Episode 114 - Curt Laird and the Key to Frontier Investing
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Curt Laird is one of the most experienced foreign investors in frontier markets. Having worked in over 30 countries, he spent 14 years in Afghanistan, where he was a founding executive director of Roshan, Afghanistan’s largest mobile phone operator. He launched his own 50-employee training company. And he founded the Business Innovation Hub, a business accelerator at the American University of Afghanistan. Curt is the author of “The Culture Key,” a book many believe to be the go-to resource for successful investing and entrepreneurship in frontier and emerging markets.
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. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. This is a podcast for Christ followers who are eager to understand how to allocate their investment capital in a way that makes a difference in the Kingdom of God and participates in the work that He is doing around the world and gives them a sense of joy in the process. And there are so many different ways. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that we never mean to be prescriptive or presumptuous about what it looks like as you allocate your capital, both your investment capital and your philanthropic capital. But this is a community to get together and hear from different guests in different positions so that your heart might be awakened to how God might have you invest. And one of the things that has captivated my heart personally is I look to allocate capital are emerging and frontier markets. And our guest today with us will talk to us about them and talk about the distinction between the two. But Curt is become a good friend and is a friend who's living now in Nairobi, Kenya. He's lived in Indonesia, has been in Nigeria. He helped to found $1,000,000,000 telecom company in Afghanistan. So he's in small businesses, he's in big business, but I can't think of many people better. To give us a perspective on how to place investment capital in emerging and frontier markets, then Curt and he'll help us to walk through the things that we need to be eyes wide open about the real headwinds that exist, the elephant in the room, all of those things. Curt, thank you very much for being with us.
Curt Laird: It's great to be with you, Henry.
Henry Kaestner: Curt, the thing we always like to do is we get things started is we always like to get an idea of the background of our guest and yours is different than most. And so we want to get into that. And of course, the way we always end, every one of our episodes is we find out from them about what they're hearing from God in His Word that is inspiring and equipping them where they are right now. But first thing first, who is Curt Laird? How did you find yourself on the Faith Driven Investor podcast?
Curt Laird: Well, I'll tell you what, I grew up on the frontier.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah.
Curt Laird: And so it's no accident that I have been involved with frontier investing and entrepreneurship. I moved across the border when I was three months old from Canada to the U.S. and then moved down to Costa Rica and Ecuador. When I was two and three years old, my dad was a pilot with a Christian organization, relief and development organization. So we were in Ecuador. It was an amazing place, right on the edge of the Amazon, truly the frontier. I knew many of you have heard of Elisabeth Elliot. Nate Saint. I grew up and knew them. I didn't know Nate Saint. I knew his widow. I knew the man who had killed the five Christian workers there.
Henry Kaestner: Wow.
Curt Laird: In the 50s and who had come to faith and who had reconciled with the widows. So I was exposed to the sovereignty of God in these incredible situations. We moved then to New Guinea, to the island of New Guinea. And New Guinea is an incredible place to grow up as a kid. Many of my Papuan friends, though we were on the Indonesian side, many of my Papuan friends literally had grown up in the Stone Age culture. Some of them even knew what human flesh tasted like. Wow. Yeah. Cannibalism had been practiced as a way to shame the enemy. So I grew up in this on the frontier. My coming of age was when my dad kicked me out of the helicopter when he was balancing the skid on the rocks in the middle of a river. And he said, Curt, I was 16 years old. He said, Get out and build me a helipad. Build us the helipad. Because we had just found unfortunately, we found the crash of one of our airplanes and I was too much weight on the helicopter and he needed to hover around it. So he kicked me out in the middle of New Guinea, the middle of the ends of the world. And he flew off across the hills. And I was left there. And I knew that just down that river a few months before, my dad had taken a helicopter to land in a place, and just before landing, a battery warning light came on and he turned around. He didn't land. He found out later that they were waiting an ambush to kill him and all the people in the helicopter and God had intervened. And so I knew the down that river that I was on was this group of people. So this was my coming of age. This was the beginning of my frontier experience. I then went to boarding school in Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia. I went back to the U.S. and got an electronics engineering degree. I always had a heart for doing business in difficult places. It's just been in my heart and soul. I traveled the world selling avionics, and then I just I wanted to start my own business. So I turned in my stock options and bought a little bankrupt security system business. I knew nothing about business, but I finally got it turned around after four years.
Curt Laird: And so.
