Henry Kaestner: [00:01:47] Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. It’s really good to be with you all. This is a special edition recording that we’re doing with a good friend of all of ours. James Cham. It’s infrequent that we have a guest on the program that Rusty knows well. William knows well, I know well. And so it’s a great joy to have James Cham of Bloomberg beta with us on the Faith Driven Investor podcast during a crazy time and what’s going on in finance and investing in the economy. James, thank you very much for making time to be with us this morning. [00:02:15][28.3]

James Cham: [00:02:15] Of course. Of course. I’m glad to be with you guys. I always look for excuses to hang out with all three of you. [00:02:20][5.0]

Henry Kaestner: [00:02:21] You know so many people that there’s a good chance that every listener in his podcast knows you, but on the off chance that somebody doesn’t tell us. Who are you? Where do you come from, what you do? [00:02:32][10.4]

James Cham: [00:02:33] Yeah, I’m a seed-stage investor with a v.c firm called Bloomberg Beta, where we invest in the future of work. [00:02:39][6.0]

[00:02:39] But more importantly, I’m a person who started as a software developer and then became a v.c a few years ago and struggled a lot about what that actually meant and why it might be important. And as a Christian, I think I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what is the actual role of an investor in God’s kingdom. [00:03:00][21.2]

Henry Kaestner: [00:03:01] Mm hmm. So that notes to some extent, of course, that that faith is a part of your life. Have you always been a believer? [00:03:07][6.3]

James Cham: [00:03:09] You know, I grew up in a Chinese church in the San Gabriel Valley of California. [00:03:13][4.8]

[00:03:15] And it was a vital part of both how I thought about myself and how I thought about the world. And, you know, I was lucky enough to get involved with Intervarsity in college. And it’s meant a lot to me. And so it’s been a vital part of my life for a long time. [00:03:29][14.6]

Henry Kaestner: [00:03:30] As you were a software engineer and then now as an investor, how do you see this faith that you’ve had? There’s been a big part of your life. How do you see that come to bear? Is it something that Sunday’s you go to church and it’s been a part of your intervarsity background and all that, and then Monday you’re just kind of coming in and just bringing home the bacon? How have you seen faith work into your life vocationally? [00:03:50][20.2]

James Cham: [00:03:53] You know, it’s interesting because when I got right out of college, I worked as a software developer. But more critically, I ended up living in a house with a bunch of other Christians, many of whom were involved in our local college fellowship. [00:04:06][13.3]

[00:04:07] And that meant for me the way that I thought about my work. [00:04:10][3.1]

[00:04:10] Getting my life wasn’t quite as sort of clearly separated that those things all melded together. [00:04:16][5.6]

[00:04:17] And I think that’s been quite helpful for me, even though I worked in sort of totally secular workplaces. That’s meant that that’s always been part of the discussion and part of the way that I thought about things. [00:04:27][10.4]

Rusty Rueff: [00:04:28] Hey, James, it’s awesome to have you here. You know, we probably should mark this moment in time because our listeners of the Faith Driven Investor podcast could be listening to this years from now and not know why the audio quality is a little off and what’s going on. Well, this is a moment. [00:04:44][15.6]

[00:04:44] It is March the twenty sixth of twenty twenty. And most of us on the line here are in shelter in place as we go through the COVID-19 pandemic. And you know, we wanted to have you on James, not only because of your background and what you do as an investor and a faith driven investor and how your faith informs that, but also to give your insight about what you see going on around us, particularly in the investing world. And like, how should an investor be thinking in this time both strategically and actually tactically, right. Because we’re struggling a little bit here and we want to get your words of wisdom. [00:05:24][39.7]

James Cham: [00:05:25] Yeah. You know, sort of these are the times. So I’m glad I’m not a public market investor. Like I have no idea. [00:05:29][4.3]

[00:05:30] So they’re how they should be thinking about the market or how they think about the world. But I think for an early stage investor and critically for early stage founders, this is such an important and unique moment. There are ways in which for many people they have felt like they’ve been made for moments like this. I think for normal people like me, you know, there were kind of freaking out and we’re trying to figure out what to do day to day. But I think that there are sets of people right now for whom their entire life has been made for a moment like this, when the rules have been broken and thrown up and suddenly they get to try to create something different or redefine things. And I think there’s an openness right now that’s just going to be unique. And the people who are able to understand that and, you know, not to be too theological about it, but the people who’ve been created by God for this moment of whom. It’s not everyone, but they’re just a few. They will be able to do things they would have never been able to do before. It is now the time for like this 17 year old who’s has no right to command the stage or the 60 year old who’s been sort of thinking deeply for a long time. [00:06:39][69.0]

[00:06:39] It’s like their chance now to really sort of take advantage of this moment. And I think it is so hard to sort of imagine that and think about it, but it’s just right there. And I think that’s really exciting, even amidst the terror and all the ways that this is going to be really bad and really hard to give us some more specifics on that. [00:06:58][18.7]

Henry Kaestner: [00:06:59] As you look at your portfolio as a private investor and you’d look at different sectors and you think about what the economy might look like and whether it’ll be the same or different coming out of this, where are some of your observations? [00:07:10][11.6]

James Cham: [00:07:11] So I think that it is easy depending on how you feel to go swing wildly between “We’re going to be in a sort of depression for 10 years or we’re to have a time of unprecedented growth.” [00:07:22][11.1]

[00:07:23] And I think it’s just very hard to know. But what that really means is that the cone of possibility, you know, sort of the range of what’s possible right now is so wide. And so that is both terrifying and exciting. And I think that that means that for the portfolio companies I talked to, they’ve got a plan in both places. Right. There’s a way in which even as companies are going through and figuring out what lay offs are going to look like or how they’re going to extend a runway at the same time that that’s happening. There’s also this chance where they have to dream and say to themselves, you know what, actually my relationship with my customer or my relationship, my partner, could be fundamentally different because I might be in a position to serve them differently or better. My partners might be open to new opportunities. And I think that way of thinking is so hard to do. But for the best entrepreneurs that I’ve dealt with or I talked to, they aren’t thinking that way right now, that they are living in all three places at once. They are thinking right now about, you know, gosh, I’m going to have to renegotiate the lease and I’m going to have to lay off these 10 people. At the same time, they’re saying, you know what, actually, this means that I could actually sort of offer this service to a customer who in the past would never been open to it. And at the same time, they’re saying, you know what, I should now be reaching out to, you know, those 10 people who I’ve talked to three years ago who made some difference in my life and just sent them to quit Texas quick. No. And I think that, Mark, it’s so rare and it’s so hard. But when you see that, it’s an incredible blessing. And it’s incredibly encouraging to me. [00:08:57][94.3]

Henry Kaestner: [00:08:58] As some of your portfolio companies are coming back to you and talking to you about liquidity and obviously some of the reactions you’ll have to that are that in some cases they need to lay some people off. How are you thinking about capital structures right now? How are you thinking about companies and their ability to access debt or more equity? Are you finding that this is a time to think creatively about shoring up the balance sheet where some options? What are some of the discussions you’re having right now with some of your portfolio CEOs? [00:09:26][27.8]

James Cham: [00:09:28] What’s fascinating is that the answer yesterday is gonna be totally different. The answer tomorrow that the capital markets are so fluid. Right. And, you know, we’re at a point right now where there is a massive stimulus that I think may have just been passed and the implications of that. We’ve got a number of folks who are trying to figure that out. I mean, remember companies and what that looks like could fundamentally make a company. Right. And I think that’s what’s weird about this moment, is that there are so many things that are possible. We were joking earlier about the fact that we were having trouble with our videoconferencing system and it exposed the fact that although we call it a cloud, it really is a bunch of servers, right? It’s a bunch of. People servers are going to be overloaded right now because everyone’s using it and it sort of exposes sort of the actual underpinning of what actually works and doesn’t work in the. [00:10:17][48.9]

[00:10:17] It’s almost as if, you know, when you watch The Matrix is a point in the movie where you realize everything’s a simulation and you realize all the pieces are working and grinding together to make the system work. And we’re seeing the same thing across the board in lots of different ways. Right. We’re seeing that also for the financial markets where there are a number of people who thought they had a lot of money to invest and suddenly don’t. [00:10:38][20.6]

[00:10:39] But at the same time, we’ve got a bunch of people sort of who sort of are sitting on piles of cash or eager to play. [00:10:44][5.6]

[00:10:44] Right. And I think that that ability to sort of adjust quickly to the shifting reality and to see the world as it actually is, that’s hard. And so I’m reluctant to make sort of grand pronouncements, but it is definitely one of those cases where I feel like as an entrepreneur and investor, so much of your time now has to be just keeping your eyes open and sort of not using the old rules of thumb that you had. Right. That I have a whole set of like pat answers to things that may no longer apply. And that’s both the fun and the terror of the job. [00:11:13][29.0]

William Norvell: [00:11:14] Hey, James. William, here I want to shift gears to a little bit as your job as an investor in sort of finding new companies to come along, and you mentioned earlier you glad you’re not a market investor, but as you look at what your day to day looks like, are you open for business, looking for new businesses to invest in or are you a pause as well and kind of taking some time to see everything shakes out? Help us kind of get into the world of a venture capitalist or you specifically during the season. [00:11:42][27.4]

James Cham: [00:11:43] Yeah, I think that, you know, I was a software developer in 2000 and then I was a new investor in 2008. And of course, now so I’ve seen a couple of versions of this. And of course, this is totally different from anything that we’ve seen before. [00:11:58][14.9]

[00:11:59] So that’s the first part. And I think that as far as like the generic answer is that seed stage guys are always later to react to macro events that as a seed stage investor, I’m running such small checks, you know, sort of in the grand scheme of things. And also, I’m looking so far ahead. Right. So I’m not expecting to sell a company or sell my position in a company in six months. I’m thinking about it in terms of six to 16 years. [00:12:24][25.5]

[00:12:25] And so as a result of that, you know, the timing is totally different. So that’s the happy talk version of it, which is, yes, we are indeed open for business. [00:12:31][6.1]

[00:12:32] We’ve made a couple investments just even this week. The other part of it, though, is that the world is so uncertain now that now more than ever, like my hypotheses or ideas of how the world will turn out. They’re all up in the air and my ideas about how to think about valuations and what’s valuable. That’s all up in the air. And so that does mean that in some ways my normal theses are changing right now. And I think we’re all trying to adjust. [00:12:56][24.6]

William Norvell: [00:12:57] Well, that’s good. That’s good. Could you go one layer deeper. And you’ve been looking at the world in a certain way, predicting that is sort of your job, trying to predict what will happen and invest in, you know, the world changers. Could you talk about how you got to thinking about that? And this is a point in time. We’re not going to hold you to what could be changing, what should be shifting, what is in question for you right now. And I know you don’t have all the answers, but maybe just minor investors in there right where you are right now. [00:13:24][27.3]

James Cham: [00:13:25] Yeah. You know, sort of I invest a lot in enterprise software and I love enterprise software. I believe it transforms the world. But also, there’s a way in which it is also fundamentally corrupt. It is corrupt in the sense that the people who buy enterprise software oftentimes really are buying it so that they can keep their job or so that they could get promoted rather than they could actually improve the life of a company. And I think that there are a whole bunch of products that were hard to sell in the past because they would require too much wrenching change inside an organization. And if we are indeed looking sort of at a prolonged downturn, then I think there’s a perverse way in which willingness to change is totally different. And so the willingness to adopt new technologies can be different than it has been for the last 10 years. You know, the stereotype of the cool innovation team with the guys, with the purple glasses, you know, sort of that’s how people used to think about new technology. And now the way to think about new technology is something that might actually make a huge difference. And then the implication there is then the buyers are different. The way they buy is different. The way that we think about selling is entirely different. [00:14:33][67.2]

[00:14:33] And I think all those sorts of things we’re trying to figure out right now and it is partly about predicting the future, but it is mostly really about finding the most interesting entrepreneurs in the world who are living the future right now. [00:14:46][13.2]

[00:14:47] Right. And so that’s the way that I actually think about it. [00:14:50][3.2]

Rusty Rueff: [00:14:51] And James, what do you tell the entrepreneur who right now is like at that precarious moment, like about to go raise, but was a couple of months away? But, you know, as the time goes by, they’re burning. And so their burn is up. How did they approach you at this point? Very tactically, and then is there something that you can provide as advice about how they go back to their current investors? Because in normal times, you’re running out of cash and you’re going to hit a wall. You know, you might be able to raise. You just need a little more time and you might go back for that bridge loan that can sometimes feel predatory. In some ways, just give them a little bit of advice on what to do if they’re in that precarious moment. [00:15:35][43.9]

James Cham: [00:15:36] So this is the time for over-communication. I think that if I were just to look at the best founders in my portfolio, they’re just spending a lot of time with what you could generically call investor relations. Right. That they are trying to figure out what’s the position of their various investors. Where are they? How are they doing psychologically? What’s the position of the firm? And I think that involves just lots of conversation, whether that’s over text or email or Skype or phone calls. And I think there’s a way in which the only way that can work well is if you’re connecting with other people. And in part because of the pandemic, it is both easier and harder. It’s obviously harder because just like right now, we can’t see each other face to face. You know, the zoom meeting skips and you can’t tell whether someone’s frowning or whether they just got frozen. Right. So that whole piece becomes harder, but it’s easier because there are so many different ways to connect. Now that there’s so many different ways you can connect with people. [00:16:29][53.8]

[00:16:30] And also in part because this pandemic is so universal, you could connect with people in authentic, deeper ways than you’ve ever been before because everyone’s like worried about their grandmother or they’re sort of stuck at home by themselves. And that chance to connect just gives you visibility. And, you know, sort of from a pragmatic point, it gives you visibility into what’s going on. But also from an eternal point of view, it lets you create relationships that are just going to be important forever. [00:16:57][27.7]

Rusty Rueff: [00:16:59] Yeah. And I got to think that on the flip side of that, as an investor, you know, you probably also got this sort of nervous moment, too, where you don’t want to over ask, but the same time you want to be communicated to. So that over communication piece is a great piece of advice because as an investor, I mean, I’d like to hear before I have to ask. That’s right. And again, that creates confidence. [00:17:22][22.5]

James Cham: [00:17:23] That’s right. And, you know, sort of the essence of that is over communication. But also, it is genuine conversation and it is hard to get genuine conversation just in general in life in the sense that I actually talk to someone. I get a different reaction. I hear something back from them. I react to that and that sort of interplay. I think the best entrepreneurs are able to get there right now very, very quickly. But it’s just hard to do because it’s hard to get people off of their generic positions or to actually think about the situation they’re in the middle of right now. Because I don’t know, as of v.c, I might be on sort of today 15 different 30 minute zoom calls. Right. Plus a couple of blogger meetings and just that ability to transition and think and be present. That’s a huge opportunity. And it’s so, so hard right now. [00:18:11][48.2]

Rusty Rueff: [00:18:12] Yesterday, I was on a call with one of the companies that’s in my little portfolio of investments. Day before yesterday, actually in one of the co-founders wasn’t there. And I said, you know, hey, what’s going on? He goes, Well, I got bad news. He’s very sick, is covered 19. He tested positive. He’s 40 years old. Right. 40 years old. And the other co-founder. You can tell he’s scared. Like he goes, we’re leaving him alone. Fortunately, his wife is a physician’s assistant, but she’s sick, too. And they’re trying to kind of work through this. And you know what it does? It also gives us an opportunity to say, hey, you know, I’m a person of faith. Would you please pass to him that I am sincerely not just making it up. I am praying for him. He goes on my prayer list. So there there is that moment for authentic that we can actually go even a little further in the authenticity of how our faith plays out. [00:19:05][52.6]

James Cham: [00:19:06] Yeah. And I think this is also you know, it’s interesting. This is the moment for Jesus. Right. That this is the moment where it’s only going to be by paying attention to the Holy Spirit and being finely tuned and not getting distracted on Twitter. Right. For you’re going to be able to think that instead of be prompted. And I feel like it’s amazing to me because, you know, the best entrepreneurs have so many distractions and so many like the places where they get information and that ability to step back and actually hear right here what’s important. [00:19:41][35.2]

[00:19:42] That’s beautiful to see when that actually happens. [00:19:44][1.6]

Henry Kaestner: [00:19:45] Indeed. And, you know, I think James, you pointing us to Jesus is super important. [00:19:49][4.3]

[00:19:49] I know I’ve had some actually some very rich conversations with people that share faith over the course last couple of days. Many of them are in the health care space and they are very, very concerned about the impact that this has on the general health population. And of course, it makes sense as their perspective. It’s their flock. It’s for guys uniquely equip them to do with their their talents and their experience. On the other hand, my background is more of being an entrepreneur or even more so than being an investor. And so I feel a particular sensitivity for my flock, if you will. And those are small to medium sized business owners who are going through some real challenges and questioning whether the treatment is going to be worse than the actual disease. And yet again, on the flip side, the health care, people are looking at health care systems being overwhelmed. And I think that the answer for all of us is that we need to look to guide and understand the guy to sovereign and guy cares about the health care and cares about health care professionals. And he cares about the economy and jobless claims and small to medium sized business owners. And the thing that unites us is something that’s we really need to rely on. We need to rely on our shared faith and understand that God is sovereign and that we if we lean on our faith first, it will then give us the grace to be able to engage with other people who might have views that are different than ours will be able to rejoice in what we share in common more than the differences that we have. And it will allow us to then be able to be a more effective witness and testimony to others that are trying to figure out what they think and why they think. This just really strikes me as just an incredible time for us all as believers to be able to speak into the different sectors in which we have been given the special privilege of being able to speak into. And I think as investors, that’s super important. My sense as an investor right now, the conversations I have or the next two months about why I have the hope that I have, the perspective I have will clips that that I had in all of 2019 and probably will have an of Lord wine on all of 2021. And it’s a conversation, hopefully of encouragement to the entrepreneurs that are in our portfolio that are laying people off. It’s an encouragement to our is to be able to help them and understand that with their money that they’ve entrusted us with, that we’re looking to be faithful stores of that and that we’re playing the long game that we’re looking to love on great enterprises and great leaders who we have chosen invest in not so much because of their idea or because of what they’re can hit next quarter or the following quarter, but because of our assessment in their talent to be able to see what the market is giving them and to be able respond by adding value to the overall economy. And I just I hope that we all lean into that. And it’s daunting. It’s not easy, but it does, I think, make us rely more on God. And so this has been a very spiritually rich time for me. [00:22:35][165.9]

James Cham: [00:22:36] Yeah. You know, it’s so interesting because, of course, it’s not going to be all good news. Like, I feel like I’ve maybe I’ve sounded too optimistic in this conversation. There’s going to be a lot of pain and a lot of people’s lives are going to feel like they’re gonna be destroyed. And it’s really, really hard. There’s a way in which, you know, sort of for the younger entrepreneurs, they’ve never seen a downturn. Reagan sort of they’ve got in the job market in 2008, and they’ve only seen it go up since then. [00:22:58][22.3]

[00:22:59] And I think this idea that bad things could happen to people who are capable or people who are good will have a difficult time getting a job. [00:23:07][8.1]

[00:23:08] That idea is actually going to be really hard for a bunch of people to understand and to process, especially for those who’ve been incredibly blessed and incredibly successful. And I think that that that humbling process, you know, that’s going to require deep character, but it’s also going to require like deep theology. I think there’s a way in which all the theoretical things that you’ve learned in Sunday school, all the ideas you’ve got around the Trinity, all the ideas you’ve got around redemption. Sort of God’s role in this world, they’re going to be tested now, and I think and I hope that the church is ready for this moment. [00:23:42][34.5]

[00:23:43] And that’s, you know, to us I am partly praying about now, but I’m also partly praying that we as a set of institutions and a tribe of people that will be resilient for the long term and not sort of fall apart because of, you know, various disagreements or discussions over the next couple days, because we were still thinking in terms of days. I feel like we should be thinking in terms of months and quarters and years. And so that’s the thing that I pray about. [00:24:11][27.7]

William Norvell: [00:24:12] Amen. James, I’m interested in how when you talk about people that are not in a downturn, I just think that’s such a pressure conversation, especially in Silicon Valley or in the broader, you know, early stage technology world where I think it’s been especially good. Right. I mean, if you’re a good engineer, there’s ten job offers. People are e-mailing you on LinkedIn everywhere. There are no layoffs. It’s just even further out to the right. As you see, your company potentially have to deal with layoffs. I’m wondering a couple of things. One, are companies in the early stage tech space, do you see some layoffs coming, too? Do you see in 2020 budgets being readjusted? I think there’s also a mindset out there that are you know, once they open the doors, all are going to go back to normal. Mehta How are you counseling your company there in 3D? Do you see a fundamental shift maybe out in the early stage tech sector where people are going to slow the pace a little bit, maybe go more towards optimal growth instead of crazy venture capital feel growth that has been sort of happening over the last decade. Like and I know Megan needs a couple of different predictions and I wondered how you see it this time, you know, potentially changing those things. [00:25:21][69.2]

James Cham: [00:25:22] You know, it ranges. So why the…I will admit that I’ve tried very hard to bite my tongue and to let the entrepreneur tell me what’s going on first before I come over because it really depends on the sector right now. And I think the only thing we know right now is that that, yes, there are going to be lots of layoffs in certain sectors and it’s going to be really, really painful. And lots of very good people are going to be in a position where they’re going to face financial insecurity for the first time in their life and sort of being able to process that and being there for them, it can be hard. I think the other things is gonna be true, that layoffs are going to happen online. And, you know, layoffs are already inhumane. It’s so difficult for both parties but to have to lay off 100 people or 150 people over video conference like that’s crazy. And that’s never been done before. I think that for certain types of companies, they’re going to do very, very well in this market. There’s certain ones where companies are you know, investors are banging on their walls because they’re especially suited for remote work or for automation. There are other companies that sort of, let’s say, companies in the travel industry. Right. Or companies that are reliant on sort of Face-To-Face interaction as part of their value, where they’re going to have to like shut down basically for months and months as everyone figures out this pandemic. And I think the reality of that is just it’s just so hard to look face on and understand. So that’s part of it. And then I think the broader question of will things be different? Yes, things will be different. But it’s not like gods told us how things will be different three months from now. The way that things are we different. We are highly dependent on sort of the decisions that individual entrepreneurs and leaders and pastors. The pattern is that they set right now could sort of set the pattern for the next couple of decades. And I think that’s both encouraging and terrifying, right. That right now, when we’re already distracted and worried about our kids or our grandparents at this moment, when we are hampered, the decisions we make are going to set down for a long time. And it’s only by the grace of God. Right, that we’ll make the decisions. And I think spending time sort of just holding your breath a little bit, stepping back and praying and sort of in a world where there’s infinite amounts of information. Right. Sort of being able to focus on the things that are really important and that sort of actually should influence your decision. That’s the challenge, I think, for investors and entrepreneurs and everyone right now. [00:27:42][139.9]

Henry Kaestner: [00:27:43] James, anything else that may have not come up in conversation or anything else? And there is a need to be we cover a lot of ground, but is there anything else that you think that our audience needs to know about? [00:27:52][9.2]

James Cham: [00:27:53] So, you know, I come from a strain of Christianity that’s mildly charismatic. Like we’re not, like, super charismatic, really mildly charismatic. [00:27:59][6.3]

[00:28:00] And I’ve been convinced for the last couple of quarters that revivals around the corner. [00:28:07][6.6]

[00:28:08] You know, there’s a secular historian named Jill Lipoor, who writes about American history, who the other day said, you know, America’s overdue for a revival, like a religious revival. [00:28:16][8.5]

[00:28:17] And I thought, oh, my goodness, here we have a secular historian and she has more faith in me. What’s wrong with me? Right. And I think that there’s a way in which, you know, there’s going to be revival and it’s going to come out as like something out of jail. But it’s going to be the dreams of old men. And it’s can be the prophecy and work of young people. And I think there’s a way in which, like as a 46 year old, you know, sort of my dreams are different than the actual work that’s gonna be required. And so I’m very hopeful about this entire generation of like teenagers and 20 somethings who are gonna talk about God differently and they’re gonna be raised in a totally different environment and their ability to communicate. And our ability is like sort of investors or older people to recognize the value that they create and encourage that. I feel like that’s the challenge for me. [00:29:04][47.3]

Henry Kaestner: [00:29:05] That’s a great encouragement. That’s a great word. [00:29:07][1.4]

William Norvell: [00:29:07] Amen, such a great word. Thank you for coming on sharing your wisdom. I love how you framed the last couple of moments of just that. This is a big time for people to lean into the Holy Spirit, to lean into Jesus, to try to understand what he’s calling us to in situation, and that those could have big impacts moving forward. And so in the midst of that, I’d love to ask you, you know, whereas God have you right now, potentially this morning or over the last few weeks during this crisis, where did he have you and his word? What name is coming alive in a new way? You just mentioned a great pass from Joel. So maybe a little bit more on that, but it’s something else. Where did he had you maybe walk us listeners through where you are experienced? [00:29:47][39.2]

