better way to communicate. Now, what we’ve got is we have partizan division. We have people being blocked because of this. We have some large tech conglomerates that are starting to tell you what you can and can’t say. Right. So, you know, I’m not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but somewhere between nineteen eighty four and brave new world things are happening. Right. And we see this in China with the social credit system. What happens when all of a sudden technology can become used to monitor everything you do? So it’s very important that we’re investing in those entrepreneurs that one have a sense of humility, that they’re not leaning towards this God complex of taking over the world, but they want to do well and they know their limitations. Right. I think it’s very important that we are investing in entrepreneurs that know their limitations and are also putting other great entrepreneurs and investors beside them. Right. Scripture says plans fail for lack of a council, but with many advisors they succeed. So how do we put people around ourselves, just like we should do in our own personal lives, to have people point out our blind spots left to my own? I’m going to step into the ditch where the ditch is on the right or left hand side of the road. I’m going to hit one of the ditches unless I have brothers, advisors, counselors, mentors helping remind me of my limitations in the team that we put in place. And so we want to invest in those entrepreneurs. Right? We certainly want to invest in those entrepreneurs that know their own limitations, build great teams around them, but also have what I call cognitive flexibility, ability to take different mental models and know when and where to apply them, because there are new challenges that are coming up in our world and we need to know how to approach them as believers and have a stance on those. Right. A lot of people say we got to defend the faith. The word defend doesn’t resonate well with me because you don’t need to defend a lion. You just need to unchain it and let it defend itself. So we just need to be bold in our stances and we need to be honest. We need to be intellectually faithful to know what we believe and how to apply that. And we need to give other believers by standing up the courage to stand up and say what they believe as well. And I think that as people that invest in technology in the future, in these next new platforms, if you are to invest the next Facebook or Twitter or go beyond communication platforms to whatever. Her new medical technology. We have a responsibility beyond just the shareholder responsibility to make money, to know why we’re doing this and how this benefits society in a positive way that ultimately points to our creator and savior.

Henry Kaestner: You’re out there, you’re talking to some of the most exciting entrepreneurs in the world. Do you ever get a chance to share your story? You know, everybody, whether they’re in Israel or Silicon Valley or Wichita, has a world view that kind of directs them towards what they’re doing. And I’m wondering if any of those folks that are developing some of this disruptive technology. I know some to be clear. I did. I’m an investor, so I know some, but maybe not at the scale that you’re looking at. Do you see any that are motivated by their Christian faith? You see that any that are open to that, any that are as they go about inventing, they’re trying to figure out why they’re doing it and what’s the bigger metanarrative here? I don’t want to overly spiritualized what you do every day, but I am curious about these personal relationships that you end up developing with some really, really interesting people about what are they thinking and does that ever give you an opportunity to kind of be in a relationship with people and maybe not the same way that so deliberately countercultural as it was for you on The Bachelorette, but what does that look like?

Jason Illian: Yeah, I think sometimes we over Spiritualized sharing our faith. I mean, really what that means is building relationships and valuing the people that are in your life. Right. And as you value people, as you listen to their story, they want to know your story as well. And so I take every opportunity or I attempt to take every opportunity with any great entrepreneur to ask what they’re building, why they built it, like, what are your challenges and tell me about your family. And what happens is we build this personal relationship and then it becomes a conversation right here. I want to know what you believe. Tell me what you believe. Give me your world view. How are you seeing this world? And then can I share my world view, too? Because I would love for you to understand how I look at the world. In my world, view is a biblical world view. Now, I’m very fortunate because here at Koch, Koch are not necessarily a Christian entity, but they have what we call market based management mbm in the market based management. A lot of the philosophies around that align very well with biblical framework. Right. And so it gives me that opportunity to engage people where they are. And when you engage people and you share your story with them and they show you, you start to understand the type of people you want to do business with and live your life with. And as you know, many of these companies take years and years and years to build. And we’re going to be sitting on the boards and we’re going to be sending Christmas cards to each other and we’re going to have dinners together. You want to work with people you like, trust and respect. And that doesn’t mean they’re going to share the same Christian faith with me every time. And that’s OK, right? It’s an opportunity to build a relationship with them. But I will say there are a lot more believers in the trenches that are trying to make a difference for the kingdom than you know, and it’s an opportunity to encourage them when you run into them. And so it’s either an opportunity to share, encourage, but no matter what, it’s an opportunity to build a relationship and then see what God has with it. Things don’t always change overnight. It may be 10, 15 years down the road when somebody comes back and says, I remember this conversation I had with you, and those are wonderful conversations to have. Or when an entrepreneur calls you and said, I’m having a tough time with my wife, I’d love for you to get some feedback. Great. I’d love to share. Matthew, 18 conflict resolution with you. Let me tell you what works in my family and let me tell you all the ways it’s gone wrong. When I approached my wife like this and just to be honest, right. Believers make all the same mistakes that nonbelievers do. We just believing there’s grace for that and that, you know, God’s given us a path to that redemption and how we should interact with others.

Henry Kaestner: Now, it’s beautiful. And, you know, for our listeners, there are a great number of men and women really driven by their faith that are leaning into technology in this time. And of course, we both know the Anthony Tan story. Grab and Mark, seriously, CloudFactory. And there are many, many, many more that’s really encouraging.

William Norvell: Absolutely. And yeah, love sort of some of the concepts you talked about. I think from a code perspective, which we talked about a little bit, I read good profit years ago. I think a lot of kind of what you’re talking about is sort of espoused in there and just some incredible wisdom on how to treat people well and build transactions and deals that honor both parties and of course, a lot of their management, the MBM process you took as well. So it’s a good read for sure. If anybody finds himself needing to read about one of the largest private organizations in the world and how they become who they are.

Jason Illian: Yeah, and I think one really interesting thing is, you know, we’re told that a tree is recognized by its fruit. So I can tell you what kind of tree it is by the fruit that it’s going to show. And Charles Koch is eighty five years old. And he still is as active as he was when he was 40. Right. He is still using his opportunity and his platform to make people’s lives better. And he still comes to the office. He still gives back tremendously to things like criminal justice reform and, you know, next generation education. And I can go down the list of like 15 things that he is spearheading because he’s not sitting on a beach somewhere. Right. He did not make a ton of money and say, I’m checking out. He’s like, I have this opportunity to give back. And those are the type of men I want to work for. I want to work for those that are going to the grave, trying to help make other people’s lives better. And I feel very blessed and fortunate to do that.

William Norvell: Women and men. And as we come to closure, this section of the podcast, we always love to invite our guests to share with our listeners where God has them in scripture these days. And that could be something you read this morning. It could be something you’ve been meditating on for a season, but just maybe a story or a verse or whatever God has brought to the forefront of your life through his word.

Jason Illian: You know, I think all of us, anybody listening to the podcast and ourselves included, 12 months ago or so, we did not know we were going to be hit by something like covid, which I think’s changed all of our lives in various ways. On top of that, we went through one of the toughest election cycles that I can ever remember. I feel like we have a country that feels very divided. We have racial tensions. We have all sorts of challenges that as believers and as the church, we need to step up and lead through. Right. And so a lot of where God has been moving on my heart are just things like Joshua five, right. When Joshua is sitting there in the Angel of the Lord appears to him and he says, hey, which side are you here for? Right. Thinking like if you’re with me, we’re said, if you’re for our enemies, we’re in trouble. And the angel replies, Neither. I’m here for the Army of the Lord, saying, I’m here on behalf of God. I’m not taking sides. I’m coming to take over. Right. I’m coming to take over. So that’s when he bowed down and realizes my first thing is to worship God. Right. My first things to be at his feet. And that’s reflected again in the second chronicles where, you know, Solomon could have asked for anything and he could have asked for anything to you could ask for wisdom. He could have asked for riches. He could ask for anything. And what he really asked for is, God, give me wisdom to lead your people. How great is your people? And I need the wisdom discernment to lead them well. And because of that, everything else was a symptom of that primary ask because he desired in his heart to lead God’s people well. And that’s the same desire I want to have. I just want to have this desire to lead God’s people well, not that I’m leaving a legacy of money or how many deals that I’ve done or how successful. Hopefully those will be great symptoms because I lived my life appropriately. And it comes back to just the Sermon on the Mount of where you said, you know, blessed are the meek. Right? So I’m doing a Bible study with my kids every night. So we do a devotional every night together. And so we have to read over something again that you read over a thousand times. It makes you stop and reflect upon it. And we’re so blessed are the meek for they inherit the earth. I ask my kids, what is meek mean? And then I thought to myself, I don’t know if I know it. Right. And as we started talking about this and looking it up and what really it is, it’s power under control. It’s power under control. Right. And what we need is we need men and women that are willing to worship and recognize God is who he is. And Joshua to ask for wisdom, to lead God’s people well and then be meek. We don’t need to be shouting from the rooftops. We don’t need to be screaming on social media. We just need to know what we believe into Henry’s point early to build relationships with those people. Right. The outcome is going to be based on how the Lord wants that. I’m not in charge of the outcome any more than I was in charge of winning every TCU football game. I had a role to play. And if I caught passes and made blocks and hopefully at the end of the game, the score was in my favor. But when it wasn’t in my favor, then I got to walk away with something to learn. And in my house, my kids learned through the sports that they’re in. We either win or we learn those are our options. And so every day, just meditating on those scriptures, bringing them to the office, knowing that I’m going to have a dozen amazing potential entrepreneurs and people I get to interact with, how can I help make their lives better and value them so that they will go out there and do that to others and that virtuous cycle will continue to replicate itself. And if it does, I happen to believe lives will be changed. We’ll make money doing it right. New technologies will make this world a better place and overly hopefully it will bring us all together and make us realize that these differences that we’re fighting about, some of them are completely perceived and the other ones aren’t as wide. We think they are we just need to be able to sit at the table and have a civil discourse on most of them, Amen, Amen, that’s one of my favorite words.

I love it. I love Mique. So glad you brought that in. And also, I totally empathize with reading the exact same stories over and over. My three year old is currently obsessed with Nayman. It’s his favorite character. So we read about Sickness Amen and Healed Neyman. That’s a great story over and over and over again. And it is. It made me read it again like multiple times and it’s amazing.

So my son just asked on this exact story because I think name is a perfect example that he wanted to do something miraculous. He wanted to do something big in his simple thing was like, hey, just washing the Jordan is like, wait, I don’t want to do that. I wanna do something big in your name. He’s like, just be faithful where you are. And that’s that’s what I tell my kids is like, just be faithful where you are. And when I tell them that I’m always looking in the mirror being like, am I being faithful or I am, I’m just telling my kids this, but I got to live it out. And so what you guys are doing and how you’re continuing to have this impact through podcasts and your network and stuff is tremendous. And so thank you for what you do. And I’ll certainly be praying for all that you do. Thanks for. Thank you, brother.

It’s great being with you. Yeah, likewise, guys.

Ben Chelf: It’s about the heart posture of the investor, it is about recognizing that God is constantly working on us, teaching us things, sanctifying us to use the big term.

And honestly, that’s all that’s required, paying attention to the way that the Lord is directing, being really intentional about looking for what God wants to teach you in any given moment, the way he wants to apply the gifts and talents and resources that he’s given to you, all the product on the shelf, all the different options. Look, there are tons and tons of ways, both, quote unquote, faith driven and not to deploy capital. And God can use all of it. And God does use all of it.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, I’m here with my partner and co-host, Luke Roth. Luke, good morning. Good morning. Good to be here, Luke in from our virtual studio and Sweet and Spy and Nash, Vegas and Nashville.

Luke Roush: How does it feel to be in that it’s our new home? It’s a cool thing. Everybody’s doing it. Come on out. Water’s warm. That’s right, everybody.

Ben Chelf: Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Come on. San Francisco Bay Area. There’s hope. There is.

Henry Kaestner: Yes, there is. Ben isn’t there? And Ben is our special guest. Ben is with us in San Francisco. As you may have just gathered and I am in the South Bay down in Los Gatos. And we are going to be talking and Ben, about a whole bunch of different things today. There’s just a myriad of things we talk about. We can talk about entrepreneurship. And I think we well, a bit we’ll talk about investing. He’s a partner Elementum partners. He’s also a venture partner. I think that’s your official title. Maybe a Praxis talk about Praxis a lot because they’re really, really good at what they do as they work with us on thinking about the redemptive frame of entrepreneurship and investing. And our hope is that during today that you get a sense of, again, just a broader sense, a more textured sense, maybe, if you will, of the way the guy is working in the marketplace out here in Silicon Valley, but through investments and that you might leave your time with us today, encouraged and that you might feel that much more clarity about how you might store the wealth and the resources that God has entrusted you with and how you might participate in the work that he’s doing the world, how your interactions with entrepreneurs might be advanced and richer for you and for the entrepreneur, and that you’ll feel closer to God. That’s our hope. That’s our hope with every episode. And then it’s great to have you. We like to get a biographical sketch of every one of our guests. Who are you? Where do you come from? Why do you like baseball so much? Anything is fair game. So bring us right through, including your entrepreneurial career, including snowboarding and snowboarding. A long time. I’m asking you about it. OK, so who are you? Where do you come from? Please weave your faith. Of course, because it’s the faith driven investor. Weave your faith into that too. You grew up in a Christian house.

Ben Chelf: Yeah, well, you asked about baseball. I guess we’ll start there. That’s the most important thing, I guess. I grew up in Indiana. How did I get into baseball? It started in first grade when I’d come home. There were really only four channels on the TV at home, the major networks and WGAN, which is Chicago’s local station, where they played the Cubs games and White Sox games and whatnot. And so I come home from school. And because Wrigley Field didn’t have lights at the time, all the games are played during the day, come home from school, flip on the TV, there would be WGAN and the Cubs would be playing. And I got used to watching the Cubs after school every day. And in fact, they just happened to be on a home stretch.

And so there were a number of days in a row where was true. And then I remember the first day I come home and I flipped on the TV after school and the Cubs were playing and I was really distraught. And I asked my dad, like, where’s the Cubs game? And that’s when he taught me about baseball schedules and the fact that they travel around. And that’s kind of how I got into baseball from a very young age. My mom and dad met in seminary. And so that gives you a bit of window into the church environment at home. Tons of church in home, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, the whole nine yards. But like a lot of people, my own faith had ebbs and flows throughout, you know, definitely grew up in the church, learned a ton about God and a ton about Jesus. But when I went to college. Faith kind of took a backseat, didn’t rediscover it until graduate school. And then kind of from there, my faith matured as I became an adult, kind of interweaving the life stuff. I did come out to California for college. I like to joke that I’m a Silicon Valley cliche in every way, except for that I have faith in God. You know, I went to Stanford, I dropped out of Stanford, I started a software company. I started another company. I became a venture capitalist. I mean, I don’t know how you draw it up any differently as cliche as it comes out here, but yeah. So that’s a little bit of the personal track in the faith track.

Henry Kaestner: So tell us about that software company. You know, we also have a sister podcast for those of you don’t know, called the Faith Driven Entrepreneur talk to us about that software company dropping out of Stanford. It must have been a pretty good opportunity.

