August 20, 2021 • 50 mins
Mac Conwell left his 6 figure job at a government contractor to form his first start-up in 2009. After founding a range of companies Mac moved into the world of Venture Capital funding minority owned businesses for the State of Maryland, where he noticed the gap that exists in the ‘pre-seed’ funding, often provided by friends and family that exists in minority communities. This led him to form Rare Breed VC, which provides early state funding for minority owned startups. Mac and David talk about this crucial gap that exists, and the impact that it has on small businesses in marginalised communities, as well as how he’s leveraged Twitter to grow his fund and become an influencer in the VC space.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm David Grosso, and you're listening to follow the Profit
Today I'm joined by someone who has a pretty interesting
perspective into raising money and to getting businesses started. His
name is Mac the VC, otherwise known as Matt Conwell.
(00:20):
He's joining me today from Maryland. What's up, Mac, how's
it going? David is good to be here, man. So
when you meet people in the elevator, what's the elevator pitch?
You give them? What's the elevator pitch I give them?
I tell them give me your money. I'll make you
more money. Well that's pretty convincing. Tell me more. That's
(00:40):
the point of elevator pitch, right, you want to get
to the point where somebody says that actually more. Um No,
so um at rare brief ventures, you know, we look
to invest in companies with rare brief founders that can
be found anywhere, not just the major tech hopes. So
we're looking for the opportunities that are overlooked and counted out.
(01:01):
So let's talk about that money gets distributed to tech companies.
Basically in the Northeast and in California and everywhere else,
it's just absent. Why is that? Um? I don't know,
well I do know. It has to do with the
density of where the venture firms and the capital are.
(01:21):
So you got Boston, but Boston's because that's where the
life science help bigs and so there's a density of
capital life sciences. You got in New York because that's
the financial capital. So that's where all the big pe
firms are financial firms, and they got interested into doing
venture investing. So it's a big, you know collection there.
And then you got to look on Valley, which is
(01:41):
his own unique thing. But in the early you know,
nineteen hundreds, when we get around the times of World
War two and even a little earlier, you had a
lot of government money going in to support the war
efforts and support all this creation of new technology, which
led to this boom of technology companies and led to
(02:04):
a boom of capital that just kind of centered there.
And so you just got this density of technology and
capital which attracted more and by the time everybody else
would figure out what was going on, they had a
fifty year on so dense pockets. So how did this
happen though, because you know, even when we were little kids, Matt,
because you I'm gonna assume you're about my age. There
(02:26):
wasn't really a big difference in cost of living and
in jobs across the country, right, And now there seems
to be two America's, right, these hyper expensive technology forward
America and then this left behind America. How did that happen?
That happened as when you get past the great migration
(02:50):
in the sixties, and then too the nineteen seventies and
nineteen eighties, you had this proliferation of people leaving out
of the rural parts of the country and going into
the metropolis, into the metropolis and major cities, right, and
as you have people chasing the American dream. What we've
seen over time, what we've seen time and time again
(03:11):
is that money leads to more money, right, and so
the rich get richer, and as they do, they start
to leave more and more people behind. That's how you
get a minimum wage that's been left behind for free.
Damn their generations at this point, because the folks making
money are only thinking about how to make more money,
(03:32):
like we see this in Mars tech firms where. But
that's why the show was undercover Boss is so interesting
to me because you have all these I've seen it,
the CEOs who work at a point where they're detached
from the day to day work. So the way they
see people spreadsheets. And then on the spreadsheet, every person
has equates to dollars. And so if we can say
(03:54):
fifty cent here here or a dollar here, that's saving
a dollar and every person here ease to us, saving
millions and aggregate. So yeah, let's start to cut things,
or you have things like shrinkage. So like over time,
as inflation goes up, the sizes of products go down
because it's easier for a serial company to shrink the
size of a box that it is for them to
(04:15):
make it cheaper and so or make it more expensive.