Henry Kaestner: Where is this?
Curt Laird: This is in the US.
Henry Kaestner: Okay.
Curt Laird: This was in Seattle. And then after I sold it, it was one of those God connections that it was actually a wrong phone number call that got me connected to a man who was working with an NGO, non-government organization in Afghanistan. And this is pre 911. When 911 happened, God put on my heart that Afghanistan needed to rebuild.
Henry Kaestner: And how does this work? Because I've gotten calls that have been wrong number of before and they typically don't end up in business deals. Person calls you up and says, hey, is this Bill is not Bill? And they say, Well, then who is it? And you say, It's Curt and, say, well, I got a deal for you. How did that go?
Curt Laird: You know, he asked me for a lady whose name was Beth Rainey, and I knew Beth Rainey was my brother in law's mother. And she had been like my aunt in Papua, and she had stayed in my house when my brother in law had to have open heart surgery. He was a pilot also, and so he had her number in his contacts list and he was trying to get a hold of her, but he connected with me and he was working in Afghanistan. And I said, You know what? I have a heart for working in difficult places. And at the end of the conversation, he said, Curt, it's not a coincidence that we made this phone call. So about eight months later, after Afghanistan, you know, the U.S. went into Afghanistan, I thought, I only know one person who knows Afghanistan. I don't know anything about it. And so that's how I got connected into Afghanistan. I went over there and I fell in love with Afghanistan. It is a majestic, mystical place. And while there I had another God connection with a man who walked into the room while I was talking with one of my friends about business. And he said, Hey, I'm getting ready to start the mobile phone system. The [...] mobile phone system. And he said, Send me your resume. And the fact that I was in the room exactly when he walked in was an incredible coincidence. And six months later, I was part of the founding team of what became Roshan, the mobile phone company. So this is 2003. So the Taliban, they had been defeated, but there were still rockets coming into the Kabul. It was the Wild West. And in that was incredible opportunity to build a business. So we went from 0 to 200 million in about three and a half years. What absolutely crazy. The stories. I could go on for hours of stories, but what we were doing, we were providing Afghanistan with an incredible tool for social and economic development. And this was something that was both an incredible business, highly profitable, and it was doing an amazing social good for that country. So I built that up. I was part of the team there and I left that because we saw that there was a huge need for leadership development. And so I started a training company, leadership training company with my business partner, Susan. And that probably that business had some of the most impact. And this is the beauty of frontier markets is the impact that you can have as you do business is something that is unique, I think.
Henry Kaestner: Tell me more about that. I think that to this audience, some of that is obvious because they've taken their time to listen to the Faith Driven Investor podcast and understand indeed, investing in business makes an impact. And yet the way that they've come to that knowledge is likely different than the way that you've come to it. Speak more into that. What's the transformation in a culture that you see through business? What does that look like?
Curt Laird: So here's one of the things that I think is fundamental and is that fundamentally change comes through shifted leaders. When leaders see new possibilities, they will choose differently. And so I believe that business is a tool. That ultimately we need to flip the paradigm where we so often with business, we go out and try to find leaders to help the business grow. And that's the traditional way we do it, is we're looking for those who can help it scale. Yeah, I believe that the model that Jesus practiced was that he knew that scaling happened through people, through leaders and his ministry. His time on earth was in terms of the spread of the church, was through those 12 leaders. And so I think that there is a philosophy here that what we need to be doing is we need to be identifying leaders in frontier markets who are willing to shift and look at new ways of doing business and doing life. And business is one of the best cauldrons within which those leaders can be developed. And so that is what changes nations. That is what changes America. You know, that's what changes nations in Africa is shifted leaders who see new possibilities. And so these opportunities, when you are going into a country to use business, use the resources that God has entrusted to us to identify, mobilize, train and send out leaders, business leaders, social leaders, nonprofit leaders that go out. And they're the ones who actually shift culture. And we need to see business and investing as a tool towards that end, not as an end to itself.
