Episode 54 - From Inspiration to Incorporation with Ben Chelf
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Today’s guest is Ben Chelf. Ben is a founding partner at Elementum Ventures, has been named to ComputerWorld's Top 40 under 40 Innovative IT Professionals, and is in the Stanford Inventor Hall of Fame.
He has lived every part of the entrepreneurial cycle and is passionate about sharing his knowledge and experience. As part of this work, Ben also heads up the Venture Lab at Praxis, helping serial entrepreneurs research and develop new organizations from the moment of inspiration to incorporation.
He has lived both the Faith Driven Investor and the Faith Driven Entrepreneur story, and we think you’ll enjoy hearing him talk about both.
Episode Transcript
Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Ben Chelf: It's about the heart posture of the investor, it is about recognizing that God is constantly working on us, teaching us things, sanctifying us to use the big term.
And honestly, that's all that's required, paying attention to the way that the Lord is directing, being really intentional about looking for what God wants to teach you in any given moment, the way he wants to apply the gifts and talents and resources that he's given to you, all the product on the shelf, all the different options. Look, there are tons and tons of ways, both, quote unquote, faith driven and not to deploy capital. And God can use all of it. And God does use all of it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, I'm here with my partner and co-host, Luke Roth. Luke, good morning. Good morning. Good to be here, Luke in from our virtual studio and Sweet and Spy and Nash, Vegas and Nashville.
Luke Roush: How does it feel to be in that it's our new home? It's a cool thing. Everybody's doing it. Come on out. Water's warm. That's right, everybody.
Ben Chelf: Don't do that. Don't do that. Come on. San Francisco Bay Area. There's hope. There is.
Henry Kaestner: Yes, there is. Ben isn't there? And Ben is our special guest. Ben is with us in San Francisco. As you may have just gathered and I am in the South Bay down in Los Gatos. And we are going to be talking and Ben, about a whole bunch of different things today. There's just a myriad of things we talk about. We can talk about entrepreneurship. And I think we well, a bit we'll talk about investing. He's a partner Elementum partners. He's also a venture partner. I think that's your official title. Maybe a Praxis talk about Praxis a lot because they're really, really good at what they do as they work with us on thinking about the redemptive frame of entrepreneurship and investing. And our hope is that during today that you get a sense of, again, just a broader sense, a more textured sense, maybe, if you will, of the way the guy is working in the marketplace out here in Silicon Valley, but through investments and that you might leave your time with us today, encouraged and that you might feel that much more clarity about how you might store the wealth and the resources that God has entrusted you with and how you might participate in the work that he's doing the world, how your interactions with entrepreneurs might be advanced and richer for you and for the entrepreneur, and that you'll feel closer to God. That's our hope. That's our hope with every episode. And then it's great to have you. We like to get a biographical sketch of every one of our guests. Who are you? Where do you come from? Why do you like baseball so much? Anything is fair game. So bring us right through, including your entrepreneurial career, including snowboarding and snowboarding. A long time. I'm asking you about it. OK, so who are you? Where do you come from? Please weave your faith. Of course, because it's the faith driven investor. Weave your faith into that too. You grew up in a Christian house.
Ben Chelf: Yeah, well, you asked about baseball. I guess we'll start there. That's the most important thing, I guess. I grew up in Indiana. How did I get into baseball? It started in first grade when I'd come home. There were really only four channels on the TV at home, the major networks and WGAN, which is Chicago's local station, where they played the Cubs games and White Sox games and whatnot. And so I come home from school. And because Wrigley Field didn't have lights at the time, all the games are played during the day, come home from school, flip on the TV, there would be WGAN and the Cubs would be playing. And I got used to watching the Cubs after school every day. And in fact, they just happened to be on a home stretch.