So instead of chaining and making the price more expensively,
just make the boxes smaller. And those little things add
up to Moore money. Because greed is undefeated, right, So
that's what happens. It's really all the smell greed. But
in the end, MAC, we know that most job creation,
most big ideas, most economic growth doesn't come from people
(04:39):
who make cereal boxes. It comes from small business, right,
It doesn't come from these big conglomerates. In fact, these
big conglomerates, by these small businesses, they gobble it up
to guarantee growth. So how do we support small business
We support small businesses by shopping and spending our money there, right,
and you support with your capital if you want to
support small businesses, the small businesses, right, Like you know,
(05:03):
instead of going to the major jewelry store and your
local mall, go to the local jewelry store down the
street from your house. Right. You know, the way you
support small businesses is you fund them. You give them capital,
You give them the opportunity to give you that high
touch feeling. Because like once you get to the big companies,
you know that that white glove, you know, community feel disappears,
(05:26):
and they all try to do it. They all come
up with like department so their their their companies to
try and do community outreach and community touch, and it's
never the same. Right, It's like going to a Delhi
where you know the owner and you've known them for years.
And so the way we support them is we give
them capital. The way we support them from like a
venture standpoint is we don't like unfortunately a lot of
(05:48):
small businesses do not fit the financial model of venture capital,
which is why venture capital is only one portion of
the financial stack. Right. I think very often people look
to vcs and be like, hey, you need to solve this.
You can't just do the big tech companies. You gotta
do these small businesses to the business model isn't fit
for that. And the problem is we haven't innovated to
(06:11):
allow other new financial products or to really pump up
other financial products like revenue based investing that really do
fit the small business models. So we need more people
actually innovating and creating new financial products to support small business.
We've gotten to this point where everybody's just like, well,
this is how things have been done, has been this
done this way forever. It's like, no, we can do
(06:32):
new things. This is this is what we're about. We
create things to solve problems. This is a problem we have.
Let's create something to solve it. And I don't feel
like enough people are spending enough brain power to solve
these issues. Now we just try tried and true formulas.
That seems to be the problem across society. But I
want to push back on you, Matt, because we always
say that like, oh, you should shop at a small business.
(06:55):
But I'm a millennial. I'm just trying to make it
here economically, I'm not responsible for the aid to the world.
I like my Starbucks points, I like my five percent
back on my Prime card. I like my predictability. I
want to save money. And as much as I care
about small business and want them to succeed, I also
care about myself. So how do I balance those That's
(07:17):
the personal decision. You gotta decide what matters for you, right,
does your small the small businesses of your local community
matter more than you're getting that Starbucks coffee. If you
have to pay an extra fifty cents more to get
coffee at you know, Jenny's coffee shops, where are you
going to go? And those are the personal decisions that
we have to make every day. And to your point,
(07:38):
you know you just want to say money, you're just
trying to just trying to make adman. There are a
lot of small businesses that actually offer better price products.
We've been conditioned to believe that, like, oh, all the
places we go now give us the best prices. In
the actuality, we actually stopped searching for the best prices.
We just got lolled into just going to the same
place as we always go. But at the end of
the day, like those are personal choices, like where you
(07:59):
go to show where you spend your money. You get
to decide that. And if you just want to go
to all the places to save the most money, fine,
But if you really want to support your small businesses,
then you've got to do that. You can't say I
support my small businesses, but then they'll spend your money
there and then you don't really support them. Just now,
just being a performative. You're just being a performer, right
you virtual? This is how you get clicks on twitterly.
(08:23):
Now you make a really good point about big business.
They have convinced us that they are the best deal,
but oftentimes they are not. That is an excellent point.
So let's talk about the proverbial, you know, low income neighborhood.
We'll call it, some people call it the hood, whatever
you want to call it. How do we change that?
Because you know, we have this idea in our society
that poor areas are poor because you know they deserve it,
(08:46):
or I don't know, or because of historical adjustices, or
you know, name your basket of tropes about bad neighborhoods.
So how do how do we make it better? We
need to stop discarding portions of our communities. Um, I'm
(09:06):
from Baltimore, right san Chester, Win towns of a part
of Baltimore where the median income it's seventeen thousand dollars
a year. That's like a fraction of the media and
income in America. That's that's that's basically a middle income
country right there. But that's per household. That's not per person.