James Cham: [00:29:48] Here’s where I really am. You know, I have a little bit of a cold I’m sort of a little paranoid. I’m sitting in my grise. I’m worried about like my family and my friends in my portfolio, you know, sort of I’m trying to not look at Twitter, you know. [00:30:00][11.7]

[00:30:00] So that’s where I really am. And at the same time, I’m also sitting here at a time when it feels like I don’t know the institutions that proved to be effective and good now are gonna earn credibility for decades and decades. [00:30:14][13.1]

[00:30:14] And I just so pray that those institutions will be Christian ones like, you know, sort of led by people who are going to follow Jesus and Senate example for people for a long, long time. And so it doesn’t have to be me. It doesn’t have to be someone listening on this podcast. But it’s got to be someone and I pray so hard that sort of God will raise those men and women up and that they’ll help them create these institutions that really could last for a long, long time. And so, you know, that’s my hope. That’s my prayer. And sort of like that’s my blessing to you guys. [00:30:47][33.0]

William Norvell: [00:30:48] Amen! Thank you so much for spending some time with us during the season. [00:30:52][3.8]

James Cham: [00:30:52] Indeed. Yeah. Hey, feel for your brother. Yeah. No, my pleasure, guys. You know, God bless you for your work and hope to see you guys physically soon. [00:30:52][0.0]

[1692.0]

Henry: [00:01:55] Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. It is awesome, as always, to have you with us. I’m joined by my co-host, William. And we have a really special guest here that’s made a big impact in the way that both William and I have thought about this larger faith driven investing lens and ecosystem. Jerry Boyer here. And we’re going to get right into this. Jerry is very thoughtful about many different aspects of faith driven investing. He’s thought about it, about what God says. I listened to a talk that he gave several years ago about how he looks at some Old Testament stories like the sons of Issacar and what they meant for this age. [00:02:32][37.3]

[00:02:33] And so, Jerry, I want you to take this conversation the way you want to. We were talking before the program started today, and you were like, you know, ’cause there’s so many different podcasts that talk about God owns it all. And we’re going to get right in this and just validate all that. We understand that there’s an increasing awareness of Christ followers, that there’s an opportunity to worship God with the money entrusted us to, and that we need to be vigilant for greed. That is a very important part of this overall piece. And yet it’s just a little bit of a piece. You’ve done some really interesting work in going back into scripture to endeavor to understand what did Jesus say about invested in? What did Genesis say about investing in Genesis is an easy place to start. Is it the beginning of the Bible? What is your reading of Genesis tell you about how we might think about investing in a way that honors God? [00:03:21][47.5]

Jerry: [00:03:22] Well, I think if you look at the Book of Genesis carefully, and the easiest thing for us to do is to take our best thinking and hang it on a biblical text or to take our arguments or our debates or even our questions and bring them to the Bible and tell the Bible, “answer my question, Bible.” And I happened, actually, my wife and I together decided to look more closely at the Book of Genesis several years ago. It was actually after a health crisis. I know you had a health crisis. You ended up in the hospital unexpectedly. So did I. And I was laying in that hospital bed and I thought, OK, God, I think this is a good chance to get closer to you. And I was already a Christian, and I think I would have considered myself a serious Christian, and most people would have said the same thing. But maybe I need to get more serious. [00:04:10][48.5]

[00:04:11] And I thought, well, what’s God’s love language? Well, God’s love language is scripture, mostly Hebrew. So I said, okay, God, I think what you’re calling us to do is to get deeply into the scriptures. Let’s start from the beginning. So what my wife and I did is every night, my wife and I would read the creation account in the book of Genesis in Hebrew together, and we would do Genesis 1. And then, you know, that would take a couple of weeks. And then we go back to the beginning of 1:1 again. And then we’d go and when we that Chapter 2 the next time through and we just kept going until it was like Genesis 1 through 9. [00:04:49][38.3]

[00:04:51] And after about five years of that, an archbishop who had ordained me, who was also the chancellor of a university, asked me about my personal study. Jerry, what are you studying in your personal Bible study? And I told him about the Genesis work and he said, well, I think that’s a master’s degree or we call an STL. And if you enrolled and wrote an 80 page thesis on that, we think that could be a degree. Me being a deacon, him being an archbishop, I thought, I guess I better do this. So I did it. And it was 240 pages, not 80, spent about a year and a half on it. And so there’s a lot there. So I don’t really think we can cover the 240 pages, which are basically a commentary on Genesis 1 through 3 Hebrew text. But a lot of stuff jumps out in the Hebrew text and it’s really not about what we bring to it. And what most Christians bring to the text of Genesis is our fight with Darwinism. And we have a fight with Darwinism and it’s understandable why. So we want to know what can Genesis fit with an old earth or a young earth? [00:06:04][73.0]

[00:06:04] We’re bringing our questions to it. But God didn’t write Genesis 1 through 3 to refute Darwin. He wrote Genesis 1 through 3 to tell us something. So throughout we said, What are you telling us? In other words, we ask the Bible to tell us what questions it wants us to ask it rather than bringing our best questions. Two thousand years ago, the church fathers brought philosophical questions. Now evangelicals bring scientific questions. And we concluded that even though it has scientific or philosophical implications, it’s not mainly about that. And we said, OK, God, why did you write this to us? [00:06:43][39.1]

[00:06:44] What are the questions we’re supposed to be asking? And that’s the work on Genesis. So we stop there and see kind of where you want to go from there. Because it’s such a broad topic, it’s really kind of hard to know what part we should focus on. Yeah, we could go a thousand different ways there. [00:06:57][13.2]

Henry: [00:06:57] I’d love to talk about the difference between reading the Bible in Hebrew versus English and I would like to go in all that, but we probably can’t with this. What I’d like to go to specifically is as an investor and you speak a lot about investing, what does your reading of Genesis tell you about the way that you were to Steward Capital and to invest? How are you a better investor because you read through Genesis 1 through 3 exhaustively? [00:07:21][23.4]

[00:07:23] I wish exhaustively. I exhausted myself. But, you know, just as of yesterday, there’s something else that popped out at us. It’s really amazing. It’s probably the densest piece of writing in human history, except maybe some of the gospel accounts. All right. So what do I take away from that? I take away from that that this is a book about apprenticeship. God is the Emperor and Adam is the prince in waiting. And Adam was put in a garden to learn how God did things. And then at some point, when he was sufficiently apprenticed, he and his wife were to be given a ceremony, were to be given authority, and then sent out into the world to make the wilderness, the land like the garden. [00:08:05][41.6]

[00:08:06] So that this is basically the story of a dynasty. What’s called a co regency, where you have a senior king and a junior king or king in waiting who is watching and studying the ways of the palace so that someday he can rule together with his father, not replace like we have with human kingship ships, because the senior king, the emperor is eternal. But there was an under-agedness to Adam, which was not supposed to be permanent, and he was supposed to learn the ways of Elohim, learn the ways of God, and then go out and make the world that way. And the world was made to be remade, but the world wasn’t finished. The garden was finished. But the wilderness was not finished. The garden was the model. The world was the clay that Adam was supposed to shape to make it more like the garden. And he was supposed to learn wisdom through an apprentice model. [00:09:00][54.2]

[00:09:01] So the world was made to be changed. And it yields over and over again what has created created as Baraa and made as Osei. So you have Osei God made, and that’s similar to the word yield. Yield as an investment word. Well, the reason that we can have yield in investments is because yield is built into the creation. The creation is made to grow. When we interact with it and that growth or growth potential in the creation is the reason that yield is legitimate. Aristotle didn’t think interest rate or yield was legitimate because he thought it was sterile. Marx thought it wasn’t. A lot of medieval theologians didn’t because they saw a static universe. Pagan economics just basically saw the universe as static and whatever god there was as either stingy or uninvolved. [00:09:46][45.4]

[00:09:47] But we have a God who’s generous, and if God’s generous, then I can lend you money and you can make money and you can still pay me interest because it grew faster than the interest. A generous God is a God where investment is possible, where me getting a dividend or an interest payment or a capital gain is not at your expense. Cause there’s enough growth for the investi and the invest store to be partners with one another and grow together. Because the Hebrew universe is a seed in itself. Things multiplying universe, whereas the pagan universe is essentially a dead no growth universe. [00:10:23][35.8]

Henry: [00:10:25] So the first lesson from Genesis is that investments, looking to get a return on investments, is something that was part of the initial design. [00:10:32][7.2]

Jerry: [00:10:33] Yes, you can argue that God’s making of the garden is an investment. He expends labor to create a physical plant environment. In this case, the garden is basically a school. It’s job training for Adam and his wife to become, you know, the earthly king and queen of the universe. God spends of himself first to get a return later. So he himself is an investor. [00:11:01][27.9]

Henry: [00:11:03] OK, so things didn’t go where it was just this beautiful investment with just yield year in, year out the way that it might have been their fall happened. Presumably that impacted not only the Garden and Adam, of course, irreparably, forever, but it also included the type of investments that man then made from that point going forward. Talk about that. [00:11:25][22.4]

Jerry: [00:11:26] Yeah, well, God made an investment. And Adam and his wife were essentially the stewards, kind of the managers of that investment. And they ripped him off. And, you know, that’s a problem that comes down to us today. Economist call it agency risk. If I’m the owner and I put assets under your care. Are you gonna follow my interests? Or are you going to follow your own interests at my expense? Are you gonna give yourself an expensive corporate jet or engage in political virtue signaling or just mismanage or grow out of a psychological need rather than, you know what’s really wise or fail to grow, you know, whatever your thing is. Are you gonna be a self dealer or are you gonna be a faithful steward? [00:12:06][39.7]

[00:12:07] See, this idea of stewardship goes right back to Genesis. It’s not something introduced in Jesus’s parables. Jesus as parables are genesis based parables in many cases. It’s why there’s so agricultural. So God made an investment and the stewards of his investment essentially ripped him off. Now God came back in and rescued it, but he had to rescue it. And one of the ways he rescues it is in some sense by making it tougher on the stewards. The curses in Genesis after the fall tend to be weakening and confusion, curses, not just like punishment curses. So Adam’s strength was his work, but now he sweats, right? Adam’s strength again was his labor. He was supposed to conquer the world. You know, the wilderness. But now he gets thorns and thistles. The woman’s role was to help him in that and to help him. You know, one of the ways was bring children into the world, but that’s where it goes wrong. [00:13:03][55.9]

[00:13:03] So every place where the man and woman were strong, their strength was decreased a little bit. And so we live in that fallen world of we work and it’s hard and there’s sweat and we work and we intend one thing. But another thing comes out that’s thorns and thistles. We think we’re planting wheat. And what we end up getting is things that really don’t serve our purposes. So in addition to the challenges of being a faithful steward of God’s resources, which Adam had, we now have the additional challenges of not being able to be trusted completely with the power that man originally had and to have that power. In some ways, Kirst and turned down a little bit because if things were too easy, we’d have too much room to get into mischief. Human nature is such that we can’t be trusted with as much power as we’d like to be or even as we were before the fall. [00:13:58][54.7]

William: [00:13:59] It’s really interesting. Jerry, William here. I Love kind of going back through the word of God. I mean, we try to do that a lot here on the show because it does just reveal so much about God’s character, who he is and what he wants us to do with our resources and our capital. And I love how you’re kind of reframing maybe some common thoughts about a story, especially here, the creation story, and kind of bringing it back to, you know, what is the scripture actually tell us if we take away our world view that we’re bringing to it. And I’d love if you would maybe dove into, you know, a topic or two more. Another passage to a scripture where maybe you’ve heard it used for the faith driven investing movement where you think, you know, hey, not that people are going to go wrong here, but maybe they’re not seeing the full picture here of what God story is trying to tell us and how we should steward our resources. [00:14:47][48.2]

Jerry: [00:14:48] Well, yeah, I think that may be one of the things that we’re missing or gets too little emphasis is that the main purpose of mankind is to glorify God by filling the earth and subduing it. The main purpose of man is not avoiding sin. And I think the evangelical conversation in general, and that includes the evangelical financial conversation can easily fall into the idea that the Christian life is the life of sin avoidance. And you certainly are supposed to avoid sin. I mean, the very definition of something you should avoid and God did give a limit. God did say guard the garden. Adam failed to guard the garden. And the serpent came in and ruined everything. We can come back on that if we want. I don’t think the first sin was the eating of the fruit. I think the first sin was letting the serpent in. I’ll just put that there is a marker. You want to come back? You can or we can just kind of move on. [00:15:42][53.7]

[00:15:43] Adam’s job was primarily a positive one, which was fill the earth and subdue it. And however, Adam, I’ve got a restriction on you. There’s a tree you’re not supposed to eat from. But Adam’s main job was not to refrain from eating that tree. Adam’s main job was to fill the earth and subdue it and guard rails around that are one of the things you shouldn’t do is eat from that tree unless I tell you you can eat from it. And I think what happens is that we get focused on sin. And arguably it was in fact too much focus on sin that made the tree so appealing when we’re supposed be busy about the business of glorifying God. How do we glorify God? Well, how did he say to glorify him, fill the earth and subdue it? Exercise dominion over the birds. They are the fish of the sea and over the beasts of the field. That’s the job of humanity. And that’s largely what businesses. So that mandate is never removed. It’s never turned down. It’s never rescinded. It is, in fact, reaffirmed in Jesus the second Adam. And so that’s mainly our job as entrepreneurs and investors is to fulfill that. And yes, of course, along the lines, sin messes it up. So avoiding sin is ancillary to the main goal, which is glorifying God in this case through dominion over the earth, glorifying it. [00:17:07][83.9]

Henry: [00:17:08] So I love that from a couple of different angles. One is that a lot of times in our investment, we talk about sins that we see in our portfolio companies. In this one, I mean, we prefer sins of commission rather than sins of omission. We’d like to see leaders who will take action and error on that side. And I think it really comes to the subject really of taking risk. Since there is no specific example of exactly, here’s what you’re supposed to do next is not open, nor there’s some risk involved of going ahead and trying different things towards an end goal in mind. And yet we have to take risk. If we’re just focused on sin avoidance, then that’s almost a risk avoidance. Absolutely. Maybe I’m reading into it too much. [00:17:46][38.4]

Jerry: [00:17:46] Now, I know you’re not. That’s right. If we’re focused exclusively on sin avoidance, then what we will tend to do is we will get paralyzed. And I think this is part of the message in the gospels of the various paralytic that Jesus runs into, that a lot of society had become essentially paralyzed. I can’t touch anything. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t do anything. Everything is unclean. Everything is bad. Or if it’s not bad, it’s debatable. And the Pharisees just added rule on top of rule on top of rule. And it was never enough. And you’ve got one group of Pharisees who come along and at some commands and then other Pharisees come along and say those other Pharisees, they’re really soft on sin. Where the real pure ones. And then they add more and eventually you get the scenes. They have to completely withdraw from society. But even Knake Sin goes with them. You know, to the Kumaran community, right. Even though they’re basically hermits, they’re still sent in the world. And it’s a paralyzing thing. And Jesus comes along and just breaks all those barriers down. He’s touching unclean people. [00:18:46][60.2]

[00:18:47] Does he become unclean? No. They become clean. When Jesus touches a dead body, does Jesus become ceremonially unclean, like in the Torah? No. Why? Because the Torah was wrong? No. Because Jesus is contagious holiness. He’s contagious life. So he’s touching lepers and he’s touching women with a mission of blood. All this unclean stuff. And also morally unclean. He’s dealing with tax collectors. He’s dealing with prostitutes. And he’s getting criticized for it by the people who want to take no risks. So when in doubt, do nothing. Jesus is very active, taking all kinds of risks and getting criticized for it constantly. He is investing himself, even at the risk of being seen as being far too close to centers. [00:19:32][44.5]

Henry: [00:19:33] So this is fascinating. You’re heading right into a big, big, big topic that’s going on a feature of investing, which is how do we think about screens and negative screens? How do we think about companies that are doing things that would bother us as Christ followers? Maybe they’re involved in pornography, maybe they’re involved in tobacco. Think of the different things that would make us uncomfortable. And so on one hand, as someone who’s driven by their faith. You don’t want to presumably be a part of aiding and abetting somebody who’s a known distributor of pornography. And some people would say that’s what we do when we invest in a company that has that as a major part of their revenue. On the other part, you can see another angle, and I love to see just how you balance these two, which is if Jesus was out there talking to the prostitute into different people, tax collector and people who are thought of as unclean at the time, do we just run away from all those things? So how do we appropriately engage but without being in a spot which would make us fall into sin? So I think that everybody’s following what you’re saying. Make it real in the world of investing through this conversation about negative screens, please. [00:20:41][67.8]

Jerry: [00:20:42] Yeah. I’m happy to. But let me just kind of say that I’m happy to talk about that. But I do notice. I guess that’s the big topic, right? So we sort of have to talk about it. But I’m bothered that it’s the big topic because I don’t think it’s the big topic in scripture. I think it’s there, but it gets so much more conversation. The Bible does deal with these issues. The Pharisees criticizing Jesus. Then later, the Judy Isaiah’s and also some of the weaker brethren were concerned about meat being sacrificed to idols. Right. So you have those controversies. But those are almost side issues as Jesus goes about his business. And then later, as Paul and the apostles go about their business, their about their father’s business. Right. And then these issues come up and someone accuses them and then they answer and then they get back to their father’s business. So, I mean, in the providence of God, the evangelical conversation has largely been about sin screens, which I find unfortunate, but that is God’s providence. So we kind of have to work with that. So what I would say is, first of all, if something is not a faith, that sin. So the Bible is perfectly clear that if you think something is morally wrong, it violates your conscience. You’re not allowed to do it. So even though you have the freedom to eat meat sacrificed to idols, if you don’t know that you have that freedom, if you think that it’s wrong, maybe you’re a recent convert and you still have feelings of religious piety towards the false idols. When you eat meat sacrificed to idols, maybe it understand how much liberty you have in Christ. Maybe it’s a real stumbling block for you. Then you definitely should not eat. And screeners and financial advisers can help you with that. You know, you can tell them what you’re scruple is and they can say, OK, well, we’ve got a fund for that or even we can set up a separately managed account so you don’t have that. So I strongly affirm that people who have a conscience issue with a particular investment. [00:22:30][107.6]

[00:22:30] Nick Stonestreet, my friend likes to say, let’s say somebody who’s a child was killed by a drunk driver. They don’t want to invest in alcohol stocks. Honor that. They think it’s wrong. Honor that. And an adviser who helps them honor that is in my opinion doing righteous work that should be praised. But to go the extra step, which is to say that your social associations, which include your commercial associations, mean that the sins committed by someone with whom you are associated or dealing even with a financial tie become your sins too, that they you’re appropriating like you touch a dead body. And your ceremonially dead, I think, is not the teaching of the Bible. I think the biblical teaching is your sins or your sins. And if I associate if you’re doing some sin, Henry, and I know you are. Because we all are. If you’re doing some sin and I associate with you, your sin is in mine and my sin isn’t yours. And if you have business dealings with somebody, if you buy a product from a company and something company does something sinful, their sins aren’t your sin. Sin is not transferable along commercial associations. [00:23:44][74.0]

Henry: [00:23:46] But some people and I think you’re very right, when you started it, when we started going down this rabbit trail, you said, you know, do we really want to go there? And if we go there, is that the risk of consuming what a lot of people are talking about right now, and yet they’re missing a much bigger picture. I need to be very clear. I absolutely want to move on quickly from this to get onto the much bigger picture, because I think people are missing the positive aspects of how we might invest. I think that’s important. I do want to just ask you this question, those clarifying things, some people, listeners might think, well, is it different, though, when we’re investing in a company that’s about adult entertainment? Is some aspect of debt financing or equity financing actually helping them to accomplish a goal or a mission that is counterproductive to society in the first line of society? And therefore, while we’re not actually engaging in that pornography by investing in them, we’re participating. Is that a dynamic or if that’s too thorny, we can move on. We can go on to the positive side. [00:24:41][55.0]

Jerry: [00:24:41] But no, no. We can take it on. Like I say, I think that once we start with what are the limits and what am I allowed to do? We’ve already started the Pharisee’s conversation. OK. And that conversation already kind of arcs the Pharisees direction. And that’s why those are the kind of questions that came to Jesus. Generally, they didn’t come to Jesus with. I mean, there’s one who said, well, what’s the law and the prophets? And he said, while you’re close to the kingdom of God. With that answer. But generally it’s what are the limits? How much can you do on the Sabbath? Who can you touch? Who can you eat with? And I think if that is the starting point of our conversation. And let’s start off with hardest cases to find out whether there are any lines at all. Then we’re already staring at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and saying, well, we can’t eat it. Can we touch it? Can we eat the other trees? We’re already starting. In my opinion, the conversation that then the Hosch wants to have, which is just how many commandments has God given you? And he seems to give you a lot of commandments and he seems to be a very restrictive God woman. [00:25:45][64.1]

[00:25:45] And she kind of goes along with it. She says, yes, we’re not allowed to eat, nor are we allowed to touch. So I’ll just put it this way. Where did Jesus put the limit? Who was Jesus unwilling to deal? With who was he unwilling to eat with? Who was he unwilling to have financial dealings with? He 8 with tax collectors and prostitutes. So where are tax collectors were so hated that. I mean, you think about ancient religious leaders. One thing religious leaders they like to do is they like to accept donations. Tax collectors were so hated that they were singled out as a group you couldn’t even take donations from. So religious leaders who live on donations like. Yeah, but not from tax collectors. And Jesus constantly ate with them. [00:26:31][45.2]

[00:26:31] Some of them are dependent, but there’s no sign they all repentant. They still ate. They bought him lunch over and over and over again. And in fact, Jesus, his critics even saw that. What did they call him, a glutton and a winebibber because he was living off of the ill gotten gains of the tax collectors. So I’ll just turn it back. Let’s look at the life of Jesus and let’s find out where Jesus put his the limits on his relationship. I’m not seeing it. He deals with the rich young ruler. Right. The rich young ruler is corrupt. You can read an essay I wrote about that. I don’t think he’s just greedy. I think he’s corrupt. [00:27:01][29.4]

[00:27:02] But who walks away? Does Jesus walk away or does the rich young ruler walk away? The rich young ruler walks away. Jesus was hanging in there. So when did we become the walkaway people? When did we become the first people to walk away? When did we become the people whose whole conversation is about? How long before we walk away from the Sanhedrin member or the tax collector or the center? No doubt there is some kind of limits and we can talk about limits. I think the limits are. Are you, in fact, yourself sinning? But let’s get rid of any idea that having lunch with Zacchaeus, the tax collector catered by Zacchaeus with his dirty money, didn’t make Jesus unclean. So let’s keep going back to the life of Jesus and see where he put the limits, not where I put the limits. It’s where he puts the limits. [00:27:51][49.5]

William: [00:27:52] That’s good. That’s good, Jerry. I want to switch out of a little bit and want to talk about that. I’ve heard you say before it’s similar lines, but now I’ve heard you talk about Jesus never gave instructions on where and how to invest. One of the most famous investing parables, the parable of the talents. People bring that up a lot in these talks when they talk about faith driven, investing in a love for you to give us a little bit of what your study has shown you about that passage and how that translates into the everyday investor and how they should think about how Jesus thinks about stewarding our money. [00:28:27][34.5]

Jerry: [00:28:28] Yeah, I’m happy to. But, you know, I hate to be this guy who’s always like critiquing the question because I love you guys. But I want to let the text tell me which questions to ask, not me. Say, what does this mean for investors? Right. And like so once we let the tech speak to us, once Jesus delivers his economic message to us, then we reflect on it. We chew on it like a cow chews on cud, and then we start applying it to our lives. So I don’t want to go so quick to how do we apply this? I think we pre apply. We don’t necessarily drink deeply and reflect over a long period and then apply. So I mean, it’s that’s part of the general conversation. What’s Jesus doing all this money stuff in the Bible? I mean, the Gospels have an enormous amount of material about money. [00:29:14][47.0]

[00:29:15] And the really weird thing is that Jesus, who’s supposed to be, according to a lot of the academic scholars, leading some kind of peasant revolt against business and against markets and all the rest of it seems to. Over and over again. Right. These little business stories, these little case studies, these parables in which the good guy is the investor and the unfaithful steward is the bad guy, a guy who’s leading a peasant revolt against private property. And, you know, kind of like Jesus as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro, which became very hip in the 70s and 80s. And academic theologian circles. The way they had to do that is by basically saying Jesus didn’t write those parables. They were added later. Well, you know, because Jesus couldn’t have known all this stuff about finance. So therefore, these aren’t from Jesus. Therefore, we can rescue Jesus, the revolutionary. Well, all right. That’s wrong on so many levels. First of all, Jesus was financially sophisticated. How do we know? Because he grew up in Nazareth. And Nazareth was a small town, but it was a suburb of a large town, which was the financial center of Galilee called Sulfurous. There we have. We’ve dug up the banks. Jesus would have grown up around financially sophisticated people. So these parables are not beyond his ability, beyond the ability of the Jesus that we thought. We know the archaeology. Mel tells us that Jesus would have been around finance a lot. And he’s telling stories in which the investor is generally the good guy. So I think that’s a big part of just approaching Jesus as old money and his Jesus holds money. Conversation number one, he knew what it was talking about. He wasn’t a country bumpkin. Number two, he seemed to have an investor’s point of view. Number three, related to this, the economy of Galilee was very different from the economy of Judea. Galilee was a very entrepreneurial economy. I’ve just I’ve I’ve read the archeological reports almost on a nightly basis. Almost every Galilee in town had several shops. You had builders, you know, like Joseph and son. You had industrial they stone jar masons at Cana. Wedding at Cana rings true to history because they did make stone jars. There you have industrial fishing going on, not subsistence fisherman Peter and James and John. This was an industry. So Jesus grew up in an entrepreneurial area. [00:31:26][130.7]

