Episode 225 - Marks on the Market: Celebrating America 250 & Entrepreneurial Spirit in the AI Era | Donna Harris

Speaker A: Here's to bold visionaries, faithful investors who make God the goal. While some may call them crazy, we see a joyful adventure. God has empowered us to use courageous capital, solving the world's greatest problems under his power or his glory. Welcome to the Faith Driven Investor Podcast. Opinions expressed in this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Hosting guests may maintain positions and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only. It should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening. Well, friends, welcome back to another episode of the Faith Driven Investor Podcast. Great to have you with us for what is our June marks on the markets? Luke Roush. It's hard to believe we are coming up on the halfway mark in the year. And, you know, we're recording this podcast on June 16th. It will release on Monday, June 22nd, to all of you that are listening. And so what that means is that this is effectively our last marks on the markets before our beloved country turns, uh, 250 years old. And so in light of that and in celebration of America 250 today, we are talking America's greatest asset, and that is the American dream, American entrepreneurism, um, American entrepreneurial dynamism, all of those things. And so we've got two awesome folks here. Speaking of that, Luke Rausch, one of our faithful co hosts, Donna Harris, who happens to be near the nation's capital. She's a football mom, Luke's a football dad. They're all things America. And Donna is the founder and CEO of Builders and Backers. And they are doing a ton of work funding, um, finding backing great entrepreneurs, making entrepreneurialism more accessible to all types of overlooked, underserved communities. And they're doing it in this realm of AI so we're going to get into all of that. But fired up today, kind of a celebration of America 250. Luke will say hey to you, let you give some opening commentary, and then we'll say hey to our guest, Donna.

Speaker C: Well, ah, longtime, uh, fan of what Donna has done with, uh, builders and backers. And I'm excited to get into the meat of the discussion today because Donna's life work, uh, is absolutely intertwined with, uh, our history as a nation and what makes, uh, I think America unique in, uh, the global ecosystem. So I'm super excited about this. I'm, uh, a big fireworks fan. It feels like everybody's going to go big this year for the 250th, so I'm already looking forward to that, Richard. Uh, but back over to you.

Speaker B: Well, Donna, welcome. Great to have you. Maybe give us some of the, uh, summer highlights for Team Harris, what you guys are up to, and then we'll get into, uh, some of the program.

Speaker D: Team Harris is a great way to put it. So glad to be here. It's been a busy summer of entrepreneurship and football in the Harris household, working with entrepreneurs all over the country, helping them get started. And I'm driving with my 16 year old son all over the country to football camps as he explores that as a career pathway. So it's a good time of year and I'm really excited about the 250th anniversary. Looking forward to today's conversation.

Speaker A: I love it.

Speaker B: Yeah. You know, Donna, one of our frequent podcast guests is the CIO of, um, Blue Trust, Brian McClarton. And one of his children just got their license at 16. So it sounds like in the greater Atlanta area, greater D.C. area, we've got 16 year olds on the road. So steer, uh, clear, stay off the road.

Speaker D: That's for sure.

Speaker B: That's awesome. Um, well, so Donna, you've done an incredible amount of work in the faith driven investing community. You're one of the authors of the kind of redemptive investing playbook at Praxis with our great friends and partners over there. And there are probably few people out there with as much experience as you in VC because you are also a venture investor in your work at Builders and Backers. But even pre that, you know, you have a decade of venture investing experience, but you also have a rather skeptical take on the traditional model of venture capital. And so I'd kind of like to get into that a little bit. Would like for you to break that down for us. You know, what have we historically gotten right in the venture industry? We've seen a, uh, kind of a crazy pullback over the last, call it 18 months. But then kind of the AI era has ushered in a kind of a resurgence. There's been this kind of American exceptionalism, hard tech type of resurgence as we kind of re onshore critical industries in the venture ecosystem. So what have we gotten right? Where do we need to rethink it? And I'd just kind of like to hear some of your talk track on just the venture model currently. And I think a lot of that will get into why builders and backers also exists.