And so there were a number of days in a row where was true. And then I remember the first day I come home and I flipped on the TV after school and the Cubs were playing and I was really distraught. And I asked my dad, like, where's the Cubs game? And that's when he taught me about baseball schedules and the fact that they travel around. And that's kind of how I got into baseball from a very young age. My mom and dad met in seminary. And so that gives you a bit of window into the church environment at home. Tons of church in home, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, the whole nine yards. But like a lot of people, my own faith had ebbs and flows throughout, you know, definitely grew up in the church, learned a ton about God and a ton about Jesus. But when I went to college. Faith kind of took a backseat, didn't rediscover it until graduate school. And then kind of from there, my faith matured as I became an adult, kind of interweaving the life stuff. I did come out to California for college. I like to joke that I'm a Silicon Valley cliche in every way, except for that I have faith in God. You know, I went to Stanford, I dropped out of Stanford, I started a software company. I started another company. I became a venture capitalist. I mean, I don't know how you draw it up any differently as cliche as it comes out here, but yeah. So that's a little bit of the personal track in the faith track.
Henry Kaestner: So tell us about that software company. You know, we also have a sister podcast for those of you don't know, called the Faith Driven Entrepreneur talk to us about that software company dropping out of Stanford. It must have been a pretty good opportunity.
Ben Chelf: Yeah. So I was working on some new technology in the research lab there that would analyze software, looking for problems, quality problems, security problems and really, really tough stuff to find stuff that's difficult to find in Cuba and whatnot. So oftentimes problems that would manifest themselves out in the field. And we started getting a lot of inbound requests from folks who wanted to use this technology. So we smelled the market opportunity and we decided to start a company based on that. And we productize that technology. We started selling it in the market. We grew that business to about three, four hundred fifty people before it was acquired in twenty fourteen.
Luke Roush: How many partners did you have when you got started?
Ben Chelf: And yeah, there were four of us in graduate school together and we kind of all jumped out of school over that first year to start the thing full time. And then of course our professor was involved. So we had technically five co-founders. It was a really robust group of co-founders which allowed us to really grow the business. In a cash flow positive way, actually, before even raising funds, so we bootstrapped the thing for five years before doing just a single round of financing anything, here's the big pithy kind of cliche type of open ended question.
Henry Kaestner: Anything about God that you learned through your process of running a company and growing a company, exiting a company?
Ben Chelf: That's just such a big question. It's hard to come up with an answer to that question. But Faith Driven Entrepreneur.
Henry Kaestner: So let's start with us. So you've got a bunch of partners. Yeah. And you're out there. Any of them share your faith?
Ben Chelf: Yes. One of them in my first company did.
Henry Kaestner: Was prayer a part of what you did? Was your faith ever brought in a question? Did you sense that there's a holy ambition of what you're doing?
Ben Chelf: Yeah. So I'll kind of describe a company one and company to the second company was in the entertainment industry and we were developing software and other tools for doing story development in a new way. And I would say with the first company, I was still in that mindset of sacred secular divide and plugged in a church service in junior high in ministry. Did my Bible study all the things that you would do? But at work there wasn't much talk about that. And I felt like we should do a good job at work. I should build this business. Your question about what did you learn about God? It was so clear that God was just opening doors and providing opportunities. But what was interesting is as I got more wrapped up in that business and my identity was as Silicon Valley co-founder or founder or tech startup founder, from a character standpoint, I started putting God making God smaller and smaller. And it was more about me and me and my company and us and much to my own detriment, and took years to kind of realize that because it started small and then it kind of creeps up and creeps up. So while I think the work we were doing was good work for other people who were writing software, and there was certainly a care for those people and wanting to make their lives better that I could see God in and God blessing, I allowed my they didn't get too wrapped up in that one. And so coming out of that experience and then thinking about what to do next and how to do it, I did kind of have a real come to Jesus moment for lack of a better way of putting it and saying, all right, Lord, I want to do better this next time or from an ongoing standpoint. And so how can I kind of keep the priorities straight? And so we built the second business a little bit different way and kind of made sure that from an identity standpoint, I didn't have everything in me kind of wrapped up in that. And I tried to keep my identity where it was supposed to be.
Luke Roush: And how much gap between kind of company one and company two to one or more of your co-founders come over to Company two with you, or was that just a totally Denovo experience?