[00:31:27] Down in Judea, it’s very hierarchical, very old money, very politically connected. What we might call a crony economy. So here’s something important to remember. Jesus does not have a single confrontation over wealth with any wealthy individual in Galilee. Not one. Every single confrontation with wealthy individuals is geographically near Jerusalem, the political capital, and socially near in that the confrontations are with a rich young ruler. Senator Zacchaeus, the tax collector and the moneylenders who had a monopoly from Herod. So Jesus. Only makes financial critiques when he is in places where the economy is largely a top down extractive as opposed to an entrepreneurial economy, and he only does it with people who are members of the extractive class. [00:32:20][53.4]

Henry: [00:32:22] I follow that. This has been super helpful for me. And, you know, whenever we get ready to do this podcast, we come in with just a whole bunch of different questions we’ve been wanting to ask you for a while. And what you’ve done is you’ve changed the paradigm for me. And I hope that for a number of our listeners, which is what are the questions we should be asking and I want to get back into that. And before we go to wrap and I think Lord One, this will be first of many, many installments. I love the way you’ve been very thoughtful about all of this. And I know that you gonna be come out with a book, this simulator in the spring. There’s so much more we can revisit on this. But before William asked you the final question, we always asked our guests. I want to ask you, what’s another question that you see? Investors that endeavored to follow God was the question that they should be at. We know the questions are asking. Right. We’re just as Sally said now, you just grain all those different different types. Then what can I invest in? What I can invest in? And I think that you’ve put together a very good point about why those are the wrong questions. But I’m curious about what’s a question you see that investors should be asking but aren’t. And how does the text answer that question they should be asking but aren’t? [00:33:27][65.4]

Jerry: [00:33:28] Let me first mention the one that I want him to stop asking. You know, I used to be a Christian radio talk show host, so I kind of got a sense of how Christians thought. And we did, you know, shows on Christian entrepreneurship a lot. And a woman called in and she said, well, we’re entrepreneurs. My husband, I own a business. But for, you know, a year and a half, we wanted to be business owners, but we didn’t know whether we were allowed. So we talked to our pastor and we read books and we studied the scriptures to find out if we’re allowed to be entrepreneurs. And they ended up believing that they were allowed to be entrepreneurs and they became entrepreneurs. And I was glad they landed there, but my heart was broken by that conversation. So what I would say, I mean, I almost want to scream it from the rooftop. Stop asking potential Christian entrepreneurs. Stop asking the question. Am I allowed? That is so much the wrong question. I’m telling you right now, you are allowed you are encouraged to by the example of God himself, is the creator of the universe and Jesus who came from an entrepreneurial family and an entrepreneurial culture and start asking God, how should I do it? [00:34:40][71.5]

[00:34:40] How can I do it with excellence? How can I be the best? Oh, and along the way, God, please help me avoid sin. But how can I glorify you with excellence so that people say, look at the excellence of this person’s work and look at the wisdom they have. I want to talk to them and see where they get that wisdom from. Stop asking. Am I allowed? Stop starting off with what am I not allowed to do? And start asking God, what would you have me do? What is your command for something for me to do? Not focus on whether I’m allowed to be an entrepreneur at all. I took away from that conversation the idea that at least in the subculture of that particular Christian Christians had a year and a half disadvantage. They had a year and a half thinking about whether they’re allowed to move and innovate, which non-Christians didn’t have. I would rather we have a forward culture when it comes to entrepreneurs where we entrepreneur earlier and faster and it becomes part of our culture and entrepreneurial culture. And of course, don’t sin along the way. [00:35:39][59.0]

Henry: [00:35:40] OK, so that’s very helpful. I completely get it. I’m right with you. I see it all the time. So tell us, what does it look like? Where did the questions that we might be asking more generally of scripture that might lead us to being able to innovate and invest better and more quickly than rest of secular society because they’re looking in the wrong place and they’re asking the wrong question? [00:35:59][19.1]

Jerry: [00:36:01] Well, I’d say one of the things I would hearken back to a conversation you had with Trae Stephens and I look at the example of Peter Theil that the Christian philosophy of Renesmee rhade enabled that shop to have an advantage over others. They were able to set aside rivalry, what Gerard would call mimetic rivalry and ambition, and get through the tech burst at a time when others couldn’t get through the tech bearse because instead of trying to make their enemy lose, they tried to actually do something. So they had a positive goal and their goal was not mainly. [00:36:36][34.9]

[00:36:36] This is something Peter likes to say. You know, the goal is not to disrupt. The goal is to provide a good or a service in a profitable way. Now, if it disrupts, all right, so be it. You know, that’s in God’s providence. So I think if Christians start to follow the example of Jesus, I’m really key into Jesus. I don’t mean the word Jesus. I don’t mean say the name Jesus. And then recall all the sermons you’ve heard about Jesus where people hung their best thinking on that. You know, Jesus says Gandhi or Jesus as Che or Jesus as Confucius. Wait. We got all these Jesuses of our own making. I mean, actually reading the gospels carefully and just kind of get Jesus in your gut. I mean, that’s literally what we do in our Eucharist, right? I mean, theoretically or whatever, symbolically different conversation, but just begin to just think like Jesus and you will be a better entrepreneur because he was the most successful. I don’t want to, like degrade him by saying he’s much more. But he was he invested everything and he won everything. And entrepreneurs, in some sense, I don’t want to do the Jesus CEO thing because Jesus is bigger than any business enterprise. But risking, loving, risking, serving, being willing to lose it all is not something that Christians should maybe be skeptical about. It’s in the very nature of the Christian walk. And if we do that, we will in general be better entrepreneurs will be less afraid because we don’t love money and don’t worship it. We’re more able to risk it. [00:38:04][88.1]

William: [00:38:08] That’s a good word. And as we do come to a wrap, the center said, I would love to find out a little bit about where God has you. So you’ve taken us through an amazing journey of God, Scripture and his lessons. What does he have you chewing on right now? That maybe would be fun for our listeners to hear about. Oh, you mean like with a day job rather than this sort of thing, like the quantitative analysis kind of thing? Yeah. Well, or just in God’s word, right. I mean, something else that he’s kind of put on your heart, you spent so much time in Genesis, you got a book coming out just. Is there anything else that’s coming alive in a new way, maybe in your daily devotionals? [00:38:40][32.5]

Jerry: [00:38:42] Well, I’m continuing to find new stuff in Genesis that would kind of take a while to get us to the point where he could talk about it and certainly more and more about what we see with Jesus in the Gospels and how he’s interacting along economic lines and all of the rest of it. I mean, he really, really all the treasures of the wisdom of God were hidden in Jesus. And if we’d stop skimming over the details, the details matter, place names matter. It matters that Jesus was killed in Jerusalem, not Rome. It matters that Jesus ascended from Bethany, the house of the poor. And, you know, not from Jerusalem. It matters that he was born in Bethlehem. Not Jerusalem. The story of Jesus. If we really believe in the incarnation, we believe that all of the story of Jesus is for us. And what you’re going to find is every time he’s in a city and every time the Bible tells us the name of the city. And then you compare that to Jesus’s commentary there about wealth or about anything else. Jesus knew where he was. He wasn’t giving the standard stump speech or if he was, he was varying it from place to place. You know, you’ve got the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew. But then you have the sermon on the plane and Luke. And they’re different from one another. Right. So scholars say, oh, it’s a contradiction. Sermon on the plane is given to a Judean audience, much harder on wealth. All of these little details matter. And we’re so used to reading them spiritually, we skip right to spiritual. But Jesus didn’t come as a spirit. He came in flesh and blood. So we can’t skip just the spirit and skip over all the flesh and blood stuff we see Jesus doing. And, you know, we could spend hours and hours talking about how those details matter. But let me just convince you now, all of those details matter. There’s no unimportant parts of the gospels. And if something Jesus says doesn’t make sense to you. Or it’s weird to you as it is to me, the Bible isn’t weird. I’m weird. And the Bible will make sense to me when I stop being weird. And so we have to adjust our way of thinking to the Bible’s rather than our own. And please stop taking our best thinking. And sometimes it’s really good thinking and try to find a verse to hang it on rather than look at the context of the verse and let God give us his best thinking man. [00:40:52][130.6]

Henry: [00:40:53] So that’s very helpful. A big takeaway for me and hopefully the investors that are listening is how important it is that we don’t have the primary way that we engage in God’s word through somebody else who goes ahead, puts her own spin on it. One of the things that you’ve told me is that you don’t want it, not that you don’t listen to sermons in other pastors. I’m sure you do. And yet you wanted to go ahead and spend time in God’s word and you wanted to do it in the language in which was written and going in and asking God to speak to you through his word without being necessarily influenced by the questions of the day, whether it’s science. And we would have that one hundred years ago, or whether it’s negative screens now as a feature of an investor. [00:41:30][37.9]

Jerry: [00:41:31] Right. And let me make this clear. It’s not that I’m reading it alone, but what do I read? I read Josephus and others from Jesus’s time. I read the Roman historians. I read the rabbis at the time. If so, I don’t want to get stuck in modern evangelic. Sure I listen evangelical sermons, but I already think like an evangelical because I’ve been in evangelical for 35 years. I need to learn to think like a first century Jew. And that’s what we all need to start doing it for real. And once you do that, you will be amazed at how the storehouse, you know, how the treasure house, the thestories opens up to you. [00:42:03][31.7]

Henry: [00:42:03] There’s a book in there. There’s a podcast in there thinking like a first century Jew. I love that I would subscribe. There’s no doubt about it. We got a taste of it today on the podcast. I think it’s going to make us think differently about investing. I do absolutely know that. Jerry, I want to have you back. [00:42:17][13.8]

[00:42:17] I’m grateful for the time you spent with us. And yeah, I’m grateful. [00:42:20][2.9]

Jerry: [00:42:21] I’m grateful for you and for your mission and for what you’re doing in the world and as being a leader in this space. [00:42:21][0.0]

[2379.8]

Henry Kaestner: [00:02:34] Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. You know, we haven’t spent much time at all talking in either the Faith Driven Entrepreneur or the Faith Driven Investor podcast about what some of us do during our day jobs. And a lot of that’s been neglect. And just thinking that other people’s stories are really interesting because they are. In part, that’s also because we’ve never wanted this to be anything that would be self-promotional. And yet we very much do feel called by God to do the work that we do at Faith Driven Entrepreneur in Faith Driven Investor and at Sovereign’s Capital. [00:03:06][32.4]

[00:03:07] And for those of you don’t know, Sovereign’s Capital is an investment fund that Andre Mann, Luke Roush, who’s our guest for today, and I started about eight years ago coming out of the experience that we collectively had in running faith driven enterprises and believing that there is an opportunity to have aligned capital coming alongside and encouraging the entrepreneur to be able to love their partner, vendor, customer or employee in a way that might have some level of marketplace witness and transformation. And so we started Sovereign’s Capital, which is a fund to do that. We did it eight years ago and over the course of those eight years have invested just about 45 companies in the southeast and in Asia and along the way have brought onboard just an incredible staff to include William Norvel, frequent co-host and co-founder of Faith Driven Entrepreneur. So it’s been with the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast and Faith Driven Investor podcast since the beginning. Many of you may not have known what he did. You may have thought that he was a color commentator for Alabama football or basketball. But no, actually, he is a full-time investor. [00:04:07][59.9]

William Norvell: [00:04:08] Honestly, the color commentator for Alabama basketball is pretty bored. In fairness, I might get that job one day. [00:04:15][7.2]

Henry Kaestner: [00:04:18] Luke, welcome to the podcast. You have never been—have you ever been on the show? [00:04:21][3.4]

Luke Roush: [00:04:22] I have not. Long time listener, first-time guest. [00:04:23][1.8]

Henry Kaestner: [00:04:24] It’s awesome. What do you think? [00:04:25][0.7]

Luke Roush: [00:04:27] Thrilling. [00:04:27][0.0]

Henry Kaestner: [00:04:30] So why don’t you do this, why don’t you take us back to the beginning and tell us what Sovereign’s Capital does, what’s its theory of change? Why does it do what it does and then just bring us up to speed? And then as you do that, I’d love for William to chime in a bit as well, because the funds have matured and gotten bigger and there’s been more opportunities. We’ve seen other niches in some of those are ones that Williams involved in particular. But take us through again the problem we’re trying to solve, the theory of change, all that. [00:04:58][28.8]

Luke Roush: [00:04:59] Yeah. So just to back up a little bit before that. My background was really as an operator and I think that Sovereign’s was really born out of our experience collectively as operators and we had seen the impact that capital can have on the direction that corporate cultures and corporate values take. And my background is really in medical devices and healthcare consumer products. And I had seen the impact that venture capital had on companies that I’ve been a part of and started to have, you know, what I would call just a holy discontent around the disconnect that I had seen between my own faith and who I was on Saturday, Sunday and who I was during the week. And I hadn’t been involved in anything unethical or anything crazy, but I just really felt a sense of real sacred secular divide in my own work and my own faith. And I had a desire to try to figure out how to bring those two worlds together, something the Holy Spirit put on my heart. And he also put some people around me that I think pushed me to better understand how those two worlds might intersect in a way that was winsome and relevant. And so our real theory of change at the beginning of Sovereign’s Capital, which has really persisted over the last eight years, is that people who are leading companies and building businesses are ones who are truly shaping culture. If you think about the entrepreneurs the last fifteen or twenty years, they’re all impacting the way we work, the way we play, the way we interact and communicate with one another. The way we live, the way we work. And there’s a huge opportunity in the midst of those enterprising businesses to be able to really create new culture and define the way people interact with one another. So we really felt as though the opportunity as an investor to come alongside entrepreneurs and to be able to speak into their journey in both who they were in terms of their identity, but also how they thought about using their businesses to be a blessing to others and impact culture in positive, redemptive, restorative ways. Just a huge opportunity. We weren’t a hundred percent sure what that looked like, but we knew there was something there and that was kind of how our journey began. [00:06:54][114.8]

William Norvell: [00:06:55] Thanks for taking us through that amazing journey from where you guys got started. I’m sure it’s an amazing effort to have the world’s greatest co-founder, not just next to you, but along the journey around, it’s good to have Henry on board. [00:07:07][12.3]

Henry Kaestner: [00:07:08] Who’s that? [00:07:08][0.3]

William Norvell: [00:07:09] Yeah, yeah. that’s you. [00:07:10][0.7]

Henry Kaestner: [00:07:10] That’s a shout out to Andre Mann right there. [00:07:12][1.9]

William Norvell: [00:07:13] Yeah. I hope Andrew is listening. But Luke that’s an ambitious goal. You know, you guys set out on an ambitious journey here. There were like you said, it’s kinda shown itself to work. I’m sure it wasn’t that easy, though. I’m sure you learned a lot of things along the way to our investing audience. I feel like most investors. Right. You go out trying to prove a couple of big things, right. You think they’re true. That’s why you rally support. That’s why you raise capital. That’s why you build a team. That’s why you go out to make investments, to try to make a market return, but also make an impact in the world. What were those three or four big things for you guys as you started and how those play themselves out of three years? [00:07:49][35.9]

Luke Roush: [00:07:50] Well, one of the things that we really were hoping to be able to prove out was something that you just said, which is we hope to be able to deliver both an at market rate of return, but also see businesses be salt and light where they were planted. And, you know, I grew up with this two part gospel of we are sinners and we need a savior. And that was really the extent of a lot of what I heard on Sunday mornings. But there was also, as I came to better understand this creation narrative in the early part of the Bible and then a restoration narrative in the latter part of the Bible that I really came to believe were central to the journey that many of us as business people were on. And so now we had this idea that many thought was really crazy at the time because the prevailing winds back in 2011 and 2012 were that there was a tradeoff between sacred returns or spiritual impact and secular returns or at Market Alpha or better than at market real achievement of Alpha in terms of investment results. [00:08:42][51.9]

[00:08:42] And so we had this idea that actually biblical values generally correlated with good business principles and we wanted to be able to actually test that out and to evaluate and prove in the context of a professionally managed fund, not an investment or a company, but actually a portfolio of companies that both spiritual returns and financial returns could be pursued in parallel, not at the expense of one another. But in some part because entrepreneurs had a clear sense of who they were and what they were trying to do in and through their companies and were able to instill that belief in that ethos within their employees who ultimately extended that into, you know, customers and the entire ecosystem that a business operates. So that was one of the big things that we wanted to prove out. [00:09:21][38.5]

Henry Kaestner: [00:09:21] Do you ever find any conflict in that? [00:09:22][1.3]

Luke Roush: [00:09:23] Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, particularly when you think about short term, medium term, what’s going to happen this month, what’s going to happen this quarter, what’s gonna happen, you know, in the next year or two? There are absolutely some Zero-Sum games to be played in that timeframe. [00:09:39][15.8]

[00:09:40] But our view, my view, is that over a longer time period. Call it four, five, 10, 15 years to the extent that you make businesses that really value employees. And then those employees are able to make decisions to value customers and to develop things that customers love. It affects the economic engine of the business such that you’re able to acquire customers and retain customers way more cost-effectively than your peer group. And so over a long haul, we actually. To the integration of gospel into core business practices has actually correlated positively with returns, not at the expense. But you’ve got to take a long view. Short term is definitely some sacrifices. [00:10:17][36.9]

Henry Kaestner: [00:10:18] Are there enough companies out there to invest in? [00:10:20][1.6]

Luke Roush: [00:10:20] Well, so there was another big thing that when we went around and actually spoke with folks about this is kind of what we feel like. That’s been our hearts. We’ve been operators, but we want to transition over into being investors. What a lot of people said is that’s great. You know, there’s likely to be five or 10 world-class entrepreneurs over the next five years in the U.S.. Good luck on finding as many as you need to be able to find to generate that many well-qualified deals. [00:10:44][23.4]

[00:10:44] Because the general rule in venture investing, which our first two funds were really more focused on venture capital style investments. General rule is you got to look at 100 deals to be able to find one that actually passes muster. And so, you know, if you want to find, you know, 10 companies or 15 companies as we had and found one, that means you got to find fifteen hundred or a thousand entrepreneurs that meet the criteria. And nobody really thought there were that many out there. In fact, I think even those of us on the team had some questions about are we can end up with a portfolio of seven or eight, which is going to make us a little bit overindexed and over concentrated. [00:11:16][31.7]

[00:11:17] Are we really gonna be able to get 15? And what we found was actually there are a boatload of believers who are also building companies, many of whom have been largely underground because secular capital doesn’t really understand these entrepreneurs, which is something that we believed and also saw proven out over time. [00:11:33][15.8]

[00:11:34] Many of them are actually just kind of underground in their faith and they hadn’t actually come up and become visible in terms of being a Faith Driven Entrepreneur. They’d been living really a dual life, much the way I’d done much of my professional career. [00:11:46][12.6]

William Norvell: [00:11:47] Well, that sounds like it was just an easy journey. You found a lot of people who believed in you. You got everybody together. But how was raising money? So we’re an investing podcast, right? There’s a couple of different parts of it. You just talked about finding the companies and that was, you know, a little bit easier. Maybe in the numerical sense. I want to hear how you actually found them. So maybe it is that I’m sure it’s more difficult than it sounds. But what about raising money? What about convincing others? You said the team even had questions. How was the fundraising trail? [00:12:13][25.9]

Luke Roush: [00:12:14] Yeah. So, you know, you would think. Absolutely. And both Henry and I and Andre and Tom, all the folks that were really around the table in the early days, believed that because of some of the entrepreneurial successes, that we would have to be really easy to go out and raise a $20 million fund. In fact, we had alloted ourselves 90 days to go out and raise 20 million dollars, which we thought we would then put to work over the ensuing 12 months, and then we’d be able to raise a follow up fund about 18 months after the initial inception of the fundraising process for fund one and then raise fifty to a hundred million dollars as a fund two in short order. Mind you, and what actually happened was that fundraising process originally supposed to be 90 days turned into 18 months and we ended up after we called literally everyone in our family Rolodex. We were able to scrape together 12 million dollars of investable capital. [00:13:05][51.1]

[00:13:06] And, you know, again, just something that is now actually a real blessing. But at the time, we were just like, you know, hand slapped face. We had 75 LP’s. We had to have 75 people invest in the fund to be able to get the twelve million dollars. Now, as fund one has had some success, I can tell you that there is infinitely more joy in sending out 75 distribution checks to individuals, mostly individuals, infinitely more joy in that than sending out 10 distribution checks to, you know, some fund manager in Connecticut. So what we originally were incredibly frustrated with has actually become one of the great moments of joy, particularly the last two years with a fun one. [00:13:47][41.2]

William Norvell: [00:13:48] That’s great. That’s great. And look, just thanks for walking us through that. And one of the things I always love and you get into investing is really looking at a few specific companies. A few examples, if you would maybe walk us through a couple of companies you invested in where you can really show what not only what the company has done and what God has done through them, but what you think Sovereign’s has been able to do as a unique niche investment partner along the way. And then potentially as well as share one that, hey, you met an entrepreneur who loved the vision everyone bought and you invested. But the story, wasn’t one of wild financial success, but it was something else. And maybe the company didn’t work out because that is the nature of investing capital is some of these companies don’t work out. And God still teaches us so much through those investments and through those journeys. [00:14:33][45.3]

Luke Roush: [00:14:35] Yeah. So maybe the first company I’ll talk about is Cloud Factory, and I think Mark Sears has been a guest on before, and so you’ve heard parts of his story either through FDE or FDI podcast. But you know, Mark’s story and what God really called him to in Cloud Factory is a unique one. And what really resonated with us was the scope of his vision. So this idea that there are a million workers around the world who want to be connected with work and are prepared to actually work hard and produce, but really just need access to work that needs to get done and being able to pair that source of labor with demand for labor in developed countries where work cannot be efficiently outsourced and whether it’s machine learning or whether it’s artificial intelligence or big data analytics. There is an amazing story that has been written through Cloud Factory. The work that that country has done, not just now in Nepal, but also in Kenya and in other countries around the world. And so, you know, that’s an example of like an early stage company where he needed a few things. He needed an investor that was going to both understand and resonate with where God had called him in terms of Ezekiel, 37, of the valley of dry bones and what he was called to do in and through that workforce. We understood that vision. We supported it. We’re excited about it. We actually were looking to help him even reinforce that in ways that he maybe hadn’t thought through. And I think that really resonated with him. The other thing that he needed was some amount of patient capital. This was not a story—at the time that we invested, they had, well, less than $400,000 in revenue—I think about one hundred or one hundred fifty thousand dollars in revenue. So there was enough success in customer product market fit to be able to reinforce, but it was still really, really early. And so he needed somebody to be able to come alongside and be patient with them over the long haul. And the last thing he needed was somebody that was willing to just think a little bit differently, whether it was currency risk or whether it was sovereignty risk. And some of the environments he worked in, particularly in the early days where there was less of a cushion, because one of the other things that we wanted to be able to set out prove—back to an earlier question, William—was this idea that almost any company can be a biblically oriented company. There are no Christian companies. There are Christian leaders who lead companies, and that can be done in almost any context. [00:16:43][128.5]

[00:16:44] And so just to give you an example of a different kind of company was an organization called Lock It, which we invested in in Southeast Asia, which was focused on effectively making live events safe and transparent, both for the organizer as well as the attendees, as well as for a government who were trying to assess how people are getting in, getting out. And, you know, if there are problems, who do we contact? And so the entrepreneur there had seen some real challenging things in the live ticketing industry in Indonesia and had a vision to really bring a Livenation type business model to that country. And we got excited about his vision for impact and were able to come alongside and encourage and support him as his first institutional investor. And ultimately that company sold to another company. And now he’s got an opportunity to impact a much broader universe in the company that acquired him. So it’s a good example of like how do we think about investment, but also how do we think about exit? Ultimately, these are not companies that we’re going to own forever. There are companies that are going to own for a period of time. We’re going to help to shepherd and steward for a time. And ultimately they’re going to end up either as a publicly traded company or as a part of a larger entity. And as that happens, oftentimes the ministry platform that existed pre acquisition actually expands. It doesn’t contract or go away. It expands after a company’s bought. So there are a few examples. [00:18:01][76.6]

