Noob School - Insights from a Startup Growth Leader: Matt Dunbar

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Today on Noob School, we’re joined by Matt Dunbar, Co-Founder and Managing Director of VentureSouth. With a distinguished career in venture capital, Matt has been instrumental in driving growth for countless startups. In this episode, he shares his journey, the lessons he's learned, and his unique perspective on how venture capital and sales are intertwined. Discover the strategies and insights that have made Matt a key player in the industry, and gain valuable knowledge from his experiences and expertise. Get your sales in rhythm with The Sterling Method: https://SterlingSales.co I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

New School All right, welcome back the Noob School episode 123, 123 of the podcast. Can you believe it? I can't. They tell me it's been two and a half years, but anyway, we're at 123

and we've got a special guest to celebrate this wonderful number. Mr. Matt Dunbar, welcome Matt. Thanks, John. Glad to be here. Yes, sir. Matt has become, I would say, quite an important part of business.

emerging business in the southeast, he runs Venture South, and he runs the upstate Angel network, both of which find and invest in the very best emerging tech companies, right, in the Southeast. And let's start by you telling us a little bit more about what these companies do and how long you've been at it, just give me the whole, give me the skinny on it. Yeah, yeah, happy to. So the upstate Carolina Angel Network was the genesis of what has become Venture South. Okay.

So You Can is the acronym for Upstate Carolina Angel Network. We launched in early 2008, which, as you may recall, was an interesting year in the economic history of our country. But there were some silver linings to that, namely that we hadn't already started investing and so we didn't have a portfolio that went under during that time. Had we started two years earlier, that probably would have killed us. But that bought us some time to try to figure out how to put this angel investor network together. And for those it may not be familiar, an angel investor is an individual that's investing their own money in a risky startup that's not a direct friends and family connection,

as opposed to a venture capitalist who raises money from institutions primarily and then invest on behalf of the, institutions an angel investor is risking their own capital and so there was this movement that had started to grow across the country around that time partly as a result of the dot-com bust where individual investors started to get together to try to learn from each other how to invest in startups and maybe not make some of the same mistakes that had been made during the dot-com era so angel groups started to emerge there were a group of leaders in Greenville that wanted to put a group together they decided to try to hire

somebody to organize and run the group. I happened to be in a transition at that point in my career and was in Atlanta at the time, but started networking because I had set my sights on trying to land in Greenville, happened to literally bump into one of the gentlemen that was organizing the group at a luncheon event in Greenville. We had a chat, and ultimately that led to me becoming the inaugural managing director for the upstate Carolina Angel Network in 2008. The group that put together next in the first place?

So I wasn't here, so I don't know all the nuance of exactly how those groups overlap, but Next was involved in helping organize the interest meetings and facilitating the conversations around this topic. Okay. And so that was a very integral part of getting the group together that we then launched in April of 08. And so what you can was was a local network of investors that want to invest capital in startup companies in the hopes of growing the entrepreneurial ecosystem. and obviously generating attractive returns from those investments.

So we started out in 2008 with about 70 investors in the spring of 2008. Of course, the financial crisis unfolded over the coming month. So we pretty quickly skinned down to about 50 investors over the course of the next year. But again, that bought us some time to try to figure out our processes and our approach and start to generate some deal flow. And lo and behold, we started to make investments slowly over those first couple of years. but then an interesting dynamic emerged where we started getting phone calls from folks around us and other communities in the area asking us how we started this angel group because one of the things that people had discovered around this time was that all net job growth in the economy comes from startups. So big companies obviously have lots of jobs, but lots of big companies die or shrink or layoff people.