Speaker D: Sure. Well, I would say I'm not sure. I would say I have a skeptical take. I think it's a really solid tool for a specific use case. I think the challenge is that We've misapplied it. And I think that's where a lot of that skepticism comes in. I mean the numbers kind of tell the story. Only one in about 10,000 startups ever sees a dollar of venture capital and we often forget that. So when you travel around the country and you go from city to city and ecosystems, you see pitch competitions, you hear about programs that are teaching founders to raise money and those are good things, but they're not really targeting the other 9,999 entrepreneurs who by the way aren't lesser entrepreneurs. They're just building something that doesn't fit a particular mold. So I think it has been a very valuable tool for funding world changing companies for sure. Um, but we often just misunderstand it. And I also don't think people realize how much venture capital invests in companies that are already getting traction. Not necessarily that like cowboy with an idea stage company. Right. Increasingly venture capital is coming in. Once some of that risk has been proven out, you've got traction, you've already got product market fit. So it's really more um, of a financing scale tool increasingly today than it is a financing that early stage experimentation. And I do think just critically, one area where I am skeptical is how much the, the vehicle is kind of leaned towards extraction. I think there's a lot that is sort of when you have a mandate to maximize your return, the default behavior becomes growth at all cost. And if you aren't proactively pushing against the default, then that can create some unintended negative consequences that we do see and you do hear about when people are posting some of their negative views about venture capital. But you know, my sense is it's a good tool and it's one tool of many in the toolbox. We're just not, we don't need a hammer for every single job at hand.

Speaker C: Your comments, Donna, make me actually think of um, there's a great article written maybe six or seven years ago on uh, hey, venture capital, uh, is a little bit like jet fuel. And if you're trying to build a jet, it's a great thing to, to have and you're going to need it. But a lot of people are building other things that are not as conducive to the type of outcomes that venture capital is looking to have to be able to make their model work. And so I think it's actually uh, prescient. And I feel like there's maybe more sobriety now than there was five or 10 years ago where it was this Sort of Pandora's box of excitement and opportunity in venture capital. And now people are becoming more accustomed to this idea that, hey, not every company really should be raising venture capital because the outcomes that, that are pushed for by those investors are very much driven by power law dynamics, which is just more, more, more risk in shorter and shorter amounts of time. Uh, and so maybe just comment on that, this idea that, you know, when is it appropriate, when is it not? And what would your counsel be to, um, investors and entrepreneurs who are listening to our show?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I think my number one piece of counsel is that it should not be the default. So it is the single most expensive source of capital a startup can take. So maybe don't start there and start with the job at hand. What is it you're trying to get done? What kind of company? What scale? How fast can you grow? It's really amazing how few, um, ecosystem builders and entrepreneurs really understand the math of vc. So how quickly do you need to grow? How big do you need to get? What is your market size? And is that really viable? When you just apply very basic mathematics to it? That's going to eliminate most companies. And a lot of founders don't even understand what they're signing up for when they're pursuing it. They just sort of assume it's the way we fund companies. So, um, unfortunately in a lot of places it's the only source of funding available, which is a whole different conversation. Um, but you know, it really does come down to the economics of a fund. If you understand how a fund works. We've got a limited fund life, no more than 10 these days, maybe 12 to 14 because it's taking longer to exit years. So how, how do you grow to be 100 million plus size company and call it 5 to 7 years? There are very few companies and very few founders in very few industries that can actually achieve that dynamic. So starting with that front and center and then working back from that. And I think we have to do away with the stigma that if you are building a company not VC funded, that somehow that's a consolation, uh, prize type company. I think valuing all entrepreneurial outcomes and really putting finance in its place. It's merely a funding choice that we're making and we've somehow made it more sexy and cool than other forms of funding choices for companies.

Speaker B: Good framing. All right, so enter builders and backers. And you're too humble to make this a commercial for builders and backers, but you know, you are effectively trying to spur one of America's greatest competitive advantages, which is entrepreneurial dynamism. You know, are we creating enough builders today, people that are willing to kind of go out and take the risk and start a side hustle, start a business and then what are you guys uniquely doing? How are you using AI to almost make entrepreneurialism something that everyone can go step into and talk about the solution you're trying to bring to the market and then get into some of the, uh, why is this so core to the future of our country and what's going on with AI and how that's going to invite and kind of maybe necessitate folks to step out into that kind of entrepreneurial journey?