Ben Chelf: Yeah. So I was working on some new technology in the research lab there that would analyze software, looking for problems, quality problems, security problems and really, really tough stuff to find stuff that’s difficult to find in Cuba and whatnot. So oftentimes problems that would manifest themselves out in the field. And we started getting a lot of inbound requests from folks who wanted to use this technology. So we smelled the market opportunity and we decided to start a company based on that. And we productize that technology. We started selling it in the market. We grew that business to about three, four hundred fifty people before it was acquired in twenty fourteen.

Luke Roush: How many partners did you have when you got started?

Ben Chelf: And yeah, there were four of us in graduate school together and we kind of all jumped out of school over that first year to start the thing full time. And then of course our professor was involved. So we had technically five co-founders. It was a really robust group of co-founders which allowed us to really grow the business. In a cash flow positive way, actually, before even raising funds, so we bootstrapped the thing for five years before doing just a single round of financing anything, here’s the big pithy kind of cliche type of open ended question.

Henry Kaestner: Anything about God that you learned through your process of running a company and growing a company, exiting a company?

Ben Chelf: That’s just such a big question. It’s hard to come up with an answer to that question. But Faith Driven Entrepreneur.

Henry Kaestner: So let’s start with us. So you’ve got a bunch of partners. Yeah. And you’re out there. Any of them share your faith?

Ben Chelf: Yes. One of them in my first company did.

Henry Kaestner: Was prayer a part of what you did? Was your faith ever brought in a question? Did you sense that there’s a holy ambition of what you’re doing?

Ben Chelf: Yeah. So I’ll kind of describe a company one and company to the second company was in the entertainment industry and we were developing software and other tools for doing story development in a new way. And I would say with the first company, I was still in that mindset of sacred secular divide and plugged in a church service in junior high in ministry. Did my Bible study all the things that you would do? But at work there wasn’t much talk about that. And I felt like we should do a good job at work. I should build this business. Your question about what did you learn about God? It was so clear that God was just opening doors and providing opportunities. But what was interesting is as I got more wrapped up in that business and my identity was as Silicon Valley co-founder or founder or tech startup founder, from a character standpoint, I started putting God making God smaller and smaller. And it was more about me and me and my company and us and much to my own detriment, and took years to kind of realize that because it started small and then it kind of creeps up and creeps up. So while I think the work we were doing was good work for other people who were writing software, and there was certainly a care for those people and wanting to make their lives better that I could see God in and God blessing, I allowed my they didn’t get too wrapped up in that one. And so coming out of that experience and then thinking about what to do next and how to do it, I did kind of have a real come to Jesus moment for lack of a better way of putting it and saying, all right, Lord, I want to do better this next time or from an ongoing standpoint. And so how can I kind of keep the priorities straight? And so we built the second business a little bit different way and kind of made sure that from an identity standpoint, I didn’t have everything in me kind of wrapped up in that. And I tried to keep my identity where it was supposed to be.

Luke Roush: And how much gap between kind of company one and company two to one or more of your co-founders come over to Company two with you, or was that just a totally Denovo experience?

Ben Chelf: Yeah, totally start over from scratch and back, basically, because it was in the entertainment industry, I kind of left Silicon Valley. We built the business here, but it was much more of a Hollywood type of thing than it was a Silicon Valley type of thing. So we had different network of people, different co-founders. And it was about nine months from when I left, when I started having the inkling for the next company. And then another six months after that, when I kind of had the cool founding team and we got incorporated and off to the races.

Henry Kaestner: So when you talk about the second company being a little less about the secular spiritual divide and a little bit less like a smaller guy, just for fun, that a little bit. Tell me a little bit more about what that look like, and especially now as you work with Faith driven entrepreneurs through your work at Praxis, what does it look like to be more intentional about weaving your faith in.

Ben Chelf: Yeah, so I talk to some folks at church about a year ago on the intersection of faith and work or the integrating your faith into your work as I think is a common phrase. And the point I made there and this is you know, this is a bit of a bold statement, but bear with me. I said, look, if you’re trying to integrate your faith into your work, you’ve probably already missed it because it is not about this puzzle that you’re trying to, like, put the pieces together. It’s rather your faith should be so foundational to who you are and what you are and what you’re trying to do, that pretty much everything should flow from that. And that’s obviously an aspiration that Jesus did perfectly and we will never do perfectly. But I think that when we try to just start manipulating things or orchestrating is such a OK, I’m going to pray at this hour, during this day at work, because that’s how I’m integrating my faith into my work. I think we’ve we’ve kind of missed it.

And I’m learning these things through the years as well. I always say when I first started getting really intentional about integrating faith and work, it was a little bit more of that. It was like the Ben-Chelf-integration show as opposed to the Lord fueling everything that I do and giving me the energy and me being rooted in that and just letting the work be the work. And so I think one of my favorite verses is first. Thessalonians, five 17, pray without ceasing. I think it’s just an incredible concise call to the kind of relationships we’re supposed to have with the Lord, and that’s obviously not to me. We’re just on our knees talking to God 24/7, but rather the spirit of that continual communion that he is always present in every thought and everything we say and everything we do.

Luke Roush: So when you now as an investor at Omentum, when you work with portfolio companies, how do you counsel? What I hear you saying is that it’s not so much prescriptive sort of here is this tactic or that tactic, but it’s more descriptive of kind of where the heart posture and posture kind of indwelling of the Holy Spirit in somebody’s life. How do you counsel one of your business leaders in a direction that isn’t sort of some kind of a forced integration or both on spiritual integration, but actually kind of dwelling? How do you counsel them?

Ben Chelf: Yeah, good question. One of the things that I notice is that so much of the entrepreneurial journey, I mean, is the life journey is kind of about self-discovery. Entrepreneurs are constantly learning about their businesses, about market share, but about themselves in the process. And, you know, one of our founders, Christian Guy, was exposed to Praxis, became a Praxis fellow. And what it did is he got to see other Christians working out their faith in their businesses and their lives. And he kind of came back with this new excitement about faith that he hadn’t had previously and just could see how, you know, there could be a more holistic view of faith as it pertains to life and work and whatnot. And I simply told him, pay attention to that, pay attention to what you see in others and what you see, like in the energy that you have. You know, this brings to you to be considering, you know, the way or your faith can play out. And so I think a lot of it, in terms of counseling, to answer your question more directly, is pay attention to the work that God is doing in you and work on that more than anything else.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s some great counsel, particularly for those listeners that are angel investors working with entrepreneurs. I want to shift gears just a little bit and focus on a faith driven investor ministry a bit. And I want to turn back the clock to the beginning of faith driven investor. And there’s this working guy that maybe twenty five or thirty of us we’re all working on together, which is the sense of, well, you know, there’s probably a community out there of Christ followers that are in the investment world and venture capital and private equity. And what’s it look like? We come together to encourage each other to share best practices. And if we can do that, what’s a mission and a vision? What are the problems we’re trying to solve? Where are the things that we’re for? And in that, one of our hypotheses was that there wasn’t a lot of selection that at times we described the movement like walking into a Russian grocery store in the 1980s, and it’s not really a lot of product on the shelves. And what does it look like to get out there and to encourage the formation of other funds that are in real estate and private equity and public equity, domestic and overseas? And actually, interestingly, over the course of last 18 to 24 months, we found dozens and dozens of funds, some that already existed, a whole bunch that are new, always spiritual integration. But the problem that we really saw was that there wasn’t a lot of selection on the shelves. And I’ll never forget you looking at that and saying, nope, that’s not the problem. That’s not the problem. What do you mean it’s not the problem? You know, the people want to be intentional about how they store their capital and they want to be able to find funds that they’re going to be able to see some sort of chaplaincy or some sort of faith driven employee resource group kind of work into the fabric like, no, that’s not it. The formation, the foundation of the movement needs to be about something else. What was that something else?

Ben Chelf: It’s about the heart posture of the investor. It is about recognizing that God is constantly working on us, teaching us things, sanctifying us to use the big term.

And honestly, that’s all that’s required, paying attention to the way that the Lord is directing, being really intentional about looking for what God wants to teach you in any given moment, the way he wants to apply the gifts and talents and resources that he’s given to you, all the product on the shelf, all the different options. Look, there are tons and tons of ways, both, quote unquote, faith driven and not to deploy capital. And God can use all of it and God does use all of it.

And so I think if we just had Christians who are just 100 percent sold out to all right, Lord, I want my balance sheet to look exactly like you want it to look. I want my pencil to look exactly like you want it to look. I want my cash flow to look exactly like you want it to look. And I’m willing to sacrifice I’m willing to lay it all out there for you to teach me things and. Reallocate things according to what you need to teach me in any given moment, whether that be very safe positions like cash or more speculative things or more impact things, you know, he can lead us. And I think to the Lord, these are just the tools he uses to grow us closer to him and to love us, because that’s the bottom line. It’s about that relationship with him, his love for us and our response and love to him.

Luke Roush: Maybe share just a little bit about from your personal story. I mean, I think one thing that you and I have talked about previously is a loan that you made to a ministry in San Francisco, just kind of responding to the holy Crompton’s call, Holy Spirit’s prompting on your life, maybe shared just for a little bit on that.

Ben Chelf: Yeah, yeah. I want to keep the details vague enough for public distribution. Sure, sure. Sure.

But look, they’re going to be times where you take a look at a circumstance and there’s a clear need. And in this case, you know, it was an organization who, due to the circumstance, there was a threat to their real estate situation. Right. And they were renting before. And suddenly that was not going to be an option. They were going to get evicted unless they were able to purchase the property. And these things happened in this particular case, it happened very quickly because there was a family inheritance involved and there was another buyer lined up and so on.

And this was one of those cases where, you know, if you looked at it on paper and we talked to our quote unquote financial advisors, we talked to our financial advisors about it, and they said, now this is this is a little bit beyond the pale of what would be responsible just in terms of the size of the loan relative to our balance sheet. And but, you know, again, using the gifts that God had given me, I felt like I could do at least a cursory analysis of the business to determine if it was a reasonable loan. I’m not a banker. I don’t know how to underwrite loans technically. But, you know, I could do a little bit of math and do my own guess as to is this a fundable thing in the medium term if they had more time.

And so I sat down with the people of the organization and I looked at their books and I did the best I could. And my wife and I, we prayed about it and we just felt like God said, hey, you can help here, so help. And we structured a deal that, again, it was it was extra risk. Right. It was a risk that we didn’t need to take from a purely portfolio management standpoint. But we could help. And, you know, in this case, it was a happy ending. Right? We made them the kind of bridge loan they bought the building within. I think it was three or four months. They had a bank do a real mortgage. And so we were paid back and it was then we could just use that capital for something else. But yeah, I think as an example of just being open to things that go a little bit beyond the norms in terms of asset allocation. And honestly, we had to be prepared for it to end badly where either that capital got locked up or we ended up having to foreclose. I mean, there was all sorts of ways it could have gone wrong, but maybe a little bit on that, which is, I think in my own observations, is we can play things pretty safe where we can isolate ourselves from the mess.

That’s one temptation that wealth can afford, is ability to isolate ourselves and not take risk and not get in the messy details of relationship and life. And the Lord just wants us to be in community. He wants us to love and serve other people. And guess what? That’s messy. I guess there’s there’s risk in that. And so if you use your wealth to eliminate all risk, chances are you might not be all the way putting yourself into these relationships and a sacrificial mindset.

Luke Roush: Yes. What you’re speaking to just in that example, but also in what you were sharing earlier, is this idea of the entwining. The Holy Spirit in the context of business oftentimes needs to be unscripted. You know, we sometimes have a bunch of debate within our partnership and with others externally that are like, hey, you know, what are the programmatic elements that every one of your portfolio companies does to manifest scripture in the context of business operations? And we wrestle with that internally. We get pushed on it in some cases appropriately, externally, to understand what the KPIs are across the portfolio. But how do you think through just on the one hand, when it’s unscripted, it can feel mushy, it can feel kind of situational, can feel even like convenience. That’s really convenient, that it’s different for every company. But maybe just speak to how you’ve navigated that an element of.

Ben Chelf: Yeah, that’s a really hard one, and I’m lucky enough, the my partner is that element and we share the same faith. And so there’s a a trust element to each of our own discernment with respect to that, where our goal is to always use the intellectual capabilities, the rigor, the data, all the stuff that God has given us to make decisions, to use all of that and kind of intention with that sometimes is the kind of prompting of the Holy Spirit, the just like what is our gut telling us how we should operate from a faith perspective, we’ve seen it work a couple of ways where we’ll make an investment that we think has certain upside from a data standpoint. But it might be, say, 70 percent of what we would normally like to see. Right. But then there’s a strong spiritual component to it. Or we might make a decision to, in some sense, be a really good actor in an investing scenario and follow on rounds happen. And that’s not necessarily the best move financially, but it is the right thing to do. And what’s been interesting, and I’ve been at this with elements and for just over five years now is almost without fail when we feel like we’re quote on quote sacrificing or when we feel like we’re maybe conceding something, it turns out we’re actually not.

It turns out that ended up being the more financially savvy thing to do or the better upside thing to do. And I don’t know if that’s God blessing the decision or, you know, a lot of times just these ideas of love. Your neighbor work out to be really good business practices to.

Henry Kaestner: So, Ben, you’ve been an entrepreneur, you’re an investor, you’ve been involved with Praxis. You have an opportunity being where you live to just kind of reflect on what’s going on in the world. And because you’ve been really good at challenging us, as we have looked to with others, grow the movement. What are some of your reflections about what is broken and what might need to be redeemed about the investment, space and world? What would you like to see happen over the next five or 10 years? As you say, this is a healthier ecosystem, but maybe there’s too much in that because it maybe it’s the fact that maybe the ecosystem in the way that investors work with entrepreneurs isn’t broken or that it’s not healthy now. So maybe you think it is. But just what are your reflections on where you’d like to see the industry go and how people think about investing? Yeah. Is it broken? Is it not broken? What do you think?

Ben Chelf: There are a lot of broken things, that’s for sure. I think, honestly, one of the biggest ways that it’s broken is both investors and entrepreneurs are not brutally honest with themselves. I think having been an entrepreneur a couple of times, there’s a certain amount of optimism that you have to have. There’s this like almost blindness to reality, you have to say. Right. And that’s fine and good. Right.

That’s that’s why stuff gets started. Otherwise, nothing would ever get started. That being said, I think there are a lot of companies that just kind of meander along for and should just be cut off, should be done.