And so the net job growth comes from young companies that grow fast. So in the aftermath of the financial crisis, everybody says, how do we create jobs? We need startups. Lots of community started accelerators to try to support startup companies during that era, but they pretty quickly ran into the problem that, well, we have these startups, but where do we find capital to help them grow if they want to have a chance to succeed? So we started fielding calls about putting angel groups together,

and it didn't take too long to sort of come to the conclusion that given the depth of capital and the depth, or I should say the lack of depth of capital and deal flow in our communities in this part of the world, it was hard to imagine a successful independent network of these groups on a standalone basis. So we started to think about the economies of scale of taking our model with an established pipeline and process, and if we could bolt more capital, more investors, and more investor brains on that platform, that would potentially be a much better way to tackle this problem collectively across the region rather than just doing only in Greenville. Because the truth is there's only so many viable early stage companies in a place like Greenville,

the size of Greenville, that there's really not a sufficient deal flow to make that model work because of the inherent risk in the asset class. There's a very risky asset class. You expect over half the deals you do are going to fail. So you've got to diversify. And you've got to do that in a way that gives you a chance to build a portfolio. that can make returns over time. So we decided that the smarter strategy was to focus on the southeast at large,

where there's still a relative lack of venture capital historically. That has gotten better over time, but there's still relatively less venture capital here than there are in the venture hotspots you think about. So that gives us some advantages in terms of being able to negotiate the right kind of structure, having more pricing discipline and things like that, but also giving entrepreneurs a way to raise more money faster through this broad network of angel investors. Rather than having to scratch and claw to try to find $50,000 there, $25,000 there, we can aggregate $250,000, $500,000, even a million dollars through our angel investor network

that's now spread across the region. And so Venture South grew out of Ucan. And so Venture South today has about 550 investors spread across the southeast. We're in, we have groups of, of investors that meet regularly in 23 markets in the southeast. Wow. But it's really one network that's just dispersed, focused on trying to find and back the most promising startups we can find in the region so that we can ultimately not only obviously

try to make returns. That's job number one. If we don't make money, we're not sustainable. We go away. But there's an element of that process that we say we want to make money, have fun, and do good. So we're finding companies that are solving real problems in the world. That's really where the value proposition comes from.

We're betting on companies that are trying to solve significant problems, whether it's in technology or life science, et cetera. They're really doing some important things and making the world a better place. And then it's just a fun activity to be engaged in, to be around other smart people with lots of experience from lots of different industries that can help evaluate and advise these young companies as these founders try to do something that's extraordinarily difficult to do, which is to start from scratch and build a viable enterprise. So make money, have fun, do good. That's what we're trying to accomplish, and we do it

across the region. How many investors are there now? About 550 currently. So you have 500 bird dogs out there trying to say, hey, here's an interesting company. Let's take a look at this. That's right. Plus they're putting money in. They get a chance to put money in, right? Correct. So it's a model Instead of just committing a certain amount of capital to a fund, then someone invest on your behalf. As an angel investor in our network, you get to pick and choose stock, so to speak.

So you can look at an opportunity that comes through our process. You're never obligated to invest in anything, but if you like the opportunity, you can invest as little as $5,000, and then if we can collectively pull at least $100,000, then we'll make the investment in the company. We do have mechanisms for people that want to do this passively. They can invest in what's effectively an index fund,

the inside Venture South. So we have a sidecar fund. And so we do have people that allocate capital that way. They say, I like what you're doing. I like the asset class, but I don't have time, or maybe I'm just not interested in spending the time to figure out the individual deals. But I like the diversified pool. And so I'll allocate capital to that particular sidecar fund.

Well, 2008, 2018, so it's been, how long is that? 16 years? 16 years. I didn't remember because it's hard to believe. Right now, I would say anyone tuning in today would say this is a very successful situation you've created here for yourself and for the team that brought you in with over 500 investors all over the southeast. It's wonderful. But I can remember in 2008 or 2009, I really hardly knew you, but I would see you, and you were in an office about as big as this table. and it was

it was like the fish bowl it was a fish bowl and it was in a busy hallway and it was all window there was no and so he was just he was sitting here by himself

working and everyone would walk by and he'd be like hey you know you just couldn't get any work done right not the most efficient

office set up but it was great and kudos to next and Bob Hughes who supported us and gave us that space to get started out of so we really

enjoyed being there even though it forced you to meet everyone, I suppose. And that was great. That was great. Yeah. Well, it's just a heck of a story. Let's back up a little further here from Rock Hill, South Carolina. Which high school did you go to? Northwestern High School. Northwestern, okay? Go Trojan. Did you know you want to be in this kind of field in high school? Never crossed my mind. What were you thinking back then?