Speaker D: So many great questions. So let me start with are we creating enough entrepreneurs, enough builders? You open the news, you'll see all kinds of press about startup rates are up, the numbers are great, and we are a very entrepreneurial, curious nation. If you go back to 2010, Kaufman put out their seminal research at that point that said, in essence, high growth startups are the creators of net new job growth, right? They, more than big companies are creating the jobs. And that was true. But if you fast forward to data they recently put out, it is less true today than it was then. Startups are creating a third less jobs per startup than they did back then. And that's before you factor in the full force of AI. So in an era where you have fewer jobs per startup, just to tread water, we need many, many more startups to stay even. Now you factor in the fact that yes, that startup rate looks high, 6.6 million people wanted to start companies last year, but underneath that, a good majority of that are people who are starting necessity based businesses, not opportunity companies intended to become employers. So when you sort of untangle that, we actually have a declining entrepreneurship rate where it comes to the kinds of companies that are going to be job creators. So we need to be really stepping up our game in terms of the number of people that are starting employer based companies just to be creating the same equivalent number of jobs we were creating 15 years ago. Now to make that more urgent, AI is coming on the scene. Career trajectories are being disrupted. So now we need an even more level of startups to be created because we don't just need to tread water, we need to get ahead of the game to replace the jobs that are going away. We don't have anywhere near the level of startup activity that we need to maintain the economic dynamism that we have enjoyed as a country. And it's, it's not a lack of ideas. 62% of Americans have an entrepreneurial dream, an idea, an aspiration. So we're an entrepreneurial country. We want to be builders. Every episode of shark tank is 3, 4, 5 million people watching it. We're, you know, very curious about this world. But less than 2% of people do anything with their ideas. And that, That's a talent. Ms. Right. That's an issue. That's an opportunity for us to really be activating our biggest asset as a country, the people that live here and the ideas that we have. So that's what we're doing. At Builders and Backers, we are very interested in getting people off the sidelines. We use a really creative method of low fidelity experimentation, quickly testing your ideas in the real world to help everyday people realize that they too can become a builder. So we've got nurses and disability attorneys and bartenders and I spoke a couple of days ago with somebody who is a homeless individual who is building a product. It's really quite incredible the ideas that are out there that if we don't look at it solely through the lens of is this VC backable, But more so is this person, uh, a builder who is willing to do some work and has a novel idea that allows us to think about more of our country becoming entrepreneurs. And we've helped thousands of people get started. We've launched, you know, almost 800 companies in the last couple of years. That is everything from AI platforms to macaroon vending machines to everything in between. And that's the opportunity that we have as a country. And it is actually who we have been the last 250 years as we think about even simple innovations that we use. Our team was talking about bobby pins for instance. That was an everyday person who invented that product and went on to become a millionaire by inventing something as simple as a bobby pin. There's all kinds of opportunity for that. Today we blend human, ah, support with our new AI platform that allows us to take this tool that is scary for a lot of people. And we've been thinking about it as a society as something that's a destructive tool in terms of jobs and economic opportunity. And we're turning it into something that actually helps everyday people bring their ideas to life. And it's become really, really powerful and helps us sort of democratize who gets access to the expertise they need to build.

Speaker C: So we had our um, a Faith Aligned Institutional Investing Summit a couple of weeks ago, uh, down at Trilis Studios in Atlanta. And the theme this year was get um in the game. Uh, and uh, the specific context for that was really getting people to think more robustly about the influence their capital can have and how God might be calling them to reflect their faith and values and the way they invest. Um, maybe just share a little bit in terms of what it looks like from your builders and backers seat to get people to lean in to the opportunity in front of them to get in the game and not to stand in the cheap seats or sit in the stand somewhere, but how do you get them off the sidelines and actually out onto the field the way your son's out on the field?

Speaker D: I mean, it starts with the stories that we tell. If you go and Google entrepreneurship and you look at the images or the stories that come up, you're likely going to get venture capital type companies, right? You're going to read about Anthropic and OpenAI and all these like crazy, crazy high growth tech startups. But if you go to our, we just took our team to the Museum of American History here in dc. They have an American enterprise exhibit which I recommend every entrepreneur visit if they're here in D.C. and it highlights American innovation over the last several hundred years. And when you read the stories and the exhibits of the people, like that's the storytelling that needs to happen today. People need to see that, oh, people just like me are bringing their ideas to life. I don't need to have a Stanford degree, I don't need to have a 30 page business plan. I don't need to have an MBA to do this stuff. And when they can see themselves reflected in the stories and the people that we're highlighting and they hear from their peers that hey, I tried it, you can too. And then they see that it's actually not as hard as they imagine it. You don't need to stand on stage in a pitch competition. No one's going to force you to write that 50 page business plan. What we are going to have you do is probably put a landing page together and try to sell the thing that you have in mind to see if anybody actually wants it. Because the number one reason startups fail is they build things nobody wants. And when we can describe it in just very plain English, it feels less intimidating. And then when you get AI guides that help you and co build and mentor with you and you can get human support and access to a little bit of capital, we provide up to $5,000 in pebble funding that helps cover the cost of those low fidelity tests. So we've sort of taken all the barriers and excuses away to say anyone with any idea, from any background anywhere, can jump in and give this a try. And we're not guaranteeing that that idea you have is going to be a good one. It's probably not because people's first ideas are usually not good ones. But, uh, it's more about learning the process. And eventually you might decide that you want to launch a company. But guess what? You're also walking away with a greater sense of agency. You're walking away seeing yourself differently because you now know, oh, I can actually solve the problems that I care about instead of wishing somebody would do something about that. That somebody is me. That, uh, somebody is you. That somebody is all, all of us in America.