(09:28):
That's per household. So devastatingly poor. Yea devastatingly poor, but
it's not from lack of effort. Like these are people
who get up every day go to work. These are
people have to catch two and three buses to get
the work and get home like they're trying. Like think
about the people complain about being in traffic trying to
get the work and it takes you forty five minutes
and traffic to get the work, where you just get
(09:49):
there in twenty minutes. We're talking about peopleho have to
take two and three busses where it takes them two
and three hours to get the work, sitting outside and
the heat, sitting outside in the snow. But yeah, we're
gonna say they're poor because they were to people, we're
not the only want to be poor, right, But when
you're young, and you're going and you're growing up in
a city like Baltimore, and you're you're in a household
where you don't know what it's like to have running
(10:11):
water or electricity every day when you're just used to
your water getting cut off, you used to electricity getting
cut off, you're used to not having you're used to
not having food. You will do whatever it takes to
survive and eat. And along the way, you don't have
people in your community showing you what success looks like.
You don't have people showing you like how you go
(10:33):
to school two, then go to college to then get
a career. Like careers aren't talked about right like in
these communities because everything about their daily life is survival.
They don't even have the they don't even have the
bandwidth to strategize a better future. And we don't give
them those support. The support we do give them, we
(10:55):
give them resources to live. So we give you food,
might give you shelter if you can get finance, if
you can get federal aid, but even within and then
we'll show you how to put a resume together. But
what's the resume when you haven't worked anywhere for like
four or five years because nobody will hire you, right,
And so what do we actually do to move these
people for We don't give them the opportunities to grow financially.
(11:17):
Like if you didn't make it in high school and
make it to college, just gotta let you go. It's
not like you can go get a job at Bethlehem
Steel and make fifty year and support a family that
didn't exist anymore. And that's why you know, we need
more programs. So like there's a company called Catalyite where
if you go there, they have a test. If you
pass their test or aptitude tests, they say they can
train you to be a software engineer in six months,
(11:40):
no matter who you are. You walk off the street,
take this test, six months, you have a job off revolutionary.
It makes sense we should have things like like this
for all types of jobs. Like you don't have to
go to college for four years to work in HR.
You don't have to go to college for four years
to be a media buyer. You can literally like we
have haven't thought about what the next wave of apprenticeship
(12:02):
could look like like so many of these jobs we
say you have to go get a degree, Like no,
you can literally set up apprenticeships where you can learn
to be a media by you can learn to do
you know, social media as, you can learn to do
that's all these things that we can learn, but we
don't give people the opportunity to do that. So you
have a whole swap of of our country who's left
(12:23):
out of the opportunity to grow economically. That's really interesting
because we make it rain in these areas with federal money, right,
and it doesn't seem to move the need all right,
So it's like these apprenticeships are a way to make
an investment instead of just blowing money that doesn't really
lead to better outcomes because the money that we're blowing
(12:45):
is just deal with your basic needs of just survival.
You need to get beyond survival to a place where
you can be comfortable enough to actually move forward. Like
here's a crazy stat the number one reason for people
dropping out of community colleges like community college where you
trying to do better, you're you're going away, can one
(13:05):
life of it? One life of it, and that one
life of it could beginning your car to because now
that you've got your car to, you don't have a
way to get to work, and you don't have the
money to get your car out of impound, and so
how are you gonna go back to school? You're not
like little things like that can throw somebody's life off,
But you're like getting your car. Told like, just get
your you don't have a problem. Like if you come
(13:27):
from a community where the meeting household makes seventeen thousand
a year, you gotta make a lot of hard choices.
And so we just give you and so we make
it rain and give you money just to go, just
to continue with the survival mode and survival mentality without
actually investing in the people to help them grow. Um,
that's just the way I think about it. But there
(13:49):
are exceptional people in these areas, and we see that
time and time again throughout history. Is that you know,
wealthy areas don't tend to produce more exceptional people than
poor areas. In fact, it's it's that's the one thing
that's equal opportunity. The one thing that is different is
environment and opportunity. So how do we empower exceptional people
(14:10):
that are not born into such luck to help their
communities change because the problem is wedify exceptionalism. You can't
view these communities through the prism of the folks who
were exceptional, because that's fundamentally going to leave out the
majority of folks. And then what you do is you
deify these folks who were exceptional and you put it
(14:32):
on them to solve the problems for their community when
it wasn't the problem they started to begin with. Right,
and so, everybody has decisions to bake in their own life.
And I can't fault anybody who says, like, look, I
made it out, I'm going to be happy. I'm not
going to deal with that stuff anymore. That's perfectly fine.