Well, I went to college to become an engineer. So I studied chemical engineering at Clemson. I like math and science and thought that's what I should probably do. And so I went and had a good experience and enjoyed learning that. I went to work in industry as a chemical engineer with a company called Eastman Chemical. They're headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee. They spun out of Eastman Kodak back in the early 90s. Kodak based in Rochester, New York. Their chemical division was based in Kingsport.

So I went to work for them. I put my degree to work, did some chemical engineering for a couple of years in one of their plants that makes specialty plastics. And that was a good experience. I enjoyed it. But I also came to realize I didn't want to do that for the rest of my career. I had an opportunity inside the company

to move to what's called an application development role. So rather than just being in the plant helping make sure we made the right stuff, it was a customer-facing role. So I was an interface between the lab and the production and the customers in the field and sort of a two-way communication role of helping the customers understand

how to use the materials and then taking feedback from the market to our scientists and our folks in the lab. So here's how we might need to improve this product for this particular application. And I really enjoyed that. But I also pretty quickly realized I didn't know much about business. And so after four years at Eastman, I decided I wanted to go to business school. And I was young and single at the time and sort of looking for an adventure as well as an education. And so I rolled the dice and decided I would try to see if I could get into Stanford.

business school. And clearly I was the only South Carolinian that applied that year, and I guess they need to cover all the bases. So I got a spot in the NBA class at Stanford. So that was an eye-opening experience in lots of different ways, but, you know, wonderful opportunity to be exposed to things about the world I'd never known about, which led into, you know, being more aware of this investment world and entrepreneurship. and so got the chance to go to school. Of course, it's in California, which is a long way to drive to Clemson football games. So after I finished, I did my summer internship in Atlanta with a consulting firm and then decided that there was a lot to gain from that role if I could do

that for a while after school. There was just a really powerful skill set. I saw both from my classmates that came out of the consulting world and then in my internship where it was a great combination of the analytics which I already liked with a really powerful communication skill set and I liked that combination a lot so I thought I want to go learn how to do that better so I went to work for a firm called BCG the Boston Consulting Group but in their Atlanta office that they had offices all over the world so back to Atlanta so did that for about three years learned some of the skills I wanted and also got married in the meantime and decided I didn't They didn't want to be a road warrior for too long.

Yeah. And, you know, the travel wears on you pretty quickly. We wanted to start a family. And I'd always wanted to come back to South Carolina and try to find something interesting to do and contribute here. I was intrigued with Greenville. A lot of my Clemson friends were in Greenville. I saw a little bit of the activity that was happening and thought, you know, this might be a pretty dynamic place to be. So that's when I started that process of looking for something interesting to do and literally happened to bump into J.B. Holman at Clemson.

Clemson had just started its foray into getting more active in the Greenville community, so I showed up for one of their lunchons, didn't know anybody, got in line to get lunch, started chatting with the person next to me who turned out to be J.B. J.B. and Tim Reed were the two folks that were really leading the charge to found the U-Can group. So we started a conversation. And actually, at the end of that conversation, when I told him a little bit about my background and what I was doing, he asked me what I knew about venture and angel investing. And I said, well, I've studied it a little bit.

But, you know, I haven't done it. It's intriguing to me. I knew I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial after my early career was in a big company, and my work with BCG was all, you know, working for big companies. I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. So we met and he said, well, it's great to meet you. We're really looking for somebody that's got a venture capital background. So good luck.