Speaker B: I mean, it is, it is. At the heart of the American experiment is that entrepreneurial dynamism m the willingness to step out and take a risk. And Luke, I'll let you ask another question, but Luke's co founder of Sovereigns Capital, who co founded this podcast, the Faith Investor Podcast. Henry Caser, one of our good friends. You know, his, his love of entrepreneurship started in college when he was like, man, I realized I could make a t shirt for $5 and sell it for 10. And I was hooked. And it says, hey, I saw a problem. We needed shirts on campus. I could make them for a certain amount and make a profit. And that's just, that's, that's the heart of the experiment you're talking about, is when people kind of start to take that leap and all of a sudden this thing snowballs. And yeah, then sometimes venture capital becomes a good tool to push forward that specific solution. But then there's also folks like yourself who have been down the path before, who have been venture investors, who have been operators. They're saying, hey, we're trying to make entrepreneurism at scale, something people go experiment with in this one era of startups being down, but to the secondary era of the wave of AI that is coming, that we all really don't know what the downstream effects are going to be, but it is going to push many of us into an entrepreneurial type atmosphere. Luke, I know you're going to ask another question.

Speaker C: Well, I was just going to follow up because one of the things that I, uh, appreciate the most that's come out of the Praxis thought leadership bubble, um, is this whole idea of re risking Donna. And so I'm sure you've heard Dave kind of give his talk. We actually invited him to do the devotional at The Faith Aligned Institutional Investing Summit, uh, where it's just. It's this idea of, you know, um, if you're in a comfortable spot, uh, it's very easy just to kind of sit tight and hang out. And yet, you know, uh, that's not necessarily what we're built for, um, by our creator. So maybe just share a little bit in terms of, like, what that re risking even looks like for you personally. Um, you know, you started builders, uh, and backers. You had a lot of success. It would be really easy to just kind of ride off into the sunset and stop doing the work. What keeps you coming back and re risking, so to speak, with, uh, with your daily work?

Speaker D: I mean, I tell people a lot that there are easier ways to make a living for sure than doing what I'm doing right now. And, you know, you get to a place where you've built me. I built six companies. I've run two funds, conceivably could take it easy, do some advisory work or some consulting or whatnot. But this is really calling for me. I mean, when I think about the trajectory of my career, the things I'm working on right now are things that God placed on my heart even 30 years ago, that when I was that entrepreneur in downtown Detroit, where there's no capital, there's no mentorship, there was no ecosystem, it was a lot harder than it needed to be. Right. I was the epitome of exactly the kind of opportunity that exists now in cities across the country, that if we can find more Donnas and, you know, more Henry's and more Luke's and whatnot around the country, that is really the key to, I think, what is needed right now. We're in a place as a country where we're very divided, people are very angry. We look around and we see nothing but problems. And, uh, I look at that and think this is the most beautiful moment for us to become builders, because most of what we look around and wish were fixed, we could use entrepreneurial tools to be fixing. And I'm not one who wants to sit around and complain and rage, tweet or whatever it is we're calling these days. I want to be someone who brings solutions. And I think God calls us to be builders. And I think the way that we're approaching it as builders and backers is very God honoring. He put that in all of us. The. The design as humans were designed to be creators and to simply say that only some of us get to be creators because we want to create certain kinds of Things I don't think honors the way God created us to be builders. So we start with people and we want to excavate, you know, what makes you tick. What are you interested in? What do you care about? What problems do you see that you wish were solved? Let's start there and then let's help you do that. And by the way, if we can help a few thousand in each city and we can help millions across the country, we have a whole different dynamic going on in our country. And that's what gets me up every morning and doing the hard work and the heavy lifting of what we're doing when I could be sitting on a beach somewhere.

