Noob School - Scott Millwood Back on Noob School: Founderville and the Future of Startups

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

In this episode of Noob School, I catch up with Scott Millwood, a familiar voice in the Greenville startup scene and co-founder of Founderville, a venture capital fund based right here in Greenville, SC. Scott shares his journey after Datastream, diving into some of the ventures he’s led and the successes he’s achieved along the way.We spend time discussing his current focus at Founderville. The fund is dedicated to supporting B2B SaaS startups, helping promising companies scale and thrive in today’s competitive market. Scott gives insight into his role with the fund, the kinds of startups they look for, and the strategies they’ve used to foster growth in the Greenville tech ecosystem.Looking ahead, Scott shares exciting plans for the future, including the anticipated launch of Fund II. It’s clear that Founderville isn’t just a fund—it’s a growing part of the Greenville startup community, and Scott’s dedication to supporting founders is a big reason for its impact.Throughout the episode, we also touch on investing, entrepreneurship, and the lessons Scott has learned from years of building businesses. Whether you’re an aspiring founder, investor, or just curious about the Greenville tech scene, there’s a lot to take away from this conversation.Get your sales in rhythm with The Sterling Method: https://SterlingSales.coI'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/3tiaxsLSubscribe 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#salestrends

All right, welcome back to News School episode 152. 152. And the funny thing about today is I've got Scott Millwood with me, of course. And we have these marketing folks, real fine folks. They gave me some research on Scott and gave me like four pages of things to ask him. I forgot to tell the marketing folks that I've known Scott since 1988. I think. Yeah, at least.

Yeah, yeah, roughly. Yeah, yeah, probably it. And so we can probably think of some things. to talk about. Yeah, yeah, let's don't talk about the old old days.

Well, the old days were, you know, I was running very small inside sales team and having some success and thought I was

really smart, and you came along and said, well, what are you doing for the larger sales? I was like, what larger sales?

I mean, you'd have this experience selling enterprise deals and I had not even seen it before. And so, you know, we put the peanut butter

and chopped Gellie, right, worked, right. And the rest is history. But Scott really helped us figure out how to sell bigger deals. And heck, by the end of our association, you know, we're selling molten $10, $25 million deals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, good job. Hey, right.

Got a mention in the book. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. So, yeah, so Scott and I work together. At first company was Datastream. It's a long time ago.

But since then, Scott's gone on. You know, he's not a one-hit wonder. He just gets hit after hit. And his probably his biggest success came soon after Datastream. He started Customer Effective, which, as I recall, was a kind of a Microsoft CRM kind of customization company. Straight up, straight up. Yeah. Took the experience of building out CRM inside Datastream.

Yeah. And Microsoft's coming to market with a product. And we were shopping Datastream around at the time. I'm going to set up my next thing to go do something I knew something about, which is automating sales and service and marketing. That's a great, such a great, great soundbite here because you already knew sales of marketing. You'd already had that experience. And then I think the company asked you or you asked the company,

could you help figure out how to get this all sorted out for the company, what's CRM to go? And so all that research led you to think this is something that could be its own company. Right, right. And you knew how to do it. Knew how to do it, right. And didn't need to go raise capital to do it because it was, you know, started out as basically. Like a distributor. Resel from Microsoft and then add consulting services on top, which was kind of a low capital way to get into a business.

And importantly, by not having to raise capital, we had had it with earnings. per share and analyst calls and public. And that was a great experience. Yeah. I didn't want to sign up for more of that level of, you know, scrutiny. Investor questions. Right, right, right. Yeah.

Unbelievable. Well, yeah, and you had Michael Elliott, one of your longtime friends with you. And then after we sold the company, a whole lot of our talent was available, and you picked off some great people. Yeah, just, you know, going back to the core, people, people that you trust, people that you know. You know, I got phone calls and then, you know, I mean, it's inevitable after a company's acquired. There's a little bit of like looking around what's next.

We happen to be kind of catching a little bit of traction and it was working. Yeah, I mean, I think we probably had at least a dozen, you know, data streamers that came on. We kind of perfected the model and knew what we were looking for, you know, elsewhere in the country. Right. Well, given that that was, what, 15 years ago? Yeah, yeah. We sold in 2014 to Attachia. If you were doing that now with today's technology and with AI, what, if anything, would you do different? Man, I mean, it's a fruit basket turner. I would say from a classic software reseller kind of model, there's still opportunities out there, but they're not as clear cut as they were.