We'll see you around. But it turns out in 2008, there were not very many venture capitalists running around in Greenville. So I think by, you know, Due to a lack of other available options, they called me back and said, hey, are you still interested? This was a couple months later, and I was still trying to decide what I wanted to do. And I said, yeah, I'm still interested, so we got together and off to the races we went in April of 2008. Well, gosh, there weren't many freshly minted Stanford MBAs running around either. I think we did pretty good getting you.

You've been so steady, just so steady, and staying after it. It's been awesome to see. One of the things that you learn the hard way in this business is it's a much longer game than you probably think it is at the beginning. You know, you think you're going to get into these companies and have, you know, a nice, easy trajectory to a three-year exit strategy. Three becomes five, becomes seven, sometimes becomes ten. And, you know, you have to learn that if you're going to invest in this space, that it's not as easy as it looks. It's easy to put the money to work. It's a lot harder to get it back.

So how many companies, how many active investments do you have right now? We've invested in a total of about 115 companies since 2008. Okay. Among those, about 73, I think, are active at the moment. Okay. The rest of either been shut down or sold. 73. And, you know, we're kind of a sales program here.

So let's talk a little bit about what you've learned by investing and watching these companies the one that didn't make it, the ones that are doing well. How is sales playing into that? Well, I would say that by and large, the failure mode for the ones that don't work is they don't sell enough. I mean, that's really, you know, sometimes it's a founder blow up or maybe there's a litigation issue, but by and large, they can't generate enough revenue. And at some point, a company has to fund itself with revenue, not just investor money. And so that's really a critical factor.

and not only what we evaluate, but obviously in the company having a chance to be successful. But when it's early, and you have a few data points, it's hard to extrapolate and know if those data points are really a trend line or if they're just an anomaly.

And that's the risk of early stage investing. You don't know if you're investing into a line or just into a random collection of a few data points. You try to diligence that the best you can, but you're really betting on the founders to go prove that out. And I'd say the best founders, have a really well-designed and orchestrated process

to grow their sales organization so they can do that repeatedly. And the ones that tend to struggle maybe either had, didn't do a good job of putting that sales structure in place, which is challenging. I'd love to hear some of your insights on that. But I think too often the founder kind of takes too much on themselves

and or the way they're able to land their first couple of deals, is not repeatable and sustainable, and they have a hard time making that transition into a scalable sales process. It's their cousin or where they were in school or something. Yeah, there's some relationship there that gives you a false signal that, hey, the market needs this

when really maybe it's just that one particular customer. I saw that. Do you remember the company, Ariba? It was a B2B company. Right before the dot com blew up, it was called Ariba. And we were trying to partner with him, and I went out and visited

they're at California somewhere and their CEO or the whole people and they were valued at like 20 billion or something and I said well show me your customer list they had 12 customers and I just eye-volening it I could tell that

I could point to eight of them that were connected to the CEO Purdue University did you happen to go to Purdue you know and like some of their investors like companies and stuff so anyway you're right Yeah.

The first couple of, I say get them. Get them in any way you can. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But then you've got to put something in place. Right.

I've seen, what I've noticed the most over and over again is it's kind of the one more feature people. It's like, how sales coming? Well, as soon as we get this mobile thing working better. Yep. I didn't ask you that, you know. And a founder or the co-founder, there's so many things. you can do in a startup, that you, if you're not smart about sales, you end up doing the things you like to do.

Yeah. Or you don't have a good enough filter on what you're hearing from the market. You're chasing that feature, thinking if I could just get this done, that's going to unlock this next wave of sales. And so I think that's part of the challenge in the art of being a great founder and early stage sales leader is really listening carefully to the market and really honing in on what really is the unlock that you need to get there. And yeah, too much time and too many resources are wasted chasing too many different features

or components that you think are really going to move the needle when ultimately they don't. And that's the challenge. Did you invest in 6 a.m. City? We did. We did. So I did just a tiny bit of work with them a couple years ago, just enough to watch and see what was going on. but they're going to be successful.