Speaker B: It's awesome. Re risking. Um, well, Donna, this gets me into the. I want to get into the AI conversation and in transparency, I am not fully sure that I buy the AI job loss narrative quite yet. I think it remains to be seen how that is going to play out. I think we've all kind of heard of the software job postings are actually up and everyone would have expected that AI would have consumed immediately the necessity for software engineers because now everyone can code. But actually it's creating greater prosperity, greater opportunity in that ecosystem. And so firms are actually hiring more software engineers. However, on the other side of that equation, you know, I've got sister in law who is just graduating from University of Kentucky, unbelievably dynamic bright young gal, and she and her friends can't find a job and they're coming out of college and so they're saying there's just, there's no entry level work. And so, uh, enter the narrative we're talking about right now. Her desire is to go out and start something. And she is an unbelievable baker and she's like, you know what? I'm just going to start my old bakery, start at square one, and if I can make a living doing this and we'll see if it scales and creates other people's jobs. You know, that's very anecdotal, but it's a direct on the frontline storyline of the AI job loss narrative. Unemployment print has consistently come back low. And so on a macro level, we haven't seen this kind of complete job consumption that everyone keeps promising with AI. I think Dario and the anthropic folks are a little bit doomerism on what they're creating and how it's going to steal jobs from everyone in the world. But anyways, I kind of want to put out the AI narrative. Everything we're seeing in the headlines and I Want to hear kind of some of your framing of the conversation, like, where do we have the narrative right right now? Where are we off? What are you seeing on the front lines? Are people coming to builders and backers at a necessity and saying, hey, there's just no job for me right now, so it's time for me to kind of go into the entrepreneurial seat? Or are people coming for the same reason they have in the past? Like, hey, it's time for me just to take the risk and put the chips on the table and go for this thing?

Speaker D: Yeah, I would lean to some degree where you are as well. I think if we look at our legacy as a country, we have been through massive dislocations before. So this is not a moment where we're looking at this saying all these jobs are going to go away and that will be the end of it because we have a legacy as the country that says, and something else will come and replace it. So it is a restructuring more so than, I think, a going away. Particularly when you reflect that it is in our DNA as humans to be creators. It is very difficult for me to imagine that we watch this technology passively and do nothing about it. I actually think that's what's fueling a lot of the job postings and a lot of the job growth is that it actually is an entrepreneurial renaissance moment. And the part that I don't think people really grasp is if we look at every industry on the planet, what we are able to do in this moment is unbundle and rebundle every aspect of the economy where it isn't just humans and some efficiency tech, but humans. Plus AI allows us to completely reimagine every single aspect of every single industry. And guess what happens in that moment? New businesses get created because these moments don't favor the incumbent, they favor the upstart. And that's where I think a lot of just really fascinating entrepreneurial energy is happening. So you know this. If ever there was a moment for people to become a builder, there has never, ever in history been a greater moment to become an entrepreneur. And in fact, if you at all are skeptical about jobs being replaced and what job goes away and what new job comes, we should stop thinking of ourselves as being job people and start seeing ourselves as idea people. Because once we do that, we realize that we have this tool that is in our hands to shape and to do things with now. Not to say there aren't dangers and there aren't aspects that need to be controlled. For sure and disruption is good when we think about it over the long run, but hard for the people that are experiencing it in the moment. So we don't want to be cavalier about it. But if you look at the trends of entrepreneurship, they were already favoring everyday people, right? High school graduates, people with a high school degree actually start businesses at a higher rate than people with college degrees. So like, that's really an interesting stat to me when you think about who gets to build and you know, your, your baker example, like inherently human businesses, we to some degree are also a little tired of scale and tech and everything requires an app. And like, we crave these human experiences that there's a lot of opportunity to build businesses around. So, you know, my projection where we land is that we end up in a world where human and AI together find the symbiosis, where we have reimagined every aspect of the economy and we've created entirely new enterprises to do. The big concern for me is making sure that that prosperity is widely shared and that every American has a possibility to participate in that. Which necessitates thinking differently about how we on ramp people to entrepreneurship and how we make sure that every American is exposed to entrepreneurial principles and has the ability to give their idea a try if we can do that. I believe that we're ingenious as a country. We're inherently entrepreneurial. It's in our DNA as Americans and, and we'll be pretty amazed at what gets created.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think that Richard and I have talked a fair amount about this and there's a bunch of really interesting debate even within our firm about like, what happens. I agree with you in terms, Donna, in terms of like long term optimism for opportunities that this, um, that AI arrival creates. I think that the barriers to entry for people to conceive of a new idea and actually kind of breathe life into that new idea using some of these tools. The barriers to entry have never been lower. Um, and that's super exciting. Um, I think also the speed at which the different industries that AI touches are going to transform, um, will create, um, some gluts or some boons of opportunities. And so there'll be both kind of moments of despair and moments of extraordinary optimism just because the pace of change, I think is likely to be really quick over the next five or ten years. And so, you know, in the middle of that, whenever autonomous driving becomes a reality for trucking as an example, there will be some disruption. There, uh, will be new opportunities that emerge. None of us wants to be A Luddite. And every new, ah, technological evolution that we've gone through as humanity feels like this doom and gloom in the early days. But it then becomes, uh, something else and opens up new opportunities that we can't even imagine, uh, today. So I'm super optimistic. I am kind of curious just because of how quickly humans don't change quickly. The same way that technological parts or factories can be repurposed, oftentimes repurposing people is uh, harder. And so yeah, I'm curious your take on that, what that looks like. Um, how should we think about that? If we think about, if we do have a consciousness around the equal opportunity that we hope is available to all Americans, not equal outcomes, but equal opportunities, how do we think about that? How do we step into that breach and actually be forces for good, Win some witness to trying to enable those sorts of opportunities?