Ben Chelf: Yeah, totally start over from scratch and back, basically, because it was in the entertainment industry, I kind of left Silicon Valley. We built the business here, but it was much more of a Hollywood type of thing than it was a Silicon Valley type of thing. So we had different network of people, different co-founders. And it was about nine months from when I left, when I started having the inkling for the next company. And then another six months after that, when I kind of had the cool founding team and we got incorporated and off to the races.
Henry Kaestner: So when you talk about the second company being a little less about the secular spiritual divide and a little bit less like a smaller guy, just for fun, that a little bit. Tell me a little bit more about what that look like, and especially now as you work with Faith driven entrepreneurs through your work at Praxis, what does it look like to be more intentional about weaving your faith in.
Ben Chelf: Yeah, so I talk to some folks at church about a year ago on the intersection of faith and work or the integrating your faith into your work as I think is a common phrase. And the point I made there and this is you know, this is a bit of a bold statement, but bear with me. I said, look, if you're trying to integrate your faith into your work, you've probably already missed it because it is not about this puzzle that you're trying to, like, put the pieces together. It's rather your faith should be so foundational to who you are and what you are and what you're trying to do, that pretty much everything should flow from that. And that's obviously an aspiration that Jesus did perfectly and we will never do perfectly. But I think that when we try to just start manipulating things or orchestrating is such a OK, I'm going to pray at this hour, during this day at work, because that's how I'm integrating my faith into my work. I think we've we've kind of missed it.
And I'm learning these things through the years as well. I always say when I first started getting really intentional about integrating faith and work, it was a little bit more of that. It was like the Ben-Chelf-integration show as opposed to the Lord fueling everything that I do and giving me the energy and me being rooted in that and just letting the work be the work. And so I think one of my favorite verses is first. Thessalonians, five 17, pray without ceasing. I think it's just an incredible concise call to the kind of relationships we're supposed to have with the Lord, and that's obviously not to me. We're just on our knees talking to God 24/7, but rather the spirit of that continual communion that he is always present in every thought and everything we say and everything we do.
Luke Roush: So when you now as an investor at Omentum, when you work with portfolio companies, how do you counsel? What I hear you saying is that it's not so much prescriptive sort of here is this tactic or that tactic, but it's more descriptive of kind of where the heart posture and posture kind of indwelling of the Holy Spirit in somebody's life. How do you counsel one of your business leaders in a direction that isn't sort of some kind of a forced integration or both on spiritual integration, but actually kind of dwelling? How do you counsel them?
Ben Chelf: Yeah, good question. One of the things that I notice is that so much of the entrepreneurial journey, I mean, is the life journey is kind of about self-discovery. Entrepreneurs are constantly learning about their businesses, about market share, but about themselves in the process. And, you know, one of our founders, Christian Guy, was exposed to Praxis, became a Praxis fellow. And what it did is he got to see other Christians working out their faith in their businesses and their lives. And he kind of came back with this new excitement about faith that he hadn't had previously and just could see how, you know, there could be a more holistic view of faith as it pertains to life and work and whatnot. And I simply told him, pay attention to that, pay attention to what you see in others and what you see, like in the energy that you have. You know, this brings to you to be considering, you know, the way or your faith can play out. And so I think a lot of it, in terms of counseling, to answer your question more directly, is pay attention to the work that God is doing in you and work on that more than anything else.
Henry Kaestner: So that's some great counsel, particularly for those listeners that are angel investors working with entrepreneurs. I want to shift gears just a little bit and focus on a faith driven investor ministry a bit. And I want to turn back the clock to the beginning of faith driven investor. And there's this working guy that maybe twenty five or thirty of us we're all working on together, which is the sense of, well, you know, there's probably a community out there of Christ followers that are in the investment world and venture capital and private equity. And what's it look like? We come together to encourage each other to share best practices. And if we can do that, what's a mission and a vision? What are the problems we're trying to solve? Where are the things that we're for? And in that, one of our hypotheses was that there wasn't a lot of selection that at times we described the movement like walking into a Russian grocery store in the 1980s, and it's not really a lot of product on the shelves. And what does it look like to get out there and to encourage the formation of other funds that are in real estate and private equity and public equity, domestic and overseas? And actually, interestingly, over the course of last 18 to 24 months, we found dozens and dozens of funds, some that already existed, a whole bunch that are new, always spiritual integration. But the problem that we really saw was that there wasn't a lot of selection on the shelves. And I'll never forget you looking at that and saying, nope, that's not the problem. That's not the problem. What do you mean it's not the problem? You know, the people want to be intentional about how they store their capital and they want to be able to find funds that they're going to be able to see some sort of chaplaincy or some sort of faith driven employee resource group kind of work into the fabric like, no, that's not it. The formation, the foundation of the movement needs to be about something else. What was that something else?