It makes sense, of course, but we're not setting these
(14:56):
communities up for true success. If all we want to
do is to a look so and so made it
you can too. Well. I'll give you an example. There
was a young lady who um, I was working with
the Robotics Club and the Inner City Baltimore. This one
young lady on the team was exceptional. She was doing
really great. Then all of a sudden she and you know,
(15:17):
she was on her path to being a computer science major,
going to college and everything. And one day she stopped
coming and then she stopped coming to school, and so
checked in with her to find out what was going on,
And what happened was she had gotten a job at
McDonald's to help her mom pay bills because they didn't
have electricity, and they hadn't had electricity for three months,
(15:38):
and she's like, I just need to help, and it's
like who whoa, whoa wha whoa. You were on the
path to real success to getting out in her whole
things like one, I don't know if I'm good enough
for college to I can't afford college. Three we need
electricity right now, And you shaid know you know what
we did. We got her an internship working for the
(15:58):
guy who was like the cold for the robotics team.
He ran a tech company, and through her internship she
was able to help her mom. She end up getting
scholarship with a full rider at the college and is
now a software engineer. She is an exceptional story. But
did you hear all the things along the way where
people had to step in to make sure she got there?
(16:20):
But we are all like that. If people hadn't stepped
into my life, I wouldn't be where I am today either.
We're on that situation we are, But then we need
more people like that gentleman who hired her as an
intern to help more kids like her, because the amount
of exceptional folks that are in these communities is much
larger than the amount of exceptional folks and actually make
(16:41):
it out. And that's the part that's getting missed, right,
And so it's like, how do we truly support all
of these exceptional people to make it out? And we
don't and we don't provide the resources for that. We
don't come like. It can't just be the exceptional people
who made it out to come back. It's all the
other folks in the community who care about the community,
(17:01):
support the local leaders, the local businesses, to really pour
into these young people in these communities and not just
the young people, their parents too. We don't do enough
of that. So, Mack, you're someone who you know still
(17:23):
goes to these communities. Is it demoralizing to be there?
These are violent places, these are places with poverty. Like
I feel like I get anxiety when I when I
go to you know, poor areas. So do you Because
I feel like I want to change it. I feel
like I want to, you know, make a difference, and
you know, and it doesn't seem like we know where
to start with this type of stuff I do my
(17:47):
I don't feel uncomfortable because like, I'm from those communities,
Like I know these people. These are like my friends
and my family members. These are people I grew up with.
But it is heartbreaking. But it's heartbreaking more so because
so many people don't under stand the true realities of
these communities. Right do you see the stories? You watch
the wire, You think that's all it is, But there's
(18:08):
so much more of the stories to be told. That's like,
these aren't lazy people. These aren't people don't want to work.
These are people who want to be poor. These aren't
people who want to live on the system. These are
people who are just trying to survive and they need
to figure out way to live life beyond just survival.
But we never give them that grace. We automatically put
(18:29):
them in these buckets. And so for me, I'm always
encouraged by the work that a lot of community leaders
are doing. And like, for me, you know what little
bit I can do helping You know, I'm a VC.
I'm investing in companies because I want to find companies
that can grow the unicorns and be worth billions of dollars.
But that's also why I invested in a black woman
(18:52):
out of Baltimore who was a single mom who had
an amazing idea for a product that nobody wanted to back.
I'm not backed her and her company is now growing.
You know what, she's employing and helping people from her community.
You know what else she's doing. She also has a
nonprofit where she goes into these communities and she teaches
young black girls and gets them excited for stim education
(19:15):
for you know, science, technology, and engineering through makeup and jewelry.
Last week she had a session where she had young
girls like elementary and middle school ages creating led ear rings.
They created ear rings that live up right. But like,
(19:38):
but like it's a young lady like that who's now
empowered to do more good works. And so you know,
that's how I help and hopefully one day I'll be
able to do more. But yeah, for me, like it's heartbreaking,
but moments like that are encouraging. So what is VC?
For people who don't know? What's the simplest term? Is
it just money that you invest in people and you
(20:00):
take a piece of their company. So venture capital is
a subset of private equity, which basically means we make
investments into private businesses. Right, most people know, like financial advisors,
they take your money and they invested into public companies,
they invested in stocks. Right, we do the same thing.