Henry Kaestner: So that's very interesting. And I'm fascinated by that, that leaders can shift as they see different possibilities. And whereas they thought that they might have to live a life that's influenced by corruption or that has just different limits and, you know, it's just all about just taking care of me or this market that I'm in only can deliver these possibilities. When you see a business is growing rapidly and you see a product or service that is then received by a broader swath of customers than you once imagined, it can alter the way that you think about the possibility for your life, for your business, for your company, for your community. Right. Or maybe even your culture. And you've seen that. And that's one of the things, of course, it draws me in as well, which is helping folks to expand and have an alternative imagination. If I channel my inner Dave Blanchard from Praxis to talk about this alternate and expanded imagination for what the Kingdom of God might look like, that seems to be really powerful. So you're saying that that process can happen with a leader who's already in an organization rather than having to find the leader? More Maybe I'm putting words in your mouth. Can that process happen within a company where the leader expands and changes their perspective and then is able to lead people in a company more successfully? Or do you have to bring onboard a new leader whose possibilities have already shifted and already expanded? Into that business that you're investing in. Talk a bit about that.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, I think there's both. But what you're going to find and I speak about frontier markets more directly because frontier markets tend to be much rawer. There's less infrastructure. There's less business services. It's earlier in the process, and so there's often less developed business leaders. So take, for instance, in Afghanistan, the survival mentality is very, very strong. And of course it is. They had 30 years of war and so survival mentality worked for them. It's a mindset that worked and I talk about this in my book, but the question is will the survival mindset actually get them to their vision once they were finished with war? Once they got out of that, will that survival mentality take them? And in most cases, it won't. But we can't from the outside, from the West, come in and say, Oh, you've got to change your mentality. What we've got to do is show that what is their vision and how are they going to get to their vision. I'll give you an example of a place where the survival mentality really came to play. We're building the mobile phone company, and I have an Afghan putting in split unit, AC, AC units into our office. This was our first office. He put eight of them in. I came back and they were a mess. Yes, they turned on, but they were a mess. He had cracked the windows. There was tape hanging down. And I said to him, I said, I'm not going to pay you for this. He said, You have to pay me. I said, No, I'm not going to pay you. You need to fix this. And he said, No, you have to pay me right now. I said, Look, here's the thing. If you'll come back and fix these, you know, we're going to grow this company in the years to come. We're going to grow this company. I'll give you a hundred of these installations if you'll fix these eight. He said, No, pay me now or I'm going to the police. I was appalled. I could not believe that this was the thinking that was going on. And I got judgmental. I thought, Is he stupid? Is he ignorant? What's going on here? I finally said, Look, if you don't fix this, you will never get another job with this company. He said, I don't care. Pay me right now. And this is what I deal with in the book. From my belief system. His behavior was incomprehensible, right? But from his belief system, he needed to be paid that day for that work to pay for food for his family that day. That's all he was worried about because in the survival mentality, the belief is, get it now, you know, feed my family, let tomorrow take care of itself. In his belief system, he was being rational, he was being logical. He was doing exactly what worked for him. But to build a world class business, you need quality. You need things that last right. And so how do we work with that mentality? If I get judgmental about that mentality, then I lose the opportunity to actually engage with his beliefs. And so if I engage with his belief and that belief and I can shift the vision, the possibilities that there will be a tomorrow, that this company will be here, then he sees a new possibility, and now he will invest the time and effort into quality.
Henry Kaestner: So how did that play out? And this is some fascinating about this guy. So how did that play out right then? So you're in kind of an impasse. You think this is shady work? I'm not going to pay for it. He says. You got to pay for it. How did that resolve itself? And were you able to shift his understanding to a place which was actually there is a tomorrow?
Curt Laird: No, I was not. And that was my weakness at that point. I didn't recognize that he was being totally rational in his belief system. So later on, what we would do would be we would go ahead and pay them daily. They couldn't wait for the end of the month. We would pay them and work with them to extend their horizon because he's saying to me, You're a stupid American. How can you guarantee that tomorrow will come? I've lived through 3000 rockets a day into Kabul, and how are you going to guarantee it? And so the way to do that, to extend his horizon, was to pay him more quickly, to pay him consistently, and then begin stretching that out. So he started to see a new possibility, but he had to shift his vision in order to shift his behavior. And unfortunately, so many investors come in to frontier and emerging markets from a Western perspective and a Western belief system or a Western worldview and fail miserably. Most impact investing funds in the medium area. I'm not talking about the big ones. Most impact investing funds are failures. Nobody wants to really talk about that, but most of them are actually failures. Why? And a lot of it is because people come in with a Western model, with a Western mindset and try to impose it on a different culture and it doesn't work.