You know, back in the day of, you know, software resale, you could find numerous companies that were looking for a channel. And they would pay healthy margins. I mean, it was, you know, 30, 40 points on software resale. You could make a living on that alone. Didn't really even need the consulting. Now, you know, most software and technology, they've got a direct-to-consumer ability. And so, you know, they've slimmed that margin down and down and down and down. And you really got to be good at selling.

the value-ad consulting side of things. Right. And that's probably how we differentiated ourselves versus just being a softer resale shot at customer effective. We took a consulting approach that was more well-defined that you would typically find at the upper mid-market, and we took it sort of down market, more of a professional approach, but the people in the mid-and-lower market had never seen that before.

So they appreciated that, you know, that approach. I think that would still be consistent. If I were doing anything right now, I would probably look at, you know, how do you go out and help people take AI from this sort of, you know, nebulous concept? It can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people and apply it. What do you do? You don't have to invent the algorithm to be able to take that and apply it. And that same consulting methodology and focus on live.

listening to the customer, understanding the problem, and figuring out a way to solve that problem, you can do that today in spades because there's so much fear and confusion in the market. Yeah, yeah. So kind of an AI consulting shop. Yeah, right. Consulting is not a good word, but. Right. I've thought about that.

Not that I'm like the best person to do that kind of work, but it's just like it's a goldmine. I mean, every single company wants to use AI to improve their earnings. And most of them don't know how to do it. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Sitting into smart people. It's guidance, right?

The same thing you do with sales consulting. The same thing I do with, you know, operations consulting. And same thing we do with advisement on the, you know, the funds or the portfolio companies in the fund is you're just trying to figure out, you know, what can you do to make it just a little bit better. Just, you know, we were talking about earlier. You don't have to turn it into an A plus. You just got to get it from a C minus to a B minus and move the needle.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, I tell people all the time, you know, when I was a kid and I would read like ink magazine and fortune and all that stuff, my sights were set on, you know, Steve Jobs and, you know, these unbelievable. And that's not, I mean, I get it maybe, okay, but how about just set it right here? Right. Get here first.

Get there first. Once you get like three quarters up the ladder, then look up there and see what that would look like. Right, right. Because that's a better goal. It's a better goal. Yeah, yeah. I mean, not to jump too far ahead, but it's part of our Founderville. com.

One is to just take these companies that are local to Greenville that have a good idea, that have struggled to go out and get backing. Yeah. And to take them from 100K in recurring revenue annually to a million. Yes. You know, it's changes the game. Over a couple of years, if you do that, it's a game changer. And you've demonstrated clear growth on that, obviously. Yeah.

But you haven't said to them, hey, you got 100K ARR company today. And we're going to be doing 100 million. Yeah. And you're going to be worth a billion dollars. That's the VC mindset that you find all over the country, particularly West Coast. Right. It's either that or nothing. It's either home, not just home run. It is moonshot.

And that's not, we just don't think that's for everybody, right? I mean, a good solid hit is we got you from 100K to a million in occurring. Your value as an organization for your investors and for you went from, say, $2 million to $10 million? Or maybe nothing to 10 million. Nothing to 10 million, right? Fantastic here. And for us as a fund, wow, that's a knock on the cover off the whole. Interesting, just another, if we're going to go side note, but you know, you just said a million to a million in recurring revenue to 10 million in enterprise values.

That's 10 to one ratio, which is fairly normal for these higher growing, interesting companies. One of the things that happened to us as soon as we, I think we worked together. maybe for 10 years as a private company and then we went public and so immediately we had a stock price and we knew how many shares of stock we had right so we knew what our value was and we also knew how that price was driven yes it's driven by earnings per share right it was gonna be what 10 times earnings or I can't remember what the number was now and so we all kind of had this thing to gather around.

Right. Let's get this thing up. Just drive it up. Let's get his EPS up and so on. So that'll be worth 20, you know. Yeah. And I guess for what you're doing now, that's an important lesson to them is to say, you know, this year,

if you try to sell your $100,000 a year company, you'd probably get nothing for it. Right. But when you get to a million, it's worth $10. There's something you got. Two million, it's probably worth $25. Yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing is, you know, in the,

in the small market and particularly where we are and you know fund one thesis is greenville founders investing in greenville founders there's a little bit of a difference in that valuation that sometimes you get guys that are that are you know reading reading too much you know they're they're reading all the uh all the uh trade press about valuations and they think oh you know i got a million recurring revenue i'm a 25 million dollar company and it just doesn't hold water right so in In our southeast and in our little sub sub to that, the ratios are probably more like a 5x1 revenue and recurring, depending on the growth rate. But if you've got, as we do in a couple of our portfolio companies now, a couple hundred percent growth year over year where they're going from, you know, a starting zero to a million over the course of a couple years, you know, boom, you've got it. That obviously tails off a little bit as they get bigger and bigger and bigger.