Ben Chelf: It's about the heart posture of the investor. It is about recognizing that God is constantly working on us, teaching us things, sanctifying us to use the big term.
And honestly, that's all that's required, paying attention to the way that the Lord is directing, being really intentional about looking for what God wants to teach you in any given moment, the way he wants to apply the gifts and talents and resources that he's given to you, all the product on the shelf, all the different options. Look, there are tons and tons of ways, both, quote unquote, faith driven and not to deploy capital. And God can use all of it and God does use all of it.
And so I think if we just had Christians who are just 100 percent sold out to all right, Lord, I want my balance sheet to look exactly like you want it to look. I want my pencil to look exactly like you want it to look. I want my cash flow to look exactly like you want it to look. And I'm willing to sacrifice I'm willing to lay it all out there for you to teach me things and. Reallocate things according to what you need to teach me in any given moment, whether that be very safe positions like cash or more speculative things or more impact things, you know, he can lead us. And I think to the Lord, these are just the tools he uses to grow us closer to him and to love us, because that's the bottom line. It's about that relationship with him, his love for us and our response and love to him.
Luke Roush: Maybe share just a little bit about from your personal story. I mean, I think one thing that you and I have talked about previously is a loan that you made to a ministry in San Francisco, just kind of responding to the holy Crompton's call, Holy Spirit's prompting on your life, maybe shared just for a little bit on that.
Ben Chelf: Yeah, yeah. I want to keep the details vague enough for public distribution. Sure, sure. Sure.
But look, they're going to be times where you take a look at a circumstance and there's a clear need. And in this case, you know, it was an organization who, due to the circumstance, there was a threat to their real estate situation. Right. And they were renting before. And suddenly that was not going to be an option. They were going to get evicted unless they were able to purchase the property. And these things happened in this particular case, it happened very quickly because there was a family inheritance involved and there was another buyer lined up and so on.
And this was one of those cases where, you know, if you looked at it on paper and we talked to our quote unquote financial advisors, we talked to our financial advisors about it, and they said, now this is this is a little bit beyond the pale of what would be responsible just in terms of the size of the loan relative to our balance sheet. And but, you know, again, using the gifts that God had given me, I felt like I could do at least a cursory analysis of the business to determine if it was a reasonable loan. I'm not a banker. I don't know how to underwrite loans technically. But, you know, I could do a little bit of math and do my own guess as to is this a fundable thing in the medium term if they had more time.
And so I sat down with the people of the organization and I looked at their books and I did the best I could. And my wife and I, we prayed about it and we just felt like God said, hey, you can help here, so help. And we structured a deal that, again, it was it was extra risk. Right. It was a risk that we didn't need to take from a purely portfolio management standpoint. But we could help. And, you know, in this case, it was a happy ending. Right? We made them the kind of bridge loan they bought the building within. I think it was three or four months. They had a bank do a real mortgage. And so we were paid back and it was then we could just use that capital for something else. But yeah, I think as an example of just being open to things that go a little bit beyond the norms in terms of asset allocation. And honestly, we had to be prepared for it to end badly where either that capital got locked up or we ended up having to foreclose. I mean, there was all sorts of ways it could have gone wrong, but maybe a little bit on that, which is, I think in my own observations, is we can play things pretty safe where we can isolate ourselves from the mess.