But for lack of on the part of both entrepreneur and investor, just being really honest about the opportunity and not being afraid of saying, hey, we tried, we could swing and we missed. They’re going to be other at bats. But in this one we took a swing and we missed. I think that’s one of the big things that’s broken. I think a lot of times in the faith driven world especially, we can be a little bit conflict avoidant. We can be afraid of that conversation because it might be seen as not the Christian thing to do, to just cut something off, especially if there’s a maybe an investor has a perspective. That’s right. That the entrepreneur doesn’t and says that or the other way around or the entrepreneur or the investors really want the entrepreneur to keep trying and giving, potentially providing more funding. And the entrepreneur knows it’s like, well, I guess I could, but it’s really just not going to work. I think that’s the biggest thing that I would love to see. Just more conversation about more honest rigor on both sides to try to address more specifically to the investor. I think the brutal honesty for investors is to just truly recognize where they have expertize to deploy capital and where they don’t. And that heart is great. But I did some angel investing before becoming a C, and there’s a big difference between investing as a hobby and investing as a profession. And, hey, look, it’s great to have hobbies and it can bust a lot of people with your hobbies. And we’ll talk about snowboarding in a minute. But yeah, I think to really be honest, OK, I invest because it’s a hobby. I have these objectives. And to recognize that there can be some danger as someone who deploys capital as a hobby for the companies you’re investing in. So those are some of the things that come to mind.

Luke Roush: So maybe just a couple of like with our name and. Names, specific examples where you feel like you’ve done a good job to speak the truth in love, right, because there’s a relationship, particularly if there’s a lot of faith between an investor and a company. Right. There’s a desire to kind of love them. Well, even when you’re telling them something that they don’t want to hear, any specific examples from your own experience, maybe just encourages with.

Ben Chelf: Yeah, look, we ended up kind of doing an asset sale of my second company, which from a financial standpoint wasn’t a home run that everybody was hoping for. And I think that’s an example where not to toot my own horn, but I think we did that well. We tried a number of different things, always in conversation with the investors. When my co-founder and I when we decided to wrap it up, it was a mutual decision between the two of us. Obviously, the staff was very sad. It was a very hard couple of months to do all of that and to end it as well as we could end. And then in the conversations with the investors, you know, obviously we’ve been keeping them appraised of everything through the years. And, you know, one of the key angel investors, when I asked him about it as we were wrapping up, after I kind of told him and look, I think it’s time to call it, he said, Ben, you tried everything you said you were going to try. You worked really hard at this for years and it didn’t work. I’m satisfied. Like you lost money and this wasn’t a Christian guy. So I think that’s kind of what I’m talking about is just that critical eye towards things. And, yeah, it’s not easy to do that. It’s harder, but it seems like the right thing to do.

Henry Kaestner: And as we come to a close here, I do want to hit on just a couple other things. One is the concept of Sabbath. And so, yes, we talked about snowboarding. Talk to us about seasons of Sabbath. Talk to us about what it looks like for somebody to worship their work. And just reflections on work versus Sabbath.

Ben Chelf: Yeah, I’m pro Sabbath. I think you took an incredible Sabbath Sabbath that I wish I was getting somewhere along the way. Yeah. So when I left my first company, I knew that I needed a break and not just I take a couple of weeks in Hawaii and then you’re better.

And so there is a whole confluence of things with respect to my girlfriend now wife that led to actually just having this time where I could be away. But I decided to move to the mountains, so I moved up to Tahoe for a winter. I’d snowboard for exactly one weekend in my entire life before I did this, but I decided I’m going to actually learn to snowboard. I’m a serial hobbyist. I love picking up hobbies and learning new things.

And so that winter, I just decided I’m going to spend three or four months learning to snowboard. I thought that was the primary goal of that time. But in reality, the primary goal of that time was for me to really connect with God in a much deeper and wonderfully holistic way, which was kind of born about I’m going back to honesty, me being really honest with God and airing some things that I had been thinking about for years that I had never really voiced to him or others in terms of my own wrestling with faith and why things were the way they were.

And much of what we’re talking about today in terms of my perspective on investing and faith driven investing and why it’s a hard posture thing was born out of that time in the mountains, going to snowboard every day. And so it’s kind of funny how the Lord uses uses our own wiring, our own desires to kind of catch us in different ways and teach us different things. But yeah, so I spent I guess it was four months living up in the mountains. It was really sabbat I mean I didn’t work at all. I mean unless you count getting up and going to the mountain to snowboard and try to learn. My time was cut short by a couple of weeks when I dislocated my shoulder, taking a jump too high in the park, but otherwise it was an amazing time.

And so my own view on the Sabbath, and that’s a very long winded way of getting to that. But my own view of Sabbath is it is not one of balance. I think people will talk about balance like, OK, I want to have good balance in my life of work and rest. I don’t think that’s quite it.

I think there’s a certain intensity to seasons that require just being all in starting companies is so hard that the idea of, oh, I’m going to have two or three hours every day carved out to rest or I’m going to have a full day, a week carved out to rest. It just might not happen. I might regret saying that on a podcast, but I think looking at the balance of a month or a year or whatnot, and if you can’t identify the places where you stopped to rest, like the Lord stopped to rest after creating the universe, then something’s off. Right. And so I think for me, what that’s look like practically, it’s meant three kids. Everything is a little different now that I have a couple little kids. But pre kids, it was at least one ten day period every year where I had no outside communication, no Internet, nothing like that, completely unplugged for ten days. That was kind of the yearly rhythm for me. And from a daily rhythm standpoint, I have when the season affords. I’m a big fan of Friday night after work to Sunday afternoon after church, kind of that window being the key either unplugged time or you’re really trying to let your mind rest from other things. For me, a lot of it has to do with digital connectivity. If I’m on email or on my phone, that’s not restful. I think that’s another thing for Sabbath is you really have to figure out what is rest. A lot of people will flip on Netflix, myself included, or browse the Internet on your phone or you kind of have these rest ish things that aren’t actually rests.

So when you’re going to take the time to Sabbath, I’d say actually take it, even if it’s just going to be a few hours on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon. But yeah. So those are some thoughts.

Henry Kaestner: So I’m grateful for you. I’m grateful for what you have taught us and our listeners about our posture. It’s become really the anchor bedrock value is we talk about faith driven investing. If you’re a listener to this, it is about heart posture. Faith driven investing is not prescriptive, non presumptuous. There are all sorts of different things you can do across now, all asset classes, all different types of geographies to really have spiritual integration. And even a gospel proclamation is a part of the investments that you make. And yet it’s about our posture. It’s about getting down on your knees, as Ben did with Cam back after an exit and just saying, God, how would you have us use the resources you’ve given us for your glory? What does that look like? And you may come out of that experience. Out of that exercise. Out of that time with God and feel that you are absolutely called to invest in solar farms in the Nevada desert, and that is equally valid, of course, then somebody who wants to invest in entrepreneurs in Africa or Eastern Europe or whatever, fill in the blanks. Ultimately, it’s about an opportunity to participate in the work that God is doing the world and commune with him. And so then you early on were very helpful to get us grounded in that and speak in the movement. So thank you. One of the things the thing rather, that we like to do is we close out every episode is to ask our guests what they’re hearing from God in his word recently. How do you feel that God is speaking to you now? Maybe it’s something this morning, though. It truly doesn’t need to be. It could be over, of course, last week, over the course of last month. But what do you hear God speaking to you now?

Ben Chelf: Yeah, it’s always such a good question. I’m working on kind of a new experience for Bible reading and leave it at that. It’s still kind of under wraps and in development, but I’ve been tinkering a lot. So my desk is full of wires and gadgets and all that stuff about reading scripture. Yeah, well, you can’t tell us about it. Yeah.

Among other things, maybe in like six months when I get a kick started going, I’ll tell you about it or we’re going to look at this seriously.

Yeah, exactly.

So I’m in full on tinkering mode right now, which is fun. And again, like I said, I always have a hobby. I always have something I’m working on inside and I’m using some twenty three is kind of the text that I’m testing with a lot. So I’ve been looking at Psalm 23 every day the last couple of weeks, and in verse three there is a phrase that’s just says he restores my soul and that phrase is just kind of really resonated with me.

That is the promise. If you put your faith in God, that makes all the anxiety and the things we worry about and the world. And what a year, right? This last year with everything that’s gone on. But he restores my soul and it speaks to the brokenness. Right. We only restore things that need to be restored, that have some sort of brokenness. It speaks to the simplicity of it. And so, yeah, I’ve just been relishing those four words this week. He restores my soul.

Henry Kaestner: That is awesome. That’s very good. That’s a very good word. Look, how come we don’t have been on every week?

Ben Chelf: I think we should. I think we should, actually.

Luke Roush: So, Ben, thank you so much for taking time. Grateful for your insight. I always find your perspectives to be helpful and informed and reflective of just a lot of contemplation on your end and listening to what God is telling you. So grateful for your friendship and grateful for your insights. I think our listeners really enjoy it. Thanks, Ben.

Ndidi Nwuneli: You know, seeing the face of Africa, the hungry child makes me angry and I believe we can change that narrative as Christians and as people of faith. And so that propels me. I started LEAP Africa because I was angry about the concept of leadership and the conviction that everybody could be a leader. And leadership is an act, not a position. And but a lot of people in positions of authority were rulers and not leaders. And that we had to change that message was something that propelled me to start an organization called LEAP that is now 18 years old and works in six African countries. So I think that anger stimulates an emotion that propels me to want to do something about it. And I think a lot of us are angry, but we just complain. We point fingers, but we feel powerless about actually effecting change.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. It is great to have you back. I’m here in the virtual office in studio with William Norvell. William, good morning.

William Norvell: It’s good to be here. Good to see you.

Henry Kaestner: And also, we’re going we’re going international today. We’re going all the way to Africa. We’ve gotten to know Ndidi over the course of the last several months as a number of different trusted contacts we have in Africa have pointed us to her and her very, very, very compelling, very widely viewed. Ted.com talk about what it looks like to be a Christian in Africa and boldly and courageously sharing her faith in her personal witness and testimony. And if you’re going on a run or if you’re sitting down to a family dinner and you’re looking to do a family devotional, this is something I highly recommend. It gives you just a really good sense of a woman’s story and her journey and just a glimpse into what it looks like to be a Christ-follower in Africa, in the marketplace. And so it’s a special treat for us to have you with us on the phone and on the podcast. And what I want to be able to do is we get started and hopefully Ndidi you be able to help me to do this as I want to be able to just paint the picture, if you will, the canvas of what Africa looks like. I think that as we start this podcast and someone’s listening in and they’ve got a picture in their mind about what Africa means, and for some people it means game parks and for some other people it means extreme poverty. And some of the people and maybe it means opportunity. It can mean a whole bunch of different things. But if I’m honest, as I thought about Faith Driven investments in Africa, I thought of the fair trade coffee deal. I thought of giving African farmers a fair wage and selling those wares in church. I had not thought of the dynamic and bustling economy and marketplace that have come to understand that Africa really is. And it wasn’t until I went to Kenya probably I guess it was 18 months ago and was just really just captivated by the energy of the marketplace in Nairobi. And I’d been to South Africa many times over the course of the last decade. But I thought that maybe that was just kind of a one off. But I was ashamed to have just had such a small view of the opportunity in the African marketplace. We had sovereigns had been focused on Southeast Asia and some of the other economies, but came to see just a really vibrant market, SAS companies, innovations in technology and medical devices and cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning. And it gave me just a completely different view of Africa. And as I started looking more and more into that, as we wanted to support the work of Faith Driven Entrepreneurs in Africa and Faith Driven Investing, we came to understand that there is a massive continent that most of us have missed. And the world is littered with the stories of people that have lost money in Africa or have been reading books like Dead Aid. And yet people, I think, in my estimation, haven’t really persevered to get the sense of the opportunity in Africa. Ndidi, I want to get your sense on this, but one of the things that’s really captivated me, too, is that during this time of pandemic gives us some time to reflect on economies and markets. That’s what we care about in the Faith Driven Investment world. And we’re looking at a time where seven of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ghana, Rwanda and Kenya are seven of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world. So I think that maybe we’ve missed this a bit. One of the people that connected to Ndidi is Efoso Ojomo, who is the coauthor, along with Clayton Christensen of The Prosperity Paradox, in which he portrays a broader picture of opportunity in Africa, talking about the fact over the next 20 or 30 years, there will be more entrants into the marketplace, into the job market in Africa than India and China combined. So Africa is something altogether different than maybe what we had thought of. And as we think about where God might call us to steward his assets for his glories over the next 20 or 30 years, Africa probably needs to be a place we need to look at. And Ndidi how would you help us to think about the continent in which you live?

Ndidi Nwuneli: Thank you so much. And I’m just so excited of your passion and interest in the African continent. So just starting with the size of the African continent, it has a land area of thirty point three, seven million square kilometers. That means you can put the United States, China, India, Mexico, Peru, France, Spain and counting almost every country in Europe into Africa. And you still have space. So Africa is huge. And most maps that we’ve been conditioned to see from our childhood don’t represent a massive scale. So 80 percent of the world’s arable land is on the African continent. Africa also has one point two billion people and it’s projected to double by 2050. So when you think about the number of consumers on the African continent who wants to eat and have to eat at least three times the. They have to work clothes and shoes. I mean, this is a huge market and 70 percent of the population is under 35. So it’s a vibrant young market with lots of energy, talent and skills. Africa also exports much of the world’s natural resources metals. We all know about cocoa when you have a chocolate bar, 70 percent of the world’s chocolate is sourced in Africa. And we all love chocolate. But it’s not just commodities. It’s chemicals. It’s natural resources. It’s vibrant, vibrant ecosystem around mining. And also, when we think about the African continent, I often ask people, how many billion dollar companies do you think we have in Africa? And, you know, people say one or two. And a McKinsey study revealed that there were over 400 companies making billions of dollars. And so we often don’t realize that we have this many business. In fact, it’s four hundred and thirty eight businesses with over a billion dollars in annual sales. Some of obviously some of them have multiple billion dollars in sales. And this was in 2018. So I’d argue that today we even have a larger number. So the African continent for me is, you know, an emerging continent but has such diversity, 54 countries where we think about these 54 countries, their language, diversity, cultural diversity, but tremendous value. And the great thing about the continent is that it is dynamic. And with the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement, we are also starting to trade among ourselves. Historically, we’ve traded mostly with Europe, Asia and North America. But now there’s a lot more internal trade on the continent, which for me will not only grow the market, but ensure the competitiveness and the growth of the ecosystems and make us obviously less dependent on the rest of the world, which in my own view is actually positive because, you know, when a continent looks internally like Europe has done to improve the competitiveness of your products, your markets, but also see yourself as one entity which allows you to take on the world in a more cohesive manner.

Henry Kaestner: One thing I want to point out now, you and your husband have also gotten to know, know a tremendous amount about agriculture and food. And with 80 percent of the world’s arable land, Africa is not in a great spot to be able to actually to feed itself, but also to help feed the world. Some of the starvation we know about comes from what we hope to be a decreasing amount of strife that comes from military issues. So you know about that. And I want to talk about that to be clear. But there’s also a tremendous amount of innovation around telecom, some of the most creative and innovative companies in the world. And I mean, that’s not just the best in Africa coming out of Kenya, but the best in the world are coming out of Africa because of their advanced mobile communications technology, Safaricom and PASÓ, the ability to transact online and be able to have ewallets and fintech startups and telecommunications. All these things exist in Africa because of Africa’s ability to leapfrog traditional technology infrastructure. And I see that pace accelerating. And I think that that’s probably a new perspective for investors to look at as well. I want to go backwards a little bit and I want to hear about your story. Who are you? Where do you come from? You’ve got such a great story. And I alluded to that before when I was talking about this telecom talk that you’ve got out there. But tell us about who you are, where you grew up, what led you to the work that you’re doing today? And then, of course, what role faith played in all of this?