But if you're doing a million and you're going a million to three million in a year, okay, you know, now you're talking about a seven, eight, nine, ten X to be a multiple on that. As long as they're going someplace, you know, they see where they're going and it's not all or nothing. But let's back up a little bit because I want to talk about, I want to talk. So very successful data stream exit, very successful customer, effective exit as the founder, co-founder. And then you went to Yesflow, and you started another company called Yesflow, which, you know, you were located right across from where I live. You used to let me use your conference room, which I appreciated. But my recollection was, again, this was back to something to do with the CRM and sales, and it was using technology to make it, to solve the problem.

I've got this right. The salespeople won't update the CRM because they're too busy or lazy or whatever. And so this was a way to make it easier for them to do that or even force them to do it. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. We were scratching on AI in 2017. We were scratching on AI.

You were the right guy to do this. It was the right thing to do. It wasn't quite the right time. So early, right? So we're scratching on it in 2018. And, you know, the world is coming at everything from an app standpoint, right? and our known problem from years of implementing CRM for enterprise systems and using it ourselves that both customer effective as well as data stream is people don't really like to update things.

I mean, salespeople are busy. They want to make calls. They want to talk to customers, go to meetings. They really don't want to update, you know, something that's cumbersome. So the goal was, let's make that super easy so you can, you know, talk to your watch. You can talk to your phone. We got all that working. And it was all pipelined in to.

you know, back in Microsoft Cloud, Azure AI, natural language understanding, automated speech recognition, all those models working well, and we got it in place with enterprise customers, right? New Corps, Blue Shield. So all that sounds like it's clicking, and they were paying us. So, you know, a million in revenue, right? We're clicking along pretty good. Fast forward into about 2021, and you start to see that the, you start to see that the, you

actual technology that we're built on, Microsoft's back-in and Azure, a little long in the tooth, hard to work, really, really cumbersome for our developers to make those prompts work. And we were using that language of prompting in 2020, 2020, 2021 as ways to think about how to interact with the technology to go grab the back-end information, display it, update it, push it back in. it's just brittle. It just wasn't as good. So put a pause on that for a second. Chat GPT is coming along. Bill Gates is meeting with Sam Altman. He's an early investor in Open AI. He's having all these conversations. And Gates is having these epiphany wow moments. And this is a guy that has seen his share of stuff, right? He is seeing technology come along that in his words, blows his mind.

that it can happen and it's moving so fast. So in about mid-22, we're hearing what this is. And when it released in 22, and we got a good look at, you know, ChatGPT, it was like, uh-oh, everything we got on the back end is not going to work like that is. That is going to go to the moon, right? And luckily, we had an out with attachment. and we sold all that technology into Itachi and essentially cleared pretty well

to take something that's AI early stage that wasn't built on the LLM and go, all right, you guys figured out from here, we're going to go do some other stuff. Yeah, well, good for you, man. I mean, getting to a million. I mean, I just, I loved the idea.

You know that. But I remember, you know, I'll be the oldest guy in the room, but there's a show called Get Smart, you know, a long, long time ago. And one of his things was he had the telemed. phone in the shoe. Right, right.

And anyway, I just love the idea if I'm a rep, you know, and I've got my, I guess, my Apple Watch on. And it knows, it's synced up with my CRM and it knows that I just had a meeting with Scott Millwood and I have not updated the thing and it's been 30 minutes. Yeah. He goes, beep, beep, beep, beep, you know, and up, John, what's the update? And I talk to it. Yeah.

I mean, anyway, it's... So it's happening, right? I mean, the crazy thing is you're now, I mean, with GPT4, you're talking. to your chat. You're talking to it, right? And it responds back with a voice. I know. It's so hard to do it.

It is so hard for that to have. So, but is that, are they doing it with the CRM? I mean, are they talking to the CRN that way? So it will be there. You know, the, and that's probably one of those things. You say, connect this to my CRM and it'll do it, yeah. That private data pool being connected to, you know, kind of public LLM, those connectors are being aggressively pursued and there's lots of companies out there that are they're kind of making that

happen but you know there's an interesting thing and kind of all up AI adoption I guess at the enterprise is there's a lot of fear of security there's a lot of fear about the data getting loose right what happens to our customer data what happens to our proprietary information about customers yeah happens our product data if it gets out in the wild all that's you know still big fear and I think what's going to happen over the course the next couple of years is people are going to start to see that embracing it and connecting it can be done safely, can be done through, you know, through federated identification and that sort of thing, and it'll become more reality. But, you know, enterprises, as you know, they're slow to adopt, they're slow to change. You know, I saw something

the other day from an MIT study saying that 97% of all AI projects at the enterprise level are failures. Well, yeah, it's like it's like the first inning. They're just experimenting. And, you know, I'm going to guess two years from now, you're going to start to see that go to 50% are successful. And then those who are behind are going to be so far behind that they may never catch up. And that's the kind of transformative change at the enterprise. This is the, I guess, the early adopter phase.