Well, they are successful, partially because Ryan can't help himself but to be a sales guy. Yeah. He's CEO. I mean, he's out there cutting deals and working the phone. He likes to do it. And there's no surprise that they're going to be successful. And if he was a feature guy, he could be in there designing another newsletter feature. And to case and point, I mean, they're in the process of shutting down one of the things they built

because it was a good idea at the time, but it's not generating the margins that they need, and so they're shifting focus to where they're able to generate better returns, and that's what they should do. And it's not to say you shouldn't experiment, but you've got to be very judicious about how much resource you invest in that experiment and having a discipline around when to know, when to kill something versus continuing to poor resources.

So one thing you asked me what I thought. I like to get, if you have a co-founder, and a co-founder, I like one of them to be the salesperson. And a lot of times I'll say, well, you know, the CEO's got to be the salesman. Well, maybe not. Maybe not. I mean, everyone can't be a salesperson. Maybe he can help or whatever.

But even if you don't have either one of those people, somebody has got to do nothing but sell. Yeah. It doesn't have to be even the founder. But if there's somebody, like when I started with Larry Blackwell, you know, he's an engineer. He was doing all this stuff and the product and the people and the services and the training. And he said, John, just do the selling. I'm like, I can help you with the lease. No, no, no, no.

I don't want you to do anything else. You've got a goal. You've got a comp plan. I don't need any help with anything else. And it kind of hurt my feelings at first. But now, of course, I know how important that decision was because that could have easily gotten all wrapped up and what the color scheme was going to be and what the new features should be.

Those are fun things to do. Sure, sure. But calling people on the phone all day, that's not as fun. Yeah, that's tough. So I think I would tell all your folks, somebody needs to focus on it. And it'll make it.

Because your founders will tell you, yeah, we're working on that. I make a few calls every morning if I have time. Who's got time? Yeah. Very rare. Yeah, no doubt. How many of those 70,

One, would you say has a real good sales leader? That's a good question. It would take me a minute to think through the Rolodex. And obviously within a portfolio of 73 companies, we have a wide range of the trajectory that they're on. But I would say that, you know, probably invariably, the ones that are on a nice, healthy growth trajectory have a strong sales lead. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm sure it's out there, but I've never seen a company that had a focused full-time effort on sales that wasn't making some progress. Yeah. Because you could always wait for the product to be better. But you can make progress today. Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, again, at the early stage we invest in,

we're still at a point where we're triangulating on some data points, trying to convince ourselves whether or not we think there's a product market fit there. Right. And so I do think in those early stages, again, back to trying to experiment and see if you can do it repeatedly. Like, I do think there's a period there where it's less certain if you're allocating the resources in the right direction on who you're selling to

or how you're trying to sell. And so we've seen some companies, you know, have to navigate that challenge. But when you have the right dedicated resource, that's really good at listening to the market. I think that's how you break through that conundrum early on and get to the point where you've got this. You really know the direction need to point the resources

to be able to scale. it up. Agreed. Maybe one other thing I'll say about sales from the founders is that's interesting in our role is that there's two sales that they have to make. If they're coming to us, they're trying to sell us on them and their company in addition to try to sell their product to the customer. And so the best founders can do both.

And that's a pretty rare skill set. But the best founders have to sell the value proposition of the company, not just the product, but the company to a group of investors. And so what we tend to tell investors is that, or excuse me, tend to tell founders who are trying to raise capital is that think of it as a sales process, you know. It's a different sale and it's a different audience, but you need to think of it as a sales process. And really for early stage investors, the thing you're trying to sell is credibility. Because investors, if they've been at this for any length of time, they need to. know how risk it is. They know how difficult it is to make these startups really successfully get

from zero to one and then one to many. And so they know the odds are long. And so, and they see a lot of different deals. We look at a lot of companies to try to find the ones that we'll invest in. So they see a lot of pitches. The founder is really, their job is to tell a credible story about how among all those different options and against those very long odds, this particular team and this particular company and this particular market opportunity is one worth betting on. And there's a painting of a picture that shows a clear path to how we generate a return on your capital in spite of those long odds and in spite of the challenge that we're very early and we're asking you to believe in a future state that we can't prove yet.