William Norvell: [00:18:02] That’s great and it’s a great segue. Let’s switch gears just a little bit. Investing is a relationship driven business, as are most businesses. But specifically, you took up a pretty unique mantle here when you were starting Sovereign’s Capital with Andre, Henry and Tom. And you actually moved your family to Jakarta, Indonesia. You just mentioned a few Southeast Asia investments as that might throw some people off. Talk about why you did that. As the legend goes. You made the decision about two hours from what I hear. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not? We can ask, Brooke, if that’s accurate or not. But I would love to hear the story of why you did it and what you learned through it. What was true, what wasn’t true, being in the place, fully immersed in where you’re investing. And tell us about that story. [00:18:45][43.1]

Luke Roush: [00:18:47] So we had this idea of like, wow, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could come alongside entrepreneurs who are motivated in their faith and wanted to live that out in the work that they were doing and also had a desire to really build sustainable economic engine companies. And so as we were talking through just the convergence of 10 40 window and emerging middle class, we started to actually do a little bit of a boil the ocean. So we spent time on the ground in Middle East, spent time in Eastern Europe. Andre took a trip down to Latin America. We looked at parts of Africa and ultimately decided the through process of elimination around the demographics, local demand, geopolitical risk, instability. We ultimately decided that Southeast Asia was the place that we wanted to focus. And as we got further into Southeast Asia being the right place to begin, specifically a focus on Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. We had this awkward conversation when they were like, well, you know, we all know that the lifeblood of any deal of any fund is deal flow. How are we going to source deal flow in Southeast Asia from Durham, North Carolina? And I always remember the old tobacco warehouse where we had our office in originally. And it, I think, hit us all at once that it was going to be very difficult for three white dudes who were in Durham, North Carolina, to try to come in every month or two or three to Southeast Asia and actually get access to the best deals. The only way you get access to great deals is being in community. And as we became more aware of what was going on in Indonesia specifically, we realized that there was no western venture capital money on the ground. There were a number of people that had tried to do it. Living in Singapore, living in Hong Kong or living in Tokyo. But nobody had actually like moved to Indonesia and done it in so in a relatively short order. We had this conversation as a partnership. I went home, talked to my wife and then about it wasn’t two hours, it was about 45 days later, we got on a plane and moved to initially to Kuala Lumpur and then ultimately to Jakarta. And then Andre and his family joined us about six months later. [00:20:45][118.7]

[00:20:46] It was the best decision we ever could’ve made, but it didn’t feel that way about six months in because six to nine months into that adventure, we had yet to find a single deal. There wasn’t really anything that was even in our pipeline of things like we might do at some point. And so you had those moments in life where you really start questioning what are we doing here? And if I wasn’t having these questions, my wife was definitely having those questions. But by God’s grace, in the three months after that, we ended up finding our first couple of deals and we got going and ended up in an amazing four year run. [00:21:19][32.6]

[00:21:19] And that continues today with full time staff that are Indonesian that that really shepherd those investments and are also making new investments. [00:21:25][6.4]

William Norvell: [00:21:26] Amen. Okay. Let’s switch gears a little bit. We’ve talked about fundraising. We’ve talked about funding investments. I’ve got about 45 of those in the books now. We’ve talked about the niche of sovereign’s capital investing in Christian led businesses. What does that look like? We’ve talked about it as a spiritual integration. What is that look like coming alongside and being a part of this journey? Practically right. Could mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. What does it mean at Sovereign’s to come behind Christian led businesses and encourage them in the work that they are doing and called to by God in the marketplace? [00:21:57][30.9]

Luke Roush: [00:21:58] Yeah. So one of the things that we’ve learned is that one size fits one. And there are some things, though, that we think are consistent across the body, the portfolio, and that for anybody who is tracking content on faith driven investor Web site, you’ll see some things that I think we’ve posted in blog posts in the past. But there are really five characteristics that we look to reinforce as we come alongside entrepreneurs. The first is that we want to make sure that they’ve got a real clear sense of identity and who they are. It’s one of the things that we see most often corrupted amongst entrepreneurs is that the narrative of the world in the narrative of most venture capital, private equity, is that it’s all about you as the CEO of a fast growing startup that’s, you know, getting a whole bunch of attention and creating a lot of value, at least on paper. There’s a real easy and slippery slope to get on around, just a mistaken sense of identity and ultimately were know children of the king and that’s who we are. But even though we know that to be true on the journey day to day, that something can get warped. And so we really want to try to focus on that as we get to know an entrepreneur and make sure that they in their heart know who they are so that we then have permission to be able to remind them of that on a regular basis. [00:23:10][71.7]

[00:23:10] If we end up investing, the second thing that we really care a lot about is business excellence. If the product that we produce is not high quality, then the quality of the testimony that we have is compromised. So we’ve got to make sure that we’re producing high quality products or services. Otherwise, we run the risk of potentially being a negative witness. The third thing that we focus on and we think these are things that can apply, by the way, to every business. This is not a one size fits one thing. This is one size fits all. The specific manifestations of each of these things are actually quite different depending on the nature of the business. The third thing is that we want to make sure there’s a real theology of work. Who owns this business ultimately? [00:23:47][36.8]

[00:23:48] Who do we report to? We report to a board of directors or, you know, a set of investors. The best entrepreneurs in our portfolio had a real clear sense of a holy calling and a holy ambition that they work mightily and heartily under the Lord. Now, they are thoughtful in terms of how they surround themselves with the right advisors and counselors, but ultimately they don’t report to me as an investor. And in the last two things we intentionally put last, but we think they’re really, really, really important. And the fourth is ministry indeed. And then the last one is ministry in word ministry indeed looks a lot like what corporate social responsibility typically looks like in the world. So how do we love our employees? How do we love our customers? How do we engage with our community in ways that are winsome and relevant and loving? And we feel like we need to. Demonstrate to people that we truly love them, irrespective of where they are on their own faith journey, because we do not believe in the idea of creating holy huddles inside businesses. We got to be able to recruit, retain, promote and celebrate the best and brightest, irrespective of where they are and anything other than performance and the quality of their work. But we do want to make sure that we demonstrate through ministry, indeed that we really love them. In the last one is ministry and word. When we’ve done the other four things well, we ultimately believe it’s important to be able to share the hope that we have and why we do what we do in four. Again, the best entrepreneurs in our portfolio have a tremendous platform to be able to provide a winsome testimony as to why they do what they do. And so those are the five marks of how we engage with our entrepreneurs on the spiritual element. [00:25:22][93.6]

William Norvell: [00:25:22] That’s great. That’s great. And it’s fun to see how they work at every company, you know, in different places and different formats that one size fits one mentality. I think it’s really good just on that for our listeners to remember, you know, there’s not a playbook at Sovereign’s, you don’t sort of get your chaplain after you get your investment and then you get this next thing and then, you know, there’s not this thing that’s handed to you. It’s really significant to understand what God’s weaving through each person, each company, each geography individually. [00:25:50][28.2]

Luke Roush: [00:25:52] Yeah. And, you know, it’s one of the things that we often have requested of us is like, show us what your score card is or, you know, a real formulaic approach around metrics in evaluating where each business is in terms of spiritual integration. And there are some things that we can measure, particularly around prayer and, you know, scriptural reference in how scripture underpins core business practices. But one of the things that we have learned is that we don’t want to be formulaic in the kinds of tactics that make sense, because what makes sense, you know, in a country like the US or a company in California versus North Carolina can be pretty dramatically different. And certainly when you look at some of the US or Nepal or Kenya or Indonesia or Singapore, what’s acceptable and what’s culturally appropriate can be quite varied. We still think that those five elements are true in every business, but the specific game plan, depending on size and stage in the style of the leader or the founder. Very, very important to try to get that right. On a 1 to 1 basis. [00:26:49][57.9]

Henry Kaestner: [00:26:51] So it’s been eight years since you raised that first fund and a lot’s transpired since then and a lot of development and team in Indonesia. And then along the way, though, you found an opportunity not just to invest in fast growth companies, companies that are growing at, say, 10, 15 percent month over month, but also in the lower to middle markets, companies, companies that might be going through a level of generational transfer. And that’s really where William comes in, too, because that’s part of the team that he helps to lead. Walk us through that transition and how you’ve seen opportunity to stay doing some of the things on the fast growth side, but then to merge that in with some the opportunities you’ve seen with some businesses here in the United States that more of us might be familiar with. [00:27:32][40.9]

Luke Roush: [00:27:33] So one of the other things that I think is really important and is just a lesson that we’ve learned, particularly in the first four or five years of investing outside the U.S., is the importance of having local partners. [00:27:43][10.0]

[00:27:43] And one of the things that we’ve been pitched on any number of times is entrepreneurs who live in the U.S. who have grand plans of being able to take their business either to Southeast Asia, to Africa, to Europe or wherever. And what we’ve seen on the ground is that in different countries, each country’s different. [00:28:00][16.2]

[00:28:00] Investing in Southeast Asia, which I’d put in air quotes if you could see me, is something that’s not a good idea unless you’ve got a really huge fund, because what it looks like to get capital into and out of Indonesia is completely different than Malaysia or Vietnam or Cambodia or Singapore. And so contextual awareness as investors put capital to work is really important because the people who really understand what ministries can be most effective on the ground in emerging markets and also understand who can be trusted in business and also understand how to ethically in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act context, navigate the governmental authorities. You have to be on the ground to be able to understand who those men and women of peace are. And that’s something that was a really important lesson that we learned in the early days of Indonesia. It’s something that we continue to apply today as we think about, you know, our work with Fund Three just in terms of our work with lower middle market sector. One of the trends that we observed of the last four or five years in that we’ve had a lot of conversation not just with our own team internally at Sovereign’s, but also with our limited partners, is that on a comparative basis, venture investments have gone quite a bit more expensive over the last four or five years. And at the same time, what we’ve witnessed with the baby boomer generation here in the U.S. is that there’s well over a hundred thousand businesses that are going to go through generational transition in the next 10 to 15 years. Many of those businesses don’t really have any idea about what that transition is going to look like in terms of leadership and in terms of continuity around the culture and ethos of the business. So as we’ve waded into now our third fund, we’ve become a lot more focused on businesses that we would describe as generational transition or tightly controlled family style companies that are in the lower middle market sector. And so our focus has really been on the southeastern part of the U.S., although these businesses exist everywhere. And, you know, on the venture side, we oftentimes are talking with entrepreneurs about what it might be like some day for them to have 50 or 100 or 200 or 300 employees on the lower middle market side. We’re talking about businesses that already have 50 or 100 or 200 employees and oftentimes have tremendous witness and testimony and impact in communities where they’ve been planted for 10 or 20 or 30 years. And so a big focus in our third fund has is coming alongside these entrepreneurs and providing long term think 10 to 15 year plus hold periods aligned capital that celebrates where they are in terms of values. We’re okay being a minority investor and we value, particularly in the current economic climate, the ability to maintain low leverage. So we think about return on equity, not as a leveraged ratio, but as a straight ratio. [00:30:46][165.8]

William Norvell: [00:30:47] Now that’s I mean so one thanks for branching off into that market so that I have a job. [00:30:51][3.5]

Luke Roush: [00:30:51] Wait, let me ask you a question. So, William, what gets you excited at lower middle markets? Like what other kinds of businesses that you get really ginned up on? [00:31:00][9.1]

William Norvell: [00:31:01] It’s fun. I mean, I I get excited that I get to be a part of Sovereign’s Capital because I get to hear about venture stage companies. Right. That’s exciting. You read about them a lot. I think they have the potential to be cultural change agents in really unique ways. These are companies that end up on the cover of Time magazine. Right. And do really world changing things. I guess for me in my life, I’ve never been a home run hitter. I love a good single right between the first and second baseman. And I feel like that’s a little more the way my mind works. And so when you talk about one size fits one, what I think it’s the same for investors, right. So my investment philosophy is I love seeing a business that has been an anchor tenant in their community for a long time, they’ve been kind of on this long obedience in the same direction mentality, just continuing to get, you know, half a percent better every single day at what they do. And we had a guest on Don Flow who said one of my favorite lines that I keep repeating the other day. And he said, you know, when someone entrust their scarce labor capital to me, I take that very seriously. And in contrast to, not that this is bad, it’s just different. In contrast to the moving around nature of startups where you work in a barge and you kind of try new things. And a lot of these companies in lower middle market and in these communities, people entrust their scarce label capital for 25 years. I mean, they go to work at this company and they never leave if it’s done well and if it’s done right. [00:32:26][84.8]

[00:32:27] And while you’re unlikely to end up on the cover of time and you’re unlikely to have, you know, five, ten thousand employees, because that’s probably not the scale of the company that you’re going for, you are likely to have a really impactful vision into a company in the community. And for me, a lot of that comes from my personal story. My dad more or less ran a small business. It was a small unit of a bigger business. And he probably had eight to 10 employees. And I just grew up seeing the impact he had on their lives and that just God planted a seed in my heart to be a part of that. And I saw what happened when he left and I saw how they were treated afterwards. And eventually the office actually closed. And so I saw the impact that leadership could have. And Stauber, my holy ambition, my highly ambitious life is to be a phenomenal number. Two, to visionary entrepreneurs and leaders of well-run small businesses. And being able to come alongside them in unique ways is great. And lastly, I’d just say the way my mind works to think about different investing is just I’m really good at taking a canvas and making it better. Having 10 20 years of data to build on had in that to make decisions on is just the way my mind works. I don’t work as well with kind of the blank canvas and come up with something out of the blue. [00:33:38][71.0]

Luke Roush: [00:33:38] Good. Thanks for sharing then. [00:33:41][2.2]

William Norvell: [00:33:41] And as we come to a close, you’re going to get the hot seat question that everybody gets. It’s amazing to see how God’s work continues to move through us and through our companies, but specifically through us and then therefore through other people. [00:33:53][11.7]

[00:33:53] And so would love, if you would tell us maybe a portion of scripture that has come alive to you in this season of life, maybe something you’ve been meditating on for a while or even this morning, just something, God’s word that maybe you could share with our listeners that’s impacting you and how you do your job as an investor. [00:34:09][15.7]

Luke Roush: [00:34:10] So it’s a great question. And one of the things that I’ve been doing in the last couple of years is actually reading through the Bible on youversion. And at the end of each day, you can actually go through all the verses that you read and then you can highlight and then copy paste. So I’ve been building this note’s file over the last couple of years and then over time I hope to be able to actually pass effectively a Bible off to each my kids that has all the scripture that has spoken to me and then some notes on how that scripture spoke to me at the time that it found me. And as we know, the Bible is alive. And so one of the things that I’ve just observed is the rediscovery of scripture and what it said to me ten years ago or 15 years ago or 30 years ago. As a kid is oftentimes common, but sometimes different. But I was doing a devotional with my son and one of his friends at a football combine down in Southern California a couple of weeks ago, we were going through proverbs, as I’m prone to do periodically when I’m just looking for something quick. I’ll go to whatever day it is. And then the proverbs. You know, if it’s March 16th, it’ll be Proverbs 16. [00:35:11][60.9]

[00:35:12] But we were going through Proverbs 16 on this day and I highlighted the verses most important to me. And and my son and his friend did the same thing. Just really interesting. The narrative of these three verses from different parts of Proverbs is proverbs 16 to 9 and 10. And in 16, I won’t read ’em in sequential, although note to listeners that there’s some other scripture between each of these, but all persons ways seem pure to them. The motives are weighed by the Lord in their hearts. Humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps. The lives of a king speak as an oracle in his mouth does not betray justice. How much better to get wisdom and goal to get insight rather than silver? And one of the things that has just been a great joy in Sovereigns is both the partnership that I’ve had with William, you and Henry and Andre and Tom and Jake and Michael now and others that are on our team. It’s been an incredible joy because our hearts are prone to corruption and our hearts run after things that are not always the Lord’s design. And so the joy to be able to do things in partnership and also to have our hearts start to chart our course, but also having people around us that can try to make sure that the Lord is speaking directly into decisions that we make, knowing that the heart is deceitful and trying to build up a hedge of protection around that through both fellowship as well as God’s word and prayer. That’s something the Lord’s been teaching me lately, in part based on my own failings. So that’s what I’d want to share. [00:36:38][86.1]

William Norvell: [00:36:39] Amen. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for sharing the Sovereign’s story and what God’s been doing for so many years and just highlighted someone who’s got to be a part of it. Catching a vision from the Holy Spirit and taking one step forward and seeing what happens and then taking another step forward is something I see and you and Henry and Andre and Tom and something that investors should be thinking about as they get into faith driven investing. This is not mapped out. This is not a clear strategy on what to do in every situation. [00:37:11][31.7]

[00:37:12] So thank you for sharing that story of how you guys just kept putting one foot in front of the other. Trust in the Lord, exactly what that verse said and continue to learn along the way and humbling yourself to what God’s plan is. [00:37:12][0.0]

[2027.7]

Henry Kaestner: [00:02:44] Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. It is a distinct pleasure to be back on with my co-host, William Norvel, and then also with a good friend of ours, Greg Lernihan. We’d like to think and maybe it’s because we’re involved in the production, a show that we get a great chance to talk to a great number of our friends, not just people who are guests, but people who have done some level of life with and have some kindred spirits with. And I can think of no better example of that than Greg. I have not known Greg for very long, but I’ve known him long enough that he’s made such an impression on my life that there are few select people that I have put in this kind of almost macabre document that is to be open in the event something bad happens to me. And I’ve told my kids about this and told my wife about this because I really want to make sure that my three boys in particular get a chance to learn about different things from people who I know and trust, who are subject matter experts at a whole bunch of different subjects. But one of them is the topic of faith driven investing as the Lord might put them in a position to be able to steward his investment assets. I want them to learn well and I want them to learn from somebody who will be able to share with them their experience. And so I’ve put in this document. If something bad happens and I want you to learn about faith driven investing, I need you to call Greg Lernihan. And that’s what we’re gonna be doing today on this episode. We’re gonna be talking to Greg Lernihan, somebody I personally admire, somebody who’s thoughtful about this space and to talk to him about the way he thinks, the framework that he leads his family through, how he places investment capital, what’s important to him, how his faith drives, what he does. Maybe one of the other things that really gravitates me towards Greg is the fact that we have very similar backgrounds. We both care a lot about college basketball. Different teams, but we more importantly have an entrepreneurial background. God used this to build different companies and both have had some degree of exits coming from those companies that has afforded us an opportunity to be thoughtful about stewarding resources. So Greg, with that, let me just say first off, give you a chance to say hi. It’s awesome to ave you on the show. [00:04:48][124.0]

Greg Lernihan: [00:04:49] Thank you. Very thoughtful, Henry. And obviously an honor to be part of the team. I’m a consumer of the faith driven podcast and part of this community. It’s a pleasure. [00:04:58][9.2]

Henry Kaestner: [00:04:59] Well, super grateful to have you on. As we get started, tell us about that background. It starts with an entrepreneurial background. It’s creating wealth. It’s creating a company. It’s growing value in that undoubtedly informs also, of course, the way that you think about investments. But tell us about that story first. [00:05:16][16.9]

Greg Lernihan: [00:05:17] Yeah, I worked for Siemens for about 20 years, which is a large Fortune 100 company and various leadership capacities. And then in 2001, end of 2000, my co-founder and myself decided to start an electronic security integration via life safety company. It’s called Convergint Technologies. And so what that means to the listeners is when you walk into a building and swipe a card, it allows you to go to certain parts of the building and there’s cameras watching you. We design service, then install those types of systems for very large companies. Now, globally, the banking industry in the entertainment industry, Fortune 500 companies, airports, things like that. And it’s been an incredible journey. We now have over 5000 colleagues across the globe. And what I’m proudest of is the culture that we built. Henry and that we really have a tremendous culture. We have people join us only for our culture and we give back to the community. We make it an environment that everyone feels special, very empowered. And it was a real delight to build that company still carrying on today. I’ll tell you this story and how I got into faith driven investing in that in around 2011 or so God put on my heart Haiti. I really can’t tell you why. Only thing I can think of it was on TV a lot from the earthquake in 2010. And so in 2012 I took 31 other colleagues to Haiti, which was my first trip to a developing country. I’d never been part of that. And so I was emotionally wrecked from the experience, the lack of infrastructure, the depth of poverty, the living conditions were deplorable. And of course, we’ve all seen that on CNN. But when you’re in the environment and you’re speaking to this people and they’re so religious and thankful to God, it really, really changed my life. And it’s kind of like a halftime moment, which is a book written by Bob Buford, where it was time in my life to go from success to significance. It really was clear to me. And at that same time, we were actually in a process and selling majority interests of our company to a private equity firm. And so I had to figure out how we were going to steward these new financial resources that were coming our way that we really weren’t prepared for. So I decided to leave day to day operations still on the board. I’m still an investor involved in strategy, but day to day I’m not. And it was a really challenging time for me to leave a company that I co-founded. And all I knew was that I wanted to have purpose in my life. I wanted a purpose. Well, I think back to a quote from Steve Jobs, and you may know this from John Sculley. And I was it was in the 80s when Steve Jobs was young. And you need a gray-haired guys to be on the leadership team. And he goes to John Sculley and CEO of PepsiCo and says, Do you want to sell colored sugar water the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world? And I can remember that resonated with me when I was young. A boy would I love to work for a company that’s actually changing the world. And so I committed myself when I left to using the resources God had entrusted with us and our family. And I was going do something purposeful with it. And so that’s my entry point now into impact investing was from that perspective. [00:08:25][187.7]

Henry Kaestner: [00:08:27] So expand on something I’ve come to know from many of the talks that you’ve given it, just about how you think about the assets you stored. So you think about generosity, for instance, and you’ve come to understand that we were served this generous God and think that a step towards faith driven investing begins with seeing the resources as his. And being generous with me modeled that out. But tragically, for a lot of our conversations, people will circle the subject of giving and focus on that and not so much. It invests things like they’re focusing on the left pocket of giving and come to understand increasingly that guidance at all. And they can give away and and as they give, they come closer knowing God. And that’s awesome development that’s been happening in the global Christian church as the church becomes more generous, but not so much on the investing side. So a lot of people might think I’ve been in this kind of framework that I make as much money as I can on my investments over here in my right pocket. And then with all the money that I make from my investments, then I can go ahead and give it away. You, of course, have come to a different thought, different place where you’ve come to understand that the very process of investing your capital might advance some of the same goals that you feel that God has put on your heart as you do with your given goals. But I don’t wanna put words in your mouth. How do you process that relationship? [00:09:40][73.2]

Greg Lernihan: [00:09:42] Well, it’s complicated. First, after resigning from day to day operations, I actually thought it was gonna go into the nonprofit space and use my time talent resource the best I could to help the nonprofit world. [00:09:52][10.6]

[00:09:54] Then the first thing I looked at was how much capital is going into that space. And it turns out this past year, 2018 was 428 billion dollars. And the challenge with that is that had grown less than 1 percent net after inflation. It’s been basically same over last 40 years. And there are 1.5 million nonprofits trying to get a piece of that pie. That’s pretty much stagnant. So I happen to be on a trip that I went to with Bob Lupton and Charity Detox, also toxic charity author. And he talked to me about this in his book. You Can’t Serve a Community Out of Poverty. And I remember sitting there saying that, you know, God had blessed me with some leadership skills and business skills, skills to communicate effectively with people. My brain was wired to be more in the for profit side. So I felt if we’re going to make an impact. I had to look at the capital assets. And it turns out that the investable assets in the U.S. are 200 to 250 times more Finance Square that we’re giving away. So if we’re gonna solve these social issues that we’re facing, both in the US and globally, we’re going to need other capital matter if you grew that by 50 percent. There’s you maybe from wealthy ones sustainable development goals for 2030, where they talk about all major issues facing the world, whether it’s poverty, health, education, and they have goals for every one of them. And they estimate that will take two to three trillion dollars each year for the next 15 years. So impact investing started to gain traction. And the reality is, if we’re going to make a difference in this space, we can’t do it with just care of capital. It’s not even up for discussion. We need both investable capital plus charitable capital. And fortunately, this impact investing market is emerging and trying to fill a space that has been doubling over years. There’s now 500 billion in market size and all predictions are it’ll be 3 trillion the next five to seven years. And people are pouring money in from foundations, from private equity firms, from investment banks. And so now we have more capital coming into the space. We need better deal flow. But I want to make sure that I comment that I’m not talking about not doing granting. This is in addition to we have to do granting. We just can’t rely on social and government programs and grants to solve our problems. We need more capital from the outside world. So that’s why I focused my time. [00:12:17][143.5]

Henry Kaestner: [00:12:18] So I think that that’s incredibly important. I think of, you know, just set box of Tic Tacs and all of them, they’re kind of like allocated for being able to achieve the different goals that we might all have with this U.N. Millennium Development Goals or whether it’s goals that we have that are driven by our faith. But one of those tic-tacs is giving three or four of them are government spending plus giving. But the rest of the entire box of those tic-tacs are all units of investment. And so if we really want to move the needle, harnessing the power of the rest of our Tic-Tac box, and it’s just a lousy illustration, but you’ll see it from the slide in show notes is super important. And yet you’re saying, of course, as important as it is, it’s also really important to give as well. Tell us about as you have progressed in your giving, in your investing. What are some of the aha moments that you’ve had? What are some of the things that have been kind of several places along the road where you’ve made some shifts, maybe some pivots to kind of get where you are right now? [00:13:15][57.0]