You think about back in our market of maintenance, when people were going from nothing to a computerized system, they would say things like, we need our guys out there fixing things. not on the computer all right. And what are they going to be doing on that computer? Right. I mean, those kind of things. And now, of course, you can't,

legally you can't not have a system or track everything you're doing. Well, what a great experience, and I'm glad it ended up with a sale. Yeah, and, you know, probably the biggest thing that came out of it is an awareness of the big transformational change from, you know, deterministic systems

where, you know, in kind of AI, AI land, it's all probabilistic, right? Deterministic is if then else. And probabilistic is if then maybe likely, right? Huge change. But just to know that early on has helped me to evaluate lots of personal investment options, you know, in Viti, the list goes on, like things you kind of go, ah, yes, they're on that tidal wave that's coming, but also even at the fund. level of understanding which of these ventures are going to get wiped out and which of these ventures are either insulated from the change to a degree that they're not going to be impacted tremendously and which of these ventures like a chip.com.

Are going to ride it and can they ride it successfully as something other than just an LLM wrapper, you know, right? Just a prompt tool. Can they do something more than that? Right, right, right. Yeah, you mentioned one of your investments is chip. Chip.com. Yeah.

So when I was doing my, on my website, it's called a sales professor, but my avatar. I love that. I love it. I had been trying for four years to figure out a way. I remember you talking about. And you could ask me questions and I would answer anything I knew about sales. And that was, you know, and we tried all these people. People will quote me like 150 grand to do it, all this stuff.

I almost did it one time. I was like, damn it, I'm going to do this. And I went through four different developers, and I finally found one, David Barry, who just graduated from Peter Barth's Code School. Yeah. It's like 27 years old. Yeah.

And he's like, oh, yeah, okay, I can, hold on. Let me look around and see what I can find. And he found chip.com. And he found one other thing called H-GEN, I think. Put them together. And sure enough, now we've got it works. And it was not expensive. Yeah.

I think it took him two hours. Right. Right. There's 150 bucks down the drain. Anyway, but it's just amazing. That guy with Chip done it. And the funny thing was that, you know, we found this technology after searching the internet and the guys in Greenville.

Greenville, right, right. He's one of your investments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're excited about those guys. What do they do? You know, Hunter and Scott are, you know, Hunter's in Greenville. He's got his development team.

here. It's got up in Fargo. And, you know, they sort of backed into this market of recognizing that there are a lot of people out there. Your example is perfect. You want to be able to provide a service to your customers, right, to your prospects, to say, interact with me this way through a chatbot, right? To most people saying, how do I do a chat bot? How do I build a chat bot? How will it be unique to me? How can I give it a personality? How can I have the prompts that make sense for my domain. So what Chip.A.I. does is they source to all of the LLMs, but they have this built-in library of prompts that they can tune for specific vertical domains or just domains in general,

and they sell through a channel of people like your guy that said, oh, I found this, I'll build it for my customer. So that's kind of one of their unique things is they're working through consultants, They're working through marketing agencies. They're working through system integrators who want to build chatbots quickly and easily for their customers. Okay. Yeah, a unique model there. We like it.

They're growing great. Just had a big customer conference up in Fargo and got 50 of their big reseller customers come in. So that's always a good sign. That's amazing. Well, they were very nice to deal with and, you know, reasonably priced and the thing worked. I was like, damn, this is great. Yeah. Greenville.

Well, that takes us to the present. And you're doing, as I understand it, you're doing two things. Let's start with the consulting first. But, you know, you have a longtime friend who's got a great facial recognition software company for police departments. Yeah, agencies. Agencies. These had for a long time. Right.

Yeah. 20 plus years of growing this company locally here in Greenville, kind of a steady grower. Yeah. You know, good margin producer. And I do a little consulting work there really as kind of fractional COO. And I like doing that work because it sort of keeps me grounded in the day-to-day operations of a software and technology company, which is fraught with customer problems and employee problems and a way to apply AI, right? Taking that facial recognition and fingerprint identification, putting it into a structured database and getting it out into these agency means.

DataWorks got 3,500 plus police agencies across the country. So, you know, if you're booking in New York or L.A. or Miami, it's on that software. So that's exciting. Yeah. And I like the, I like the day-to-day grind. I like, you know, I like to work. I like coming in. I like working with, you know, a team of people and helping them do better.