Ndidi Nwuneli: Yeah. So I am proudly Nigerian. I was born in Enugu forty five years ago. My mom is American and my dad is Nigerian. And they met at Cornell University and moved back to Nigeria in nineteen seventy four. I was born in nineteen seventy five. My parents were intellectuals. They actually did not believe in God actively actually discouraged us from going to church and it was actually university students on the campus where we lived who came to our house to invite us to church, where probably one of the few families that didn’t go to church on Sundays because we grew up in the southern part of Nigeria, southeastern parts where most people are Christian.

And so I turned 10 and my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said I wanted to be baptized. So all five of us, me and my four siblings got baptized on the same day. We actually got to pick out a godparents and we ended up going to church. And it was an amazing experience to get introduced to God as a young age and actually gave my life to Christ officially when I was 13 and, you know, answered the call to become a Christian, and what changed for me when I became a Christian is just a boldness and courage about my faith and a desire to live God’s way and to draw others to Christ. And I remember my classmates teasing me because, you know, during tests they would want to copy from my book. I’m sure many of you remember people saying, what was it? You know, I need the answer to this question. And I actually decided to give my life to Christ, started covering my paper so nobody could actually peek.

William Norvell: And that’s amazing.

Ndidi Nwuneli: It was actually really difficult because my sister had gotten the highest scores in the entire country two years before. And so we had been on strike for six months before this major national exam. And all the teachers pointed to my table and said she’s a local copy from her sister, got the highest scores in the whole country. And I had to cover my book. And I actually got threatened by people saying, you’re covering your book, keep your papers open so we can copy. And that boldness and courage to say, you know what, I’m a Christian, I’m sold out to God and even money, but then God will see me through. And whatever happens with this exam, it’s my name on it.

And so I think that boldness and courage came from really the Holy Spirit, and that has actually stayed with me throughout. I moved to the U.S. when I was 16. I went to a prep school called the Clarksons School and then went to the Wharton School of Leadership, Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School and worked at McKinsey and throughout my time in college was very active in the Christian fellowship and the gospel choir. And, you know, when I look back at working at McKinsey and actually starting a prayer group at the Chicago office of McKinsey, I can’t believe that I did that at 20 years old because, you know, America is not a country where people profess their faith very openly.

Henry Kaestner: Do they more so in Nigeria? Talk about that a little bit.

Ndidi Nwuneli: Well, the interesting thing about Nigeria is we’re 50 percent Muslim, 50 percent Christian. And most people, profess a faith, in fact, in our country on Fridays, people close early. They go home early because they’re Muslims. They have to pray. They have to go to mosque. In most meetings, you start off with a Christian and a Muslim prayer because you recognize that both faiths that coexisting and Christians go to church at least three times a week. And that’s why I gave that pep talk to me, because I felt that, you know, for a continent that professes such a strong faith in either Islam or Christianity, we should see that faith reflected in the way that we live. And so, anyway, we are very religious people and it’s a very big part of our lives. So it was quite unusual to grow up in a family that wasn’t religious. And that gave me a boldness and the courage for Christ, which I took into my workplace. And I can tell you that that faith has carried me through and allowed me and enabled me to make very, very bold steps in my life and to live with no regrets. And knowing that with every step being guided by God and that the Holy Spirit is my anchor and that God is my source. And I think that courage and boldness allows people of faith to dare to be different and to speak out with courage and to also take risks that many people view as unusual, knowing that you take this risk. But I always say I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future. And that courage that with every path God has sent me and because he sent me, you equipped me and see me through allows me to do the things I do.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s encouraging. So you come over from Nigeria, it sounds like you’re slightly astounded by the fact that people aren’t more courageous or more open about their faith. We think as we live the United States, it’s a Christian nation. And so, of course, we’d be talking about our Christian faith. The fact that you are surprised coming in that you didn’t see more of that is challenging. One other thing. I want to introduce you to William here in a second, who’s my partner in all of these things. But one thing before I hand off to William, because I know he’s got some questions he wants to ask, is that there’s a part of you’re talking about your faith that also is interesting, a different dynamic in that you talk about hearing God’s voice through anger, which is also a different take. Tell us about that. To our listeners, that might seem counterintuitive. What was a part of your faith journey that allowed you to hear God’s voice through anger?

Ndidi Nwuneli: So I think humans are motivated by different things fear, love and anger. And even in the secular world, we recognize the power of emotions to propel action. And in my own life, it’s actually always been anger. I actually have. Ted talk called rage for change. So I was quite an angry child, meaning when I get angry about something, I do something about it. And what my faith has allowed me to do is to channel that anger into positive action for positive change. And actually there’s a place for righteous anger. Jesus was angry at the temple. So, you know, there’s definitely a place for righteous anger. And I think that’s what I have is really seeing inequity. I’m seeing, you know, injustice and being compelled to do something about it. In the agricultural landscape, Africa is naturally endowed for agricultural excellence. We have 60 percent of the world’s arable land. And yet when that’s important food, one out of every three children is stunted. I recognize that there’s a fundamental problem and it’s actually a management problem where you have fragmented ecosystems, you have. So what can we do about it? You know, seeing the face of Africa, the hungry child makes me angry. And I believe we can change that narrative as Christians and as people of faith. And so that propels me. I started LEAP Africa because I was angry about the concept of leadership and the conviction that everybody could be a leader. And leadership is an act, not a position, and that a lot of people in positions of authority were rulers and not leaders and that we had to change that message was something that propelled me to start an organization called LEAP that is now 18 years old and works in six African countries. So I think that anger stimulates an emotion that propels me to want to do something about it. And I think a lot of us are angry, but we just complain. We point fingers, but we feel powerless about actually effecting change.

William Norvell: Oh, I love that. I love that. This is William here. What an amazing encouragement, you know, that we got on here to talk about investing. But I just think you’re blessing people with your lived experience of the Holy Spirit and where God has taken you. And just thank you for doing that. I would love to hear about some of your investing experience you just talked about LEAP a little bit. Could you push into that a little bit for us? Tell us a little bit more about what LEAP is and then maybe Segway into its foods and what you’ve been able to do with that organization.

Thank you so much. So, for LEAP Africa, LEAP is actually a nonprofit organization that was created in 2002 to inspire, empower and equip a new generation of African leaders. And when we started, we worked one on one with young people between the ages of 18 and 30, equipping them with life and leadership skills to start change projects in their communities. Today, we work in six African countries and we actually teach teachers to do the right curriculum. And the focus now is 14 to 16 year olds because we believe we can reach that much younger and we equip them with leadership skills, ethics, entrepreneurship skills, employability skills. But we also help them become change agents. So we give them a little funding to start a change project in their community to improve the lives of others. And that’s how they build their leadership muscle. And I’m really proud of the team. I stepped out of VCT management in 2007. I sit on the board and the team continues to thrive and young people are just driving the growth and they are also people of faith, which makes me really proud. Now, in 2008, I started working in the food and agriculture landscape and really felt a leading by God to create a catalytic business that would prove that we could source locally process for the local market, address malnutrition and also displace imports. So my husband and I started ASW Foods, which is an agro processing company. We produce about 16 products that are currently sold in Nigeria and also exported and we sourced from about 10000 farmers. And what we’ve proven through switch is that we can produce high quality food that meets the needs of people. We also have retail products, but most of our business is sold to institutional buyers, companies like Unilever, flour mills, multinationals as well, that sourced products that use them as inputs for their own processing. And then we have products on the shelves and we supply to a lot of fast moving consumer goods companies the prevalence of dominos and all the fast food companies in our region. Many of the brands you will not be familiar with. So as Foods has been such a blessing and I’m really proud of the team and it’s also driven by a young Faith Driven Entrepreneurs who actively seek God’s face. In fact, they actually have a fast at the end of every year to hear what God is telling them. And I’m just so proud of that team. And then my day job is to help consulting where we’re building ecosystem solutions in the dairy sector, cassava seed systems, yam seed systems and creating businesses, commercializing research in the agricultural landscape and creating value. And I’m really proud of all the dynamic teams that I work with across these companies, it’s amazing.

William Norvell: Thank you for sharing that and I’m going to ask you to go a layer deeper on how to think about an investment in the ag and food space. I don’t think we’ve had too many people there. I, for one, am not very experienced there. I’ve seen some of those investments and I don’t really know how to think through them. What’s a proper return? You know, especially from the spiritual side, I assume you can employ a bunch of people and that’s amazing. Good work. But just maybe do you have a framework or, you know, how would our listeners of an agricultural deal comes across their plate to potentially invest in, whether it’s in the US or Africa or anywhere else? How would you think about that from the experience you’ve had?

Ndidi Nwuneli: So I think agriculture is such an amazing sector because it’s very diverse and also has quite a few intervention areas in our context. We talk about from farm to fork and everything in between from primary production to logistics and storage and processing, financial services, technology support all the way down to restaurants and chefs until it gets to your tummy. And so this food ecosystem is vibrant and it requires not only catalytic financing, but also patient capital. And in our context, catalytic financing is critical because you want to bet on innovation Henry talked about in Pessah and how it has transformed the East African landscape. And the same applies to so many technologies in the agriculture and food landscape that do enable leapfrogging. In particular, I would say if you’re coming into this sector, you first of all have to figure out what entry point you want to engage in and what value chain most excites you. There are so many opportunities in Africa, in Niger in particular. If you’re focused on an export led growth, then you’d be looking at cashew and sesame and cocoa and rubber as primary production. If you’re focused on food self-sufficiency, you’d be looking at poultry and dairy, yam and cassava and rice where you’re displacing imports. And then across each of those value chains, from seed production to fertilizer to mechanization, you see companies like John Deere playing in the African continent, Caterpillar, Dupont, Monsanto. I mean, they’re all in the inputs landscape. And we have the local equivalents on the African continent that are homegrown organizations. You also have technology providers like Hello Traktor, which was started to basically be the Uber of tractor and started in Nigeria. And so I think there are exciting opportunities across the board. As an investor, you have to figure out what excites you on what component of the value chain you think can be most catalytic. The second is that you have to pick the right partners. Operating on the African continent is like anywhere else. Who are your partners? Who can add the most value? Who understands the local market and what are the growth prospects? And I can tell you are returns anywhere from 10 percent to one hundred percent returns depending on the value chain. But you have to be patient. You don’t expect to have tremendous profits from day one. The Sahel Capital Team, which is our sister company, looks at about a 25% IRR as that investment returns.

But I would say that some have been more profitable, others have been less. And the beauty of African agriculture landscape is that you have an opportunity to have a triple bottom line impact. Agriculture can employ millions of people ensuring food security, contributing to development. And if you are an investor who wants to change lives while also making money, this is the best factor for you. You can do well and do good. And that’s why the sector excites me and why it’s so compelling to local and international investors.

Henry Kaestner: Tell us if you can maybe a story or two of some specific investments that you’ve seen made to have done well. And then maybe also while you’re at it, maybe some investments that you’ve seen that have not done well. The average listener to this is going to be saying, OK, so I think I hear a little bit of the case for investing in Africa. I understand the demographic play. I understand that there’s increased ability and there’s fair trade. I understand that there’s some leapfrogging with technology. I understand that there’s 60, 70 percent of the world’s arable land is in Africa. I’m getting this now. But, gosh, know, how do I get my arms around this and maybe tell it through stories. So maybe acknowledge the fact that, yes, as with any type of region, there are deals that don’t go well. And maybe you can give some counsel to people who listen to this about here’s some mistakes that I commonly see foreign investors make. You know, they do X, Y and Z. So don’t do these. But then here’s a story or two where investors are able to come in, make a real impact on the ground. And also get a good return on their money while they really impacted the social and the spiritual fabric of a community.

OK, so first I’ll say that I’ve spent the last year working on a book called Food Entrepeneurs in Africa, Scaling Resilience, Agriculture Businesses, and through that created a new business called NourishingAfrica.com, which currently has about six hundred and forty agribusinesses on our platform. And this NourishingAfrica.com Is a wealth of information for any prospective investor in the African landscape, because we have lots of data you can search by value chain. You can also have a list of funders. We have a list of entrepreneurs who are doing amazing things. So I will just suggest that you check out that platform NourishingAfrica.com. To get into some examples. Let me just start off by saying there’s such a range of organizations on the continent. While writing my book, I profiled a few. One is called Trigger and Speak actually operates in Kenya. The interesting thing about the trigger model is that when they started, they wanted to export bananas to the Middle East. That was their interest. But as they progressed, they really realized we have to create a local market to increase the standards of the bananas available. And guess what? They had enough people in Kenya who actually want high quality fruit. So they created a business that basically links farmers to small fruit retailers in the city of Nairobi. And Swagga has grown from 2014. When it started, until today it has raised fifty five million dollars and it’s grown exponentially and it’s already in its third round of financing, but is proving the power of technology to enable leapfrogging, but also efficient and effective delivery where the retailers are benefiting, but also the farmers are benefiting. With your cell phone, you can order produce and within 14 hours the producers deliver fresh from the farm to your shop. That’s what very exciting business that I interfaced with. Another one is called COBOL 360, which has done extremely well. What COBOL 360 does is leverage logistics providers and using technology to track trucks and provide basically a huge burden, which we face is transporting produce across the continent and across countries. And so they carry fertilizer and seeds the farms and carry produce back to the cities. And they’ve done extremely well. Goldman Sachs just invested in them. The IFC has invested in them. They have generated so much interest because of the value that they’ve created in the ecosystem. Cooper 360 operates in Nigeria. Another example in terms of successful exits, they have quite a few from South Africa. In twenty seventeen there was one hundred million dollar fund called Agri VI and they exited from February, which was one of South Africa’s most respected dairy companies. I mean, they had almost three times return on the investment, and that’s just one example. And that’s in South Africa. But there are many, many examples across the continent. So when I think about this sector, I think, you know, the potential to generate wealth, but also to address hunger, poverty and also create value for yourself and for your investors is tremendous. And this book is going to be released in the first quarter of 2021, actually, as you can, preordered on Amazon. But I had hoped that it would be released this year because if covid-19 has shown us anything, not just in Africa but across the world, it’s the importance of the food ecosystem and that food is medicine. You can’t address a health ecosystem without addressing the food ecosystem. And food is so vibrant and important to our livelihoods as human and innovation in the food ecosystem is critical. So I’m just excited about the future of African agriculture, but also the future of cross-sector collaboration and cross country collaboration. And I see a lot more promise when companies in the US get interested in Africa and vice versa. Africa has so much to also teach the rest of the world.