Henry Kaestner: Ok, I want to explore that is super important because ultimately, as you might imagine, I want to be able to persevere through that dissonance and come out on the other side where our listeners do get the sense that it is possible in the tool kit and in a framework about how to think about. Now, clearly, part of the answer is the book that you've written, The Culture Key, and what you talk about, the fact that entrepreneurs, investors struggle not because they like business acumen, but because they don't have intercultural intelligence. I want you to talk more about that, about how you come about and how do you develop it. Actually, before we go on to explain, because I keep on using these interchangeably, in my mind, they're not completely interchangeable, but they might sound that way. What's an emerging market? What's a frontier market? And I'll get back to what we're talking about in terms of how to come up with a framework so that a listener might go in with eyes wide open, with an idea toward the frameworks about investing in both emerging markets and frontier markets. But what's the difference?
Curt Laird: You know, there is debate about exactly what the difference is. And in many ways it's to use examples because Southeast Asia, of course, is emerging markets. And what you will generally have is you will have a more mature investment ecosystem environment, you'll have more business services that you can count on. You'll have had successes that have shown the way frontier markets tend to be more raw, in a sense, more what you would think of as frontier, where you don't have as much of the infrastructure, you don't have the examples, as many examples of success, which often that means that leaders don't have as much experience with the success of investing in business. So it's a step before, in maturity, before emerging markets and exactly where they go from one to the other is different. So generally Africa would be frontier markets. Most African, sub-Saharan African countries would be frontier markets, where Southeast Asia would be emerging markets.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, that's helpful. Come on. Back to how one might develop intercultural intelligence.
Curt Laird: Yes, I think the first thing that we need to understand is that we swim in our own cultural water and we don't even know that it's there. We are blind to our own culture. And this is like a fish that swims. And I use a story in Papua there was a lake where there were saltwater. Sharks. It was an inlet. Sorry. And there was an earthquake that cut off the entrance to that. And it slowly became a freshwater lake because it had rivers coming in and there was no outlet. And these saltwater sharks became freshwater sharks. They were swimming in a water. They didn't even recognize what it was if they suddenly went back to the saltwater. So this is one of the first things to understand is we swim in a cultural water that we often don't recognize. So I think the most important thing is curiosity and humility, which unfortunately, we Americans struggle with that. But I think that that's one of the biggest things and then is to understand that people believe differently and think differently than we do.
Henry Kaestner: Mm hmm.
Curt Laird: So one of the things that would show that is there are three worldviews in this. I cover this in the book. There are three worldviews. And every culture is a mixture of these. So this is a set of beliefs. Our Western is primarily what's called innocence, guilt and innocence. Guilt is the language of the courtroom. Right? Wrong, good. Bad. You're for us. You're with us. You're. You're against us. It's the language of contracts. We love contracts. We love metrics. We love data. You know, we love all of those things. And we define right and wrong by is it legal? Is it against the law? We have an internal compass that says, okay, that's right or wrong. You then go to most of the rest of the world is honor, shame and honor. Shame is about maintaining the honor of your community and your self, and that honor is externally qualified. In other words, it's given to you by the community and you give it back to the community, you maintain it. So you your life is trying to avoid shame and it's a beautiful thing. Afghanistan is very strongly that a lot of Asia has a strong honor, shame and the community is important. You are part of a bigger entity and if you shame them then you can be cast out and that can be death even in certain situations. Now what happens is then you have a third, which is power, fear. A lot of sub-Saharan Africa has components of this, and power fear is very much that you are very aware of. The power structure is very hierarchical. It'd be similar to the military. So we have it in the U.S., in the military, some big corporations. It's very hierarchical. You are constantly assessing your position in the power structure, both the temporal power structure, but also the spiritual power structure. And so there's a lot of the occult or spiritism, syncretism, mixing the spiritual world and the physical world. You're constantly trying to get beyond the good side of the powers, whether it's the big men or it's the spiritual powers. And that is a really strong motivator that you see in Kenya, that you see in Nigeria. The problem is that when we come in as a Westerner, we come into this with this innocence, guilt, the language of the courtroom. We see behavior that is from a different worldview. And we're like, that's wrong. That doesn't make sense. But the core of my book is that every behavior comes out of a belief. So if we can identify the belief, then you can understand the behavior. But what the problem is, is that you are interpreting the behavior based on your own beliefs. And this clashes with. So give you one example in Afghanistan, the donors USAID come from innocent guilt. They love contracts, they love metrics, monitoring, evaluation, everything is about. So they contract to set up schools. This happened in the early days to build schools out in the far lands. Now they couldn't go and visit it, so they had Afghans who would say whether it was working or not, whether it had been built. But the Afghans worked on honor, shame. And so if something was going wrong in that project, they were ashamed to be able to tell the USAID people that something was wrong so they would pass on good news. USAID would say, Oh, it's wonderful. Let's make a good report. The metrics need it and let's go on. We're all happy. But the reality was the school wasn't built. They were taking pictures of the same school from five different angles and passing at office five schools. Now, who is at fault there? Now, we would say from our innocence, guilt. Well, they were wrong, but they were maintaining the honor of their community that if it was failing, they couldn't. It was shameful.