How much time do you spend there a week or working on a week? I'm probably half my time. 20 hours a week? Yeah, yeah, at least, right? I mean, it's probably like you. I'm always on my phone in the morning. I'm working. It's a constant kind of thing.

Well, you probably are too smart, but I tried to retire one time. I tried that. It does not take long turn into a pile of goo, man. Your brain stops working, you know. Yeah, no, it wasn't for me. It was a good, you probably had the same experience of, you know, it's good to sample it. It's good to have the opportunity to be able to make that choice and say, I think I'll try this path. And if this works, I'm going to stay with it.

And financially, I'll be good to go. What was great is that I was able to do that while my kids were still in high school. So I got to spend a lot of time, family time. Maybe I'd shortchanged that. Maybe. Nights on the road and that sort of thing. Four weeks in Europe. We figure out pretty quick, it's like, well, this is an interesting time.

Your gears move in a different way when you're in retirement mode. But I didn't love the disengagement from, you know, this phenomenal world of technology and business and how fast it moves and the interaction and the engagement. I love that. Yeah. I love it. It took me that time, though, to figure that out, but I do love that. I agree. And, you know, it keeps you, particularly in the technology area since it's changing so quickly, I think if we were like, you know, if it was something like a storage facility,

or something. Of course, we could enjoy that, but I mean, it's just much slower. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so, so, so, so, so you, you're doing that consulting. Yeah. Is there anything, I know you've been doing it for a little while, is there anything you can disclose that you've done that's really been helpful and? Oh, man. I mean, yeah, from, you know, back to CRM land. Yeah. We really kind of gut automated every process in the company. We did a classic you know, you know, snapshot of as is and built a 2B. Here's what we want to try to accomplish. Here's what we think it can drive.

A lot of that was building in resilience so that the repeatable processes would be more trusted. You know, management team was kind of at each other's throats a lot because of lack of understanding of their priorities, what's important, what should they be working on, who's got the ball on certain jobs and execution? Yeah. We just put all that into a platform, automated it. Luckily, using Microsoft CRM and that whole dynamics platform. And I leveraged my old customer effective gurus on a consulting basis to help me build that out.

And today we've got, I mean, in-flight right now, 250 projects. And roughly what we call work items are chunks of smaller work inside those. About 1,800 of those kind of flying in the, you know, flight throughout the company, connected to support, connected to accounting. So really the 360 degree, that's been fun because you take a vision of let's automate the 360 degree view of the customer and touch every part of the company and make that fly. It's not cheap to do it. It's a big investment. And part of that is you invest for the long haul, building that resilience. That's been great fun. Good. Just tremendous, you know, kind of applying the technology.

And within that, John, applying AI. So just recently, we've applied some AI to take documents that are given to customers for maintenance agreements, suck them through the, through chat GPT, copilot, Microsoft version, suck it into copilot, read that document and compare it to what assets we actually have on that customer in the actual database. And where there's a discrepancy on that, highlight that and go ahead and create the asset provisionally to say, let's make these things match up. So again, we got the right 360-degree view. And playing around with that AI with my old team, applying that, great fun. Just really, really fun.

So that's kind of how the business operates. Yeah. And it sounds to me like, I mean, I don't know your business, but I've seen plenty of them. And if you don't get these systems in place, you just get to a point where you can't handle it. Yeah. Just kind of having the morning meeting and saying, how's it going over in Utah? I mean, you've got to. Right.

So what about the salespeople? How's that going? Yeah, so, you know, I think that's just curious. Yeah, yeah. I mean, absolutely. It's an interesting group because they're all 20 plus years in this domain of selling these types of systems into law enforcement agencies. Yeah. It's a big referral network.

Right? It's built on, did you do a good job last time? Okay, you get to participate in the RFP this time. Very RFP driven, which is unique because our world never was. Trash can. You get a little bit of that. But it was 10% of the business at the most, and we hated them. In this world, it's 90% of the business. So you're constantly winning that business again on these big RFPs. You know, there's some need there to refresh that group. And I mean that by there's just got to be new blood. I mean, these guys are, you know, they're our age, and they've been selling in this market for years. They know everybody.

But eventually they're going to do what you and I do. They're going to do something else, right? Yeah. So you've got to refresh. That's probably the biggest challenge there is how do you go get somebody that's in their 20s or 30s and get them positioned into that to be there for the next. 20 years. Yeah. Well, I'm sure you'll figure it out.