That's one temptation that wealth can afford, is ability to isolate ourselves and not take risk and not get in the messy details of relationship and life. And the Lord just wants us to be in community. He wants us to love and serve other people. And guess what? That's messy. I guess there's there's risk in that. And so if you use your wealth to eliminate all risk, chances are you might not be all the way putting yourself into these relationships and a sacrificial mindset.
Luke Roush: Yes. What you're speaking to just in that example, but also in what you were sharing earlier, is this idea of the entwining. The Holy Spirit in the context of business oftentimes needs to be unscripted. You know, we sometimes have a bunch of debate within our partnership and with others externally that are like, hey, you know, what are the programmatic elements that every one of your portfolio companies does to manifest scripture in the context of business operations? And we wrestle with that internally. We get pushed on it in some cases appropriately, externally, to understand what the KPIs are across the portfolio. But how do you think through just on the one hand, when it's unscripted, it can feel mushy, it can feel kind of situational, can feel even like convenience. That's really convenient, that it's different for every company. But maybe just speak to how you've navigated that an element of.
Ben Chelf: Yeah, that's a really hard one, and I'm lucky enough, the my partner is that element and we share the same faith. And so there's a a trust element to each of our own discernment with respect to that, where our goal is to always use the intellectual capabilities, the rigor, the data, all the stuff that God has given us to make decisions, to use all of that and kind of intention with that sometimes is the kind of prompting of the Holy Spirit, the just like what is our gut telling us how we should operate from a faith perspective, we've seen it work a couple of ways where we'll make an investment that we think has certain upside from a data standpoint. But it might be, say, 70 percent of what we would normally like to see. Right. But then there's a strong spiritual component to it. Or we might make a decision to, in some sense, be a really good actor in an investing scenario and follow on rounds happen. And that's not necessarily the best move financially, but it is the right thing to do. And what's been interesting, and I've been at this with elements and for just over five years now is almost without fail when we feel like we're quote on quote sacrificing or when we feel like we're maybe conceding something, it turns out we're actually not.
It turns out that ended up being the more financially savvy thing to do or the better upside thing to do. And I don't know if that's God blessing the decision or, you know, a lot of times just these ideas of love. Your neighbor work out to be really good business practices to.
Henry Kaestner: So, Ben, you've been an entrepreneur, you're an investor, you've been involved with Praxis. You have an opportunity being where you live to just kind of reflect on what's going on in the world. And because you've been really good at challenging us, as we have looked to with others, grow the movement. What are some of your reflections about what is broken and what might need to be redeemed about the investment, space and world? What would you like to see happen over the next five or 10 years? As you say, this is a healthier ecosystem, but maybe there's too much in that because it maybe it's the fact that maybe the ecosystem in the way that investors work with entrepreneurs isn't broken or that it's not healthy now. So maybe you think it is. But just what are your reflections on where you'd like to see the industry go and how people think about investing? Yeah. Is it broken? Is it not broken? What do you think?
Ben Chelf: There are a lot of broken things, that's for sure. I think, honestly, one of the biggest ways that it's broken is both investors and entrepreneurs are not brutally honest with themselves. I think having been an entrepreneur a couple of times, there's a certain amount of optimism that you have to have. There's this like almost blindness to reality, you have to say. Right. And that's fine and good. Right.
That's that's why stuff gets started. Otherwise, nothing would ever get started. That being said, I think there are a lot of companies that just kind of meander along for and should just be cut off, should be done.
But for lack of on the part of both entrepreneur and investor, just being really honest about the opportunity and not being afraid of saying, hey, we tried, we could swing and we missed. They're going to be other at bats. But in this one we took a swing and we missed. I think that's one of the big things that's broken. I think a lot of times in the faith driven world especially, we can be a little bit conflict avoidant. We can be afraid of that conversation because it might be seen as not the Christian thing to do, to just cut something off, especially if there's a maybe an investor has a perspective. That's right. That the entrepreneur doesn't and says that or the other way around or the entrepreneur or the investors really want the entrepreneur to keep trying and giving, potentially providing more funding. And the entrepreneur knows it's like, well, I guess I could, but it's really just not going to work. I think that's the biggest thing that I would love to see. Just more conversation about more honest rigor on both sides to try to address more specifically to the investor. I think the brutal honesty for investors is to just truly recognize where they have expertize to deploy capital and where they don't. And that heart is great. But I did some angel investing before becoming a C, and there's a big difference between investing as a hobby and investing as a profession. And, hey, look, it's great to have hobbies and it can bust a lot of people with your hobbies. And we'll talk about snowboarding in a minute. But yeah, I think to really be honest, OK, I invest because it's a hobby. I have these objectives. And to recognize that there can be some danger as someone who deploys capital as a hobby for the companies you're investing in. So those are some of the things that come to mind.