William Norvell: Well, it’s amazing. It’s amazing stories. Thank you for sharing that because it’s so good to pull the layers back on a place that some people are scared, for lack of a better word, to invest in. So I thank you for sharing some of the stories. And and actually, as I hear you talk, I mean, this is the way my mind works. You know, those are very understandable businesses, too. So if a foreign investor was going to come in, it sounds like you can pretty clearly understand the business model, understand what the needs are to be done as opposed to a lot of the other kind of tech or things like that that you run across here, that, you know, you’re really betting on a technology that you really don’t understand at some level. A lot of the early stage investors don’t anyway. So it’s really. Helpful as you look out, I mean, you’ve had an amazing journey, I would love to ask, you know, obviously you’re writing this book. Is there anything else that you have coming up on the horizon that you would love to share with our audience so that we could be paying attention to?

Ndidi Nwuneli: Well, I always want to share when I do have the opportunity that I’d challenge all our listeners to actually check out the food culture section of nourishing Africa. I think a lot of Americans have not enjoyed and truly benefited from the amazing food in Africa. And I think we want to rival Japan when it comes to being on the world’s top speed, when it comes to food. And so it’s not just enough to say I eat chocolates, but what about your rooiboos tea? Your South African wine for those of you who like wine. And what about all the great spices from the African continent? Half, which is Ethiopian is amazing and it’s gluten free. I mean, I would love to see African food on the world stage. And I think it’s up to all of us to start looking for African food as well. That way on a daily basis, you’re also touching the lives of farmers, but you’re also investing in your own nutrition because we have some of the best food in the world.

Henry Kaestner: Well, the Japanese food lobby wants to thank you for their shout out that you just had right there. I hadn’t been thinking about as being some rival for Africa.

Ndidi Nwuneli: No, I think that Japan is not rivaling Africa or Japan or rival Ethiopia.

Henry Kaestner: Well, I think that maybe that will be a subject for another FDE podcast about how Faith Driven investors can get involved in the agriculture and the food industry in Japan. I think Africa runs circles around Japan.

Ndidi Nwuneli: But know why I was saying this, Henry? I just I wrote an article last year. Japanese food is ranked number one in the world, really healthy. Yes. And I was shocked to learn that they’ve actually done it in a very creative way. They position their food as healthy. They draw a link between having the highest life expectancy and the healthiness of their food. And they have launched, a whole marketing campaign around their food, which has driven investment in their food. They also have a certification program for their restaurants all over the world to say it’s authentic Japanese food. So we have learned a lot from the movement to increase awareness. And the growth in Japanese restaurants across the world has been the fastest. It has rivaled Italian cuisine. So I’m just telling you this from an investor perspective, they have been very strategic and that’s what we have learned from them.

Henry Kaestner: But fascinating. I don’t think they fry their food enough. Just I’m just kidding.

And I love the fact that you’ve provided us with a website that gives a primer and an overview for somebody who’s listening to this might want to say, how do I get started? I’m interested in agriculture. I’m interested in investing in the food industry. Where do I get started to be able to chronicle on inventories? Six hundred and forty food entrepreneurs, along with some data and some analysis that gives us kind of a sense about the bigger picture and how to weighed in. So that’s a great resource. Thank you.

William Norvell: Absolutely. And if you can see in Henry’s video, if you can find the best African ice cream, you will get Henry on board. So just throwing that out there, right?

Henry Kaestner: If you’re listening is your thing in fried food and ice cream. Probably don’t need to be taking my diet advice from Henry. And you’d be right.

William Norvell: This is not a diet podcast. That is not why you come here. So not the place to be. Ndidi, thank you so much for spending time with us. We do, unfortunately, have to come to a close. And when we do that, what we love to do is invite exactly the question that you mentioned earlier is what is God doing in your life today? And specifically through his word, through his scripture? We love to see somewhere. Maybe he has you in the season. Could be a verse you read this morning or a story. Just how is he speaking to you through his living word today?

Ndidi Nwuneli: Yeah. So when I think about what God is doing, my favorite Bible verse, which I hold onto, is very popular. It’s Jeremiah 29:11 I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future. You know, 2020 has been a rough year for so many and people have experienced, loss and all sorts of ways. But the encouragement I have is that when we put our faith and our trust in God, he’s the master strategist and he always, always there a path. And so my encouragement to you listeners is to continue to trust and believe that God, who has started a great work and you will be faithful to complete it. That’s how I have stayed rooted and anchored in every assignment that he’s given me. And every time he gets too difficult, I basically say, you are the one, this is your business. God, come and show yourself faithful. At the end of the day, you will get the glory and that he always comes through time and time again and realizing that I am not on this walk alone, that God is my source of strength, of wisdom and of courage, and that at the end of it all he will get the glory, and that keeps me grounded and focused. And discipline, so I hope I encourage you a little today, and I wish you all the best.

Ray Barreth: Western investors need to bring the savvy that God has given them through gift and experience to the table. We need to understand culture. I did not understand African culture at that time. I much more fully understand it now. And I think Western investors sometimes approach founders from these frontier and emerging markets, not understanding the complexities of their culture, not understanding the family dynamic. The Swahili word Lubutu means I am because we are. And whenever you make an investment into a company, you aren’t just making an investment into a company. You are making an investment into an extended family.

Henry Kaester: So welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast is the special edition. Any time you get to talk with great, great friends and coworkers and you get to talk about something that you’ve been working on, it’s pretty cool. And so today with us, we’ve got Reuben Coulter all the way from Bristol, England. Reuben, good morning. Good evening.

Reuben Coulter: Yeah, it’s late in the evening. Great to be with you.

Henry Kaester: I bet it is. I mean, if it’s mid-morning here on the Pacific, so it’s going to be well on you. And thank you for staying up. And now we’ve got Ray Beareth all the way from Kansas City, Missouri. Probably one of the last interviews we’ll do with you, Ray, before you head over to Africa. But you’re still in Kansas City, correct?

Ray Barreth: I most certainly am. And it’s great to be with you this afternoon, Henry.

Henry Kaester: So one of the things we’ve gotten a sense for during covid is this the backdrops that everybody has. And for a long time, Rubin didn’t have much of a backdrop is amended that and get some really nice paintings behind him now. But the most epic, non virtual backdrop has always been Ray Barreth’s where he’s got this ultimate just beautiful library behind him of all of these books. And it’s just really, really cool. It’s the best one out there. You probably have the best Christian book collection, although I was on a podcast recently with Tim Keller and his backdrop was also really, really impressive. But I think that you may even have more titles as I look behind you, more titles with Jesus in the name of the book than anybody else’s book collection I’ve ever seen. Don’t you have any books on, like sports or something else?

Ray Barreth: No, but I have a lot of books on startups and I have a lot of books on sailing. OK, so yeah, that’s kind of my stuff. I love sailing. Being a sailor for 40 years

Henry Kaester: in Kansas City, Missouri is going to be a difficult place to be a sailor.

Ray Barreth: It is, but I lived in the UK for almost 16, 17 years and sailed around Britain three or four times, then a couple across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Reuben, Did you know that?

Reuben Coulter: I did. I did. I have to say, I’d love to go sailing with Ray, but I’m a fair weather sailor, so take me to the Mediterranean and sunshine.

Henry Kaester: Yeah, I didn’t know that. I’m embarrassed of that. No, no, that’s extreme. I knew the Ray Barreth was really, really cool. I didn’t know you sailed transatlantic.

Ray Barreth: Yes. Yes. And in my little catamaran. Yeah, we’ve done it a couple of times.

Henry Kaester: A couple of times I said, what are you doing for summer break? Wow, that’s pretty awesome. OK, so I’m going to set up the topic that we’re going to talk about today. But then I do want to circle back to who each of you are, and I want to let our listeners know some of your background and why you’re on the team and the roles that you play. But this is an episode that you found yourselves on in which we try to answer some of the questions. Like I’ve heard, that investing in Africa is important, but I have no idea how to go about doing it. It’s got to be insurmountable to think about discovery and diligence and ongoing management of an investment portfolio there. Erm I just better off just investing in an international index fund. Isn’t there some other way for me to be able to gain international exposure or should I just be giving money to clean water missions overseas and is that just really the best way for me to impact Africa? And of course because you’re on this podcast, you’ll understand that we think that it is very feasible, although it can be daunting, but it’s very important for Christ-followers to store their investment assets in a way that participates in the work that God is doing the world. And I would submit that of all the continents, that God is absolutely at work in Africa if for no other reason, for the fact that he has seen to it that there’s a very young population where there can be more people entering into the workplace over the course of the next 20 years than the populations of India and China are actually all of those that are coming into the job market in China. It’s a huge opportunity in Africa. How do you make sense of it as a Faith Driven Investor? During our time together today with Ray and Reuben, we’re going to wade into that and see if indeed it is feasible. Ray and Reuben, thanks for being with us on the program. Reuben, who are you and where do you come from and what’s the role that you have on the team?

Reuben Coulter: Yes, so as you might be able to tell from my accent, I’m from Ireland originally. My wife is Polish, our first child was born in Switzerland and our second child in Kenya. So we’re a real international family. My background is I’m a public health specialist by training, spent the first part of my career in Africa in refugee camps, building public health programs, but over time became, I guess, frustrated by the limitations of aid and development in addressing the big problems of health care, education, poverty on the continent, and became increasingly interested in the role the private sector has to play. And how does business creates a difference in these communities. But that’s taken me on a journey to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where I ran their Africa portfolio and to most recently living and working in Kenya, supporting entrepreneurs and helping them grow and scale their businesses. And now I find myself at Faith Driven Investor, and I have the joy, the privilege to work with our partners all around the world and really understand how do we build out the entrepreneurial ecosystem, what does it take to nurture, to support, to build the capacity of entrepreneurs so that they succeed and we’re allocating our energy, our resources, our capital to make sure that that happens.

Ray Barreth: Thank you. Thank you. Do the same, please. So you work in a part time capacity, but a very important one as a key part of our overall strategic team and then with a particular emphasis on Africa. But you do some other things, too. So bring us up to speed about what God has done in your life.

Ray Barreth: Thanks, Henry, for that. I think my story is a little like me. It’s getting somewhat longer in the tooth and my story is more about God and his faithfulness and his long suffering towards a young boy of nine years of age whom he introduced himself to in the spring of nineteen sixty three. And that started me on a unique life trajectory developed within me, my worldview and the Lord’s journey with me. We’ve had some awesome adventures together. I was privileged to be able to start a few small businesses, very, very much traditional brick and mortar companies. I had a chain of three automobile dealerships, a small chain of twenty two convenience stores. We did about 80 million a year in revenue. That was in the early eighties. In the spring of nineteen eighty five. I really felt the Lord tell me to sell my businesses and move to the UK where I had strong relationships with a church planting group and I had planted a church here in the States as I was building up my businesses. And so I did that and sold the whole kit and caboodle up, packed up my family. And we moved to the UK in May of nineteen eighty five and we had committed to go for two years. We ended up spending 16 years there and we launched eight or nine churches. We led a Christian publishing house. I launched a Christian film studio called Delts Television. And then I had an opportunity to get into the dairy business for my own company. And we grew that to the fifth largest dairy company in the UK that was based in Cardiff in South Wales. And that’s when I was really introduced to sub-Saharan Africa during that eighty five year, nineteen eighty five to the year two thousand. And it was exciting stuff. I had the privilege of working with several pastors. We launched vocational training centers. We built community health clinics, we dug wells, we built schools. We train pastors and leaders. And of course, I lost my shirt and terrible investments that I made in sub-Saharan Africa, where so-called Christian businesses led by so-called Christian entrepreneurs. And that was a life changing experience. I learned a lot as to how not to do impact investing, and that’s when I learned how to sail and competed in cross country Hunter trials with my trusty steed named Matt Dillon, who I named from the marshal at Gunsmoke. That puts an age on me right there. Most of your listeners won’t even know what Gunsmoke is and

Henry Kaester: we know what Matt Dillon is here. I think you need the horse after the actor, but knows the character.

Ray Barreth: And Gunsmoke is a character in Gunsmoke, Matt, that Matt Dillon came around twenty five years later. But yeah, Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke. And then I came back to the States, launched a very small nowhere middle market M&A firm. Our sweet spot was around fifteen to twenty five million that was based out of Miami and I learned a lot in that business. Henry, we were sector agnostic and we represented both buy and sell side. So I got to work with a lot of different VC firms and reach out of Europe. And I just got a huge cross industry experience. And so you fast forward to the day. I feel like everything that I’ve done in my life, God has prepared me for what I’m doing now. I work at. This outfit called Igor Enterprises, we have an accelerator program of faith driven accelerator program called Venture Village, and we work as capacity builders and disciples of entrepreneurs in Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya. And we help them to build out their business models and to learn how to be the hands, feet and voice of Jesus through their business. And of course, what are the greatest opportunities that I have is to represent the FDI/FDE movement in being your guy’s eyes and ears on the ground in Nairobi. And Lord willing, we’ll be moving there in Nairobi. So life is exciting.

Henry Kaester: So that’s super encouraging. There’s so many different places that we could go. I love this. On the next episode, we’ll talk about the British Kids TV channel. That’s also fascinating. But you mentioned something along the way there that I think is really important. And I think that we need to acknowledge that there are real headwinds for investors as they start to think about investing in Africa. Most people understand that there’s great opportunity. Most people also understand that there have been some real challenges with foreign aid. Question is, can you invest in Africa? Can you do it well? Can you do it in a God-honoring way? Can you trust people on the ground and you hit head on some of the challenges that people see. People have heard of people losing money in Africa, and you have done that. And you’ve done that not only with entrepreneurs, but you’ve done that with entrepreneurs who purported to be driven by their faith. So share with us a bit about that and some of your lessons learned. And then together with Reuben, I want to get into some of the initiatives that you guys have put into place with the playbook to address some of those things. But first, let’s air out some of the dirty laundry. What has it look like as you’ve learned some lessons along the way?

Ray Barreth: Well, you’re absolutely right, I did lose money in my investments in Africa with Christian entrepreneurs, I did that and I did it very well.

Henry Kaester: I mean, you lost a lot of money.