Greg Lernihan: [00:13:16] Yeah, there’s been a few of us here. When we started back in 2013, we had this philanthropic focus and then also added onto it a family fund that we were gonna start investing and impact investing I’d say I entered the space from a secular perspective. I wasn’t really familiar with or connected to this emerging faith driven movement back then, but it started reaching out to people and connecting and we ended up going to some Christian conferences, one of which being the gathering. And there’s where we got connected with leaders in this space, specifically from Praxis, which was a light bulb moment for us because their thought leaders and everything they were presenting was challenging the way we were going to steward God’s capital. So over the next year or so, I would say we finally got exposed to social, spiritual and financial returns. Up until that point, we were just social and financial. [00:14:07][51.0]

[00:14:08] And this was an aha moment that we can literally go out and invest in entrepreneurs and companies that are going to disciple and make more followers of Christ. But the biggest moment for our family, I would say, was when we figured out that these really aren’t our resources. Henry, I’d like to say that we’ve known that for our entire lives have been a Christian my entire life. But it wasn’t until we prayed on it. We had excess capital. We didn’t feel good about it. And we finally understood. [00:14:37][29.1]

[00:14:37] It took years because I literally wrote in my prayer journal. Lord helped me to get comfortable with giving all of these assets away and that these are not ours. And the steward them as you would want us to. And I remember, not wanting to write it in my prayer journal at all. But my wife talked me into it and then slowly praying on it, it came to be and now we were very comfortable. [00:14:58][20.8]

[00:14:59] So all of our internal discussions with our family are stewarding his resources, and we believe God wants us to not only steward them well, which is by everybody’s definition, what well is we can discuss that, but to take risk. These are God’s resources and to take risk and then to completely trust him. And that’s the journey one. And that’s possibly the hardest part, because when you’re looking at investment, you really don’t know whether they’re gonna be successful or not. And when you put a faith lens on, it gets a lot harder. And you have to. And we’re learning and growing from this to trust him. [00:15:31][32.3]

William Norvell: [00:15:33] It’s amazing. William here, thanks so much for walking us through that and your story. You know, it’s funny. I do want to share one quick story I ran into the other day, though I don’t think I’ve shared with you yet. We’re talking about Convergint. You talked about the culture and how much that meant to you and how much you thought about that and spent so much time. Well, I ran into a business leader who’s in a similar space as yours. [00:15:53][20.0]

[00:15:54] And unprompted, I was talking about, you know, where you get people that are kind of getting going a little bit. So they’re taking people from other companies. They’re like getting people from those places. Just this one company. No one will leave it. We call them all the time and no one will lead this company. And it was Convergint. They just said, you know, we feel like we can get anyone we want unless they work for them. And they were like, we don’t know what they’re doing over there. [00:16:20][25.7]

Greg Lernihan: [00:16:20] Well, that’s a great compliment that I get to receive today. We’re proud of the culture. And as you know, people can work for anyone and they choose to work with. We never say they work for us. They work with us. And we use verbiage that matters to their colleagues are equal. They’re not employees that work for me or anybody else that comes. That’s that’s a real compliment. [00:16:40][19.4]

Henry Kaestner: [00:16:41] I want to expand on it a little bit. If you know, of course, that we also have the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, which is a sister podcast. And there’s a lot of there’s a good amount of overlap. And so on one hand, you say, well, this is just about investing, you know, Henry, just stay to the script. And yet as investors, we’re investing in other companies. Angel investing through funds, et cetera. And maybe one of the biggest things that you might be able to impart to some of these entrepreneurs that are starting and running their businesses that you’re now investing in is how to help them to understand how to think through a framework of culture. Culture leads to more employee retention, which is what William just spoke to. And that leads in turn to better investment returns. So I think that maybe it is helpful if you just spent just a minute or two. What is the framework that you went through a conversion that led to this culture where Wayne says nobody would leave? [00:17:29][47.6]

Greg Lernihan: [00:17:30] Well, as I mentioned in the open, he worked for a Fortune 100 company for 20 years and were very well trained on business processes and leadership in growing PNL. And we had responsibilities for it across North American. When we started our own business, the first thing we did was just stand and myself, we were in the basement. We wrote down all the things we liked about big companies, professional think about growth, no such thing as not thinking about growth, well-trained, strong leaders, things like that, all the things they’re not good at, not necessarily giving back, not necessarily treating people the way you become a number of not very family friendly. You don’t know everybody. It’s more of you’re just there to get through with your day. And then we went to small companies which are small companies do well, president answered the phone in the middle of the night. They’re easy to do business. They have the easy button. They’re never hard to do business with. They’re always local. Hyper-local tough side is very normally live. Lifestyle businesses. You know, if they’re successful in Birmingham, Alabama, they have no reason to go to Florida. It’s just hard. I don’t know how to do it. They’re generally smaller in size. They generally don’t spend as much money on training because they try to cut corners. What we did was we knitted those together and came out with a company with the infrastructure and body of a Fortune 500 company with professionalism growth. But now we added in the ease to do business. Local president type of mentality. And so what we ended up building is this company now that can serve customers globaly, but very decentralized. So our culture was about I am converging. I own my position on the team. You pick up the phone, you own it. It doesn’t matter who you are. We’re all equals. We just have different sets of responsibilities. We expect to be our customers best service provider no matter what business we’re in. That’s a standard that no one can really meet. So we literally say to our clients, well, we’re at other companies, we’d say a one to 10, a scale of one to 10. He’d sit in a room going it went from 8 to 8.2. Aren’t we doing great? And then our company is. Are we your best service provider against Amazon, against the painter, against whoever you’re dealing with? Will you give us the mark that says Convergintis the best. And if they say no, we can accept that because we don’t skew to any of this. We want the real truth. And what that drives is a culture of accountability, empowerment. And I read this book. Our whole company read this book called Founders Mentality, where they studied that only one in ten companies grow their EBITDA, their profits for more than 10 years and convert. We’ve been blessed with 18 years of record growth each year, even through the difficult times. And they said two or three things. And number one is you have this enemy. They call something else in the book. But it’s where you are. In our case, it was the big billion dollar companies that we wanted to go and beat and we wanted to be better, more professional prepared. They wouldn’t be able to tell the difference because we had capital and knowledge and expertise. And the second one was ownership and we shared equity. Henry, William, quite a bit of equity, but really it’s also shared ownership that they own the success of those offices like president’s. And then the third one is it’s very decentralized and we allow our colleagues to make all the decisions. So our decisions are on the edge. Nothing came back to Dan or I. If it’s a customer issue ann you’re in San Francisco, you know what you need to do you’re empowered to do that. So I’d say putting all that together now, 18, 19 years later, people join because they like the empowerment. And then we have one last volume. We have 10. I go my last value and belief is fun and laughter on a daily basis. So our whole culture is it’s OK to make fun of ourselves. It’s OK to have fun. We constantly are doing events and dressing up as rock stars at our national meetings and anything we can do to make the environment a fun work environment. [00:21:19][229.1]

Henry Kaestner: [00:21:20] What rock star did you dress up as well? [00:21:23][2.7]

Greg Lernihan: [00:21:24] That’s a very good question. In my case, since I was the leader of the company at that event, they were kiss rock stars and I was more the director. But I’ve been a Cookie Monster before and I called booking Monster and I had the Cookie Monster outfit. We’ve had all types of things. I’ll just leave it at that. But the kiss one is actually one of our famous ones, all just in full gear. We didn’t short suit it either. [00:21:46][21.7]

William Norvell: [00:21:47] That’s incredible. Thank you for going on that tagent with us on that will shift back a little bit. You bet you if you’d ever terms on the show. We tried to get into these terms with a lot of people. Of course, you know different people to find them differently. You mentioned impact investing. You’ve mentioned faith driven investing. How do you define these terms? How do they work with your investing strategy, with the assets and resources that you’re stewarding? [00:22:10][23.4]

Greg Lernihan: [00:22:11] Well, there is some differences in the interpretations of each and from the impact investing side. Boy, I would say there’s broad agreement across the entire investing spectrum or impact spectrum. That Global Impact Investing Network, which is known as GINE, is the central repository for these types of things. And everyone’s accepted the definition of investing in enterprises with the intention to generate measurable, beneficial social enviromental alongside a financial return. That sounds like a lot of words, but what it really the two key words are intentional and measurable. So for to be an impact investment can’t say that I’ve invested in Yahoo or Facebook and they connect people in world. It has to be an intent. Your intent is to make a difference in the world. Your intent is to drive behavior and then you’re going to measure that social behavior. And in our case, that could be measuring jobs in impoverished areas. What are we paying them? Are there children now going to school? Do they have medical benefits? Those are measurable social issues on the face driving side. Everything starts now with a faith lens. So in our case, we refer to ourselves as faith driven investors. And we start everything from the Christian entrepreneur is that that he or she is faithful and Christian in this case and that they’re going to. Lead that company from a kingdom world view. They’re going to use biblical principles to run their company and the leadership is willing to share their faith openly throughout the company. In the end, we seek a triple bottom line and spiritual impact, social and financial. And so at the end of the day, as investors were investing from Christ perspective, and we’re hoping that these companies will honor God and the way to conduct business and they’ll do business in an excellent way. [00:23:53][102.0]

William Norvell: [00:23:54] Hey, Greg, thanks so much. You know, we’ve been going through the conceptual stage, which is awesome. Thank you so much for walking us through how you architect the assets that you’re steward egg. That’s just so interesting. And it’s one of the best articulations of it that I’ve heard. I’ve got to hear you do this a few times. If you could go a layer deeper for us to be really, I think, great for our listeners to hear maybe about some specific companies and how this has actually played out, both from the leader perspective, the product and then the returns, of course, both in all those categories. [00:24:22][28.3]

Greg Lernihan: [00:24:23] Sure. Let me highlight two. One is a company called Join and they’re based in India and the founders, a person by the name of Mel Murray. And she went and actually moved to India for better part of six years and immersed herself living amongst the poor and tried to figure out how she could use the skills that they have there locally. And so what they could do is manufacture high quality, high end purses. And so she has a nonprofit side called Joy Corps that takes care of all the holistic services for these women that they don’t even know what to do with the capital, that they’re paying them, how to go to work. What are the responsibilities of, you know, having these resources? And then on the other side, she’s selling purses through boutique shops and online. And we bought them for my wife and her daughters. And we’re not buying them because we’re trying to be nice. It’s because they’re really, our daughters and females in our lives that get these, love them. And what we’re doing there, William, is she’s probably between 2 and 300. She may be as much as 400 now people that she’s hired in the poorest areas of northern India. And she got a low interest loan from us. We didn’t do equity. We wanted something that would allow her to start to think bigger and still afford to be able to do it. And so we’ve been doing that for about four years. I speak with her almost on a monthly basis. We’re very connected with her and we’re actually going on trip for the first time. I didn’t tell you that she ends up getting kicked out of India due to Christian beliefs in her company and some other nuances. And she came back to states for a couple of years and then moved back to northern Thailand to ching ry so she could be as close as she possibly could to still living amongst the poor. And she’s kind of a modern day Mother Teresa in my life that really makes us better for just being around her. So the spiritual is she walks up and down the streets and converted people to Christ on a daily basis. Just when you meet her, speak with her and just have the opportunity and presence with her. Our social impact is tremendous with the hiring of the colleagues that we have. The pay we track, the pay, the benefits and those types of things. [00:26:34][130.9]

William Norvell: [00:26:35] That’s a perfect place. Great. So we’ve mentioned a few different types. You said you’ve invested debt. You’ve obviously invested equity convertible notes a couple of times. Then obviously there’s the spiritual financial impact. I’ve seen you talked before about how you think through four different types of investments and how this graph, both from a financial return or a spiritual return, you might walk in our listeners through that framework. [00:26:54][19.8]

Greg Lernihan: [00:26:55] Sure. I’ll do my best to make it easy. A couple of years ago, we started to literally plot out our investment on a two by two, which is on the X axes or the bottom axes is financial returns and on the Y up-down axes of social and spiritual terms. And then you divide that into four quadrant. So in the lower left quadrant would be low social, low spiritual and low financial where you generally don’t want to be. And in our case, we called that buried talents because we studied the parable of talents. We’re all familiar with that. You’re not using those resources appropriately. And then if you go to the right. So now you’re in a high financial still low spiritual, low social. We call that capitalistic. And most of the capital in the world is in this quadrant. These are investors seeking the highest returns. First and foremost. That’s perfectly normal. Nothing wrong with that. But then as you go to the top right corner is normally the winning quadrant because it’s high social and spiritual and high financial. And of course, we had investments in that quadrant. But what we didn’t expect is we had investments in the upper left quadrant, which is high social, spiritual, but low financial. And we tried to understand it, you know, how did this happen? And so what we learned is that these turned out to be some of our favorite investments. And we ended up kind of. These are all internal terms that we use in our family is called spirit led because we couldn’t justify financially why we made investments on this left upper quadrant, because there’s always a better investment further to the right. There’s always a higher return. And so after study in those, William, we learned in the upper left quadrant in particular and how it happened and why it moves us. We found those four things. The first thing we found is it’s biblical. This is we have gleaning going on in here the dignity of work for the underserved. And then we found it. Our faith in God and our faith in the entrepreneur superseded our fear of losing dollars or capital. We were willing to accept lower returns because we believe so much. In this case, Join is an example. If all the business opportunities that we invest in. Look perfect on paper, we said, where are we allowing God to show His Majesty and his power and give them glory and impossible situations? We like that these require God to be successful. The second is we employ the marginalized. This is where all the people are uneducated, lack employable skills, returning citizens in rural areas and predominantly women. And then the third thing was difficulty in raising capital. I’ve certainly heard Henry talk about walking up and down Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road saying he got turned down 40 times. Imagine and he was trying to raise capital in the capitalistic square. Now go up and over to a very high spiritual social content, but low financials, it makes that look easy. It’s impossible, difficult to raise capital in this quadrant. First and foremost, because they don’t have any planned exits, there’s no venture capital is going to come in. And most likely by a rural business in northern India, it’s probably not probable or strategic. Most of these are debt instruments in our family. About half of the investments in the upper left quadrant are debt versus equity. And we have used charitable capital, which I’d encourage other listeners to think about. Less than half of our capital net Quadrani from charitable from our daughter advice fund that you can use Impact Foundation or other people to help you invest in that. And then the last thing in that section is scaling is not important, William, to these particular entrepreneurs. Sustainability is they’re not looking to go global. They’re trying to keep people employed and adding. And then the last one, which is why we call this spirit led, is because these entrepreneurs are truly spirit led. The impacting humanity or human flourishing is more important than their return on investment. That’s the honest truth. Most of these investments are with women or minority led founders. And then the last thing is these, whether it’s Britney or whether it’s male. That reference, Sherley are incredibly humble. Leaders have no egos and they’re just there to serve the poor to the best of their abilities. And our family’s very motivated by them. [00:30:56][240.4]

Henry Kaestner: [00:30:57] So great. I think that’s also one of the things that I heard from you. That this upper left hand quadrant is comprised some of your favorite stories, people who have been taking great risk for the gospel, getting out there in very difficult places and their encouragement to you and their encouragement to me and our listeners. One of the things that some people who are listening to this might wonder is, do I have to in order to be able to have a gospel integration to what I do, do I have to find out that all of my investments are going to be in that upper left hand quadrant where necessarily in order to be able to have spiritual impact, to be able to invest as the Bible might lead me, that I have to have a lower financial return or take on higher risk or something like that? What does that upper right hand quadrant look like? Maybe. Maybe it’s not there the way you want to see it right now. But maybe you have hopes. You see developments in the industry so that somebody listens to this podcasts and say, well, I might have investments in both the upper left and the upper right. And the upper right doesn’t necessarily just need to be Fidelity Magellan Fund. It could be some other things that have some gospel inclusion as well. Talk to us a little bit about that. [00:31:59][62.1]

Greg Lernihan: [00:32:00] Well, it’s a good question, Henry. We definitely are fans in favor of companies are in the upper right hand quadrant. We would not expect, orwWhat we learned from this exercise is that in our view, kingdom, impact investing isn’t one quadrant over the other for our families. Both quadrants. And so we actively seek investments in both areas. Those have higher social returns, spiritual returns and financial in the upper right. And then we are willing to sacrifice some financial returns. And we also have funds in both sides. Henry and that we have a great investments, for instance, is a fund that does microfinancing in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and that’s a very high performing fund, very strong Christian principles and leading it. And at the same time, we have a fund in the left quadrant, which is talented, which is trying to leverage companies in East Africa to give them capital to scale. And so they can go across both. And I wouldn’t want anyone that’s listening to think that it has to be in one quadrant of the other. First, Fortis is a family decision between you and God. And second of all, we’re fortunate that we have investments that look just like a cola or just like joint that are in the right quadrant. And One World Pharmaceuticals, which is this company called OWBP, where they’re actually making a drug. Multiple drugs. One of them is epileptic drug. That’s a branded generic that they make profit high margins here in the states. And then sell it for pennies on the developing world because they can’t afford it. And one of the problems with epilepsy is once you’re on that drug and you create a generic, if it’s not the exact same ingredients, which according to these scientists, it only has to do with eighty to one hundred and twenty percent of the actual brand, it can cause them seizures. So they created an exact duplicate, called it a branded generic, so that, you know, when you take this drug, you’re not going to have epileptic procedure. And so they’re making profit here in the states and then using that goodwill in developing countries. And it has a great opportunity to make good money and change the world. And it’s an upper right hand quadrant investment. [00:34:06][126.1]

Henry Kaestner: [00:34:07] One key takeaway and we can’t go over too quickly is that you said that the process doesn’t lead with a prescription of how much you put in the upper left or the upper right or even if you’re in all the different quadrants. But the prescription, if I heard you right, is it’s the process by which you submit that decision to God and do that as a family and then seek his direction. I think that’s really important that this is a heart posture thing rather than cash. You have that 20 percent in this fund or 10 percent of that fund. How do you do that as a spiritual discipline, particularly with your family? A lot of people, listeners are going to be doing this multi generationally. What kind of format? How do you guys do that in submitting that to God? [00:34:46][38.3]

Greg Lernihan: [00:34:47] Well, you’re right with your answer, Henry, and that it isn’t scientific as much as it’s more heart. We have three measurements that we use. The first thing we use is, are they Christ centered? So it starts with a scale of 1 to 5 and 5 is now and in some cases living amongst the poor. Their entire lives are dedicated to the marginalized. And so they get a higher score and it’s all subjective. Between 5 down to 1 1 would be somebody who’s not necessarily faith driven and they shouldn’t be in investment criteria anyway. The second would be are they employing the marginalized for our family? That’s our number one criteria. If we have a choice, we won’t invest in companies that are spiritually strong and invest in the marginalized. So marginalized to us includes returning citizens, previously incarcerated individuals, one of the hardest to employ. It also includes people that we described earlier in Uganda and also includes people in the south side of Chicago that are under-educated or un employed. And so we write that in and the last thing we write for is the potential for a financial return. And so we arbitrarily go through one through five that some of the funds I referenced earlier have a higher opportunity for higher returns. The debt ones that we’ve invested in the debt companies or companies we provided debt to are always lower. We know that going in. We know that they can’t afford generally the capital, but they can have a good business that’s sustainable, repeatable and can pay us back our debt so that we can redeploy it. And I think some people think if you’re in that upper left hand quadrant, it’s a bad deal. It’s a weak deal. You’re not supporting excellence. We just fundamentally don’t agree with that. It can be an excellent company that can afford a 4 to 5 percent return that’s helping marginalized or underserved community. And we’ll do just fine. [00:36:34][107.3]

William Norvell: [00:36:35] Thank you so much for walking us through that. Unfortunately, as this happens, sometimes we’re going to have to move towards closed now. But will love will likely beg you for more time later. We do that with a lot of people, too, as we’d like to close. Loved to just let our listeners in to your world a little bit. Amazing how God’s word continues to be alive life every day. And we would love to maybe let our listeners know what is God doing in your life through his word in this season, potentially, or today, even maybe this morning. Just where is he taking you? What is he teaching you and what journeys have you on right now? [00:37:06][31.0]

Greg Lernihan: [00:37:08] Well, William mine has has been today. It’s been for weeks and probably over the last year or two. And that’s for me and my family working to be obedient to God’s wishes. In the short scripture that works for me is “apart from me you can do nothing,” which is John 15:5. And I would say I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a Christian my entire life, but I’m not sure I believe that verse until the last several years have really been working, I thought. And even my Convergint days, my hard work, extra hours, motivating people was more my efforts. And I don’t think I gave God enough credit. And I now have completely understood in the past several years in particular that without reservation, I need the Lord. I can’t do this on my own. It’s not from my efforts. And so surrendering and being obedient to his wishes is far and away. The number one thing I’m working on, and that includes everything from small sacrificial things on a day to day to him trying to memorize scripture and make sure that reading the word morning and night praying over every decision we make. And so I don’t think this is going to end in a week or two. I think it’s a lifelong journey. But we’re going to continue to. I’m going to continue to do my best to render complete as well. [00:38:21][73.7]

William Norvell: [00:38:24] Amen can’t think of a better place to end. Just thanks so much for joining us, such a gift, such pleasure. [00:38:28][4.5]

Greg Lernihan: [00:38:29] Thanks, William. It was an honor. [00:38:29][0.0]

[2109.4]

Richard Cunningham [00:00:00] You’re listening to Faith Driven Investor, a podcast that highlights voices from a growing movement of Christ-following investors who believe that God owns it all and cares deeply about the heart posture behind our stewardship. Thanks for listening.

Host [00:00:17] Hey everyone, all opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. And this podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization. Thanks for listening.

Richard Cunningham [00:00:45] Well, friends, welcome back to another episode of the Faith Driven Investor Podcast. A joy to have you with us for what is episode 201. If you missed episode 200, it was a joy to have Luke Rausch and Henry Kasner with us, a couple founders of this FDI movement in space, talking all about the history and landscape and kind of where this broader movement has been and where God has taken it. And we’re back with Marks on the Markets here for our July episode of Marks in the Market, joined by John Coleman. And John, we’ve got a couple of heavy hitters with us as we’re talking venture markets today. And Jake Thompson, who runs the venture business at Sovereign’s Capital, and Rob Goh out of the Boston area who runs NextVue Ventures. Gentlemen, this is gonna be a lot of fun talking venture market. We are just off the heels of 4th of July. How is everybody after their Independence Day? Oh man, doing well.

John Coleman [00:01:33] Well, it was a relaxed weekend for the Coleman family, and I feel like with the venture focus, we are doing our version of All In right now, and since JCal gets to falsely claim they’re the biggest podcast in the world, I think it’s safe to say Faith Driven Investor is the biggest podcasts in the word, so Rob and Jake, you make it that way.

Jake Thomsen [00:01:51] Awesome, Booth, you guys, and yeah, really a privilege. All the Thompson kids have all fingers after the long weekend, which is always a success. So we’re excited to meet again.

Rob Go [00:02:00] Awesome. And we had a good long weekend as well. I actually was preceded by my 20th anniversary. So I went away with my wife for about a week before the long weekend. So getting back in the swing of things here. That’s awesome.

Richard Cunningham [00:02:12] Man, that is awesome. Good deal. Well, yeah, the Cunninghams are here in Austin, Texas, where just, you know, worth saying, we are on the heels of some pretty devastating flood tragedy. Oh yeah. I was able to escape away to the Pacific Northwest with some extended family, which is just a beautiful place, but definitely coming home to heavy hearts and a lot of thoughts and prayers for the people around kind of the greater Hill Country area here in Austin. We had a boat swept away in the. Floods on Lake Travis in particular and that is about as small of an issue you could imagine considering what others are going through and just kind of the devastation and loss but shifting back to let’s talk more positive things let’s get into the docket today. Jake Thompson I kind of want to give you a chance because venture markets have been under the microscope if you will over the last few years there was kind of the peak valuations and the venture frenzy of 21 and 22 a little bit of a fall post that. The wave of artificial intelligence is taking off as of recent, it seems like there’s some momentum and optimism back in IPO markets, but we maybe just kind of canvas the venture landscape for us over the last few years to kind of set our conversation today, and then I’ll let Rob chime in after you. Yeah, small question. Yeah, very small, we’re starting small.