Speaker D: Mhm. I mean, I think part of the challenge is that the storytelling around AI breeds fear, right? Mean, we've all seen the commencement ceremonies where the speakers are being booed just for mentioning AI and it breeds fear. And in the absence of known answers, people will fill in the blanks themselves and usually not with good things. Um, so I do think there needs to be conscious storytelling around the use cases of AI that actually are productive and flourishing and generating good and thriving because they're out there. There's all kinds of really interesting stories. Um, and then secondly, I don't know that we in the tech industry have been really good at identifying unintended consequences and paying attention to those things. But when we build the sort of move fast and break things mantra has dominated and this moment, I'm a little nervous about the move fast and break things mantra. I think we have to be extra thoughtful about what does this mean when you're talking about displacing entire workforces and entire job categories. Um, I just wrote a post about the comparisons between what's going on in this moment versus if you've read the book Janesville, which was about the disruption of the auto industry in the city of Janesville, Wisconsin, and struck by the parallels that, huh, in that case it was geographic because of a plant disappearing. But in this case, imagine what happens if an entire workforce around truck driving disappears. What do we do with that? And we unfortunately have not educated ourselves as a society around things like agency, resilience, adaptability. Our entire focus of our workforce training system is to train you to move from job A to job B. But what happens if that's not the core skill? What if the core skill is you need to be able to make a living doing three or four different things. And that requires you to be entrepreneurial and curious and adaptable. And thing number one goes away, but thing number four comes in. Like, we don't. We aren't super resilient that way. For the most part. It's not a core skill that we've had to learn because in an industrial society, you're a small cog and a big wheel. And now we've got to learn new skills as a society. So everybody needs AI literacy for sure. The studies show that those that are already using it are moving further ahead and will continue to accelerate. So the longer it takes people to begin experimenting and trying it, they're already falling behind. But there's also this core skill of just being able to, you know, see the opportunities around you and create them and not wait passively for somebody to bring them to you. And that, uh, is going to require us to spend some time purposely creating skills around that.

Speaker B: Hey, Rich, I would like to acknowledge. I would like to acknowledge a Faith Driven Investor podcast. First. I am taking this podcast from Luke Roush's home right now. We're in Nashville together for some meetings. He's in one room, I'm in the other. And one of Luke's cats has decided to come pay me a visit mid recording as Donna's dropping some just absolute wisdom and knowledge on us. Luke, we gotta get you control on this farm over here, man.

Speaker C: Give me just a second. Pause, pause.

Speaker D: Look at. That's hilarious.

Speaker B: That is awesome. I hope we keep this in. Wes is our expert producer. Um, and I actually hope that Wes keeps this portion of the pot in.

Speaker D: So we'll roll the dice to keep a straight face there.

Speaker B: We'll see what happens come June 22nd. I mean, you had to finish your point as the cat was coming in.

Speaker D: I love showed his rear end while he was. Just to make his point.

Speaker B: Donna, here's a. Here's something I would, I just maybe would have a question on. Is like investor to investor, you know, a lot of our. We've got the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast and I love when like our topics kind of hybrid back and forth between the two. But, you know, a lot of our audience on this podcast are angel investors, capital allocators. Maybe sit in more of like a nonprofit institution type role or for profit, you know, institution type role with, you know, they share their Christian faith and they want to bring their Christian faith to bear in their allocation. And then you've also got the Financial advisor community who sits and talks to a lot of families who are contemplating just kind of like next generation type moves. How would you counsel an investor right now in this kind of era of AI? Like hey, how do we think of the redemptive edge of not losing sight of the people, but also how do you go attack the opportunities and skate where the puck is going? What's kind of been some of your counsel, um, as a venture investor, um, just to, to the investing ecosystem in this kind of realm we're in right now.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a difficult moment as an investor to make heads or tails of where to put your capital. For sure. You know, AI is real. The scale of investment is unprecedented. So not ignoring it for sure, right? We can't, we can't ignore the technology. That would be foolish. But history also tells us that, you know, these sort of technology waves create value unevenly. A handful of companies become extraordinarily valuable, others disappear. So when we think about, you know, concentration and winner take all dynamics, I think that that is ever more prescient in this moment than it has been in the past. So we look at it through the lens not of which AI model wins, but more so, which people are uniquely positioned to create value with AI, um, because the technology is accessible and more so every single day. But what's scarce is insight, judgment, lived experience, understanding a customer pain so deeply that you can actually apply AI the way others can't, and then trying very hard to ignore sort of FOMO bubbles and continue to focus in on, you know, the best investors aren't just investing in AI companies, they're investing in smart people who will use the tool well and solve meaningful problems in sustainable ways. So we're not looking at slapping an AI wrapper and some, you know, AI language on something, but like, where does your domain expertise become more valuable, not less. And that places a premium on things like creative leadership and human intensive skills. And you know, I spend a lot more of my time focusing on the people because the technology is going to continue to develop and advance.