I'm not worried about that. I need that or all just retired. I'm not sure if I got to figure. I'll meet you at the club and hit some balls. We'll get some soup. Yeah, we'll get some soup. So that leads us to what you're really doing now, which is, which is Founderville. Yeah.

And I think it's really cool. I mean, you and Shay Hauser have, my understanding is, that it is about raising money from successful founders in our area to be used to help stake current founders or new founders in our area. Yeah, yeah. And then also provide some mentoring and things like that. Right, right. Yeah.

That's pretty damn cool. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's one of those classic, see a problem. And as an entrepreneur, you can't help yourself but jump in and start to try to fix it. Yeah. And having to wherewithal to know, well, what, needs to be done here is pretty obvious. Well, instead of everybody running around Greenville as a budding entrepreneur with cup in hand,

raising 20K here, 40K here, and getting all kinds of misguided information about what they should do next. They're going to listen to whoever gave them the 25K. Right. They're going to listen to them for a week until they find the next 25K. And then everybody who's done that, and you've done it, I've done it, is you write these checks in a year or two, three, year later, you're like, did I, I can't remember. Did I put some money in that or not? It's, it's just kind of a bad model. So really what we did at the behest of Bo Russell was we took this idea of an investing club, which was, hey, let's all band together and put some money in X.

Yeah. Together, right? Bo said, you guys are silly. Just raise a, just raise a microfund and put it all together, you know, under a fund structure, which we did, you know, Founderville Fund won 6.8 million from 45 LPs, all local. And it's working. Greenville investors, Greenville founders investing in the next generation of Greenville founders. And it's, you know, today nine companies. We've deployed almost all the capital. And we've got three or four really great growers.

We've got a couple that are sort of good growers. And then we've got a couple that are like, all right, well, this is a struggle and is there a market there? You know, we're at such an early stage with these investors. or these founders, the first thing they really got to hit on is, do they have good product market fit? And we're, Shea and are reasonably good at assessing what they need to get that first bit of traction on product market fit. Right.

Well, I think it's an amazing idea. You said if you have 45 founders, you call them LP Limited Partners, you and Shay are the first two. The GPs. Right? Y'all came in and signed big checks to get in there. So you're part of the deal. And then that sounds like it's going well.

If you have a couple of them that are doing real well, that's awesome when you're starting or about to start fund two. Is that right? That's the goal, right? So this, you know, a tight thesis of Greenville on Greenville, A lot of people were like, is there going to be deal flow? Can you find any winners in there? Are these all going to be 10% year-over-year growers?

And, you know, to a large agree, we weren't sure. You don't know until you get out there in the mud and start swimming around. We had a few that we thought might fit. But we've probably looked at in just Greenville 100 plus ventures and, you know, landed on these nine. We think this same model is applicable to the whole state. And so, you know, I'm not interested in chasing down, you know, Atlanta ventures or Research Triangle Park Ventures. But in Charleston and in Columbia and in, you know, Anderson and Spartanburg, they exist. They exist. Just like Greenville, they exist. They're there. They are smart, young, aggressive founders with things going on.

They just kind of go lacking. They go hungry. a lot of ways. I've noticed because, you know, I've purchased a few smaller, older tech companies, and particularly not in big towns. And it's almost like they don't have enough people to talk to to even see what the possibilities are. Right. And I think that's one of the great things about clustering them into Founderville one

or another. I know there's plenty of going on in Charleston. You know, Larry, you know, your father-in-law, I think you had a nice, nice victory in Colombia. Right, he did. Absolutely. Yeah. Hunt Stan, great hit out of Columbia.

I mean, that's a nice big exit. Who would have thought? I know. He told me about that one. I'm like, ooh. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry about that one.

His, you know, his experience as an angel investor has definitely been an influence on why we did this as a fund is, you know, you get in as an angel investor and you're it. Maybe you're it. Yeah. Right? Until that venture guy. that founder can find someone else. You're on it for the whole time.

And if you want to put in a half million and then get hit up again for another half million and then another half million, and if you don't do that, you're out. You're out and it's gone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was so glad that it happened because at least one of them did real well. And I think in your case, and I'm sure you know this, but, you know, my dad was in Venture Capital in Greenville in the 70s, it was the first one.

And he told me when he did these funds that the key was just to have enough success where everyone made money. And then I'll just roll it. Yeah. You know, you were going to take that money out. You know, just keep it rolling, Scott. Do it again, you know. Yeah, yeah. And so hopefully you'll be able to do some of that too.

Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, part of it is we hear, I mean, I know a lot of people around the state that are exited founders that have done well. And they know what we're doing in Greenville. And I've heard from multiple. of them that are like, well, when are you going to do it somewhere else? Yeah. You know, are you going to do another fund in Greenville? Like, no, we're just going to broaden the aperture a little bit.