Jake Thomsen [00:03:22] We’re starting small. How much time do we have here? Absolutely happy to, Richard. Yeah, you know, even you asking that question just makes me think how resilient and unique the founders are in this season, because you think about these last five years and it’s just been, we often talk about being a venture founder is like being a boxing match where you’re just getting punched in the face over and over again. You’re bobbing, you’re weaving, you’re trying to get some punches in. And this has been a season of a lot of those punches where you start off and there’s relative normalcy right pre-COVID and all of a sudden everything changes, lockdowns, everybody wonders what’s going to happen to these companies, are they just going to sort of shrivel and die, and all sudden there’s unexpected boon with working from home and just a whole lot of optimism, right, as there’s more money out in the system, a lot more people investing in these companies, valuations just shoot up, right. All the fundamentals get very, very positive. People assume big growth rates, low risk rates, and so even as you run the discounted flows of these companies. A bunch of reasons why it just ballooned up and became quite a bubble. And then you get to 2022, you have interest rates start to go up. That just let out a lot of the air from the system and it just got really, really hard to raise venture funds. 2021, early 2022, we saw this kangaroo explosion of new fund managers, oftentimes first time managers getting out there. It seemed like every dollar you deployed was just up and to the right, like, oh, this stuff’s easy. How come not everybody’s been doing this for so long? But then that 2022 came, rates went up, and just everything ground to a halt. You looked at the deal count just started to fall through the floor. You got the amount of money deployed, just so much uncertainty. Then you get to everybody’s capital being locked up in the banks because you had the banking crisis that was soon after that. Everybody got to the other side of that thinking, okay, what kind of sigh of relief can we breathe? Rates started to come down, but then that stopped. Then you had AI, which is just such a fundamental revolution in so many ways. I mean, if you get back to the boxing match, now it’s like a boxing match during earthquake. Where you just don’t even have firm footing as you’re trying to take these punches and give them. And AI today, and we’ll get in more into this, but there’s this term that was in a well-known blog recently that everybody is quietly freaking out, right? You might have money in the bank, you might have venture backers, you may not, which might be its own benefit, and yet everybody’s quietly freaking out because you just don’t know what’s going to happen in three months, in six months, in three years, right. But there are these IPOs now, right, we went about two years with no tech IPOs. And then 2023 started to crack that open with a couple of Clavio, Instacart, a couple others over the next few months. 2024 is better, but especially the last few months, you started to see a decent number of IPOs. And again, we’ll probably get more into that. But these are IPOs that are across a lot of different types of sectors that seem to be validating that people are ready to go back and go public, get DPI, right? Distributed Come back. And yet the fundamentals are still so uncertain, right? Today, capital markets do not like uncertainty. And so you get to where, okay, well, inflation seems to be low, but is that going to jump back up with tariffs, right. Economic activity seems to strong, but is, that can totally change with AI if people aren’t backfilled as they’re acquitting and just, what does that look like? So I think the number one thing that I would say today is there’s just so much uncertainty that the last few years have been this combination of, well, pockets of really good data and fact patterns. Pockets of really challenging data and fact patterns, and a whole lot of uncertainty politically, economically. It’s just a really hard time. And so back to my first point, founders in the season, a really, really special breed. Many of them are fit in terms of the fundamentals of the companies, and yet a really hard time to be running a company and to be investing in these kinds of companies, given some of that uncertainty.

Richard Cunningham[00:07:01] All right, that’s a world-class canvassing. I can see John and Rob both kind of jumping out of their seats to jump in. So gentlemen, I’m just gonna kind of open the floor and say, Jake just opened up the Pandora’s box. What thread would you like to pull on? Rob, go, we’ll start with you.

Rob Go [00:07:13] Jake, that was an outstanding overview of the last few years and description of where we are. So kudos to you for sharing that. So I have this view that it’s easy to think of where we are in the venture markets as sort of like a normal venture cycle, right? By nature of what we do, it’s a little bit of a boom and bust dynamic. I actually think that we’re not in the normal venture circle and that things have fundamentally changed, especially for early stage investors. So bear with me for a little bit. I think that there are essentially like four major shifts that have changed this market and more or less for good. So number one, I think the industry has matured, right? So we went from a world where venture was a cottage industry into a world where it’s much more of a mature industry. What happens mature industry, there tends to be concentration at the top of the market. As the big players tend to compete on scale and scope, and there are small players, but a lot of the economic rents get concentrated. So that’s number one. Number two, there’s been a rise of two unstoppable forces in the venture market. Force number one is Y Combinator, which basically eats up, by my estimate, 10% to 15% of the early stage supply. The other unstoppable force are mega funds. That essentially take up another 10% to 15% of the market with essentially price and sensitive activity at the early stage. And so you basically have this shrinking canvas for early stage investors, because it’s very, very difficult to compete against those two forces. The third is the idea of the power law went from being. Sort of like a non-consensus right idea to be something that everybody believes in and believes in to like the nth degree. And I think that that has huge implications in terms of how the different players in this market are behaving. And the last is we’re at the beginning of this AI super cycle, which has a much longer time horizon than a typical venture boom and bust cycle. This is more of like 20 to 30 year horizon as opposed to a typical, I don’t know, like five to seven year or like. You know, good times, bad times kind of cycle. And so you put those all together and man, we are in a different moment in time than we have been in since I think I started in the venture business more than, you know 15 years ago.

John Coleman [00:09:25] So I’ll try and be controversial on the other side. Jake laid out some of the challenges to the industry. I think this is probably the most bullish I’ve been on venture capital, at least in my career. And I think the reason for that is, you know, venture capital ultimately is about disruption first, right? About the ability to start new companies that have the potential to disrupt or change industries and more mature companies. And about the advancement of technology, because the vast majority of venture capital today is oriented towards either hardware or software. And I thinking if you look at the underlying dynamics of the macro environment right now, we are on the precipice of what could be the biggest … A series of technological changes in human history. So at least since the Industrial Revolution, but I could argue that it’s greater than the Industrial revolution because the fundamental technologies are more advanced and capable of advancing more quickly. So if you break that down, what’s good for venture investing? First is technological disruption. And I think disruption cycles in markets, in business, are faster than ever. I think new technologies quickly overwhelm old technologies. Business models change more quickly. I think there is more disruption in mature and immature businesses alike than ever before, which I think actually lends itself to new models and new businesses that can participate in that disruption. At the same time, I think we’re on the precipice of several different technological advances that would be world-historic in their own rights and actually feed into one another in unique ways, right? The internet is probably the most disruptive thing that we’ve all experienced in our investing career in terms of fundamental change to technology. But I think a series of things around energy production, around artificial intelligence, around robotics, around medical and scientific advances, and maybe some other categories are all coming together right now in a mutually reinforcing way, which means that we could go through a transformation in the underlying nature of the economy, the way that people work and businesses work, that it’s more radical than at any point in history. Now, that is predicated on the continued advances in things like quantum computing and energy, But if you think about it, artificial intelligence is like the backbone of that. But with the artificial intelligence, not only do you get this disruption in every single industry in the way that we have now machines that can perform like humans in terms of thinking, but those actually reinforce the technological advancement in those other areas. You need energy, for example, in order to support artificial intelligence. And so now we’re seeing nuclear markets open. We’re seeing advances in energy production technologies. We’re seeing governments be more open to alternative methods of production of energy, both because of resource scarcity and the increasing needs of AI. You’re seeing robotics advance in a way that, you know, robotics have been around for a long time. But the combination of robotics and artificial intelligence are going to create fundamental advances in those areas, I think, that are different than in the past, right? If you have humanoid robots, if you have self-driving cars or planes, now we’ve got hypersonic jet engines, which are making a comeback and more accessible and cheaper to produce. And AI is able to advance those technologies more quickly than they would have advanced in the absence of that. And that bleeds into things like medical technology, et cetera. And so if I think about just the fundamental opportunity to try and get in on the ground floor of the creation of new businesses that can fundamentally grow into massive businesses in a much quicker cycle than ever before with limited resources, I think that capability is greater. And the ability to dig into these technologies that are gonna influence the way every mature business operates in the world, right? Every single business has to pay attention to robotics, artificial intelligence, energy and other technologies right now. And I think new companies are best positioned to at least start those and pioneer those. And then, Jake, what you mentioned is the other side of the capital markets is now wide open. Rob, you mentioned mega funds. Jake, you mention IPOs. There’s less, I think, constriction on the ability of big companies to participate. We’re seeing Google and Meta and Microsoft done hundreds of billions of dollars into these markets now through acquisitions, acquihires, funding new startups. So, I think we could be on the precipice of a massive, massive technological change. The best way to access that change being through venture investing and venture backed companies. So, that might be the optimist’s view for why now is actually one of the most exciting times to be in the market despite its challenges.

Jake Thomsen [00:13:55] Yeah, I’d agree with you, Jonathan. I’d say that’s almost two sides of the same coin, because what I hear you saying, I draw a distinction a little bit, there’s the technology markets generally and completely agree with what you’re saying, because technology is being supercharged in all those ways. And some people ask, well, hey, is there still generally the advantage of having venture versus public markets? And to your point, right, there are these category-defining companies. If you look at the 1980s, 1990s with the personal computer revolution. And there’s been research done that says, well, every dollar of revenue for the Microsoft’s, IBM’s, the Apple’s in that season led to about $10 of GDP, right? You have this 10X multiplier of the underlying technology. I’ve got to believe that AI, I mean, it could easily be 10X at, right? For every dollar that is spent on revenue in these AI solutions, could lead to 100X at in terms of general growth of the economy, economic activity, and good companies have always been able to capture the value they create. And so I think we’ll continue to see that. We’ll continue see in the longer term, our performance and venture. And at the same time, it’s never been easier to write code to start a company. We’ve never had so many companies, right? You just look at base 44 acquired by Wix after six months, right, for $80 million, right. To be a venture investor and say, well, it used to be the software that was really hard to develop. And so, I could bet on a good team that could develop software. Well, now that’s the easy part of it. So almost the picking the winners as a venture investor and all the competition you have as a Venture Founder, I would say makes it harder as an individual in that system. And yet the system overall will continue to go in a really exciting direction, because I agree with your analysis there, John, that the market in general will drive forward in really compelling ways. It’s interesting though, that

Rob Go[00:15:36] But there’s this very stark dissonance where I think most people agree with what you share, John, at the macro level, right? Like a huge amount of optimism about the potential of these technologies to be transformative and be, you know, kind of multiplicative in the economy. But at the same time, you have a lot of folks on the ground who are having a really either raising money, building companies, exiting. Lack of liquidity. So that dissonance I find very, very interesting. It’s not that those two things are in conflict with one another, but there are other things going on that we need to get through to enjoy this period of flourishing that hopefully will be on the other end.

John Coleman [00:16:13] The illiquidity in capital markets, particularly because Jake mentioned DPI in his opening comments. I mean, any time you talk to a limited partner right now, they are not getting the money back for the last three years that they expected from their private funds, from private equity, from venture capital, et cetera. And so I do think one of the challenges for the industry is like, how do we shorten that liquidity cycle in such a way that people actually have the liquidity to reinvest? In these markets because the hold times have just been too long for people to get the liquidity to reinvest. And so Rob, I think you and Jake are entirely right. The capital markets are still a little frozen for investors who have traditionally participated in venture because they remain over-allocated into old funds from which they haven’t gotten distributions. Right? And I think the IPO markets and, you know, big companies like Meta or Google or Microsoft acquiring are helpful to introducing capital for acquisitions, but not for funding from the ground up, or at least dominantly not for finding from the ground up except internally. And so there is a disconnect right now, I think, in the capital markets and the opportunities that might be out there if they were.

Richard Cunningham [00:17:17] All right, we’ve got three really intelligent gentlemen going at it here. And then I consider myself the people’s host because then there’s me. And so just to kind of level set, because you’ve thrown out a lot of terminology, Jake and Rob in particular sit in the general partner seat, which is they are fund managers. They go raise limited partner capital from wealthy individuals, family offices, high capacity folks, institutional investors, things, endowments, pensions, foundations, things of that nature. They pull that capital together as venture managers and then go deploy it into Deals, founders, startups, and those folks. And so they kind of have this unique perspective where they’ve got their limited partners they need to care for because they’re stewarding and shepherding their capital. And then they go out and they pour the capital they get into companies they want to take bets on. And so I just want to kind of orient people around to where expectations are. And you’ve got this liquidity issue where the limited partners who have invested in the funds are eager to get DPI. So distributions back to themselves as investors. They’re saying, hey, we need these companies that Jake and Rob have invested in. To exit to generate some type of return so we can get our capital back and go invest in another fund or whatever it might be, or we’re just, we’re liquidity strapped and we need to get some cash back in the door. So just kind of want to get some terminology right there. So Jake and Rob, in that seat you’re sitting in right now, what are you thinking about the most? Cause you’ve got to source new deals, you’ve gotta go find the founders out there. You’ve got the founders you have invested in across your funds. And then you’ve also got the demands of limited partners who are asking you, knocking on the door, Hey, when are we going to get those distributions? I mean, you’re in an incredibly complex role right now with all the dynamics we’ve spoken to. Maybe the question is just how are the founders doing? Like those that you interact with on a day-to-day front that you’re investing in. Jake, you mentioned their resilience early on. What are they thinking about right now and all the founders that you’ve invested in?

Jake Thomsen [00:19:03] Yeah, so it is, it’s a difficult time where I think I’ll go back to what I mentioned earlier of just not quite knowing what things will look like for the next few years, largely related to artificial intelligence. I mean, late 2022, when chat should be first came out. I remember being at a Christmas party and just making Christmas poems from it and thinking, oh, this is going somewhere. This is going somewhere pretty fundamentally potentially changing of everything we do. And yet we don’t know what that looks like. I couldn’t have guessed how I’d be using various LLMs and AI and CLOD today. And I think you generalize that and you say, well, what does that look like over the next few years? And it’s almost a, you don’t know what you don’t t know where so much of technology has been linear, where you can kind of see, okay, the internet, you can track where we thought it would go. Right. First, you had more of a linear progression of everything that was already being done came online. Right. All of a sudden you had the white pages, yellow pages online. And you had Pepsi.com, right? Business as usual is now online, but we couldn’t have foreseen were those internet native companies, social media and others would probably wouldn’t have said this is going to happen down the line and yet those are some of the biggest companies of that era. And so I think the question is, how does it fundamentally change? What does it look like to be AI native to implement these tools? Because if you’re not implementing tools at every level of your stack, if you are not hiring people that are thinking kind of first, how do I adopt the efficiencies of a lot of If you have this framework where there’s perfect competition on one end, venture has always been very clunky, right? Again, the software, trying to get venture investment. Well, it’s becoming more and more increasingly through AI of a perfect competition construct. And you’re going head to head with a whole lot of people. So we see a lot of founders that they’ll raise around, they’ve got 12, 18 months, and they kind of can breathe for a little bit, but they’re already terrified of what 12,18 months looks like because they’re going to build with working hypothesis. They don’t know how that needs to change. So they just can’t. Have a magic crystal ball and try to figure out what that looks like. So it’s just, it’s that uncertainty is what a lot of these founders are experiencing day to day. That’s what we’re seeing.

Rob Go [00:21:02] Yeah, maybe if I can chime in, we were thinking about all the things that you mentioned, right, liquidity, new investing, you know, supporting the companies that have been out there, right? Like the beauty and the curse of being a fund, you know, having multiple funds that are in different stages is you kind of have. You know, I’m thinking about a founder who just raised their first seed round last week and they’re just trying to find early signs of product market fit, and then I’m talking about founders that, you know, they’re 12, 13 years into their journey and they are either thinking. How do I get an exit or like maybe it’s day one and I see another 10 to 20 year horizon here for this company to keep on growing. And how do I be aggressive about that? Right. So it’s kind of funny being a GP, you kind of like live all these parallel lives at the same time. I actually think that there is general optimism, I would say, you know, in our portfolio among the founders, right? Because if you started a new company. You’re hopefully optimistic, right? Like you’re still trying to take the first hill and you build conviction around this problem and this product that you’re building and you’re excited about that. I think for a lot of companies that are in the mid or later stages in life, they just got through this very, very difficult period where maybe they were sitting on a super high valuation, had a lot burn, they had to get fit and get their companies in shape, but they’ve sort of done that. You’ve either done that or you haven’t, you’re not gonna survive if you haven’t done that And now you have this like new substrate of like really, really interesting capabilities that hopefully you’re forward thinking and are applying into your businesses. And you’re seeing really great returns. Like one of the interesting things about AI is that a lot of the returns can accrue to scale players, right? Because if you save, you know, 10 or 20% of costs somewhere. Like it doesn’t matter that much if you’re like a 10% startup, it matters a ton if you are like a, you know, thousand person company or a company of really significant scale. And so, you now we’ve seen a lot of our late stage companies, you have new lines of business or massive efficiencies gained through some of the, you kind of low hanging fruit presented by AI and that’s just really the beginning. So I think that generally there’s actually a lot optimism in the portfolio, albeit with full awareness of a lot the challenges that folks are encountering as well.

John Coleman [00:23:13] Are you seeing a bifurcation amongst type of companies? So like one of the things that strikes me, because Jake mentioned it earlier. You know, we are seeing companies now that barely even exist with people leaving OpenAI or Apple or whatever and getting like a billion, eight billion dollars. Johnny, I haven’t got these crazy valuations. You can build a billion dollar company with a couple of people now that’s software oriented, that’s AI oriented. But we’re also seeing a shift to hardware investing and venture and breakthrough hardware technologies, where obviously the capital intensity of those businesses is greater. So it’s a little opposite of what you guys described, where there’s just so many founders, things are getting created so quickly. You know, to create, you know Jake a cloud seating platform or something like that. You actually need more capital intensity to make that work. But we’re also seeing some of the most interesting companies being hardware oriented now rather than software oriented which I think is a bit of a pivot. Are you guys seeing kind of a break in the types of companies in the way in which founders are acting or VCs are acting at the moment?

Jake Thomsen [00:24:15] Yeah, I’ll chime in and say, absolutely. And I credit that with a couple of different trends. One, because software is no longer the scarce resource, right, we’re investing in things that five years ago, we would have said, well, there’s friction there because it’s hardware, because it is hard tech, because there’s a services component. That friction was a negative back then because you really wanted to focus on the software piece. Now that software is almost interchangeable, all of a sudden that friction becomes your economic mode. And so it’s the way that you protect your positioning. And so we are, I mean, we’ve invested in a handful of companies that wouldn’t have been on the target in the past. I think there’s that piece of it that the hard things are more defensible. There’s also, I love to hear Rob Stotz on this too, but there’s almost a change in the zeitgeist a little bit of kind of what founders are most motivated by. Probably the confluence of whether it’s the elites in Silicon Valley, right? There are more and more, you mentioned all in podcasts, right. And there’s a couple of those guys just have gone a little bit more right and unpack that in ways that they’re being listened to. You’ve always had Peter Thiel’s and Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen with American dynamism, right? You have more of that where there are the cultural elites, you have this almost political narrative, which not to get too much kind of sociological, but the difference in just the tenor of the two different administrations. Right this administration is much more the vision of the good life is quite different therefore the threat we face is quite difficult and that threat tends to be external right it’s different nation states it’s the the future of american prosperity right there are a lot of founders that have been there quietly building that now have a renewed sense of agency and a new voice and so we’re seeing i’ll just give a shout out to the reindustrialized conference right it in its second year up in detroit on this week there’s like discipulous ventures that are all hard tech investors. I mean, Rob talked about Y.C. And the bellwether they are. You know, Gary Tan, just I think it was last week, had said, hey, we’ve really been focused on agents and the rest, like we need to focus on hard tech, too. So they’re making a call for startups all around the hard tech space. And you see, take those two things that the elites, the political narrative and then even the policy where there is more I mean tariffs do lead to reindustrialization in a way that we saw a lot of interest in a company just recently that their thesis was the U.S. Produces the most cotton in the world. And we import the most cotton products, but all the steps in between, right, it’s going all over the world before it comes back. Why don’t we just have technology that are 3D printing for knitting, right? Let’s build something like that. And a bunch of ECs were clamoring to get an awesome entrepreneur. But that is something that wouldn’t have been nearly as competitive a deal even just two, three, four years ago, because you have the type of policy like tariffs that make that possible. You know, the Pentagon launched its Office of Strategic investment right to invest in long term hard tech and that was. Signed under Biden but wasn’t operationalized until just now. You have a lot of things coming together that I do think you’re seeing like cloud seeding, like nuclear small modular reactors, a lot that just would not have been considered kind of core venture that are getting closer and closer to the core just over the last couple years, especially the last year in particular.

Rob Go [00:27:15] I’m going to take a little bit of a contrarian view here. I think this is a point of view that like software is commoditized because of AI. I don’t think that’s going to be true. I actually think that great products will still distinguish themselves. I think that crappy products will be commoditize, but I think really great software products will still stand out and you’re going to build amazing companies around that. I think that there is a couple smoke screens on the two extremes, right? Like the 10 person billion dollar startup. I don’t know if that we’ve seen that yet. I don’t know if we’re actually going to get there. There is a billion dollar valued companies with 10 people, which are essentially acquihires. But like, you know, are 10 people going to build great products that customers use and pay for and are defensible? I don’t really know if thats going to happen. On the flip side, I think the hardware thing… We have some hardware companies in our portfolio, and so I’m not going to knock that, but I think it’s a little naive to think that like, okay, like things are just going to be easier for hardware startups today. I think there’s two forces going on. I think one, we’re in a boom cycle within sort of AI robotics and that sort of thing. And so capital is just flowing there more easily. I think the second is that like because it’s been a hard period in sort of traditional software or, you know, software exits, there’s the sense of like, If I’m not going to get a decent outcome from a software company, I may as well bet the farm on a crazy hardware company, right? And by the way, the mega funds have a ton of capital that they’re pouring into these things. So I’m probably going to getting a markup or my chance of getting a markup is just as good, right. As a software. But like when this is all said and done, like what are the best companies going to look like? I think there’s still going to. Look mostly like software.

John Coleman [00:28:58] Can I ask a second question to you guys? So, I remember a very contrary intake I heard, gosh, nearly 20 years ago now, 15 years ago maybe, from Peter Thiel, where he was arguing that basically there hadn’t been much scientific progress since the computing revolution, that most of the new technologies that are really exploded. Were not actually human advancement in the way that cars were, industrial technology were, like social media, which I would argue has been arguably one of the only tech advancements that’s been like a net negative for society, at least in the ways that it’s impacted individuals for human flourishing and on, you know, metrics that we can measure, there are a lot of problems as a result of that. It strikes me picking up what Jake said with this tenor of American dynamism, solving hard problems, and maybe Elon was a part of this or others were. That a lot of entrepreneurs now are thinking about impact more than they were in the prior cycles. Like a lot people rather than just saying, I’m gonna create the new social platform or a new dating site or whatever, are really leaning into structural problems that humanity faces, whether that’s manufacturing. Defense technology, energy production, weather influence, things like that, where they can define what they’re doing in terms of the positive ways it will impact flourishing in society and represent more fundamental scientific and technological advances. Am I just like an optimist about the environment right now or are you guys seeing a similar vibe shift, so to speak, amongst founders? Like how do you see that versus maybe 10 or 15 years ago?

Rob Go  [00:30:30] So embedded in that question would be the thought that 10 or 15 years ago, founders maybe were less ambitious or saw less of a connection between what they were building and sort of like the meaningful problems of the day. I don’t think that’s the case.

Jake Thomsen [00:30:47] I agree. I think the founders that do really well, you’ve got to have that conviction that you’re doing something for a very good outcome, not just financial outcome, to put yourself through this kind of wringer. And I do think this maybe is a bit of vibe shift just more recently than 10, 15 years ago. And it’s a gross oversimplification. But if the prior spirit of the age was almost like seeing the good life is a bit different and therefore the threat’s a bit different, I think there was almost a sense of the threat is internal in some ways. And the way that people, not both what they built, but also how they built I think was very much aligned with their value system, right? This is where you got to a lot of, how do you think about who we hire? How do we think about addressing some of the problems in society through various structures and systems, right. A lot of just the conversation of the last few years, you saw that as a big conversation in the tech community. And so it’s almost like the problem that was being solved more recently, might’ve been different than addressing that threat externally, a little bit more of like, hey, we’re addressing the threat in our systems and structures. So that there’s always, I think ever since the beginning of Silicon Valley, where you got all the hippies going out and saying that we’re going to build new things for society, I think that’s still there. It just takes different shapes over time.

Rob Go[00:31:56] I also think that companies like over time earn the right to expand their ambition. And that’s not really a problem. And sometimes you have companies that go out with huge ambitions out of the gate, but it’s just not practical or, you know, it’s more narrative than it is reality. One of the things that I really can’t stand in the market right now is this concept that like, you need to have this infinite narrative in order to be a successful startup company. And I think that that’s just like so backwards. Like we’ve totally lost the script if that’s what we’re telling founders at this point. Because like, I think building great products and solve real problems is like the ultimate narrative. And if you have success and scale that earns you the right to expand the narrative down the road. And in an example of that in our portfolio, we’re investors in this company called Whoop which is a human health and performance company. We’ve been in this country for 12 years. You know, I think Will is a very ambitious founder, but it had a very narrow goal around trying to understand rest and recovery for elite athletes, of which he was a part of and he had connections to those type of people. And in the last year, they’ve expanded the vision of the company beyond what originally was around human performance to lifespan and healthspan and longevity. And I actually think that this is a company that they could have gone out with that mission out of the gate, and maybe that was in the background, but they had to should earn the right to be able to do that and to do it credibly. Instead of just being a business that like, okay, we’re saying we’re going to do this great thing, but like, do we really deliver outcomes for our customers? Or are we just like, you know, trying to feed into an infinite narrative so that folks will fund us down the road? I don’t know. I just don’t like that.