Ray Barreth: Well, I mean, you know, if you’re going to lose money, you know, lose it. And at the end of the day, I did. And I made some incredible errors. And I think I was fairly young at the time and far too trusting and believing what people said. And that was a big mistake. So I think there were many mistakes that I made. One was not journeying with the entrepreneurs enough, not getting to know them, not following up with their community to really understand what community they are walking with, who is journeying with them, who is their pastor, what church do they go to? What community groups are they involved then? How do they serve in their community? So I did not do a very good job at that. And of course, you know, looking at trying to understand their business model, I did not pursue that sufficiently. I think I was so excited about the idea of investing and having this fairytale image of helping these entrepreneurs. I was too quick to move. And the money that I lost over these few deals wasn’t huge amounts. It probably amounted to, I don’t know, 80 to one hundred thousand dollars. It probably stung my pride more than anything. And it clearly showed how incredibly incompetent I was at this. And it caused me to stop and say, oh, look, I have to back up and look at this through an entirely different lens. I would not have made these mistakes in the West. What prompted me to do that here? And I think a lot of that was my desire to just bless people and to disregard some of the red flags. When you do not want to do that, a red flag is a red flag, whether it’s in the United States or whether it’s in sub-Saharan Africa. And you need to recognize that. And so I think Western investors need to bring the savvy that God has given them through gift and experience to the table. We need to understand culture. I did not understand African culture at that time. I much more fully understand it now. And I think Western investors sometimes approach founders from these frontier and emerging markets, not understanding the complexities of their culture, not understanding the family dynamic. The Swahili word Ubuntu means I am because we are. And whenever you make an investment into a company, you aren’t just making an investment into a company. You are making an investment into an extended family. And so there is no private money. It’s all family money. And if one family member needs an operation, well, you as the leading member, as the head of the clan, you need to reach out and help pay for that or maybe some other relative needs, school fees paid or university fees paid. You know, there are all these things. So an African investor receives a fifty thousand dollar investment from the West. Twenty twenty five thousand dollars go out the door to family money. They don’t consider that corruption. That’s their life. What do you mean? This is community money. We are a family, Ubuntu, and we move as one. So to understand that culture and to learn how to address that, those are the things I just did not understand.

Henry Kaester: So you talked about this time from nineteen eighty five to two thousand where you were running some business in the UK. You start investing in Africa, you’re starting to learn some of these lessons and you went in and in the midst of this you said there’s got to be a better way. I’m not going to abandon my love and my desire to be a blessing to people in Africa, but I clearly got to do a better. Yes. What was your first step toward that? Doing it differently than you had been?

Ray Barreth: Right. My very first step was to seek God and to seek out the community as to who I could partner with. I think I was displaying a bit of arrogance to think that I could go into these markets and do this on my own. I mean, that was just stupidity on my part. Once I found a good partner, a local partner, I’m talking about a solid Christian brother or sister, an organization that I could depend on and that would walk with me on the journey that really, really was helpful. And for me, my relationship with the navigators in Africa, particularly in Kenya, really proved beneficial to this day. They are one of the primary recruiters for our venture village accelerator. And I’ll tell you this, when you partner with a strong local partner, the founders you get may not. Super great guys, when it comes to business modeling or the business opportunity they’re bringing to the table, but they are men and women of true faith and true integrity. They will sell their right arm before they default on your loan. And they are men and women who love God, who love you and embrace you. And that totally changes the experience. So I would encourage any investor from the West. If you want to be a part of generosity in these frontier and emerging markets, you know, let us or let someone help you find a good partner in these markets. That’s essential.

Henry Kaester: I think what you’re getting at here and I’d love for Reuben to comment on this as well, is this kind of social community dynamic that lends to good, healthy business. If you’re on the outside of the community dynamic, as you just talked about, there are different types of ethics and a cultural emphasis then would find in America generally, if we’re in Western Europe and America and somebody goes ahead and signs and affirms that they’re going to do one thing or another with the money you give them, generally they do that in the emerging market. That doesn’t happen as much. And we might be appalled at the fact that they don’t honor their word, and yet it’s completely consistent with their culture. And yet the culture that has an emphasis on community can also be a really great positive dynamic as well. And I think that we’re seeing some of that and have seen some of that with microfinance. Right. So Muhammad Yunus and the people that have followed afterwards have understood that the concept of social collateral and social standing within the local community is a very powerful force. And so rather than having this kind of external, we’re coming in with an investment dollars from the West and we’re coming into the frontier markets on our own, thinking that that dynamic will work like it might be for an investor from New York investing in California. What we’re doing is you’re suggesting that you go into the community, find a community partner that has been there long enough to be in to the local community as well and then partnering with them. So what I mean by that, well, it’s microfinance is famous for providing loans to the poor, right, Reuben? So one of the things that seems to characterize lending to the poor is high repayment rates, and yet you’d expect them to be very low. So explain to us a little bit more about what does this community investment in this social collateral concept look like in emerging markets?

Reuben Coulter: Yes, you gave a great example. Microfinance repayment rates are phenomenal, typically. Ninety five percent repayment rates. And the reason is that the loan is not made to the individual. The loan is made to the group, and therefore the group is responsible. Their social reputation is at risk if the loan defaults at a larger scale. There’s a really interesting example, which is the Indian community in Africa. And so Indians moved over here during the period of colonialism, building the railways. But they’ve become some of the most dynamic entrepreneurs on the continent. And the reason is their close family ties. It allows them to borrow money from relatives in India to trades exports and imports back and forth, all based on relationships of trust, and that allows them to grow. Their businesses are incredibly dynamic pace. And if someone breaches that trust, well, they’re excluded from the community. And I think the question is, how do we create that as Christians, as Christian investors and Christian entrepreneurs? How do we develop those networks of trust?

Henry Kaester: So in your instance specifically, Ray, you started working with the navigator’s because you had seen where they had had a long standing relationship in some of these major cities in east and southern Africa, is that right?

Ray Barreth: Yes. And the navigators are all locally run. So these are African navigators. And they really helped me in understanding the cultural buying in. And they also provided me with kudos within the community as standing within the community that I did not have on my own. It was a great relationship.

Henry Kaester: You guys, together with Russell Bjorkman, who also is here at Faith Driven Investor, have written a playbook for investors who want to engage in frontier and emerging markets. Give us a brief overview. Maybe we’ll start with you, Reuben. Tell us a bit about what it’s about and how is it different from regular investing and due diligence?

Reuben Coulter: Yes. So a regular investment process and the due diligence that goes with it is typically lengthy and can be expensive. And if you’re making investments of 50 to 100 thousands in a frontier emerging markets, you don’t want to spend five or ten thousands on due diligence fees. So our question is, how do we reduce those costs? How do we make this an efficient process which is tailored for the local markets, where some things which we would expect to find in the US or in Europe may not exist? And how do we create a common language? So both the entrepreneur. Or the investor understands if the business is investment ready, what stage the business is that so we’ve built out this playbook, which essentially has four steps to us. Step one is engaging the entrepreneur. So how do you do that assessment of the entrepreneur’s chemistry, their character, their competence and, of course, the culture? Step two is how do you assess if the business is actually investments ready, if this business is able to take on the capital, absorbents and grow at the rate that you expect. Step three is essentially a light touch due diligence process. Looking at the legal, looking at the financials, looking at that social collateral we talked about. And step four is kind of saying, actually, once the investment happens, you need to build in post investment, capacity building and monitoring and supports if you really want to see this business succeed and flourish. So we’ve created a playbook which walks you through this and a toolkit which goes along with us, which allows you to do this in an easy and efficient manner. So we see this is something that investors can use for themselves, or indeed they can partner with a local partner and accelerator, an incubator, an advisory firm, to go through this process with them to help them on the journey.

Henry Kaester: OK, so you’re getting an important point here. And for those of us who are used to doing diligence in the states and used to working with companies that might even have data rooms. So things are just completely set for us. We’re used to spending five or ten or 15 thousand dollars and doing a quality of earnings and doing rigorous diligence. And one would think that, gosh, you need to step it up and do it even more. Exhaustive diligence if you’re going to place money in Africa. But to your point, some of these companies that are really leaders in their communities are only looking for twenty five or fifty grand. So nobody is going to be sending 10 or 15 thousand dollars to put twenty five or 50 grand to work. And yet because you work with Faith Driven Investor, of course you believe that that’s something we need to be looking at. So that only works when you are able to be much more efficient with your diligence spent. What are the pieces that make that happen? How does that happen? How can you do, say, 80 percent of the diligence with only 20 percent of the spend? What are the things that allowed for that to happen in a place like Africa that are different than the United States? Because most people say, I’m doing the math, that’s impossible. But yet you’ve come up with some thoughts on that with working with local partners. Tell us more about it.

Reuben Coulter: Well, I think firstly, if you’re able to find local investors who have skin in the game, that’s a huge value because they understand the context, the markets, they can do the social diligence far better than you ever can. And of course, they’re able to help on that post investment follow up. One of the myths is that local capital isn’t available. That’s not true. There are local investors who are making investments, equity and debt in the local markets and being able to find those partner with them and work alongside them is incredibly powerful. I think the second thing that we found is there’s some really talented consulting professionals with some of the top big four firms. So EY, KPMG, etc., and many of whom are believers and really want to see the investments in their ecosystem succeed. And so they’re willing to use their talents and expertize at a reduced cost to see investment flow into these businesses. And putting together this playbook hopefully gives them a very simple way to apply the tools that we’ve developed and do that diligence for under a thousand dollars

Henry Kaester: Ray, you spend a lot of time on the ground. And it was largely your leadership and vision, together with some very capable systems from Russell and Reuben of course, that kind of led us here. Help us to understand some of the work that you did over the spring and summer amidst the covid situation we found ourselves in that helped lead you to birthing this. And maybe you could just walk us through an example, maybe core, maybe somebody else. Why don’t you walk us through how something like this actually came to bear and how it actually works.

Ray Barreth: Yes. Well, I’d be happy to, Henry. As you’re aware, covid hit us very hard and hit our frontier and emerging markets very hard. Our founders, we had some wonderful businesses who were flourishing. You mentioned Educare, wonderful faith driven educator in Kenya who operates multiple schools and had just taken on some investment money from one of our funding partners. And she was hit very dramatically because suddenly her school was shut down and she had no revenue. And of course, there was no government support. So we championed her and thought that along with her and there were four or five other companies that were really suffering that were in a similar boat as she was, and that how could we help to raise covid relief money to just help her get through this interim period? And of course, due diligence has always been a challenge. And I remember when Educare went through their main due diligence, it took a long, long time, well over a year. And it was very costly. And it was frustrating not only to our founder, Priska Milty, but also to the investor. And I thought we must simplify this. And so we gathered together and we thought, how can we come up with a due diligence process that does henot carry a fiduciary guarantee. It does not have any type of assurance guarantee, but it is sufficiently robust to give real comfort to the investor. And it is at a price point that will be attractive to an investor that it provides sufficient independent. And I think that’s the crucial element. It’s an independent review and it is sufficiently done, sufficiently robust to make these small loans more attractive to investors. So we looked at that. We developed a system. We have a due diligence discovery list that’s quite comprehensive. We have an independent review by either a former partner or former director of KPMG or Deloitte. And these are wonderful Christian guys and they have agreed to go on for an insight, independent review. They actually do a three sixty among the executive team. They interview the employees, they call up their customers. They actually do a physical spot check and a review of the financials, and they put that into a report form. And so it is not a complete comprehensive due diligence process, but it is very good. And for the amount of money, we think it’s absolutely excellent. And we invite investors to come and peruse our work and to take a look at what we do. So the whole playbook consists of an assessment on the entrepreneur and his business, and it clearly states where we see him on the investment ready grid

Henry Kaester: Or her of course, so

Ray Barreth: Absolutely.

Henry Kaester: Most of them are female led.

Ray Barreth: 40 percent of our founders are women. Yes.

Henry Kaester: And also you mentioned some interrupted you twice in thirty seconds. But you talk about independent. And I think that that’s something that’s really important, one of the things and that’s where some of these professionals come in from KPMG and others, there are some really wonderful partners on the ground in frontier markets that have loved on these entrepreneurs and have really just done a great job with spiritual formation and discipleship, providing some of the basics on customer acquisition and retention and intellectual property and distribution channels, et cetera. They are not always the best people, though, to do independent diligence because they have been a cheerleader for the business. They’ve been an encourager and sometimes aren’t able to have the same type of a skeptical eye that maybe you need when you’re doing discovery and diligence. So these are people that are coming on board who are given a playbook but don’t have any type of institutional allegiance to the partner organization in the field that has nurtured the company up until that point. Is that correct?

Ray Barreth: Yes, that’s exactly correct. They are completely independent assessors in most cases. They have never met the founder and they have never been introduced to the business.

Henry Kaester: Good. OK, Reuben, I want to come back to you. I want to talk about some of the observations that you’ve seen over the course of the last four or five months about developments in emerging markets and your hopes, your fears. Somebody is listening to this and they’re saying, OK, so I’m thinking I’m getting it. They’re making the case for making investments in frontier markets. You can make a lot of mistakes if you don’t do it in local partnership with people that are on the ground that already have this social standing. And who can lend you that social standing. I can see that there’s independent discovery and diligence. There’s this light touch diligence, this light touch playbook, if you will. But what are we missing here? And what I’m getting at here is a little bit of a leading question is that I want you to have kind of a multifaceted answer for a Christ-follower who’s compelled to invest in emerging markets, who might look in one hand on individual deals. But are there professionals that can help them do this, too?

Reuben Coulter: Yes. So I would say it’s a really exciting time in emerging and frontier markets. There is lots of entrepreneurial energy, lots of new ventures springing up all the time. To separate the wheat from the weeds is the biggest challenge that any investor faces. And when you are thousands of miles away from a completely different cultural backgrounds, that is going to be incredibly difficult. And the good news is there are great partners on the ground. We have a network of over 30 incubators, accelerators and advisory firms in almost every corner of the world. And they’ve been operating they’re working to support and build the capacity of entrepreneurs. So I would say the starting point is find that local guides who can help you navigate the culture. I think secondly is see if they can help you access the local investor network in that community and build those relationships with others who can co-invest alongside you because they’ll be able to act as your eyes and ears on the ground. And I think, thirdly, there are people who are very experienced in helping build and scale these businesses and don’t just take a passive investment approach, but see if you can actively bring in the additional talent that needs to disciple, to mentor and to scale these businesses. And so if you’re able to bring more than capital to the table, you’re providing huge added value and ultimately creating impacts in those communities through jobs, through spiritual transformation, through social impact.

Henry Kaester: And I’d also add to that, of course, that there are an increasing number of professional fund managers that have active spiritual integration, what they do with really neat track records. And over the last three or four months, I think we’ve collectively been really encouraged by the funds that are out there. And when I look at the extent of the professional management and these are funds like Talanton, and when I think about emerging markets, I think about IBEX people that have been in the developing world for many decades, really working with the local community and then allocating the investment capital where they see real opportunities. Recently, really, within the last six months or so, we’ve seen an emergence of African fund managers, including folks that are coming out of Bridgewater Capital. Richard, Okello and Sango Capital out of Johannesburg, serious about his faith with a great investment track record. And future Africa and Sod and Tree of Life and others out of Africa. And so there’s an increased number in the industry that I would say is really starting to flourish of professional managers who have great track records, great inroads into the local community and are really serious about their faith. What does it look like to love on their CEOs in their portfolio in a way that points to God, helps them to have their identity rooted in Christ, and then this alternate imagination about how. They might lead their businesses, create products and services that really help society flourish in a way that points to God. One of the things we do at the end of every one of these podcasts, of course, is to ask our guests what they’re hearing from God in his word. And so, of course, I want to make sure that we do the same with each of you, Ray and Reuben and Ray. Let’s start with you. What are you hearing from God? In his word, that might be an encouragement to our listeners.