Henry Kaestner: So I follow that. But what's the solution there? Because you want to see schools built. So how do you kind of persevere through that? Do you have to say, well, then we have to be the ones to do all the verification? What's the solution there? If at the end of the day, you just want to see schools built?
Curt Laird: So one of their practical solutions was that they've got cameras with GPS function in and so that they could tell where the pictures were being taken. It's a practical system, but more importantly would be that you are constantly checking and constantly in relationship with those people in that area to understand when things are not working, to understand before the end of the project so that you can correct them without bringing shame. If you wait to the end of the project and it's late, it's shameful. But if you have a mechanism that allows you to continue checking and continue to keep it on track in little ways, you keep the honor and avoid the shame. But so often, if you don't understand that, then you're working by your metrics and how much billions of dollars has been wasted. Because we come in with our Western assumptions and we get into our right, wrong judgments. Instead of engaging with their belief system, instead of saying, Oh, it's wrong, we say, What is their belief system? How do they see quality? What is their belief about honor and shame and engage with that? And the beginning is you have to understand that it's different in order to be able to engage with it. And we so often don't.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, so this sounds complicated. It sounds like you need to have a lot of patience. And I think that some number of listeners will say, gosh, I just so much easier to just invest in my backyard where I've got the whole innocence guilt thing. I can have real accountability, and that's where I'm going to be able to get my investment return. And yet we have you on the podcast and I spent enough time with you to know that you get this is that the opportunity in frontier markets is so huge with billions of people in financial and spiritual poverty that we can't unsee that. We know that. We know that we're to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. We know that we're being called the love of the nations. And so somehow we have to get over this and we have to go through it because of the opportunity to help with God's power build his kingdom. And yet it's not easy to do. And yet we kind of have to do it right. And yet it's not all doom and gloom. The joy of being able to see God through his image bearers in a different culture is really profound. And I've had over the course the last three or four years this experience. I've experienced the frustrations, but I've also experienced the joy and satisfaction of partnering with people in frontier markets. That is really it's 100 acts that of a different business deal that I have here. So help us. What counsel would you give to those that are saying, you know what, gosh, this sounds hard and how do I navigate through honor, shame and innocence, guilt, and I want to get this work done. And so maybe I'm thinking about not doing it, but I feel like I've got to I feel like, you know, gosh, we are the richest nation on earth. We've been given the good news. There's financial and spiritual poverty. So I've got to persevere through this. Help me to do it in a way that doesn't do more harm than good. And it actually allows me to get some of the satisfaction of seeing some of this actually work. What's the counsel you give them beyond? Now, this is very important. What we've done up until now is that you have to understand they're these different types of cultures where they're coming from. So you've identified that, but what are tangible things to do once you have this type of an awareness of these different type of cultural realities? What do you do next? How do you take action? How do you place capital to work?