And part of it is, I do believe, and this is not just a, let's do it because it's good for the community or good for the state. There is a sea change that's going on in technology right now from, you know, kind of classic deterministic software, right? we talked about that earlier to probabilistic AI software, it's a fruit basket turnover, which is going to be amazing opportunities that are coming in the next couple of years.

And there's no real geographic boundary on intelligence or will and determination and desire to do hard work. We've got it in spades in our state. So we're going to go try to tap into that. That's great. That's great. Okay. Okay. So let me ask you a couple of other questions. Just more, a little bit of background questions for the peeps.

But how did you decide? We've talked about this before, but how did you end up getting into the technology world? Oh, man. Wow. So, you know, my dad was an architect builder. My mom's a teacher. So I had no connection at all to anything technology. Of course, coming out of school, coming out of Clemson in late 80s, why would I land in tech?

I got really, really lucky in a bizarre sort of way. I had a teaching professor that turned me on to a book called The Next Economy. It wasn't even part of the curriculum. It was just a sidebar conversation. And I read this thing. And it was the guy who had, interesting enough, had founded a company called Smith & Hawkins, which made gardening tools.

Yeah, yeah. But this dude just laid out the transformational change of, I mean, in big air quotes, information as an industry. And it struck me as very true, right? It was just, it felt like this is something, like in the Dustin Hoffman, the graduate movie, whereas the friend of the family says, Plastics, right?

This guy said basically, information, young man. Yeah. And at the same time, we had a visit to a class from a Dun & Bradstreet salesperson or customer service person

promoting jobs. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, whatever. I'll give it a shot. Turns out it was in Atlanta, right? I wanted to go to Atlanta.

And I landed that job selling information services as my first out of school. Right. They were one of the great, first kind of tech companies. Yeah, credit services and, you know, that little, that little bit was my entree into understanding the power of information. Yeah, we were, of course, carrying around these giant compact lugable computers with screens this big. And there was no such thing as the

internet. And I parlayed that into a role with a company called Harbinger, doing electronic data interchange, you know, passing electronic documents back and forth. And that gave me a little bit of a head nod to what the internet was going to be. And then, you know, came to data stream in 95 when we were, you know, back in client server days, trying to get to the internet. So, yeah, I mean, it was a, you know, a twist and a turn of like, I don't know, plastics. Yeah, plastic. Good word at the time.

I know, I know. But you, I mean, you were looking for something that was interesting. I mean, that's part of it. I tell young people all the time is, you know, you've got to decide what you want. Even if it's a general direction, try to make it as tight as possible. But, like, I could imagine me or you choosing something like, you know, librarian or something. Right. It's like, I don't care what it pays, you know, can't do it.

And so figure that out. I think I always knew that I wanted to ride a wave, right? I mean, at the core, my career has been built on looking back and trying to see the waves that are coming and waiting for the wave or catching a small wave. and looking at the one next and going, I should have waited and got that one. But being a surfer and riding the good waves is as important as how you execute inside there, right? And honestly, from a what do you do inside that, it was I was not, I was not a great student. I was curious, but I was curious about what was going on at night.

Not curious about what the book said I needed to go do in the classroom. So sales was a great channel to take curiosity and go out. And as you know, as a good salesperson, you have to be an insatiable, you know, insatiably curious in order to listen well. You have to be able to say, tell me more about that. Why is it that way? Help me unlock that problem for you. And I think that's, you know, just a characteristic of personality that led down that career path as well. Yeah, yeah, that's fun.

It's fun for us anyway. Yeah, yeah, exactly. On sales, tell me about sales and AI. What are you seeing? How is your team using AI or your various ventures using AI to make sales better? Yeah. You know, I would say now in so many ways, sales is 10x easier for salespeople than it used to be. it doesn't make closing a sale easier,

but the process itself, because you can find out everything. You can understand everything. If you're not using chat GPT or some agent to do the research about a company and have that tool advise you on what your best approach for what is it that you sell would be. be relevant to them. Give me a bullet point list of my best selling points for this company,

for this role. You're missing it. You've got to use that. So I think what's what's occurring right now, and this is an interesting kind of sidebar on where, you know, where Salesforce is right now, of, you know, Benioff is great at the marketing side and, you know, adopting this agentic AI and this term that's been, you know, bandied about recently is headless CRM, meaning you don't interact with it like you and I know of fields on forms on a screen, which is where Yesflow was, right? Let's bury that and have this agent, you know, that kind of operates on your behalf. Yeah. Yeah. So where Benioff's taking that is everybody will have agents working for them and how many agents can you operate at a time.