(20:20):
We just invest into private companies and in my case,
companies are just getting started. So I'm a glorified financial advisor.
Wealthy people giving their money and I put their money
behind companies to help me them make more money. So
your company, rare breed is the rare breed the founder
that you're referring to. Yes, rare breed is the founder
I'm referring to. So you invest in founders, you're a
(20:44):
people first company. What what do you look for in
someone who fits the rare breed? You know, ideal Every
company and every founders his own unique situation. But I'm
looking for one from a business standpoint. I'm looking for
people who are having a very unique and direct opinion
of WALM, how they do customer acquisition, experience of retention.
(21:08):
If you show me you know how to find customers,
you can get them to buy your product and they
can keep coming back, then you might have a chance
to actually win. And by having that mindset allows me
to take out my own biases where I don't have
to know exactly what market you're in. If I know
that you find customers, they love it and keep buying it.
They love it and they keep coming back to buy it. Well,
(21:28):
that's how we become the firm that never misses out
on the opportunity to invest in a copy like Spans right.
You can imagine you know when Spens is first pitching
to a bunch of vcs, like, there are a bunch
of folks who don't get it. But the moment she says, well,
you know, I go to these department stores and sell
it to women. Women love it, and most women are
going to buy four these a year, Like the all
(21:50):
need to know everything about this. You clearly figured out
a market that and something that's working, and then you
know it's it's sometimes it's the intangible. So like the
the woman I mentioned whore I backed in Baltimore. I
was working with her for like three years and nobody
wanted to invest in her. So what she did was
she became a Serican mother. She gave birth to twins
(22:12):
to raise the money start building her prototype. You can't
tell me that's a person won't do whatever it takes
and makes to be successful, you know, like that level
of grick most people will never be able to see.
And then on the flip side, I invested in a
seventeen year old kid out of Baltimore who basically hacked
(22:32):
them oh to get his first twenty five thousand customers.
One of the smartest people I've ever met in my life.
I just made the bet on him because he was
one of the smartest people I've met. Right, So, every
found in every situation is different, but it's those unique
things about them that kind of set them over the age.
We just committed to a company the other day where
we're talking to the founders a really cool company and
(22:55):
I know it's on lengthening that he ran this nonprofit
helping returning citizens or people who were returning out of jail,
and I asked him about it. He's like, yeah, you know,
my dad was a lawyer and he was a pioneer
in justice reform, and he's like, you know, really helping people,
supporting people is really important to me. And that's why
they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, you're definitely the kind of
person we want to invest in. Right. So it's those
(23:15):
it's those things that sometimes go beyond just the business
that we look for. And these are these are people
that the traditional venture capitalists would have never discovered because
they're not in Baltimore, they're not in your community, They're
not interacting with these people, and you're going to events
to meet these people. Correct? Absolutely? I mean before we
(23:36):
had a global pandemic, I spent a lot of time
in my community and other communities. You know, I spent
a lot of time in Birmingham, Alabama, and St. Louis
and Detroit. Where you get to meet these folks, you
get the Golden's communities. You go, you go speak at
a Chamber of Commerce event, you go speak at UM
Urban League event, you go hang out at the Lesbians
(23:56):
who Tech local meetups. I can't tell you how much
crap I got when I used to work for the
Investment on the State of Maryland going to the Lesbians
who Tech meet up there Like, why are you going
to this event? I was like, it says who Tech?
Like I'm looking for tech entrepreneurs, like I might find
one there. You don't discriminate equal opportunity here. That's such
a novel concept, right, um, And so I just learned
(24:19):
that when you go Wow, and you're intentional, you get
access to far more people the farm entrepreneurs, and you
do just waiting for them to come to you. Yeah. Well,
you talked about the seventeen year old kid right that
sent people a penny on Venmo to bring him to
scholar meat dot com. That's pretty interesting what ended up
(24:40):
happening to that seventeen year old. So that's seventeen year
old sami Um ended up getting some money from US
at the State of Maryland. Use that to go live
in New York and race five d thousand from a
bunch of ex Goldman Sacks folks. Ended up going to
y Combinator, which is the premier a startup program in
(25:01):
the country. Raised two point five million coming out of that,
got some money directly from the founder, and got led
by large venture firm, and now has a company that's
growing by leaps and founds and we'll have some major
updates coming out soon. He's now twenty one. He's now
twenty one year old black kid from Baltimore running a
(25:22):
company worth multimillions and it's on the pathway to being
a really large five fintech company. H So, scholar me
dot com check it out. Big things coming. So I
have all these investments been profitable for you? Because you know,
it almost seems like people would say, oh, you know,
you're just doing social good, right, like are you making money?