Luke Roush: So maybe just a couple of like with our name and. Names, specific examples where you feel like you've done a good job to speak the truth in love, right, because there's a relationship, particularly if there's a lot of faith between an investor and a company. Right. There's a desire to kind of love them. Well, even when you're telling them something that they don't want to hear, any specific examples from your own experience, maybe just encourages with.
Ben Chelf: Yeah, look, we ended up kind of doing an asset sale of my second company, which from a financial standpoint wasn't a home run that everybody was hoping for. And I think that's an example where not to toot my own horn, but I think we did that well. We tried a number of different things, always in conversation with the investors. When my co-founder and I when we decided to wrap it up, it was a mutual decision between the two of us. Obviously, the staff was very sad. It was a very hard couple of months to do all of that and to end it as well as we could end. And then in the conversations with the investors, you know, obviously we've been keeping them appraised of everything through the years. And, you know, one of the key angel investors, when I asked him about it as we were wrapping up, after I kind of told him and look, I think it's time to call it, he said, Ben, you tried everything you said you were going to try. You worked really hard at this for years and it didn't work. I'm satisfied. Like you lost money and this wasn't a Christian guy. So I think that's kind of what I'm talking about is just that critical eye towards things. And, yeah, it's not easy to do that. It's harder, but it seems like the right thing to do.
Henry Kaestner: And as we come to a close here, I do want to hit on just a couple other things. One is the concept of Sabbath. And so, yes, we talked about snowboarding. Talk to us about seasons of Sabbath. Talk to us about what it looks like for somebody to worship their work. And just reflections on work versus Sabbath.
Ben Chelf: Yeah, I'm pro Sabbath. I think you took an incredible Sabbath Sabbath that I wish I was getting somewhere along the way. Yeah. So when I left my first company, I knew that I needed a break and not just I take a couple of weeks in Hawaii and then you're better.
And so there is a whole confluence of things with respect to my girlfriend now wife that led to actually just having this time where I could be away. But I decided to move to the mountains, so I moved up to Tahoe for a winter. I'd snowboard for exactly one weekend in my entire life before I did this, but I decided I'm going to actually learn to snowboard. I'm a serial hobbyist. I love picking up hobbies and learning new things.
And so that winter, I just decided I'm going to spend three or four months learning to snowboard. I thought that was the primary goal of that time. But in reality, the primary goal of that time was for me to really connect with God in a much deeper and wonderfully holistic way, which was kind of born about I'm going back to honesty, me being really honest with God and airing some things that I had been thinking about for years that I had never really voiced to him or others in terms of my own wrestling with faith and why things were the way they were.
And much of what we're talking about today in terms of my perspective on investing and faith driven investing and why it's a hard posture thing was born out of that time in the mountains, going to snowboard every day. And so it's kind of funny how the Lord uses uses our own wiring, our own desires to kind of catch us in different ways and teach us different things. But yeah, so I spent I guess it was four months living up in the mountains. It was really sabbat I mean I didn't work at all. I mean unless you count getting up and going to the mountain to snowboard and try to learn. My time was cut short by a couple of weeks when I dislocated my shoulder, taking a jump too high in the park, but otherwise it was an amazing time.
And so my own view on the Sabbath, and that's a very long winded way of getting to that. But my own view of Sabbath is it is not one of balance. I think people will talk about balance like, OK, I want to have good balance in my life of work and rest. I don't think that's quite it.