Curt Laird: You know, for me, the first question that I ask of investors is what is the purpose of investing? And if the purpose of investing is just to make a financial return, then invest in Apple and Amazon and local investments. If the purpose of investing is that it is a tool to increase human flourishing, this idea of shalom from the Old Testament wholeness, completeness. If that's what investing is, then lean in to what you see as difficulty. I contend that investing in frontier markets is not more difficult than investing in first world countries. It's different. Difficult. It is not more difficult. Let me use an example of Kentegra and you're familiar with Kentegra. Kentegra is a company here in Kenya that is growing and processing pyrethrum, which is the world's best organic pesticide. This is a company that is doing amazing things in business. It has more demand than it can supply. Right now. It is growing like crazy. It is financially on the road to multiple, multiple acts on investment. And I have invested in it and it's one of our kind of beta investments. But this company is impacting 10,000 farmers that will grow to 30, 40, 50,000 farmers by providing them an incredibly good job. Or good income from this. So the human flourishing that's happening, the increase in education because the economic engine now is percolating with these farmers, the increase in health, the human flourishing that is happening from the investment is powerful and that business is difficult. It is difficult, but it is difficult in a different way. So I say to investors, if you want to make a difference in God's economy. Frontier markets, emerging markets are the place that your dollar can have an outsized effect on human flourishing. We need to divert the money that's going into these businesses that are in the West that are doing what are they doing? What are they doing for human flourishing? That resource can be leveraged in these markets to make huge differences. What we are doing here, what I am doing here is we are deconstructing the Western model of investing because it is failing in this level. It is not moving the dial. We are deconstructing it and saying what is a different model of investing in frontier markets that is aligned with the values of Jesus and it's aligned with the Completing capitalism paradigm, the book completing capitalism that is increasing human flourishing. And so this is the place where resources that have been entrusted to us can make much more difference. But I'm telling you, you need to have a vision. You need to lean in because it is difficult. If you want easy, stay in the US.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Although there is a middle ground. I'm going to push back a little bit. There is a middle ground. An interesting disclaimer. We are a direct investor from a family outside, not from Sovereign's Capital, but from family to invest in Kentegr. And there's something beautiful about pushing through and developing the relationship with entrepreneurs, particularly young entrepreneurs. And I want you to get to that next. I want to talk about how different cultures look at youth and innovation, maybe differently than we value it here in the United States. I want to get into it. I think that's an important thing for those of us who are called to make direct investments. And yet there is an easy button. There are funds. So you and I are co invested in Kentegra along with a number of funds. I think Talanton's involved. I know that CIF is. And so there's some other funds that understand this cultural context and are able to navigate through it. And yes, you pay a management fee and a percentage of the carried interest to do that. But the professional management and the discovery and the diligence and to increase the chances that you do good rather than harm are significant. Would you agree with that, that looking at funds that invest in frontier markets, funds that are about spiritual integration and about encouraging faith driven entrepreneurs yep, that's a good middle ground.
Curt Laird: It is a middle ground, Henry But honestly, I don't believe those funds are going to move the dial of human flourishing in Kenya.
Henry Kaestner: Tell me more about that.
Curt Laird: So let me step back and say, I when I was setting up this company, the mobile phone company, it was majority owned by a muslim investor called the Aga Khan.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. One of the most prolific impact investors, faith driven because he's the head of the Ismaili sect of the Muslim people, a remarkably successful investor. Social entrepreneur. Social investor. But yes, go on, please.
Curt Laird: And as I sat at that organization, I was helping on the investment side. I saw that what the Aga Khan would do. And he is very active in Kenya and very highly respected. He would look at a country, Afghanistan or Kenya, Pakistan, and he would look at it on a strategic level and say, what is missing? What is the missing components of human flourishing? And he looks and says, okay, I need a powerful economic engine that is driving with values and is strategically aligned to those values and that purpose. And I need to have a development side, a nonprofit side. For instance, in Nairobi, he has the Aga Khan University, which is one of the best. He has the Aga Khan University Hospital, which is the top hospital. He has high schools. He has all kinds of nonprofit, but they are strategically aligned at the top. To bring human flourishing to move the dial of an entire country. He's invested in tourism, media, hydro, agro processing. He is renowned for being the best, the highest quality. But everything is strategically aligned. And he is doing four and a half billion dollars a year worldwide on his for profit side and $1,000,000,000 a year on his non profit side. But strategically, they are aligned and we're sitting back here and we're doing a little here and a little here, and we're not aligning strategically to actually move the dial of an entire country. We have the king of kings. We have all the resources in the world. Why can we not have a big enough vision? Instead, we're piddling around honestly. We're piddling around in the minor leagues and this is where we're not coordinating. We're not aligning our investments and the strategies together to make this big difference. And I think it's a shame this is a muslim, a very progressive Muslim, and he's kicking our butts when it comes to actually impacting society. What excuse do we have? We've got far more resources than that.