And so I think that's a real skill in art that the best founders figure out that at every step with a process of raising money, you're putting chips in the credibility bank and anything you do that undermines that credibility, whether it's telling a lie, not being prepared, not demonstrating what you've said you can or have done,

all those things take withdrawals from that credibility bank. And if you don't have a pretty good robust balance in that bank at the time, you know, it's time to call the question on investment or not, you're not going to be able to secure funding. Yeah. How many times have you seen someone who's really good at doing the sale to raise the money, but then not so good at selling to the customer? It's fairly common, actually. And so this is back to your point about co-founders. I mean, I think what tends to be really powerful is if you have a leader who's really good at selling the vision, and then it might be a CTO who's really the technology. you know, the driver of the technology or the product.

But somewhere in that mix, there's got to be somebody that really understands the market and knows how to get access to the right people in the market to get that sale in front of them, that product in front of them. And so whether it's a CTO or somebody else on the team, if it's not the two founders, it needs to be probably the next hire, that really has that insight and know-how to navigate that marketplace to get to the customers. Yeah. Well, that's the key.

I think someone's got to focus on it for sure. When you were at Stanford, was there any particular, any people that have gone on to be famous, like technology entrepreneurs that you've met out there? Yeah. I'm a peon among my classmates. Lots of folks have gone on to do. You're king around here.

Well, I love being here. But yeah, one of my classmates was the founder of Match.com. And the company that has gone on to grow and acquire a lot of companies in that space, one of my good friends and classmates became the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers. Nice. Actually architected the process, if you paid attention to the NBA back in those days. He was, he's an analytics guy and understood the value of draft picks. Okay.

He positioned them to be able to get the picks that led to Joelle and B. Okay. I remember that guy. But I remember the process. I remember there was some quoth. That was the label that was fun. Trust the process. We're working towards a bigger goal.

It's going to be painful in the short term, but we're playing a long game. Okay. That's pretty cool. And was there any particular thing you learned, any class or anything that was especially good? There were a lot. And like I said, you know, I was coming into it with an engineering background, not a business background. So I had so much to learn on every front.

And just being exposed to, you know, sort of the way the financial world works. and really the way business works. All of that was sort of a revelation for me and being able to learn not only from my professors, but my classmates who brought that experience to the table was invigorating and challenging and humbling. I mean, I was around some extraordinarily smart people. So I always thought I was reasonably smart,

and then I went there, and I thought, well, they've set the bar a little bit higher than what I had grown accustomed to. So, you know, there were, I really enjoyed corporate finance. I really enjoyed. I took an entrepreneurship class or two. There were a couple classes around leadership that were impactful. So all of that together and again, just the interaction with classmates.

And obviously you're in a place where you're surrounded by a lot of the world's talent in the technology space. So we had the opportunity to see and hear from a lot of those folks in the Valley. You know, Eric Schmidt coming in and teach a class, John Morgan at Cisco at the time. you know, a lot of insights that you gain from hearing those folks. They have a series called View from the Top, where a lot of those folks will come in and share their experiences. So I still have my notebook where I took a lot of notes from those talks. Good for you. Well, I'm glad you did that. That's wonderful.

I have a couple more questions. Then we can close up. Sure. What is your all-time favorite book? My all-time favorite book is a book called Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Okay. It is the story of Ernest Shackleton's voyage in the 19-teens to attempt to cross the Antarctic on land, a full crossing. But before they ever got a chance to do that, they got stuck in the ice.

And so this is an adventure story and a survival story about this crew of 20-something, 27 maybe, who got stuck in the ice and basically had to survive for two years. years in Arctic conditions. Like a little tent thing? Well, they didn't have tents. So they stayed on the ship for a while, but eventually the ship was getting broken up by the ice, so they had to get off the ship and find a way to survive and traverse the ice.