I think there's a certain intensity to seasons that require just being all in starting companies is so hard that the idea of, oh, I'm going to have two or three hours every day carved out to rest or I'm going to have a full day, a week carved out to rest. It just might not happen. I might regret saying that on a podcast, but I think looking at the balance of a month or a year or whatnot, and if you can't identify the places where you stopped to rest, like the Lord stopped to rest after creating the universe, then something's off. Right. And so I think for me, what that's look like practically, it's meant three kids. Everything is a little different now that I have a couple little kids. But pre kids, it was at least one ten day period every year where I had no outside communication, no Internet, nothing like that, completely unplugged for ten days. That was kind of the yearly rhythm for me. And from a daily rhythm standpoint, I have when the season affords. I'm a big fan of Friday night after work to Sunday afternoon after church, kind of that window being the key either unplugged time or you're really trying to let your mind rest from other things. For me, a lot of it has to do with digital connectivity. If I'm on email or on my phone, that's not restful. I think that's another thing for Sabbath is you really have to figure out what is rest. A lot of people will flip on Netflix, myself included, or browse the Internet on your phone or you kind of have these rest ish things that aren't actually rests.
So when you're going to take the time to Sabbath, I'd say actually take it, even if it's just going to be a few hours on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon. But yeah. So those are some thoughts.
Henry Kaestner: So I'm grateful for you. I'm grateful for what you have taught us and our listeners about our posture. It's become really the anchor bedrock value is we talk about faith driven investing. If you're a listener to this, it is about heart posture. Faith driven investing is not prescriptive, non presumptuous. There are all sorts of different things you can do across now, all asset classes, all different types of geographies to really have spiritual integration. And even a gospel proclamation is a part of the investments that you make. And yet it's about our posture. It's about getting down on your knees, as Ben did with Cam back after an exit and just saying, God, how would you have us use the resources you've given us for your glory? What does that look like? And you may come out of that experience. Out of that exercise. Out of that time with God and feel that you are absolutely called to invest in solar farms in the Nevada desert, and that is equally valid, of course, then somebody who wants to invest in entrepreneurs in Africa or Eastern Europe or whatever, fill in the blanks. Ultimately, it's about an opportunity to participate in the work that God is doing the world and commune with him. And so then you early on were very helpful to get us grounded in that and speak in the movement. So thank you. One of the things the thing rather, that we like to do is we close out every episode is to ask our guests what they're hearing from God in his word recently. How do you feel that God is speaking to you now? Maybe it's something this morning, though. It truly doesn't need to be. It could be over, of course, last week, over the course of last month. But what do you hear God speaking to you now?
Ben Chelf: Yeah, it's always such a good question. I'm working on kind of a new experience for Bible reading and leave it at that. It's still kind of under wraps and in development, but I've been tinkering a lot. So my desk is full of wires and gadgets and all that stuff about reading scripture. Yeah, well, you can't tell us about it. Yeah.
Among other things, maybe in like six months when I get a kick started going, I'll tell you about it or we're going to look at this seriously.
Yeah, exactly.
So I'm in full on tinkering mode right now, which is fun. And again, like I said, I always have a hobby. I always have something I'm working on inside and I'm using some twenty three is kind of the text that I'm testing with a lot. So I've been looking at Psalm 23 every day the last couple of weeks, and in verse three there is a phrase that's just says he restores my soul and that phrase is just kind of really resonated with me.
That is the promise. If you put your faith in God, that makes all the anxiety and the things we worry about and the world. And what a year, right? This last year with everything that's gone on. But he restores my soul and it speaks to the brokenness. Right. We only restore things that need to be restored, that have some sort of brokenness. It speaks to the simplicity of it. And so, yeah, I've just been relishing those four words this week. He restores my soul.
Henry Kaestner: That is awesome. That's very good. That's a very good word. Look, how come we don't have been on every week?
Ben Chelf: I think we should. I think we should, actually.
Luke Roush: So, Ben, thank you so much for taking time. Grateful for your insight. I always find your perspectives to be helpful and informed and reflective of just a lot of contemplation on your end and listening to what God is telling you. So grateful for your friendship and grateful for your insights. I think our listeners really enjoy it. Thanks, Ben.