Henry Kaestner: How do you see through to that? What's the solution there? Is it collaboration? So the Aga Khan of start off with a good chunk of money and is clearly developed then just amid all the things you said is even more impressive than that. Just really, really impressive. And yet he doesn't have real truth. So what's your hope for faith driven investments? How do you see through? Yes, we're playing in the minor leagues. Christ followers driven by their faith, bringing about God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven while bearing witness to the King. That's important because it's not just, you know, just invest in common grace, but it's also do it in a way where we have an opportunity to share the reason for the hope we have with gentleness and respect in the cultural context. All very important. But we are in the minor leagues, no doubt about it. You're 100% right. What's the recipe? How do you see that? What's your hope for that to be overcome aside from a Holy Spirit moment? Or maybe that's it. But what do we do? You're listening to this podcast. Like, okay, I'm fired up. I want to get going now. What do I do?
Curt Laird: So here's the thing. Like I go back to my statement about what shifts what shifts nations at its core. What is it that shifts nations? What transforms? It's the working out of transform leaders at every level. Generally, you're not going to shift the top elite. The elite of Kenya are not going to shift. Yeah. Unless there's a miracle. But leadership below. And one of the encouraging, most encouraging things is Professor Chenoweth of Harvard University, did a study of all the successful social revolutions, peaceful social revolutions of the last hundred years. And she came to the conclusion that there was never needed more than 3.5% of the people to be moving in one direction, to be on the street in peaceful protest and with a vision never needed more than 3.5% to be successful. Hmm. If that's true, which I believe it is, then how do we get to that 3.5%? We have to look at a strategic endeavor that finds, mobilizes, trains, sends out leaders just like Jesus did with the 12. We have got to come up with an economic engine. So we need to have a large enough investment fund that will actually be able to not only invest at times as a minority owner. But I believe and this is what the Aga Khan does, is generally he is a majority owner, it's a holding company, and it's permanent capital. This is a 20 year vision that we've got to look at. This is permanent capital. And he generally invests as a majority controlling interest. Why? Because what he is doing is he's saying we are aligned to a vision of transformation, a vision of values. And this has to be populated down through all the strategic companies. And so to do that, minority ownership is not bad. There's a place for it. But, you know, in frontier markets, minority ownership doesn't have the same kind of influence that it does in first world countries. If Sequoia Capital says to, you know, Facebook in its early days, you've got to do something different. Generally, they'll salute and change much more here. It's not the way it works and so much more if we are going to bring this transformation and get to that 3.5%. A team of Kenyan and expat people from all over the world, Singapore, the body of Christ has skills and resources, comes in and we gather together and we go towards one vision. And what we do as we go is we draw people into that. We collaborate not by being in a room and singing Kumbaya, which is so often what we do as Christians. We all sing Kumbaya. We all say, Let's collaborate. We walk out of the room and we don't collaborate. And that's why we're in the minor leagues. And so how do you pull together a strategic organization that is the economic engine and the development strategically aligned that is pushing forward and saying to everybody, come on, collaborate as we move forward. There's got to be some critical. We've got to reach a critical mass. So I believe we need to set up a permanent capital holding company model with a development wing sister that does the nonprofit stuff that needs to be done. But everything is strategically aligned for the purpose of increasing the shalom of the human flourishing of this nation. We build a model and then we go into other places. We've got to get critical mass and we are not a critical mass. And so these investment funds are playing in the minor leagues. They're good, they're making a difference, but they're really not shifting the dial.
Henry Kaestner: So we're going to need to come to a break here. And I think there's going to be a great opportunity for us to continue to do follow up us on this. I think that it can be a really good, healthy debate about the right model going forward. By the way, I think that permanent capital is such a great, great funding mechanism. And I think you can see more and more of that developing the world of faith driven investments in the United States. And why couldn't it why shouldn't it be done also in places like Africa where you can have majority ownership? You don't have to have an artificial time constraint. And yet I continue and you might imagine this from somebody who is passionate about Faith Driven Entrepreneurship as I am. My sense is that there's something more viral that can exceed that which the Aga Khan could ever do by bringing together a community of God, entrepreneurs and leaders and get that three and a half percent, but have individual people working in unison and being able to get some leverage and some scale from individuals. And yes, that requires a minority that's more championing the concept of investing as a minority. But I think the bigger picture is to be able to bring together a community where everybody is rowing in the same direction, with the same ideals, where everybody plays really well in the sandbox together because it is something bigger than their individual entity. It's about the kingdom of God, and they cannot advance if there's not a high level of coordination because there's something bigger at stake. And that may maybe the way that the earth works, that's just too big of a challenge. And yet my hope is that with the Holy Spirit and us on being on the move and bringing together people, that indeed we can have a mix of holding companies that are permanent capital, but also a healthy entrepreneurial vibrancy and ecosystem, all working together towards the same goal of making God famous. And it's you know, if you know me well enough, you know that I have behind me this Bruegel painting of the Tower of Babel. What does it look like if the body of Christ comes together and build something to make God famous? Is that the thing that will unite everything? Can we do that? Is that the secret sauce that gives us the superpower and results beyond that which the Aga Kahn could ever do? I want to give you the final word. And also, as you just reflect on that and next steps, do throw in, just share with us a bit about what you feel that God is speaking to you through his word. We believe, of course, that the Bible is alive. This book is alive. And what are you hearing from God through his word? But then I want to give you the last say on all the things I just said. Please.