Speaker C: Maybe talk a little bit, Donna, I'd love to just hear you riff on, um, as you think about geography, as you think about industry, as you think about heuristics of the founders that you, um, get excited about, like what would be two or three examples of things that you've seen in the last year, uh, in the current life and times that we're living through, what gets you excited, what gets you optimistic, what gives you hope?

Speaker D: It's so fun to see people that we would never expect to be doing things with AI to be like, let me show you what I've, I've coded this weekend. And you look at what they built and you're like, wait, you're an ER nurse who's got zero tech skills and never been to a startup weekend. And you took this deep expertise you had and literally plugged in a bunch of stuff to Claude and cloud code, and you created something really incredible and by the way, useful because you're living that problem every day, right? So our builders at Surtracker, that's exactly who they are and what they did. Or you've got Matt who, you know, speaking of animals, visiting podcasts, he's a dog breeder, he's a dog shower, does the Westminster Kennel Club show every year. And, you know, looked at the tech and went, this is terrible. It was built in probably 1972 and couldn't we do better? And I don't know anything about it, but I'm gonna go try to figure it out. And he created Showpoints and it's hitting the national stage like wildfire. And he's not a, he's not your stereotypical entrepreneur. He lives in Tulsa and he's a communications guy working for a big company, not a techie. And I love that. Right, because that's really where the cool potential is, is like, I don't care what your background is. Like, you've stumbled on a problem that someone needs solved. You don't need to solve a billion dollar problem to create a really meaningful company and make a good living and create wealth for your family and returns for your investors. There's a lot of opportunity there.

Speaker C: You know, as you're talking, Donna, one of the things that strikes me is, um, in the same way that 3D printing really democratized the idea of manufacturing and product design, AI is doing something similar in terms of democratizing the ability to build software and applications for people that don't have a graduate computer science degree from Harvard. These are normal folks who are able to now, because of AI, conceive of ideas that they are maybe unique or have insights that they are uniquely positioned to have. Like the ER nurse that you mentioned, um, it's kind of a cool thing that I hadn't fully thought through before.

Speaker D: And if we think about where, where we have opportunities to have innovation that actually can make a positive impact and bring thriving and create the kind of society that is opportunity for more, it turns out people who have lived experience and deep domain expertise with the problem set tend to have unique ideas. The challenge is that they've never really been in a position to be able to build. And we've tried to solve that by introducing them to ecosystems and methodologies and books and go read Lean and all these things. But it's still complicated and it's still clunky. And now literally, if I give you a couple of tools and some AI guides, you can spin that business up, uh, in an afternoon. And the new model for launching a company is build, learn, rebuild.

Speaker A: So

Speaker D: condenses the time frame and by the way, it changes the capital dynamic because to launch a company, you know, typically used to take on average 30, 35k to build an MVP. You don't need 35k to build an MVP today. You need cloud code, you need a $20 Cloud Pro subscription. That's what you need. And you need 20 bucks. I'll give it to you. Like, go build it. And it, it really changes the game. And so we think about are people raising millions of dollars in capital? They don't. You can do user generated content, AI generated content. On marketing, like every aspect of building a startup is dramatically different than it was six 12 months ago. And like our company is a great example. We're building an AI platform. We have a full marketing engine, a full delivery engine. We're a tiny company and we're able to do that because of the power of AI. And now the downstream effect is we're contributing to the startups create fewer jobs problem. But that just means we need more nurses and bartenders and doctors and disability attorneys and dog show exhibitors to build things that people want and people are willing to pay for.