Richard Cunningham [00:33:32] All right, shifting gears a little bit, wanna go into the performance conversation some. Both of you guys, Jake, Rob, John, you as well, I mean, you’ve been in market raising funds, private market funds in particular, and the MAG-7 went on such a run. How was it defending private markets investing to limited partners who were just saying, hey, if I just put money in the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ, whatever it is, it just goes up into the right and this is easy. Like, why on earth would I tie up money for long periods of time in the liquidity window? Where are you at sentiment wise? What are you recognizing in the market as people kind of LPs in particular look to the private markets, ventures specifically, with kind of this private versus public and how folks are kind of reconciling that conversation and just kind of the overall performance of the asset class.

Rob Go[00:34:19] So this goes back to the point I had around the power laws consensus. And I think we’ve really seen the power lot work over the last few years, not just in early stage investing, but across all stages of investing, right? So you talk about the mag seven. We don’t hear that as much, but what we do hear is, boy, I could have just bought late stage SpaceX or, you know, shouldn’t I have just like bought Nvidia stock and like, how are you going to beat that, right. We’ve seen this like concentration of performance in a very, very small number of companies. And so if you’re, you know, because when you buy venture capital, the whole idea is you’re trying to buy alpha, trying to by like outperformance while absorbing a greater amount of risk. And, you there are other ways to do that. I think that in the last few years, that’s actually been a very compelling argument. It’s hard to actually argue against that. My view, though, is it goes back to sort of where we are in the innovation cycle. I think that we are in the very baby step ages of the super cycle around AI, which over the arc of the next 20 or 30 years, I think, that you’re going to continue to see our performance from early stage private and liquid investing in the application layer. But early on, you actually don’t, right? If you think about the early days of the internet, most of the outperformance comes from a very small number of infrastructure and sort of enabling technology players, right? And that’s where we are on this innovation wave. Or, at the end of the last cycle… You know, all the performance is concentrated in a couple like big, big mega late stage companies. So we’ve been in this like moment in time where I’d say early stage venture is almost destined to underperform. But I think if you look over the arc of several decades, there’s reason to be optimistic because, you know the stage that we’re in is not going to last forever.

Jake Thomsen [00:35:58] And that question, too, is a little bit of selection bias. If you knew the Meg 7 were going to be the Meg 7 number of years ago, well, yeah, it makes all the sense in the world. And if you knew, the hottest venture names are going to the hottest names, and you bet on the fund that had those, I mean, you’d drastically outperform the Meg seven. So I think one of the benefits of a venture capital is you do have professional managers that are going out finding these companies, that you have a distribution that the median is still going to outperform. You can’t always pick the winners ahead of time. If you invest. If you take that view now, only time will tell. But if you have a basket just in the mag seven, who knows what that’ll look like over the next three to five years, especially compared to the up and coming private companies that venture would invest in.

John Coleman [00:36:38] In a couple of macro comments, and Rob touched on this, the outperformance of public markets generally has been enormous, particularly since the great financial crisis starting in 2008, 2009 after the collapse. We have been in basically an uninterrupted bull run with little dips around COVID and some other things that’s like historic in relation to public markets and one of the biggest bull runs in the history of public market. A lot of that outside of these Mag-7 was fueled by monetary policy, honestly. You dump trillions and trillions of dollars into an economy like you did after the great financial crisis, like you do during COVID and after COVID probably too long, and you’re going to inflate markets. That money has to go somewhere. Public markets are going to go up. U.S. Public markets are the biggest destination for capital in the world right now. U. S. Public market are the flight to quality. They’re going to go up. And so the return to the S&P 500, particularly for the last 15 years, since the great financial crisis or a little bit longer, have been an historic bull run, even outside the mag seven, even without selection bias, which I agree with Jake, private markets over that period of time, still outperform public markets, but by less than they used to And I think one of the things that Rob and Jacob already mentioned is the number of new GPs in private markets has exploded over the last 10 or 15 years, particularly that COVID bubble where in 2021, we were just seeing a radical expansion of the venture capital industry. But what that’s led to is a bifurcation between the best venture capital firms and the worst. If you look at top quartile venture and private equity firms, they’re still blowing away public markets. If you look at the average or the median. It’s a little bit more compressed because the bottom quartile performers significantly underperform public markets. I mean, the gap between a bottom quartel and top quartile venture firm is like 2,000 basis points, right? It’s not, you know, 100 basis points. There’s a huge difference between the quality managers in this area and those managers who aren’t consistently able to produce quality. And so I think… You know, we do hear that a lot. I mean, you know, the famous example, the Buss family is selling the Lakers right now for $10 billion. It’s the biggest sale in the history of American sports. He bought the team for $68 million in 1979, got $10 million for the family here in 2025. If he had invested that $69 million in the S&P 500 in 1979 it would now be worth $13 billion, right? I mean you know you get these anecdotes all the time. But I do think, look, bull markets don’t last forever. I think private markets still outperform. I think particularly with the winnowing of GPs that’s come over the last four or five years where the number of new funds started has declined, that you will see better funds continuing to kind of outperform public markets, particularly as they plateau. And the only question mark now is, do we now live in a winner-take-all world where the mag-7 or the top 10 or 20 companies in public markets that are massive, that have tons of cash, whether that’s Apple or Google or Microsoft or Tesla or maybe OpenAI, once they public, etc. Are just so scaled and better able to compete in this new environment because of the capital at their disposal that they can continue to accumulate the vast majority of returns in public markets. And Rob, you mentioned like late stage SpaceX, like 50% of the returns of the S&P 500, not the alpha, the returns to the S& P 500 have been the magnificent seven over the course of the last, I think it’s like three or four years, right? 50% of the returns of 3,000 stocks have been seven stocks, right? And the question I think some people are asking is, is this just the new normal where it is more of a winner-take-all in public? And that is a question, I think, but I think the average performance of private markets versus public markets is likely to be a bit better going forward, and particularly if you can get an above-median manager or top-quartile manager, their outperformance has actually been pretty steady over that time and will continue to be.

Richard Cunningham [00:40:48] Good reflections. Thank you, guys. Hey, let’s go around the horn one last time before we get into our final question and just, hey, what’s that last thought kind of thing on top of your mind that we didn’t get to, I got my eye on the clock, that you’d want to share maybe just a quick kind of comment on the venture markets you’d like to leave the listeners with. Rob, we’ll start with you.

Rob Go [00:41:03] I continue to believe, and actually it’s validated with folks I talk to actually know a thing or two, I think, about the technology, we are much more likely to underestimate the impact of AI than we are to overestimate it. And that’s easy to say now, I guarantee you, in two years or so, it’s going to like an AI wasteland because these markets have this sort of boom and bust dynamic. So just remember, when we’re in the bust period, sometime in the next couple of years, even when we were optimistic, we were underestimating how great this is gonna be. So that’s my last thought. All right. Jake, what do you got?

Jake Thomsen [00:41:42] That’s a great thought and totally agree I might take a little bit different perspective just given this subject matter we have around faith. We’ve had a lot of conversations recently about technology and at what point are we playing God and we’re all kind of nervous around this and how do we think about it faithfully and I just love that the simple framework as believers where we can look to scripture we can say okay where’s technology show up in scripture well a couple of illustrative examples right you got God quite literally prescribing technology right you read in early and assess where he gave. Most advanced maritime technology, like quite literally the schematics to go and build tech, right? So, so God has prescribed that at times. You go to the Tower of Babel where there’s this construction technology able to build something, but for all the wrong reasons, well, God decided to step in and actually thwart something that was going in the wrong direction for his overall plan. And you look even further on and you can see where he repurposes technology. I mean, the Cross was quite literally, the most advanced kill chain technology of the Romans. And we all know that that took something that was so awful and horrible and turned in the most beautiful day three days later of all of history. Right? So God can prescribe technology, can thwart it, can repurpose it. And so we don’t have to be afraid, I guess, to the point. We serve a sovereign God. We are His hands and His feet. We can go and develop thoughtfully, right? We can build. We can use products. And I think we can have an optimistic perspective of technology and of investing in technology, even from the fundamentals of our faith.

John Coleman [00:43:05] And I just want to build on both of those comments. Rob, I think you’re 100% right. I mentioned it earlier. I think we’re underestimating the technological change that’s coming. I mean, the only thing I can think of that’s even remotely similar would be the Industrial Revolution, which fundamentally changed humanity. I mean GDP per capita now is something that one or 200 times what it was for the 3,000 years prior to the Industrial revolution, right? And I think this change that’s coming, you know, absent some sort of intervening force. Technology continues. We are in for as radical a transformation of the human experience as the Industrial Revolution, maybe even more so now. And there’s reason for optimism. Rob, I think every technology everyone has ever been afraid of in the history of humanity has worked out better for humanity. There have always been anti-technology movements, they’ve always been wrong. However, you know, there are visions of the future you can paint now where we have humanoid robots and artificial intelligence and people are out of work. Disruption cycles like the Industrial Revolution lead to abuse. They can last for decades, not months or years, right? And so I think particularly as people of faith who care about individual human flourishing, we have to be optimistic because of our sovereign goddess, as Jake articulated, but we have be uniquely attentive to what is changing about the human experience and how can we as investors and people help to shape that in a positive and constructive way and help the people who are struggling with this adjustment find their purpose, meaning their way of life through that, right? Because you can picture this going bad and us ending up in idiocracy or wally, you know, this terrible vision of humanity where we serve the machines or the matrix or the Terminator if you’re really, really negatively inclined. You could also picture like a Star Trek future where all this technology enables us to explore the stars, to learn more about ourselves and the universe, to really uncover something beautiful about humanity. And that choice is going to be not ours to make. We have a sovereign God, but we have an influence here as people of faith, I think. In the way that humanity navigates this transition. And if Rob is right, that this is gonna be bigger than we even anticipate right now, I think we have to be more attentive to what that does to individual people and how we as investors and technologists shape that future such that it can be a continuing positive story rather than an era that we look back on and say, wow, there was so much that was broken then, there were so many people who were lost, there were many people that didn’t navigate it, right? And so. That’s one thing I think about a lot is like, this technology is coming. No one can stop it. Absent God in a Tower Babylon moment, no one can stop it! How can we navigate that in a way that the average person’s life gets better, not worse, and that humanity in the future looks better, not worse.

Jake Thomsen [00:45:50] If I can, not to extend this too much longer, but let me just pick up on that. It’s been so encouraging, you know, at Sovereigns, we invest in faiths and founders. And this weightiness and this sense of stewardship that you’re talking about, John, it’s so cool to see the body of Christ stepping into. And there’s this felt sense that we kind of missed the boat in social media, right? And there wasn’t a strong view of human flourishing in a lot of the companies that really shaped social media. And we kind see what happened with mental health and depression and the rest. And there was this felt of sense of We can’t miss a boat with AI. And so believers have to step in. We have to build with excellence, but we have to built with the meta narrative and view of what it means to be human, like what it mean to flourish, right? And that’s been a really cool thing to see from my vantage point of the way that we are the hands and feet of Christ, even in technology and to see the charge that a lot of faith from founders are taking. I’ve been encouraged by that and just values driven founders for that matter, right. It doesn’t necessarily have to be from faith, but that’s cool to see.

Richard Cunningham [00:46:45] Well, Rob, your comment was so profound that it caused John and Jake to misbehave and jump the gun and start giving a kind of a scriptural spiritual reference before I ask the question. So we’re gonna give you the final word on anything God’s been teaching you and then through his word lately, it would take us home.

Rob Go[00:47:02] Yeah, so there are a couple of things that I’ll tie together and I’ll make a couple of recommendations to while I’m at it. So we’re investors in this company called Hallow, which is primarily Catholic focused, but really it’s an app that I use every day and there’s a bunch of different types of content that you can consume there, but anyway, so this morning the scripture reading was around Jacob wrestling with God. And one of the things that really struck me about that passage was how kind of like in awe and fearful. But also anxious, but also amazed he was to have had a direct encounter with this being. His response is both like, he’s fighting with this person. He’s like, wait, who are you? Tell me your name. Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I survived. It’s just like this amalgamation of emotions because of how rare and unusual it was, I think, for him to have this direct encounter. So that really struck me. I’ve also been reading a book by Greg Boyd. I’d previously read a book of his called Cross Vision, which is pretty dense. He essentially created a, like, 120-page, easy-to-read, good parts version called God Looks Like Jesus. And his basic thesis is, you know, it’s very hard to understand the God of the Bible unless you think of Jesus as the full reflection of God’s person and character and the ultimate reflection of that. And when I put these two together, the reflection that comes to mind is just, like how privileged we are that we live in the era of post Jesus, where we don’t need to. Have an encounter with God that feels so mysterious and weird and unclear where we have a person that is a more complete reflection of who God is and then that person invites us into a relationship with them. And so it’s just like such an amazing privilege that we can have that intimacy and a reminder that we didn’t always have that. So that was kind of the thing that was on my heart today.

Richard Cunningham [00:48:51] Perfect word. Well, folks, what an epic edition of the FDI pod. Thank you so much for joining us. Jake Thompson of Sovereign’s Capital, Rob Go of Next View Ventures, what a treat to have you guys on. For John Coleman, I’m Richard Cunningham, and we will catch you next time.

Host [00:49:07] We are grateful for the opportunity to serve this community and see listeners come in from more than 100 countries. Faith-driven investing can be a lonely journey, but it doesn’t have to be. The best way to stay connected is to join a group study with other investors looking to get the same answers to questions you have and find great community as they do so. There’s no cost, no catch. In person or online, you can meet an hour a week with other peers from your backyard or the other side of the world. You can also stay connected by signing up for our monthly newsletter at faithdriveninvesting.org. This podcast wouldn’t be possible without the help of many of our friends. Executive producer Justin Forman, intro mixed and arranged by Summer Draggs, audio and editing by Richard Barley. Our theme song is Sweet Ever After by Ellie Holcomb.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’ve got a really special guest today, a friend of mine, Andy Mills. And I’ve been looking for this episode for a long time. Andy is great leader in the marketplace. Here a little bit about his background here in a second, about what he’s done in all different aspects of financial services. He’s been, as you probably heard in the intro from Rusty, part of the theology and work project on their board. He started something called Faith in Financial Services, which I think is super cool. He’s been a leader in the Lizanne movement and just a very thoughtful guy, said he’s an ex rower and continues to get out there on the concept two rowers. So we’ve got that in common. But the most important thing, of course, we’ve got in common is a great shared faith and an intentionality about using the different places that God has put us to work for God and his glory, which is actually, of course, the thing that we’ve got in common with our audience as well. So, Andy, thank you very much for being with us this morning.

Andy Mills: It’s great to be with you. And looking forward to our conversation.

Henry Kaestner: Me, too. And there are thousand different ways we could take this. And what I’d very much want to make sure that we get to toward the end of this interview is a project that you’ve been working on for a long time about the public reading of scripture. And I think that that’s unique. I think you’ve been very thoughtful about that. And then a lot of things around that. Then I want to get into. Well, before we do that, I’d like for you to walk through your background. You’re a professional in the financial services space. You’ve been in there for a long time and no different facets of that. And just bring the reader up to date. Talk to us about who is in e-mails and then from there will launch in a faith in financial services and all these other things would be great.

Andy Mills: Well, let me first just give you a little bit of the biography. And then if I could, I just want to give you a little bit of a spiritual biography. And I think those three things will give you a good sense of who I am. I’d like to say first, I’m a family man. I live up in Boston with my family. My wife is Gail, 37 years. We have two children. Fortunate enough to have three young granddaughters who completely whined me around that little fingers. I just love him so dearly. We’re very close as a family. My wife and I also spent a lot of time as foster parents. We did twenty years of foster parenting and had over 40 children in our home during those times. And so family, as you can say, is really important. And being close, particularly at times like we have today, is so very important. I grew up in England. So for those of you thinking, what’s that strange accent? It’s a little bit of Boston, but it’s a lot more of England. I grew up there. I went to university there, still took my first job in London selling textiles. And then after a couple of years, the company said, go over to the U.S. and sell textiles for us over there. So I landed in New York in the mid-70s, did a couple of years there, and then went up to Boston for grad school because I love being in America. So very much joined the Boston Consulting Group out of grad school late 70s, early 80s was a great time to be at BCG. A lot of very innovative work being done, great organization. But, you know, I knew consulting was not for me long term because I like playing the game, not just advising or consulting. And I found a small company that was kind of going out of business in the information space. The financial services, a company called Business Research Corporation. And I joined that and we turned that around. Some of you in the financial services business have been in long enough will remember. First of all, that was our major product and the business was acquired back in the early 80s by the Thompson Corporation. And then I had the opportunity to build Thompson Financial that many people will remember.

Ran ll the legal publishing acquired West publishing and then an interestingly enough, in 1996, about to have a change of leadership for the whole Thompson Corporation. My name was in the hat among other people. It’s an interesting story, but I just decided that even though that’s what I wanted to be ever since I was a kid, the CEO of a major global corporation, it just wasn’t right for me, largely because of family issues I was having being on the road 200 days a year. And so I stepped back from that. And after a couple of years, I left Thompson and began a kind of fifteen year not for profit saga working in different areas, theology of work that you’ve mentioned. I started a social enterprise fund in Africa and Uganda called the Mango Fund. I was the chairman and president on several occasions at the King’s College in New York City. And I did a lot of speaking about theology of work and faith and work, and I assume that would be the rest of my life. But God had different plans. I met Bill Wong, who many of you know, just a great investor under the famed Tiger Cubs and Bill and I. He’s a great Christian gentleman. And Bill and I just loved each other’s company. We love the word together. We spent time in the world. We talked about faith and work. And so six years ago, he asked me to join him to help run his private family office and his foundation called the Grace and Mercy Foundation. So that’s kind of the potted history. One thing I would say is when I grew up in England, I went to church on a regular basis. This is my spiritual biography. But I think it was just more. That’s what you did on a Sunday morning. And I never saw any evidence of really faith in my family and my parents. And so I went, but it didn’t really mean anything. And as soon as, of course, I went off to college. I didn’t know anymore. And it became, you know, I always believed in God, but I somehow never really thought much about that. Definitely the unexamined life, I would have to say. And every so often, I felt the need to go to church and I’d kind of go to church and I’d really enjoy it. And I enjoy the liturgy and the music. But then, you know, there was always something better to do on a Sunday morning sometimes. So I kind of slipped away again and left it for another year or two before I went back again. And then three things happened and God really got my attention. Firstly, I sold the company that I was talking about to the Thompson Corporation. And that’s kind of what everybody wants to do is the American dream. You build a company, you sell it, and it just felt totally meaningless to me. Was this what I’d really been working so hard for? What was the meaning in this? That was a really hard thing to think about. It happened at the same time that my father died and my son were born within two weeks of each other and fortunately, they never saw each other. My son has my father’s name. And that led me to a whole sort of existential question about what is a human being? You know, are we the Disney circle of life or is there something more important to being human? And then the third thing, which was the killer blow, as I came home one night and my wife told me that she’d become a born again Christian. So once you, you know, wipe me off the floor and tried to figure out what had happened to my otherwise rational wife.

We started talking about faith in a serious way. And I had to first really serious conversations about faith. Who is God? Who is Jesus? What’s the Bible? And I realized as a smart guy, I had no answers. I just had no answers. And so my wife just challenged me to stop studying it because I’m a kind of analytical type of guy. And so I started studying. And over an 18 month period, God showed himself in so many powerful ways that, you know, I got to that place where it would have taken more faith to have rejected him than to have accepted Christ as my savior, frankly. And so you would have found me on Christmas Day 1988, kneeling in the snow on a bike ride, accepting Christ as my lord and savior.

And, you know, two things really changed dramatically from that point. I mean, obviously, one, my eternal destiny, which is something we all need to really think about. But the second thing is my work, because, you know, even though I was a very immature baby Christian, I just had a strong sense that God was simply asking me this question.

You’re a CEO, but now you’re a Christian. What difference does that make? Because I had a strong sense that if it didn’t make any difference, what was the point? And so that’s really begun, Henry, I’d say 30 plus year now journey for me, exploring God’s word, exploring with other people, mentoring, speaking, studying the theology of work, all of these kinds of things, and then putting these things to practice in the workplace.

And it’s been a most fascinating time. And one of the great joys I have is sharing some of these ideas that I and others have kind of you know, it’s now that we’ve discovered or made, all we’re doing is understanding what God’s word says and then bringing them up to light and then challenging people to think about. So what does that concept mean for your work? And obviously, everybody has to respond differently with the body of Christ. But it’s a fascinating discussion. So hopefully that’s a little bit of my background for those of you that know the EPL. My home was Newcastle. I’m an avid supporter of Newcastle. United, I believe, black and white. So away the lads, America.

Henry Kaestner: That’s very good. I don’t know that we’ve ever had a Newcastle fan on before, but maybe we have. I do know this. We’ve never had anybody that’s had such a cool accent on before. And for that reason, maybe our audience will permit us to go a little bit longer on this episode. And I want to get into a bunch of different things. But you’d spoke to some things there toward the end about putting your faith into practice in the business. So take us back. You’ve kneeled in the snow, you go back to work. Presumably you don’t have a well articulated thought through theology of work on day one back at work, but with time, of course, and the work that you’ve done with messenger at theology of work, you’ve developed that once you talk to us a little bit about that and then bridges in to how you see that play out in the financial services industry and maybe speak a little bit about the faith and financial services movement.

Andy Mills: Yeah, there’s a lot in there. So if I’m missing some stuff, keep guiding me.

Henry Kaestner: You mean it’s not fair to ask you five questions in one?

Andy Mills: You know, I’m getting old. My short term memory is not that good. Henry you know, when I became a Christian and God challenged me with that question, you know, what does it now mean to be a Christian as a CEO? The first thing I did is, you know, what we do as business people is we go out and we ask questions and we find people who are in the same place and we learn and we think about best practices. And so I went out and spoke to a bunch of people who were in leading positions as Christians and companies. And it was fascinating that the summary of I think what I heard was he had to do two things. Number one is you’ve got to work ethically. And number two, you’ve got to be prepared. If anybody wants to talk about faith and Jesus, you’ve got to be prepared to talk about Jesus. And look, those two things are wonderful. And you’re not going to hear from me that you shouldn’t do either of those things. But the question that came to me very strongly was, is that all? I mean, we’re spending all this time at work. I mean, is that all we’re doing is just make sure you work ethically. And if someone’s talking about Jesus, you’re ready to talk about Jesus. And so I started reading books because that wasn’t really satisfied and there weren’t really any very good deep books on.

You know, there are people who are talking about their own lives and their wonderful stories. But there was not a lot of what I would call theology. In other words, that’s a big, highfalutin word. But what is God’s say about this particular thing? Because that’s what I wanted to know. Right. When you’re a newcomer to the kingdom. The only thing you care about is what is God? So, you know, I’ve been introduced to the father. I want to sit at my father’s feet and I want to hear what my father is saying. And so the only place I could go then was back to scripture. All right. Because there was nowhere else to go. And interesting enough, what I found in scripture was that there are really three great mandates in scripture.

That’s the great commandment, right? Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, soul, mind strength and love your neighbor as yourself. And that’s the greatest commandment. Jesus says that’s greatest commandment, no question. The second commandment, most of us think all the time is the great commission, right, Matthew? And that’s obviously the mandate to evangelize. But, you know, when you open Genesis 1 and 2, you find another mandate. It’s called the cultural or the creation mandate, which is we are given, you know, the earth and all of God’s creation to steward or to look after or to manage. And as I began to think about why people talked about doing what was right and or helping people learn about Jesus, what I recognized as those were those first two mandates. There was the great commandment and the great commission. And when you think about what happens at church, that’s primarily what gets talked about a church. The great commandment and the great commission, you know, personal holiness on the one hand and reaching out as a church to evangelize and bring people to Jesus again, wonderful things. But the church almost never speaks about the cultural mandate, which is living every day in the workplace, which is where all of us in the congregation live for the majority of our time. And yet the church is kind of silent on that. So you get this sort of, you know, one sided Christianity focusing on God and focusing on personal holiness and focusing on evangelism, but not this whole aspect of work. And it’s not therefore surprising when you talk to most Christians in the workplace, they’re really kind of confused, you know, why am I working? What’s the purpose of my work? Is it just to make money? And if so, how much money is enough? You know, those are the kinds of questions you get into. But there’s really not a deeper sense of what’s the purpose of work. Why do we work a lot of discussion about how, but not a lot of discussion about why. And so that’s really where I started my thinking and my research basically coming out of Genesis Chapter 2. And you know, in Genesis Chapter 2, most people start with to15 that says then God put man in the garden to tend and work to God. And that’s clearly a work mandate and a cultural mandate. It’s kind of interesting because if you go a little earlier to 2 5, the creation exists. But it says in 2 5 that nothing was growing. Nothing was happening. And it gives two reasons for nothing being productive. One is there was no water and we kind of figured that out. So what did I think growing we get? But the second thing is this there was no man to work in. And, you know, that just struck me. And he obviously solves that problem in 2 6. He brings water from the deep etc rain. And in 2 7 he obviously creates men from dust. So there’s a problem in 2 5. It’s not productive. He solves the two problems in 2 6 and 2 7. But I started to think about that and I said, wait a minute. God could have done this creation thing any way he wants to. But we as human beings, he’s created us to be an integral part of his creation. And those without us, his creation doesn’t move forward because don’t forget, we start in the garden. We finish in the city. Right. If you start Genesis 1 2 and you end up in Revelation 21 22, you end up in those perfect places and community with God. But we’re not going back to the God. We’re going to a very complex city with many, many people. And this is what God is doing. His creation is progressing to the benefit and flourishing of humankind as we go along. And we as humans are part of that process. In fact, we are vital to that, because without us, it doesn’t happen. And all of a sudden works suddenly moves me from being a thing that you had to do as a utilitarian kind of exercise to be able to make money to do whatever.