Ray Barreth: What the Lord has been speaking to me about recently, Henry, is what the kingdom looks like from a justice point of view. Particularly, how can we as leaders, as business leaders, help set the pace for God’s restorative justice for the world? The Bible says that righteousness and justice are the foundation of the Lord’s throne. In Matthew Chapter five in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, Blessed are the seeker doers of righteousness, for they shall be filled and micas six eight. The Prophet says he has told you or more to what is good. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. And then Mike is contemporary. Isaiah talks about is this not the farce that I have chosen for you to lose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house and when you see the naked to cover him and do not hide yourself from your can. And if you do this, then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing shall spring up quickly. Your Vindicator shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer. You shall cry for help. And He will say, Here I am. And as I’ve been focusing on the Scriptures the last three or four days, the thought of how God has created us to be justice bringers we as leaders, we as influencers are to take the lead in demonstrating liberating justice, leading people to freedom and flourishing. I mean, if we can’t do it with the resources that God has given us, who can? And I think for me in my life, I’ve been challenged in living in and through our business as Jesus lived, Jesus said, as my father has sent me. So I send you. And as Jesus was to Israel, I think we are to be to the world. And that’s a big challenge. And thank you for this. Yeah.

Henry Kaester: I love the way that you respond to that challenge by saying that we’re going to go ahead. We’re relocating to Nairobi. We’re rolling up our sleeves. We’re getting involved. Reuben, how do you respond?

Reuben Coulter: Yeah, well, this year for many people has been incredibly challenging. And the Psalm that I keep returning to is Psalm 34 an inverse four and five. It says, I sought the Lord and he answered me. He delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant and their faces are never covered with shame. And if you ever get an opportunity in New York, the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church has a choir which has put the to music. And this is just incredible. The next best thing is YouTube. But if you get to see it live in person and hear them sing this, it’s just really encouraging. That’s when we look to God, our faces, our radiance. He doesn’t let us down. He doesn’t let us be put to shame. And I just encourage many of our entrepreneurs or investors who maybe have found this year difficult to turn to God in these challenging times.

Henry Kaester: That’s a great word from you both. Thank you very much for helping us to get an overview of what investing in emerging markets looks like. And may the Lord bless you and our audience and help us to figure out how to do this and how to learn from some of the lessons that we’ve all learned the hard way. But how do we love people in community, in fellowship in a way that promotes relationship and helps both the investor and the investors come to know God more fully through the development of some really, really cool businesses that are in a really vibrant and dynamic market.

Kwami Williams: So much of my question of life has been a God, can you give me this gift to open this door for my company? You bless my wife and I to let our pregnancy be successful. And these are amazing, good things that a good father wants to give. But I realize that God wasn’t enough for me. And this season has got me to a place where God has become enough for me, where adversity has adversely. I can pause and I can just say, God, I love you. I believe and I know that you are good even without this good gift.

Henry Kaestner: Here with my co-host, partners in crime, Rusty and William, greetings, brothers.

Rusty Rueff: Hey, hey, hey, hey. Good to see you guys.

William Norvell: Good to be here.

Henry Kaestner: And today, our travels take us to Accra, Ghana. One of the unique things about our podcasts, of course, is that over the last hundred and twenty one hundred twenty five episodes, maybe we didn’t do it for the first 10. But William has asked the same question at the end of every podcast. And this will be a heads up for Kwami. We always ask our guests, what is it that you’re hearing from Guy through his word? What most of our listeners don’t know, because we actually don’t usually ask it after we started recording, is that we also ask each one of our guests what they think is the best global sport and what city in the world plays that sport the best. And so I want to ask our guest from Accra, Ghana. Kwami, please tell us what your answers to both of those would be.

Kwami Williams: Henry, this question is super easy.

It is lacrosse and it definitely plays sport. Baltimore, Maryland, we have hands down all the way from Accra, Ghana.

Henry Kaestner: You heard it here first on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. What a treat it was for us to be on that call with […] together. And […], for those of you who don’t know, is maybe a look at it through the lens of like it’s a Y Combinator for the very best entrepreneurs. They’re coming out of the African continent. And it was so cool to be on this call with these brilliant entrepreneurs from over that continent and find out that Kwami and I had that passion in common. And so for us to get back on this call together, a super special for me. Great to see you again.

Kwami Williams: Great to see you again, Henry.

Henry Kaestner: So thanks for being with us. And we want to hear about your entrepreneurial journey is a great one. Your life starts off in Baltimore. Maybe we’ll start there. Give us a little bit of an autobiographical sketch. Who are you? Where do you come from? And then we want to hear all about True Moringa, what Moringa is, what God has taught you about your entrepreneurial journey.

Kwami Williams: Absolutely. And it’s a pleasure to get to meet you. Will, and Rusty really excited about this time together, and I’ll dive right in. My story starts in Accra, Ghana. As you mentioned, Henry, I was born into a home that loves Jesus, my parents at a very early age.

I was involved in church learning the books of the Bible, all of that. And probably in my formative years as well, I was super excited and passionate about aviation. Anything that got me like I would run outside when planes fly overhead and when butterflies and birds flew. And that curiosity got me really into the spirit of tinkering, more like destroying everyone’s toys, trying to figure out how to work. But we’re going to call it tinkering for all intents and purposes.

And I just sort of grew up just passionate about engineering ultimately, and was blessed with the opportunity to emigrate to the US when I was in the fourth grade. It’s two thousand, my parents believe, gone on April Fools Day two thousand. We landed in JFK Airport. My first meal is a Happy Meal at McDonald’s and I’m thinking it’s just amazing.

I get to play house not knowing that the future as an immigrant in the US would actually be extremely challenging.

And we settled in Baltimore, Maryland, and that’s the connection to La Crosse in high school, got into two things lacrosse and robotics. So I’m sort of this job by day and robotics, married all other our and I got the chance to learn the sport, got excited about sports in general.

And by the end of my time in high school, I realized that I could use this passion for building robots and this passion for aviation and a discipline called aerospace engineering. And I realized that my team was one of the best places to learn that. So I set my sights there and God opened up the door for me to get into MIT and pursue my dream, which was to become a rocket scientist.

Henry Kaestner: Did you play lacrosse at MIT? Does MIT even have a lacrosse team? Does have a lacrosse team?

Kwami Williams: I played one semester really actually just fall ball. Unfortunately, I realized that I just couldn’t keep up with school, which I’m drinking from a fire hose and then my team setting. Right. Science, I bet.

So I stuck with intramural sports as my sports outlet.

So everything ultimate Frisbee, soccer, football, dodgeball, whatever, got me moving.

And my time in my team was just this beautiful experience because I thought I was going MIT to learn about aerospace engineering. And it actually became this formative experience in my spiritual journey for so much of my life. Because I grew up in the church, they had just become second nature and I spent the first two years at MIT actually wrestling with that God exists. And if he does, fate has it right.

I join a fraternity to explore, like, OK, I’m away from home. I just want to experience what freedom looks like without immigrant parents who are watching your every move.

And God really. Just use my time at MIT to help me make my faith real, for me to get to a point where I was old enough with clarity to say that I love Jesus and that I want to live my life in a way that shares his love with others.

And in that same way, MIT was transformative and moving me ultimately from aerospace engineering to a lot of what I do now, which is agriculture. And I love to kind of talk about that journey with you as we talk about the Moringa tree.

Kwami Williams: Good. We’ll talk about that. And I think that much of the switch there, the transition came from meeting your co-founder. Meeting somebody else was a formative relationship and he saw a different opportunity to walk us through that transition. Walk us from meeting your partner, Emily, and then, yes, tell us what in the world Moringa is. I don’t think I’ve heard the word Moringa before, maybe nine months ago. And now it feels like every week somebody is saying something about Moringa, feels like it was ringing the kale of today or something like that.

Kwami Williams: Precisely. It’s, yeah. More nutritious than kale with even more antiinflammatory benefits than tumeric. It’s kind of the buzz words right now around Moringa. But yeah, let me take you back in time. So in 2010, as blessed with the opportunity to join the Campus Crusade for Christ now crew movement to visit, not on a mission trip.

And that trip took me to the northern part of Ghana. And that was really my first introduction to rural poverty. I’ve realized that it’s so easy for us to be desensitized by development statistics. But once those numbers become names and faces of people you do life with, you share life with, it changes everything.

And for me, it moved me from this place of saying, I want to go back and intern at NASA to how can I leverage what I’ve been blessed with to actually start making a difference in the lives of the rural poor in Ghana and what are the resources and opportunity around them that we can start capitalizing on to transform their lives? So it’s not just sort of a poverty lens, but really an opportunity lens. And I was stuck with this question until my final year identity when I took a course called Lab Development. And this is the course in which I met Emily, my co-founder and business partner, and as well, Daisy, my wife and my partner.

And so this course takes everything. And it started through a trip back to Ghana.

And this time we are working alongside real farmers and they’re telling us about this tree called Moringa. They’ve seen Moringa is this miracle tree locally.

And I’m saying, OK, hold up, slow down. Let’s talk about some numbers and some science here. And they’re like, OK, so the more we researched, the more we raise.

The farmers were right. The release of the tree contain more iron and more calcium in milk, protein, yogurt, more vitamin C than oranges. And so we those this nutrient powerhouse in the release of the tree and then we looked at the size of the tumor around it. It also contained is deeply moisturizing oil that outperforms, again, coconut and shale oils, which we know of in the cosmetics sphere. And when we took a layer back and we looked at the marketplace where there was a five billion dollar market opportunity. And so it became very clear to us as students in 2012 in Ghana that there was more to Moringa than getting an A on a class project that we really need to think about, connecting the dots, helping farmers as we like to joke, prove that money grows on trees. The money that they need to transform and improve their livelihoods is right there in their backyards. And so my co-founder, Emily and I, from that point on to start to research Moringa personally and we were fortunate enough to win some grant capital out of team that helped us launch through Moringa, our consumer facing and vertically integrated brand metering and Moringa products powered for our health and wellness today.

Rusty Rueff: And as I understand it, the Moringa tree is also good for farming. Right? It’s not one of those trees where like the palm oil trees where they go in and it messes everything up, it actually helps.

Kwami Williams: You’ve got it perfectly right, Rusty. So Moringa one, it grows and in arid climates. So it’s a really climate smart, sustainable tree too.

It helps the crops around it grow better. Three, it can be in a crop. And so you don’t put farmers in a position where it’s an all or nothing like grow Moringa and cut everything else down. And then for it grows extremely fast compared to other fruit trees. So Moranda fruits and about 12 to 14 months. And that compares, for example, to Shey, which takes fifteen years to give you its first fruit or even mango trees, fruit trees that are three to five years before they give you the first fruit. So in Moringa you have this climate resilience opportunity for real farmers. You also have a. Dual income opportunity from the seeds in the leaves, and then you have the opportunity to support and integrate into what farmers are already cultivating rather than replace that.

Rusty Rueff: That’s very cool. I feel like we’re just this far away from Moringa smoothies right down here at Jamba Juice.

Kwami Williams: You know, it’s it’s like it really is coming. It really is. It’s I mean, in different parts of the US, it’s already there.

Rusty Rueff: It’s very cool. So tell us about your vision and mission of True Moringa. I mean, what’s the problem? You’re talking to both Faith Driven Investor and Faith Driven Entrepreneurs here. So what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve?

And how does planting these trees actually do that?

Kwami Williams: Yeah, so True Moringa today serves five thousand women and farming families all across Ghana, and we’ve planned it two million trees across the country of forest and communities and combating malnutrition.

And we are adding value to the seeds of the tree and have created a line of natural personal care products. And as well, we’re taking the lease of the tree and have created a line of health and wellness products. And we built this vertically integrated supply chain really because we have a bold vision. And that vision is that there are a plethora of underutilized high value crops here on the African continent. And what’s missing are really the rails to connect these underutilized crops to a global marketplace where they can be enjoyed and appreciated and to build those rails in a way that improves the lives of farmers that cares for the planet as well as ultimately is sustainable by generating a profit. And so we like to say that our mission is to improve the lives of our farmers and to improve the wellness of our customers, all powered by this Moringa tree.

Rusty Rueff: That’s very cool. If I can paraphrase somebody that we all not only admire but follow, you’re not only teaching them to use a tree, you’re teaching them how to plant a tree. Right? You know.

Kwami Williams: Precisely, precisely. That’s good.

Rusty Rueff: So there must have been some disconnect in the market, though, because Moringa trees have been around for a long time and somebody didn’t see the market opportunity. But yet you have. So how did you see it and what’s your fix for that disconnect?

Kwami Williams: Yeah, so we realized that a big part of the disconnect revolved around the initial positioning of Moringa. It was largely being championed by non-profits and aid organizations working on the African continent, focused on rural malnutrition prevention.

So they would go into communities and they’ll say, hey, farmers here, soem Moringa Seeds, plant them, eat the leaves, your life will be better. Goodbye. And of course, farmers will receive seeds, plant them, and ultimately became jaded because they’re saying, OK, we’ve plant this amazing tree. We can’t eat all the leaves from hundreds of trees. And we know from everything you’ve taught us that there’s a market value to both the leaves and the seeds of my tree.

And so we realized what was missing was a for profit social impact focus to the supply chain. So we now have come in and said, right, we’re not just going to educate you on how to plant Moringa and how to consume it to combat malnutrition at home. We’re going to help you scale your five 10 trees to five hundred on an acre with your other crops. We’re going to now add value here in Ghana, transforming Moringa into ingredients like the seed oil and the leaf powder. And then we’re going to take these two key ingredients and create everyday products that people can enjoy. So there’s an economic engine behind the social impact work and environmental impact work that Moringa presents naturally. And so that’s been the differentiator that we brought into the marketplace. And so even now, when you go to our truemoringa.com Website and you make a purchase, we built the […] ability to allow you to know there’s where my products came from, the community in Ghana they came from. And as you buy one, you plant one. And so we’ve really connected the dots all the way from sort of the souls of Ghana to the shelves of Whole Foods and as well to the smartphones that we have as we shop online in the US.

Rusty Rueff: That’s cool. And we know you’re not only sowing Moringa tree seeds, we also know you’re sowing seeds of your faith. And so take us through, you know, the spiritual integration of your work, your project, your mission. And then while you’re there, talk to us about why Ghana and what harvests are you hoping to see spiritually through your work in Ghana?

Kwami Williams: Yes, such good questions, Rusty, I sort of go in order, so as I think about sowing seeds beyond Moringa seeds, it really comes down to how do I as the co-founder and CEO, I connect, share my fate and display and walk my faith out in a hopefully winsome way in our organization. And what’s been so special is that from the very beginning, God has been the foundation of everything we’ve done, actually. I remember when I first moved back to Ghana, we launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to kick start the business and we had a twenty five thousand dollar goal and we had raised something like four thousand dollars.

And it’s Christmas Eve. Nineteen thousand more to go. And I get an email from a couple in Sweden saying, hey, we don’t know you, but God told us to fill in the entire round. So you meet your goal.

Rusty Rueff: Sweden, you said Sweden and Sweden. So how to connect those dots for me to Sweden?