(25:44):
That's what's the point of the business, right, So I
have to ask, I have to ask the obvious question. Mac.
It takes a long time to get the money back
because here's the thing. Like, as a VC, when we
invest in companies, we get paid back typically one of
two ways. The company goes public or is acquired. That's
a really high bar that takes a long time. So
(26:05):
but I will say many of the companies that we've
invested in and that I invested in previously are still
doing well and are moving in the direction of being
very successful investments. I do not do this just for
the social good, Like, yes, do I care about diversity,
that I care about social goody? I do. But my job,
(26:25):
the point of my job is to make money for
my investors. That is my job. People give me their
give me their money to make the more money. So
every investment I'm making, I'm making it with that in mind. Now,
most companies are going to fail, I know that, but
that's why we invest in companies. That's why we're looking
for companies that are going to be worth a billion dollars.
(26:46):
That way, those successes outweigh and cover up all the
failures because it's running a company so fragile. So it's
this model of VC a bit more profitable because you're
dealing with all who don't have family access to capital
or friends and family. Typically when you start your own business,
the first money you get is from friends and family. Well,
(27:08):
if you're of a modest background, that's not possible, is it. No,
it's not possible at all. And so well I will
say about investing as early as we do, is it
can be very, very profitable with smaller dollar amounts because
when you invest in the company, you're basically putting money
in at a certain valuation. Right, You're at a certain
(27:28):
value and the value grows out over time. Well, if
you go out to Silicon Valley, you'll see companies, like
when they're first getting started, getting valuations of twenty million,
twenty five million, these very inflated numbers. You go to
like a Baltimore, a Philadelphia, Detroit, you might find an
early company where the value starts at four million, five million,
(27:50):
six million, something far more reasonable, something with much easier
to attain expectations. But then from the investor standpoint, the
opportunity to general it a lot more so, Like in
the case of a company of starts at twenty million
as their valuation and then they grow to a forty
million dollar evaluation. If you put money in, you now
to extra money. That's awesome. You double your money if
(28:12):
you invest in the company at a four million dollar
evaluation and then they go to a forty million dollar evaluation,
now ten extra money, right, So but the profitability goes
up very significantly from an investment standpoint, so it goes well.
So you know, there there's some real advantages to finding
companies outside of these overpriced, overcrowded hopes. Well, it seems like, uh,
(28:36):
the economy large, everything's overvalued and overinflated in certain markets
and just clinically dead and others. So speaking of that,
you worked for the state of Maryland and investing in companies.
Is it smart for the government to support you know,
small business in areas that need it. You know, the
largest purchaser in the country is the government, right the uh,
(29:01):
the the the company that has the largest amount of
money to spend in the United States is the government, right,
and so we want to jump start these communities if
we know, like, hey, we're we're we're lacking in jobs.
We need more jobs in America. You said it already.
Most jobs come from small businesses. But small businesses don't
(29:21):
fit the venture financing world or other kind of investment worlds.
Then where you get your money to go? The government
should be there the kind of supplement and in my opinion, right, um.
And then well, it's the teach a man to fish principle. Right.
If you teach them to fish, they'll go fishing by themselves.
If you just give away money, the money runs out
and then you're done. Yeah, but that's assuming that the
(29:45):
person you gave the fish didn't take that fish and
turn the bait to make more fish to go and
catch more fish, right, Like how it like that discredits
people's ingenuity, right, and people's want to do more. Um So, fundamentally,
I believe that in the state of Maryland, UM, where
(30:05):
I work, the Maryland Technology Development Corporation is the largest
fund of really states tech companies in the state of Maryland. Right,
here's an interesting fact. They were the first investor in squarespace.
Square Space is an amazing product that supports small businesses
every day. And there was three young men out of
University of Maryland who got their first check from the
State of Maryland. Now multibillion dollar company. They are based
(30:27):
in New York, but they don't get that money from Taco.