And ultimately, they were able to salvage some of the boats, the rescue boats from the bigger ship. And Shackleton and a couple of his guys made it to another. island from which they also launched another ship, another boat to get to elephant island where there was a whaling outpost. But the story of their survival is fascinating. It's unbelievable. Like it gives us a great perspective on how soft we are today, like the conditions that these hardy people endured is hard to fathom. None of them died. They all survived after two years in unbelievable conditions. It's also a great

story about leadership because Shackleton really took some actions that were that resulted in people surviving when they easily could have all died. And dealing with startups, it's a great story for startups because every time you think they've got something solved and there's going to be a rescue, a new challenge props up. And they couldn't anticipate it, but now they've got to deal with it or they're going to die. And so it's this series of challenges that, present themselves for which you have to solve a problem that's, you know, life or death. Yeah. And do that in a way that he got everybody to follow along.

It's just pretty remarkable. A great leadership story, a great adventure story. I just have to listen to that one. Oh, that's a fantastic. What about favorite word? My favorite word, I will say, that's a tough one, but I'm going to say serendipity. Serendipity, partly because it's fun to say. Yeah.

partly back to my story about how I stumbled into getting involved in angel investing to begin with. That was a serendipitous moment, a happy accident. I could not have planned that. I had no way to anticipate that was going to happen. I wasn't angling for that particular career, but I just happened to show up and happen to engage with somebody that led to a conversation that opened up an opportunity. And so I think there's a lesson in that, you know, just, showing up and engaging with people, you never know as you turn over those rocks, what's going to emerge. And so I like to think about trying to create serendipity.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I coach young people all the time to get involved in as many things as possible. You know, whether it's, you know, volunteering for downtown alive or whether it's volunteering for a TED Talk. or joining a club or a group or playing picketball, but anything where you can just meet a lot of people because it increases your odds of something serendipitous happening. The other thing that you did by getting an MBA to begin with,

particularly one from Stanford, is that also when that moment happens that you meet somebody, you have more chances to make something of it, right? Absolutely. You could have done that. You know, if you never went to Clemson at all, you just showed up at this thing, it probably wouldn't get out of the job, you know. So you prepared not specifically for that, but for a broad range of opportunities.

Yeah. So I'm happy all that worked out. Is there anything that you want to promote today? Well, we always like to promote Venture South. So for anybody that might be interested in learning about early stage investing, we have a lot of folks that are new to that asset class. I've never done it before. We spent a lot of time on education for our investors, because like anything else, there's a lingo you need to learn and there's a learning curve.

You have to climb to give yourself a decent chance to be successful with an early stage investment portfolio. So we're always recruiting investors that want to get involved. Obviously, we're also always recruiting companies that are promising and want to raise some capital, and we try to bring our network to bear to help those companies along. And what would that look like? What's your typical emerging company look like? revenues and stuff like that. Yeah. So we are, we consider ourselves primarily seed stage investors, seed in Series A. So it's beyond an idea on a napkin. There's got to be a real business. Depending on the nature of the business, more than likely there's at least a customer or two.

So there doesn't have to be a lot of revenue, but we would like some evidence that the dogs will eat the dog food, so to speak. And so typically we're investing as the first sort of non-frients. and family money and around that might be anywhere from half a million to a couple million dollars. And the company doesn't necessarily have to have a minimum threshold of revenue, but we need some evidence that the market is there and customers will buy. So usually there's a bit of revenue. It could be relatively small, but then we also will engage with companies at a series A stage and they might have a few hundred thousand or even a couple million of revenue at that stage.

And venturesouth.com? Dot vc. Dot v.c.Venture south. dot VC, Matt, thank you very much. Thanks, John. It's a pleasure. Appreciate it. Yeah. It's awesome.

Great to see you. All right.