Kwami Williams: And I share this story because when I open up that email, this is Christmas. And I just started crying. And as I was crying, you there’s no voice in heaven. But I just felt in that moment God saying this is to show you and remind you that I am building this business with you and that I am the foundation of this. So your highs and lows are all going to have to be rooted in me in building this together. And really, there is no direct link between us and this incredible couple that are now still investors in our company. Seven years later, they saw our work online. They followed it and they were obedient to God in their giving. And I share this because it set the tone for the rest of our journey as a company. Today we start every meeting and every meeting and prayer. We create the space in our hiring process to say Colossians three twenty three is going to be our guiding sort of light and framework. And it challenges us to say, let’s work as something done for God, not for our human paycheck and not for any accolades. We create the space as well personally to fast weekly. And I do that because fasting has been a powerful physical expression of saying, God, I need you, but I want to work with you in building this organization. And we haven’t been perfect in modeling our, you know, our faith in God. And not everyone in the organization is a believer, but we’ve created the space that really invites God’s presence into our day to day decision making.

Rusty Rueff: That’s really great. When are we going to dove more into that? But I just have one more question for you. So I’m looking at your product lines here. And you have one product called the Tranquility Face. Now, you can see all of us here. Nobody else can.

Do you think that product could actually work on us? I mean, could it make us better?

William Norvell: And who have all of us needs it the most.

Kwami Williams: So let me just put myself in this and say that I use our oils and the tranquility. Oil is one of our scented oils every day, so I need it. And so I think all of us should use it.

And I personally use it as a beard oil to reduce irritation before and after shave. My wife is using as a lovely facial oil. My mom is using it as a hair oil. So it’s just as powerful. All-Purpose Moisturizing oil for your hair, face and body. I’m going to say we all need it and that’s why you should try it out.

Rusty Rueff: I just want someone to look at me and go, Hey, look at the tranquility in your face. I mean, that would just be a beautiful thing, especially right now at twenty twenty. All right. So William is all yours.

William Norvell: Has the as the only member of the team with a full beard, I take that as a backhanded way of saying William needs it the most.

Kwami Williams: But, you know, that’s it.

William Norvell: That’s all right. That’s all right.

Kwami, I want to dig a little deeper. And one thing we probably haven’t done on here in a while, I want to reread our mission statement, a Faith Driven Entrepreneur, because I think you are going to help us in this. And on the front page of our site, you read our mission to help entrepreneurs who are hard at work on the trail, who are often tired, exhausted, under-resourced and confused. They need rest, support, guidance and provisions as they get ready to head back on the trail to fight dragons. And in no time or is during this pandemic that we are all dealing with in different ways. And God is orchestrating his ways in different ways across the world. But I do know twenty, twenty years been a tough year in some ways for you and the company. And you’ve been so gracious to tell us that you wanted to share that with our audience. And I just think it’s going to be something they need to hear. And so if you could just share what challenges do you guys have faced and how God has walked with you through those.

Kwami Williams: Thank you so much, William. And. I just love the foundation that this mission statement sets, because we are living that to paint the picture for our audience today, starting January 20 19, we start to basically experience our own version of Job’s story. And for color, we’ve been growing at sort of seventy five percent CAGR as a business since inception. Twenty nineteen was supposed to be this big year. We had multimillion dollar contracts to supply companies and Whole Foods and Costco that retail Moringa products. And so there was just this year filled with so much hope and anticipation. And from the first day I come home from of in Ghana, you pray all throughout the night into the new year.

Come on. Supercharges during the first twenty nineteen and I get a call when I wake up on New Year’s Day that fifteen thousand trees were literally burning, that a wildfire had gone to our largest farm here in Ghana four months later in April twenty nineteen.

I also get another message saying that our factory was burning down to the ground and with it went over a million dollars worth of lost revenue assets and as well the livelihoods of job creation opportunity for over one hundred and eighty of our people on our team. And then fast forward a couple more months. A colleague passed away due to health complications and the very next month, the dam that’s upstream from our nuclease farm had an uncontrolled release and ultimately flooded parts of our farm. And to kind of end the year, a burglar broke into our office on Boxing Day the day after Christmas and stole a bunch of stuff. So twenty, nineteen, even before we get to twenty twenty years challenges, global challenges. Twenty nineteen was literally just like hell for us. And twenty twenty as we’ve all experienced. Covid pandemic hit everyone from the rural farmer to the biggest corporates. And for us during the lockdown months they passed about 90 percent of how we make money. It also touched me personally. In July of twenty twenty I got sick with covid. My wife and I both got sick with covid and we actually ended up having a miscarriage as well in that same month and then in September thinking that, OK, that hopefully that’s that’s it. That’s the last thing. In September of twenty twenty in one of our rural communities, three armed gunmen robbed three of my colleagues. They shot into our pickup truck and two were ultimately hit by the heavy ammunition. But by God’s grace, miraculously, they survived the shotgun heads and the AK 47 heads and are recovering post surgery.

And this specific attack is just it’s not Ghana. Ghana is extremely safe and it’s not even in this community. So it’s just a series of events where we have to pause and say, oh, God, what is happening?

Why is that happening? How do we even talk about this?

And so I think God has put not just myself, but our entire company on this sort of crash course of resilience and also of a reclarification and redefinition of our faith and so our love to maybe share some of the lessons that we’ve learned through these back to back adversities.

William Norvell: Thank you so much for sharing. And yeah, definitely. And I ask you to do that. And just that is a wilderness season and they’re littered through the scripture. I don’t know if this is from the Lord or not, but somebody once told me when I was going through a long one that, you know, God uses those mightly that he has taken to the wilderness first. And I don’t know if that hits where you are not. So take it from the Lord if it is and not if it’s not. But all of our heroes from the Bible have experienced things like this. And then I just am grateful for you sharing these stories with our listeners. And yeah, if you would, what has God taught you from these challenges and just. Yeah. Thank you for sharing.

Kwami Williams: Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me and the happiness of all of this. And for that word, I do think that there’s truth in that because so much of this season has been challenging me with a couple big questions. So I know the first one is what’s more important to me? Is it God or is it his gifts? And one of my colleagues, Peter Neila, always knows just the right things to said to me at the right time. He and my mom have that gift and he sent a video to me, I feel this year from 2010. And he shared C.S. Lewis, quote, says he has God and everything else has no more than he who has God alone.

And the day I first heard that, it just changed everything for me because I was so, so much of my Christian life has been a God. Can you give me this gift? He open this door for my company.

You bless my wife and I to that pregnancy will be successful. And these are amazing, good things that a good father wants to give, but I realize that God wasn’t enough for me and this season has got me to a place where God has become enough for me, where I adversity after adversity I can pause and I can just say, God, I love you. I believe and I know that you are good even without this good gift. And I think a related question that I’ve had to wrestle with in this season has been, you know, is God good in my life or in our lives as believers because he protects us from bad things or because his presence with us and I think is right.

So if he protects us from our pain or present with us in our pain and I think honestly, for most of my life, I just chose I want the keep the bad thing away.

And God has used this season to challenge me to get to a place where every day I get to say that your presence is what I want is what I desire.

And that has impacted where I find my identity. So is my identity. And walking in this calling to use botanicals to improve the lives of people or as my identity and just being loved by God.

And I think the last kind of high level question that has helped bring out some lessons for me is around this idea of am I working as as a slave or as a son of God? And I share that the point to the fact that most of the past seven years I’ve drank the Kool-Aid of grind and hustle as a founder, you know, days off and my phone is with me when I’m having dinner with my wife.

And there were seasons I remember when we first won the Forbes 30 under 30, I’ll sleep in with my laptop every day because I’m like, I have to do even more. And when the factory burned and when we that we had to completely restructure our business God said, I need to start resting.

I need you to start taking a sabbatical and you just start setting better boundaries for work. And, you know, it’s been twenty four months almost of back to back adversity, but and I have not perfected it.

But I can say that by God’s grace, I’m progressing in this and setting better boundaries and my wife will call me out if I stray too far. And so just to kind of some that up, I think the big lessons are around really loving God and pursuing God for him, not his gifts. Secondly, being excited and acknowledging that God is good because of his presence and our pain, not simply the times when he protects us from pain. And then I think a big lesson has been how do I work alongside God as a son who rests rather than a slave who is constantly striving and grinding and hustling without his loving father guiding him.

So I think those are the big things that have come out of this season for me as I think about my faith journey in the face of so much adversity.

Henry Kaestner: Wow. You know, I had thought that we’d hear about Ghana in an entrepreneurial story and learn about Moringa, but it’s really powerful just to hear that we all got something much, much more than we expected and grateful for your faithfulness and sharing your story and a lot of transparency and vulnerability and just really seeing faith at work. And I know that that’s an inspiration, encouragement to all of us.

William Norvell: I’m in and I love what you said. I would love to have this pastor. I’d like to have read a book, a new book by a guy named John Mark called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. And so I don’t know if it’s one to send you. I’ll happily buy it for you. It’s an incredible book, but he does a section on the word hustle and how it’s been co-opted. And, you know, the word actually, the definition means to move hurriedly or unceremoniously in a direction that’s not something to aspire to. The words the words been co-opted a little bit and like it’s definitely not biblical. And I love how you reframed that. And John, Mark does an incredible job. I’d love to hear him talk to entrepreneurs, but it’s all about trust. It comes from a quote from Dallas, Willard, that he asked one time and said, you know, what’s the biggest thing we should do to pursue Jesus?

And he said ruthlessly eliminate her. He said he said there he’s like, OK, what else? He’s like, that’s it. I’m done. So I thank you for that. And but you so you also have an interesting view there. I mean, so that’s your personal journey and what God’s taking you through. You’re also the leader of a company that has gone through these stresses. Not and I’m sure it sounds like just from getting to know you, that they probably walked alongside you through the personal struggles as well as the business struggles and the business is going through issues. How has that affected your organization and how is God equipped you to lead through this?

Kwami Williams: So first, my brother in Christ and colleague Peter Bieler, who I mentioned, always knows just the right thing to say, just yesterday was talking about the ruthless elimination of poverty. So he’s there with you. And I checked out the devotional in the Bible. So I got to taste a little bit of the book. But I think it’s worth diving in and actually reading it.

And to talk to your question about professionally how we’ve sort of navigated adversity and build resilience. I think the first thing is that the senior leadership team, we realized that we needed to self care because we were burning out or will burn out. And so for that, some of the biggest things that we did practically is create space. My co-founder Emily Create Space for a mindfulness meditation for me was a lot around writing down things I’m grateful for every day because I just changed my lens beyond sort of the caring for a mind. All of us have gone into wellness and fitness and so caring for our bodies just so we can actually endure the emotional, physical, mental, intellectual toll of what’s happening. And then in the organization itself. And we really double down on two simple frameworks. So one is start, stop, continue says what can I start today? That is going great. What do I need to stop? That’s not working. And what should we continue? And then a second framework, the growth framework. What’s our goal? What are the options that we have? And then what is the reality on the ground and what’s the way forward? And we took these frameworks as a way to just sit down and dissect our business. It meant we had to lay off our staff who were connected to the factory. That’s the most painful thing I’ve ever had to do as a leader. But then in that pain, we also created opportunities for those who knew how to sew, started making masks to support covid. And we raised our own capital. We really donated our savings to create an unemployment fund to serve those who don’t have a safety net. On the product side, we launched a couple of new skills and these skills actually became the trigger to get into Whole Foods in New England. So in our grocery at the worst possible time, the expansion of our product line doubling down or triggering a brand, companies getting to Whole Foods at the end of twenty nineteen and at the end of twenty twenty, that’s helped us get into Costco. And I think that basically taking these frameworks ultimately has helped us run lean experiments that have unlocked opportunity. And as we end twenty twenty, we’ve grown revenue by almost three times that of twenty nineteen. So we’re really excited that God has blessed these small efforts to really say, what can I start, what can I stop, what can I continue. And as well, how do I grow even in the face of adversity?

William Norvell: Amen, amen. And as we come near to our close, I would love to know as someone who’s on the ground working with entrepreneurs, I know you’re involved with so many. I think it’s a group of us, I think speak for the three of us. We’ve just collectively been inspired by the continent of Africa and what is going on there and just, you know, shame on us for missing it and not seeing the amazing opportunity and growth and looking past it. And so I would love for you maybe to give a pitch as well while you’re on this podcast. What’s your vision for the future of Ghana specifically? And maybe if you have one for Africa, what could entrepreneurship do for the country of Ghana and the continent of Africa?

William Norvell: That’s a great question. I think it’s been said that, you know, talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn’t that thing. That’s really the case. When you think about Ghana on the African continent, my sort of vision is to unleash the entrepreneurial capacity of people on the African continent.

I believe that Africans should be the one in the driver’s seat to solve the injustice of poverty, to create opportunities that improve the livelihoods of their communities, their cities, their countries. And we need allies from around the world in that partnership. But I think that it’s basically saying if the right acting come alongside African entrepreneurs, if they’re the coaching the capital, the community, the connections can create a conducive ecosystem, that we can transform this continent and take it from the economist, call it a hopeless continent to one that’s actually a beacon of excellence across every industry that we can imagine. And for me, the poorest demographic in our world today, our real farmers. And so, so much of how I think we can do this is creating opportunities that increase the income and improve the livelihoods of women and farming families all across the African continent.

William Norvell: Oh, that’s amazing. Thank you. And that’s Henry alluded to in the beginning. We are going to come to a close and we’re going to ask our favorite question. And we’ve recently been led by the spirit to ask a second question. So if you haven’t listened to the recent podcast, this may be new, but we’d love to invite you to share with our listeners. Where God has you in his word right now, where he has you in his scripture and what he may be teaching you, it could be something that you’ve been studying this season, could be something that he told you this morning through your mom or your business partner. And then secondarily, how can we be praying for you and how can we be praying and our listeners be praying for True Moringa?

Kwami Williams: A funny story is that my mom did send this verse to me this morning. It was her verse of the day, but it has been the verse that I have found so much comforting in the season.

And it’s Isaiah. Forty three, one to two. And I love to just sort of read it. And when I do, I insert my name just to make it as powerful as possible. And it’s the same. But now, Kwami, listen to the Lord who created you, Kwami, the one who formed you cells. Do not be afraid for I have sinned. You I have called you by name. You are mine when you go through the deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through the rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up. The flames will not consume you. And it resonates because we’ve literally gone through the flood, the fire, the oppression in a physical sense, and God has been faithful to it all. And so I hope this speaks to anyone who is going through any difficulty, especially with what twenty, twenty and covid-19 has brought to the world and just know that God is real. He loves you and he is presence in the most painful things.

William Norvell: Amen. And how can we be praying for you and your company?

Kwami Williams: True Moringa is at an inflection point. We’re grateful to God for the ability to be growing over one hundred and fifty four percent year over year. And so the keeper now is for like minded investors to partner with us to support our growth beyond this year. And I think that’s going to be the biggest sort of catalyst to our future as we work to improve the lives of farmers here in Ghana.

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.