Or more often, unfortunately, it’s an exercise in idolatry. Right. Look at me. And it was for me, it was it was an exercise of idolatry and pride as much as anything else. But we’ve moved from that to being a fundamental co-creation with God of the progression of his creation from a garden to a city. And when I started to figure that out, I mean, it changed everything. That’s one of the stories I wanted to tell everybody who fits my garden to acidity that story and how fundamental and important that work is a creative exercise that we’re doing in partnership with God for the flourishing of humankind. And all of a sudden, when you think about it that way, you know, you understand things like calling. I mean, it becomes so much more deep and so much more powerful. And then something else. And so then when you think about that, you know, how does one create you know, you create with products, you create an environment, you do that inconsistently with God’s commands. You think about the way people are treated. You think about the way creativity takes place. You think about how you serve. You serve customers. You serve stockholders. I mean, all of those things start to come together in a much more sort of creative sense.

William Norvell: That’s good. It’s funny, I don’t know if you’ve read this, but have you ever read Garden City by a pastor named John Markhommer?

Andy Mills: No, I have not.

William Norvell: It’s real good. I mean, it’s this whole premise. And he sort of pulls it out in. The first half of the book is about work. And the second half the book is about rest. But the overlaying architecture is about how exactly when you. Exactly what you laid out, how we started in the garden and we’re going to a city and we’re going to have jobs and we’re going to have things to do and you know, there will be farmers, but all of us won’t be gardeners. Right. That is not where we are heading. And it’s a book on faith and work. And he just has a really excellent job, in my opinion, of laying out some pieces of what you walk through.

Andy Mills: Yeah, I think a lot of people are a little worried about heaven because they go, and how can I do eternity sitting on a cloud with a harp in a white dress? But no, we’re actually going to return to work and to society. But it’s gonna be without sin. And, you know, it’s impossible for us to actually appreciate that.

Henry Kaestner: I have a question on that. Will there be financial services in heaven?

Andy Mills: You know, I think there will be, because financial services are the medium by which goods and services gets transmitted, delivered. It’s really the matrix of the building blocks of society. And so I know that was another part of your question is how do you relate that to financial services? And so, you know, the way I think about financial services as God writes about money all the time in the Bible.

Right. I mean, money is a very necessary medium in the Bible. And it’s very clear how moving away from a barter system to a financial monetary system has developed, you know, systems of commerce and has allowed us to develop so much more quickly. It’s allowed specialization to take place. If you go back to Adam Smith and all these kinds of things, you know, without money, none of those kinds of things happen. And also then without things like lending, whereby I take, say, excess that I’ve got, I provided to somebody else who needs to apply it to create more value and environment. They are working in a business they’re putting together so that they can create a new economic engine so that out of the benefits of that, they can then repay me with some, you know, interest level to allow me to want to be able to do that. So it’s an important measure of how we do commerce. But on the other hand, the accumulation of wealth also allows us then to borrow and to lend in such ways that we can actually create more productive assets more quickly. And to me, that’s as a financial professional, that’s really important. We know we’re public investors, so we invest in companies that are bringing products and services to bear in the marketplace. I spend a lot of time in Africa. You know, it’s undeniable the value that, for example, drugs and medical products have had in Africa. It’s undeniable the impact, for example, of cell towers and cell phones. And so you think about companies that are doing that. And on the one hand, you can say, well, they’re just producing a cell phone. But on the other hand, you can look at how they are changing the way societies work and people work by having better information, more safety, being able to understand markets, better bring products to the right marketplace to get the best returns for their labor. I mean, when you start to see all of these things, it’s really exciting to be able to invest in these kinds of companies because we’re investing in companies that are moving flourishing forward.

And that’s really why I love the financial services side of things, because, you know, it is the medium that accelerates the growth of products and services and ideas that a rapidly expanding globe global population, 1871 billion today, seven point three billion.

And yet we’re living at a much higher standard. All of this, although there’s a lot to be done, you know, with the gradation of poverty, et cetera. But we’re all living at a much higher standard than we were in 1870. So not only has the population multiplied by seven times, but, you know, the standard of living is improved. Pick a number four to five time. So we’re looking at like a 30 times increase in product and services and offerings. That’s incredibly productive and that’s being done through work. And that’s going back to Genesis 2 5, making us as human beings, taking God’s creation, making it productive, using imagination and moving it forward. And that’s exciting.

William Norvell: Amen. And, you know, and that’s a big piece of that Garden City concept right now. But, you know, it’s bringing heaven on earth, right. And those two things will merge into the city one day. And as you think about that and you’ve started a movement of some sort. You know, with faith in the financial services industry, could you talk a little bit about how that’s working? What are the goals and the mission behind that and sort of how that’s participating in building that city that we’re going to live in one day?

Andy Mills: Good. Well, let me just start by saying I am just one of a number of people doing this. I want to make sure that we’re clear on that. This is not a me thing. There’s a great team of people in New York. But this came out of a an observation that there are a lot more Christians in New York City and the financial community than most people are aware of. And most people live an isolated life.

And most people hide the fact that they’re Christians because of, you know, minor forms of persecution by persecution, nonetheless being ridiculed or whatever, and so people kind of left Christianity in the closet. And what then happened is they just became like everybody else in the workplace. They work like everybody else. Nobody knew that they were different. And if they were different, nobody knew the reason why. And they were isolated and get caught up. If you you know, the old one log in, a fire doesn’t burn. But if you have Lenny, they will burn strongly. That that isolation. I really believe is one of the enemy’s great strategies is to divide us and separate us and isolate us. And so the whole idea of faith in financial services is twofold.

Number one is to gather people together so that people begin to form a network. We had an event in September. We just sent out a few invitations that became viral. We had 300 people turn up to a hotel lobby just to gather. And you could see people looking around. People were saying to me like I didn’t realize there were 300 Christians in the whole financial community in New York City. I mean, they were shocked by what they saw. One guy came up to me at a major bank. He said, you know, I’ve just met a guy.

He and I sit 30 feet apart from each other. And we have done for the last 10 years and we didn’t realize we were Christians until we met here. You know? So talk about isolation. And so the first thing is to gather people.

But the second part is, you know, just gathering people, it’s good. But what we need to do is we need to transform folks so that they become impactful for the kingdom within their communities. And we do that by doing two things. And we talked about earlier, which is called the public reading of scripture. So when we gather in groups, the first thing we do is we listen to God’s word, because, you know, we spend a lot of time listening to man or listening to woman. Right. But the reality is we’re not spending enough time listening to God. And frankly, he’s the only person in many ways I want to hear from. It’s kind of nice to hear stories from people. And it’s kind of nice that your listeners will be listening to me. But I’m just a man. And I would much rather you listen to God’s word and just listen to me. And so we listen to God’s word. We take a little time for reflection and then we take an aspect from the theology of work that reflects on the scripture. We’ve just heard. And then we have a discussion about so what in the workplace? So what does that mean for practice? How could we do something different? And so what we’re trying to do is we’re doing spiritual formation, because if you don’t form people spiritually, too many baby Christians right now, but if they’re not formed spiritually, they can’t stand in a tough environment like New York City’s financial services community. And our belief is when people are in community, when they’re being spiritually formed, when they’re being encouraged by each other, and that wonderful linkage is taking place now. People are helping each other with jobs, with ideas or the setting. When we stand together, we can begin to take a stake in the stands for God in the workplace to begin to change the way we work with people, to begin to change the sort of attitudes towards work and time at work and how we think about bonuses. And so all of those things become so very interesting. And that’s what faith in financial services is all about.

Henry Kaestner: Andy I want to switch gears a little bit. You and I have talked a bit about the concept of faith driven investing. And was it look like as Christ followers are starting to understand, of course, that as God owns it on his entrusted assets to us, he cares very much about how we think about giving it. And he cares very much about the concept, I believe, of ownership and in our motivation behind these things. But also, he cares increasingly about how we deploy investment capital and that there can be a mindset of I want to make as much money as I possibly can over my Fidelity account or wherever batteries acquire. Just make as much money as I can so that I can give away as much money. But maybe there’s a concept in that the actual creation of wealth through financial price and services might bring about God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Up until the time that there is an exit event and you have liquidity to then go ahead and give to things like young life and American Bible society. Fill in the blanks. Riff with us a little bit about that. What are your views on that? What are your hopes and your dreams? What do you think?

Andy Mills: Well, you know, the first thing I would say is I’m always very leery about someone who says to me, my spiritual gift is making money or the idea that I’m going to spend the first 20, 30 years of my career making as much money as I can so that I can give it away, because that’s obviously going to be the greatest benefit to the kingdom.

You know, I’m very skeptical about that because frankly, what I find is mostly that people are justifying the fact that they want to earn a lot of money. And the Bible’s very clear says, you know, he who loves money never has enough. And, you know, if you were to say, OK, I’m starting out at twenty five, I want to make ten million dollars a month, it made $10 million, then I’m going to stop. I’m going to change my lifestyle. I’m going to sort of give it away. And it’s that I never see anybody do that.

If you’re lucky enough or fortunate or hard enough working to get to 10, you know, by the time you got to 10, the numbers 40, by the time you get to 40, the numbers 100. And by the time it’s 100, your life’s over. You know, the story of the rich landowner continually build his bonds and store away is, you know, I think a very provocative parable. And obviously he was called a fool. And I think people are foolish to think that way. And because I think they’re not thinking well enough about the deceitfulness of their own heart, quite frankly. And they you know, they kind of want to do it their way and they want God to bless it. And they think that’s a way to do it. So I’m pretty strong on that, I have to say, maybe more strong than I should be. But I’m not sure that I really met anybody who I think the purpose of their life is to make money so they can give it away.

Because part of what that does is it delays the kingdom part till 20, 30 years down the road. And it kind of gives you a free pass on the now. Yes. And my belief is the kingdom is now. Yes. And that everything you do today is the kingdom. And you can’t have a God. Give me 30 years off and then I’ll get back to you. It just doesn’t work that way. And so even if you’re an entry level person as a Christian, you know, there’s a word in the New Testament, Oikonomides, which appears ten times.

So okionomos as Oikos is home and know Moses law. So it’s the lawgiver of home. It’s the master, if you will. It’s translated many times, but it’s also translated other ways. It’s really the intrusted one one place. It’s translated as the guardian as of a son. And I think we have to think that way. We are economy and of God’s creation. And so wherever we are in our little workgroup, our entry level work group, whatever it might be, that’s the place that God has given us of his precious creation. He loves his creation. He’s given us this part of his precious creation for us to be the Econoline of that, to be the kind of his trustee in that area. And so from the first day you move in, I think everybody should be thinking as OK, as a Christian, how can I impact this place? This place needs to be redeemed. What does that look like? And I’m just not talking about walking around with the Bible and telling everybody Bible verses. I mean, that’s part of the worst way to do it. But I’m talking about the quality of the work you do, how you work in teams, how you encourage other people, you know, all of those kinds of activities and in the investing world to make sure that the investments we’re making are going to places that will add value and, you know, kind of like that about the investment process, because withdrawing funding from businesses that are no longer as relevant as they were or who have gone wrong in some way or who are abusing whatever aspect of life is. And we’re moving constantly towards the new ideas and the ideas that are bringing progress. And that transitioning and that constant movement, I think is something that’s so very important in the financial community. So I just want us to be in the moment doing the best we can with what we’ve got and bringing a kingdom to the place that we’re in right now. In every decision we make, whether it’s a business decision, it’s an investment decision, whether it’s a people decision, it’s a culture decision. All of those just how we’re spending time even, you know, isolated today. Right. I mean, nobody’s watching what we’re doing as knowledge workers. How does anybody know? Well, God knows. You know, how we spending our time doing the best we can, even in the circumstances we’re in today.

Henry Kaestner: Andy I think that was really profound. I think that it’s really important for us to hear that as we accumulate assets with the idea that we’ll go ahead and participate in God’s kingdom in 20 or 30 years. That’s really the workings of, as you called it out of, for knowing that there’s also a different camp of people. And we’ve had some of them on the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, for instance, I think about Alan Barnhart, who goes ahead and freezes how much earnings he makes and he gives everything else away. And yet there’s also a huge maybe where most of us end up being in this place where we look at investment assets, the investment assets in American in the world greatly dwarf that of philanthropy and of giving and charitable resources. How do you think about how those investment assets that are so large and are being deployed by different firms? How do you see them being done in a way that brings back God’s kingdom on earth? Now they’re just anythings as you just observe the financial services industry and say, you know what? That seems to be an approach and a thoughtfulness that’s hastening the New Jerusalem or bringing back God’s kingdom. And that’s a way that isn’t so.

Andy Mills: Yeah, well, it’s an interesting question. Let me just say upfront, I don’t think there is a one answer for everything. All right? We are God’s people. God’s community are all built of different people with different gifting and different calling. And I think that’s really important to understand that diversity. So, for example, you talked about Alan, who feels called to give away a lot of his resources. God bless him for that. And look, there are a lot of wonderful ministries and Mercy Ministries, et cetera, that without that kind of funding, millions of people would live. Horribly worse lives. And so, you know, I have a big category for that. I do a lot of giving myself to those kinds of things.

But I also have the category that says long term, the average quality of life across everybody in the world is being raised by business.

And if you look at Africa, for example, you know, I think you can say philanthropy’s done a very good job on the medical front, but it’s done a kind of a lousy job on the business front in terms of creating economic activity by which people can grow and communities can grow. And that’s being done by business.

Henry Kaestner: Talk to us a little bit about the Mango Fund, because that’s something that you’ve been very intentional about for a long time. I think a lot earlier than people were talking about faith driven investing. You had started the mango fund. Walk us through that paradigm and that dynamic about how you seen investing in commerce in hard places like that is bringing my guys kingdom in Uganda.

Andy Mills: Well, the Mango Fund, like so many things when you’re working with God, is kind of like we had no idea what we were doing. But thankfully, it did. And so it just came out of me traveling to Uganda because my daughter was over there for a missionary semester and she turned 21. And my wife and I said, we’re not going to have our little girl turn 21 without us being there. And I went to Uganda and I’ve never been to Africa before, ran global businesses, but never been to Africa before.

And I looked around Kampala, which is a capital city of Uganda. And I just saw people kind of bartering and trying to scratch a living. And, you know, the old adage is, when you’re in hammer, everything looks like a nail on the business guy. But everything looked to me like a business, right. They needed to grow businesses because if they didn’t have businesses, they’re not producing things that operating wealth. And then I went up to a place called a rule, which is in the West Nile region of Kampala was bad. I mean, a rule was off the charts. It’s a marginalized dollar a day kind of place. And I just felt led by God to keep going back to this place. I had no plan. I had no strategy in place. You know, I’m so enamored by people who have these global rollout strategies. Henry, you’re a little bit like that. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m just kind of go and do and try and be faithful.

And I started meeting with people. You know, when I say someone in the transportation business, I mean, they had a bicycle and I tried to help them think a little bit about how could they begin to grow? How could they do more revenue? How could they hire another person? And the church was very instrumental in introducing me to people like that. By the way, they had a theology of work up there, which is work is evil. Therefore, why should Christians be involved in work? Wow. And it’s not surprising, therefore, that most of the work done up in a row is done by the Muslim community and the Christian community was condemned to poverty. And so, you know, I had to work with the bishop there and all kinds of things. But ultimately, what I realized is this thing called a missing medal and it’s talked about now. I mean, I’m talking ten, fifteen years ago now. But, you know, you have the micro-finance one hundred dollar, one hundred dollars.

And then you have the structured finance from the bank, which may be 50 to 100 thousand dollars. But that’s not where most of people are living. Most of people are living in small businesses with two or three people milling or extracting oils or doing some repair work or a little bit of manufacturing or whatever.

And they have no cash. I mean, there’s just no cash. So even if they have a good idea, there is nothing they can invest in that idea. Their families don’t have money. You know, they can’t go to a bank for money. There’s no lending into that area. And that’s called the missing middle. And so we just decided that because we believe in the theology of work, the people should be productive.

The people should be working. That it does yield returns when done. Well, those returns can be reinvested and grow and multiply, etc. It’s this virtuous circle because we believed in that from the Bible. We started investing in some of these little players and that was the beginning of the mango fund. So today we have about 13 people on the fund working on the fund. We have investments all over Uganda where in about fifty two companies right now I think. I mean, heaven only knows what will happen as a result of this coronavirus. I mean, the whole thing might just die.

It’s possible. But we have seen businesses grow. We’ve seen employment double. We’ve seen just wonderful things take place. And people, when they’re productive at work, you see a change in their lives. You see a change in their attitudes because they’re doing what God’s designed them to do. God is not designed to sit around in the marketplace waiting to be hired. Right. God has designed us to be worked to use our hands, our brains, and to see people beginning to work like that is really just such a joy.

And even as the thing goes away, I’m convinced we’ll start all over again and work with it and try and build that, because I just think that’s so fundamentally important.

William Norvell: Andy, as we come to a close, let’s switch gears a little bit to something Henry mentioned in the intro, which is your it sounds like some of your friends are renewed vigor for the public reading of scripture and God brought that alive to you in a new way and you all really took action on it. Could you tell us a little bit more about that effort in New York and within your circle?

Yeah. Thank you. It’s something we’re very passionate about. And you know, again. Credit for this goes to Bill Hwang. Bill is a pastor’s son who had a hard time reading scripture. He knew he wanted to read scripture, but he had a really hard time consistently reading scripture the way we’re told that we need to get on to it every morning and read fifteen, twenty minutes and be in God’s word every morning just because of his work, but also because of who he was. He had a hard time doing that, so he always says so he went to Amazon to solve this problem. And at Amazon, what he found was some audio drama Bibles. And he ordered a couple of these audio drama Bibles. And he started listening to these audio drama Bibles and suddenly found out that, you know, while he’d listened for half an hour and he’d really enjoyed it and received it the same time he and I were talking together. And I remember once in his office we were opening up Nehemiah Chapter 8 and went as we read the scripture. Bill is such a man of action that he immediately started a Friday morning public reading of scripture session at his office whereby he invited people from Wall Street and anybody wanted to come to listen to God’s word for an hour on a Friday morning. By the way, that was about a 10 years ago. That’s still going on today. So that led us to you know, on the one hand, we had a practical experience that people were really enjoying this and getting something out of it. But at the same time, we then looked into scripture and we said, oh, well, lo and behold, actually, scripture talks about it itself as one of the ways to read scripture. Right. So you go all the way back to here, the public declaration of God’s word throughout the Old Testament, obviously, into the Jewish first century life. And then, you know, this is what Paul talks to Timothy about in first Timothy 4:13, who says, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to preaching and teaching. So all three of those things are important. And I think what we’ve done in the church typically is we’ve done a lot of teaching and preaching. We do very little of the public reading of scripture. By the way, when I say the public reading scripture, I’m not really talking about, you know, standing on a milk crate on the corner of a thing with a loudspeaker. You know, in Times Square, just having scripture bleeding out. Also, folks that do that, God bless them. I think that’s amazing. What we’re talking about is communities gathering together around tables in community together to come regularly, to listen to large portions of God’s word and to do it together. And so we do it four times, including faith in financial services in our office. We’re finding churches are doing it more. Colleges and universities are beginning to do it.

So something that happens when we come together. Listen to God’s word in community. You know, that’s something that’s very humble about listening and having someone else read to you because you’re not in control of that. When I read scripture, I’m in control of it. You know, it’s kind of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m not necessarily putting any emotion in. It’s not really challenging bit. But when someone is a voice actor who’s taking the words and is really putting emotion and emphasis into it, it really has a very different impact on us. And we have to humbly listen to God’s word. And when you’re listening with 20, 30, 50 other people in a room, I can’t explain it to you, but you concentrate harder. You’re listening more. You don’t get distracted. And the Holy Spirit is just so much more powerful. And we just see when people are finished, they just sort of sit there and people writing notes and we’re seeing people get so much more out of this. So this is a practice that we think is so important because, frankly, biblical literacies as low as it’s ever been today. The strategy of go off onto your own and read your little bits of 15 minutes at a time if you can do it is fine. My wife can do it. She’s unbelievable icon. And for the majority of people, the majority of people don’t you know, you start off with a Bible in a year. And by the time we’re in Leviticus in February, you know, it’s all over, frankly. And this is a way of gathering people together to hear God’s word. By the way, God’s word is only 90 hours. I mean, that’s all it is, 90 hours. People are shocked by that. So if you meet a couple of times a week for an hour at a time, you through the Bible and much less than a year. And, you know, you just keep at absorbing God’s word. You’re constantly in it.

And that’s something that happens when you listen for an hour or half an hour as opposed to listening to a chapter or a part of a chapter that you hear at church, because you have no context to it. And there are themes that come through when God is talking to us in these practices and in these chapters that that become so important.

I mean, to read a letter. Twenty three of the books of the Bible are less than 20 minutes. You read the whole letter. We just did. First John and second John, actually, for our latest Faith in Financial Services last week, when you read the whole letter, we had N.T. Wright in our offices and he heard first Peter with us. And at the end of it, he just said, you know, I’m a renowned first century scholar, a New Testament first century scholar. So that’s the first time I’ve ever received this book, the way it was meant to be received in college. You know, as a group read out as a letter outloud. And he was blown away by it. And so anyway, I could go on and on and on. But this is something we’re pushing very hard now with Finding ministries. Prison Fellowship International. Taking it into prisons all. Can you imagine prisoners hearing word in their language and just being able to listen to God’s word? Nobody having to tell him anything. Just let God speak. And that’s really the movement is to let God speak to us again.

William Norvell: Amen, Andy as we do come to our final clause. Sounds like you’re getting a lot of it. Weekly, what piece of God’s word is coming alive to you right now? Could be in the season, could be this morning or something you’ve heard and had read over you. What would you mind share with our listeners? Is God doing in your world?

Andy Mills: Yeah. Well, so much. But I would say a couple of weeks ago we listened to the Book of Roots and we had a very fruitful discussion afterwards about tithing in the 21st century. And how do we use our wealth and how do we help them or marginalized? And then I’ve been struck by acts. Chapter 2 was at 42 and on 45 in particular, which is they gathered together and sold possessions to help each other. You know, we’re in an unprecedented time right now. I mean, the unemployment figures are just coming out.

Businesses are closing. I mean, this is gonna be a really difficult time. And I think for me, those kinds of passages really. I mean, in some ways, I think God was preparing for this. But, you know, one of the discussions I’m having with the elders of our church is, OK, we’ve already got like half a dozen people unemployed in that church that just happened in the last couple of weeks. So how are we going to deal with that? Right. I mean, how do we come together as a community to help each other? And then how do we come outside the church community to help everybody else so that the church can be the church? So I do a lot of work with the Salvation Army. And I mean, they’re having to change the way they deliver food. But that’s so wonderful. They put themselves out on the front line. And, you know, that’s the church being the church. So that’s kind of what’s on my heart right now. What’s on my heart is how do we that have more help with people that have less at a time of great stress like this? And I think that’s what God’s been putting on my heart.

William Norvell: Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you so much for sharing your time. This has just been a wonderful journey through scripture, through God’s word, through his view of financial services and view of faith and work as a whole in view of just how he’s going to culminate and bring things to work in eternity. And just really thankful for your time and for for spending with us.

Andy Mills: So it’s great. Is exciting stuff, isn’t it, guys? This is really good stuff to get a hold of. And I’m so frustrated by when I see Christians in the workplace just kind of living out the string, if you will, without really thinking about what is God’s purpose for them. And that’s if I had a message at all. That’s that. Think about purpose. We what purpose is God had for you and bring a completely different attitude to work. You know, we can change the world.