And I think that sea change is going to happen in the next 12 to 36 months. The concept of every sales agent better be operating 10 to 20 agents on their behalf. So if you can't as a salesperson adapt to that and figure out how to operate agents that work for you, you're going to be screwed. So that would be something like a sales ad. We're making calls on your behalf. Making calls on your behalf. Constantly working on your behalf for outreach, constantly doing research on prospects and targets,

constantly looking for changes in LinkedIn or people changing roles and just giving you back information, right? Well, I use copilotai.com, not the Microsoft co-pilot. Have you seen that way? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's doing that. My targeted list, we've got four companies,

So each one has a targeted list, and we have navigator for each one of those companies. We've created our list, and it's pinging those people with these messages that I approved. And then once they reply, based on what they did it, they just kind of start going back and forth. The nudge. The nudge until the person accepts the LinkedIn thing, and then we go to work trying to schedule an appointment. And then we have a discovery call. Yeah. And it's been a lot more work because I have a lot more calls than normal, but it's been delightful.

Well, and you dial it in, right? Yeah. Over time, you're already started on that. Yeah. So now it's just over the next 12 months and just dial that, you know, dial it in. And if you're not doing what you're already doing, if you wait another two years to do that, you're like a neophyte. You don't even know where to start. So when I say it's easier, it's easier in that there's so many more tools in the way.

resources available. It's harder in that I do think you have to be a little bit more of an advanced thinker and kind of see where the ball is going to be to start with that now. Start using those tools now and having that idea in your mind of if I'm going to leverage me, I need 10, 20, 30 agents working on my behalf in these different capacities. And that's not easy to get going. Once you get it going, I think it's fairly straightforward, but to start into that,

and that might be, you know, when you think about consulting, is how do you, how do you 10X the performance capabilities of an individual? Yes. You give them capabilities for agents.

Codot, we set them up with sales AI. We're going to set them up with, you know, navigator, hunter, or whatever it is. Interesting. I'm going to do more of that then. I'm going to add more of these services. get those balls in the air.

And, you know, this whole thing of, you know, using AI, 24 months from now, there won't be this idea of, you know, are you using AI? Of course you are. It's just built-in intelligence to the software and tools that you already have or another layer that you've now brought in. Right. The idea of it being AI is just a, it's a, we're in this kind of a moment in time where it's, it's like cloud, right?

of course it's freaking cloud. You know, why would it not be? I'm going to use the cloud now. Yeah, right. As ridiculous as that sounds. Yeah, or use your computer. Yeah, we're just always, well, okay, I've got, really, the last question is just to ask you if you have anything you want to say about Founderville or Fund 2 or anything. and people want to contact you to be an investor or employee or a founder, whatever?

Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean, where we are today with Founderville, we're getting to a place where we're pretty much fully invested, right? So the number of companies we're looking at in Greenville specifically for that fund is we've kind of got our crop. So as we're looking to raise this next fund, We'll invest in Greenville, of course, and we'll also invest throughout the state. Oh, good. So we're always actively looking at new up-and-comers, people with, you know, ventures that fit our profile. And that profile for us is pretty tight.

It's, you know, technology-enabled, recurring revenue preferred, not manufacturing, right? and typically we're looking for a co-founder situation. We like having two. And we like a product that's already got something built out that customers have vetted and have paid you a dollar for. We don't have to see a certain, you know, a lot of VCs will look for, a minimum of a million or two million or three million in recurring. We don't care.

We just want to see proof that there's a product that customers are paying something for. And a lot of that jobs. I think comes from a little bit of the background we shared is, you know, back to the truthism that, you know, nothing happens until the customer buys something. Yeah. You know, nothing happens until a sale occurs. I believe that. Yeah. You just don't know.

That validation. And if you don't have enough hustle as a founder entrepreneur to get something done enough that someone will pay you, you know, we're not big believers in, at least. in our market. Yeah. You know, Silicon Valley, other places where people will throw millions of dollars to build a product from scratch without, you know, with nothing. I get it. I understand.

It's not our market. It's a different game. It's not the way we play. We look for hustle where people have had the grit and determination to get something out of the ground to get it out, fortitude and determination, to get a customer to pay you. And that's one of those checkbox to go, okay, that, that, you know, that proves. you're the right kind of person. Now, let's see if we can help you get better product market fit

and maybe make that next sale and the next sale easier. But show some of that grit and determination, and we love talking to those people. Yeah. And they find you at founderville.com? Founderville.VoreVle.V.V.V.V.C. VC. Well, thank you very much, Scott. That'd be here, John. Thank you.

Always fun. Appreciate it. You bet. Thank you.