Speaker B: I love it. Then you kind of tie it back all the way to like our initial point and Donna, our reason for having you, we're very grateful to have you on the podcast, you know, we're talking about, you know, this just what it means to be American and just like just the privilege and blessing it is for all of us to live where we live. This 250 year old American experiment that I hope prolongs for another 250 and then well beyond that. And one of the words that we hear tossed around a lot and Elon has said it and you know, everyone can kind of say what you will about Elon, but like he has talked about in this realm of AI, uh, just like the, the pursuit of abundance in this. And we as believers truly know in God's economy what abundance looks like. And it is getting out of the scarcity mindset and just knowing that Our God is so creative and so much bigger and unfathomable than we could ever imagine. And, ah, in this wave of technology, he is still on his throne. And Donna, like you're talking about whether there's going to be new abundance created that none of us expected in different realms and ways that it was unfathomable. Because now anyone can just, hey, I'm going to go solve this problem and I no longer need the $50,000, you know, seed check to go build the MVP. And then I need to go hire the engineer. I can actually go take a stab at this myself. And I might be onto something. And so fun to riff on. Um, fun to tie it back to just what makes this country so special as we celebrate its birthday and as we close, as we ask at the close of every podcast. And both of you guys are going to get this question, um, let's take it back to the word. Let's take it back to scripture. Um, what's God been teaching you and through His Word, uh, that you'd love to share with our audience? Donna, we'll start with you and then Luke will go to you.

Speaker D: Sure. I mean, for me, where God has had me is that we often think of the Bible as being filled with heroes, but it's really a book of broken people. We think about Moses was overwhelmed when, you know, he asked God to kill him. And Jeremiah was deeply, emotionally exhausted and cursed the day he was born. And Elijah asked God to take away his life. And on and on and on. There are examples that when God calls people to do big things, it's not all sweetness and light. It's often messy and hard and emotionally exhausting. But we serve a God that can do amazing things with that, and that gives me hope. And what's interesting, just reflecting on that, to tie it back to this conversation, that, uh, God has been just continually pressing on my heart, that this is one of those moments where he can do really incredible things with this thing that we are approaching with fear when we could be approaching through this lens of abundance and using it as an inspirational moment to really honor the talent and the gifts that he's put in all of us. So, um, I'm personally very optimistic about the possibilities for the next 250 for our country.

Speaker B: Come on, Luke, take us home.

Speaker C: Two examples, um, uh, from scripture of individuals, uh, that are re risking, uh, so one is, uh, the woman from Luke 7, 37, 38. The, uh, woman who, um, poured out the alabaster jar of perfume and then washed Jesus feet with her hair. Ah, woman that was in a difficult situation, kind of caught up in some controversy, some shame, and, uh, decided to re risk it all, um, because she was living out of an abundance, in a trust that was remarkably, um, risky because she had a grace and appreciation, uh, and gratitude for what she knew Jesus had done for her. So I would do for her. So I think that's, uh, some inspiration I get from scripture. The other one is the boy John six, uh, bring in the entirety of what he had for lunch, uh, with, uh, five loaves and two fish. And I gave them all. And, uh, so Henry and I have talked a lot about this recently about this idea of kind of re risking, you know, for us to think about doing that today. You know, what do we bring? Maybe a couple of the loaves, maybe half a fish, I don't know, something.

Speaker B: A piece of the asset allocation.

Speaker C: So those are two examples of kind of re risking from scripture that are inspirational to me and just trying to remind myself. It's the prosperity paradox that we live in here in the US 250 years in. There's a lot more people living under it today than were in this place in 1776. And so we need to aggressively re risk, uh, otherwise we get lulled into this stupor of prosperity and comfort and building bigger barns and all this. And so, uh, you know, we have to aggressively swim the other direction because the gravitational pull of everybody around us and of society more broadly is to take, uh, risk off and to diversify and to not lean in. So I love, uh, Donna, what you're doing with builders and backers, I think it's pushing people towards the right mentality and encouraging people in a very broad based entrepreneurial perspective, not just a venture capital entrepreneurial perspective perspectives to get in the game and to re risk. So I'm really grateful for what you shared.

Speaker D: Thanks.

Speaker B: Amen. Yeah, friends, go, go look it up. Builders and backers dot com. Share it with that person that you know that needs to go re risk or, or get off the sidelines and get out there, young person who, who knows who it might be. And so look up Donna and her work at Builders and Backers. Um, folks, I hope this podcast finds you doing something really fun and epic with your family for the fourth of July. Um, thank you for joining us. This is a special edition of Marks on the Markets, and we're just grateful to have you. For Donna Harris and Luke Rash, I'm Richard Cunningham and, uh, we will catch you next time. Thank you all.

Speaker A: Come for content. Stay for community. Join a faith driven investing group online or in person. Visit faithdriveninvestor.org that's faithdriveninvestor.org.