Curt Laird: You know, the thing that God has been really speaking to me about is there's an old game, a child's game, and a lot of people won't even remember it. But it had about 16 pegs on this board and had a bunch of gears and one of the gears had a handle on it. And you could, as a child, you could put the gears in different places and you'd spin the little, you know, one gear and the other gears would move. Mm hmm. And I see that, you know, we're sitting down here in this in the bottom right corner, and we're going around with the gears, and we want to turn the gear up in the upper left corner, which is human flourishing, which is shifting nations. Mm hmm. And between these two gears, there are a number of other gears that have to be in there in order for that gear that's turning in the bottom right corner to actually turn the one up in the upper left. And we can get going around in circles and we get frustrated. And God just say and Curt, be faithful where you are to turn that gear. Because I have resources beyond your imagination that are the gears that will fit into this board, that are going to turn the human flourishing of Kenya and then DRC, and then we're going to go back into Syria. You were going to go into Syria when it's ready, and we're going to bring shalom. We're going to bring human flourishing in the name of Jesus. And hands and feet of Jesus. And so there's a beauty of this body that has all these years. And God is saying, I've got them and I'm getting them ready. And some of them are a bit stubborn and they've got resources that they're not releasing. They've got resources that they're investing in Apple and Amazon, and it should be released to frontier markets. There's a skill set and it's a beautiful thing to see that God is the one who brings those years to bring about his human flourishing, his shalom, his glory. And that's encouraging to me because I see the incredible opportunities in Kenya. It is not more difficult to do business here. It's different, difficult. And if you, as investors and as practitioners, will lean in to that, learn, not be ignorant. Not be fearful. Fear is not of God. Lean into it. You will find fulfillment beyond what you can imagine in the US. You can find it in this in investing here. That's what God is showing me.
Henry Kaestner: And I agree. And He's shown me some of the same as the joy in an expansive way, much in the same way that, you know, you've got a sense as a 23 year old about what life is like and what love looks like. And then all of a sudden you have a baby and you're like, oh, my goodness, that's just a different dimension of joy and love that I even know is capable of. I've experienced that with my life and with my investments in being involved in some of these funds. I do think that there is a role of funds, but I think there's a degree of coordination and then direct investments in some of these frontier markets that selfishly gives me more joy. And I think that that's something that God gives in a way that I hadn't expected. My hope and my prayer for all that are listening to this is that you see that there are tremendous opportunities. There is a joy on the other side beyond being just faithful and obedient and having to just like, well, I guess I have to put 10% of my money in frontier markets now. Now it's something that's a Technicolor type of joy, but that you will ask God to speak to you through his word about how to get involved. My full belief is that while it is a different type of difficult, which for a lot of people, listeners might say, well, that's just plain difficult. But my sense and my belief is that as you ask God to lead you in the direction in frontier markets, and then they're more mature cousin in emerging markets, as you ask God to lead you and that you might be able to be faithful and obedient to how he leads you, that he will lead you. And for some of you, that's going to be getting involved and understanding the honor and shame culture and making direct investments for others of you. It may be investing in funds that do that for others of you. It may be getting out there and setting up that permanent holding company. It may be actually picking up your family and actually moving to an emerging market. I don't think that there's a pat answer. I do think, though, that there is joy to be had in participating in faith driven investments in these frontier markets, and that if you ask God how to participate, he will lead you in that direction. That is for you and right for you. Curt, I'm so grateful for you and your faithfulness in your obedience and in navigating through these cultures, sharing your time and your expertize in the book, The Culture Key, and on this podcast, and just our friendship and our partnership in the movement. Thank you.
Curt Laird: You're welcome. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.