I don't know square space exists today. I will also
say that, and within that organization they have a fund
completely dedicated to stem cell research and commercialization. Because they
have been doing that work for the last ten years.
They are now companies being commercialized from the technologies that
(30:48):
they were investing in years ago. They are now saving
people's lives. That technology doesn't exists without, you know, the
funding from the government. So do I think the government
should be putting money in this, Yeah, I do. And
I think they should be doing programs like that all
over the country because then that's when you don't have
these like dense hubs and these three locations, but you
(31:09):
actually have strong ecosystems that both startups and small businesses
all across the country. Because, oh yes, I think they should.
Our economy seems to be engineered to attract big business, right.
(31:30):
It's very traditional for a big business to announce that
they're searching for a new headquarters, and local and state governments,
you know, whip out all these incentives. Why don't they
turn it on its head and invest in local people
instead of trying to attract business, because that's the way
we've been done for so long. You need a community
to see the value of a local business grow for
(31:52):
them to really understand. And I'll give you a great example.
So in Birmingham, Alabama, they have they have a tech
eco system is growing and it's growing around one company.
It's been called Shipped. Shipped is a company that basically
does grocery deliveries. Well, a few years ago, Shipped, which
is based in Birmingham, Alabama, got acquired by Target for
five million dollars. So half a billion dollars for a
(32:13):
tech company in Birmingham, Alabama. I promise you half a
billion dollars goes a much further than a billion dollars
in San Francisco, of course, But because of that they've
created all these jobs. They also have all these folks
who worked there who have seen how to grow a company,
who are now starting their own companies. You now got
a bunch of people who got wealthy through this funding
(32:35):
round or this acquisition, who are now becoming angel investors,
who are now investing in the local community, right, who
are now starting their own restaurants, right. Like a whole
bunch of things came out of this one central company.
And so now the folks in Birmingham are like, how
do we get another shipped? Like instead of us talking
about bringing Amazon here, let's let's have a homegrown company
(32:56):
actually cares about being here. How do we create more
more of those? And as we start to see more
communities have local winners like that, I think we will
start to see these things happening, Like that's really what
I want to see for these communities around the country. Well,
it's really funny you mentioned that because we just went
to Birmingham and Atlanta and talk about two cities that
used to be the same size, the same economic might,
(33:18):
and now Atlanta has the world's largest airport, is the
home of Coca Cola, Chick fil A, too many other
things to name, and Birmingham is kind of fading into obscurity.
I have friends who lived there, I've been there many times,
but this seems like the way out of their hole
for communities that have fallen behind economically. It definitely can
be a way out of the whole. But this also
goes back to something you mentioned earlier. Right, when something
(33:40):
like that happens, the founders and individuals who got wealthy
through those acquisitions need to pour back into the community. Right.
Every time you have a successful exit like that in
one of these communities, and that doesn't lead to the
creation of angel groups, venture groups, new companies, new small businesses,
(34:01):
it sets a community back by a decade because you
get one of those, like what's the decade? But once
you get more of them, it starts to build on itself.
So it goes from once a decade to once every
five years. So now you're just getting a bunch of them. Well,
the moment you have one and they don't pour back
into that community, then it leaves a gaping void and
(34:22):
you have to wait for the next one. So I
see Twitter as a place where most trolls go to
bother other people. And somehow you've turned Twitter into this
hub for you know, finding talent and investing in people.
How the hell did you do that? Um, I don't know, man,
it was just luck, Like I just I was just
(34:44):
tweeting about I was. I started off just tweeting about
the things I learned in my you know, time being
an entrepreneur now being an investor, because there's there's so
many things that we take for granted in this in
this in street. They're just known, right, you just know,
you don't that vcs don't sign in the a's right,
(35:06):
you just know that, like valuation is don't really how
much to do with the business at the early stage,
far more about leverage, like or or reality for that matter,
reality for that matter, right, you just know, like to
get to vcs, you got a network and meet people.
You just know, like for a pitch deck, these the
slides you need. And there's a new first time founder
(35:26):
every day who doesn't. And so all I was doing
is just trying to give advice and like demystified venture capital.
And as I did that, you know, just more and
more people were gravitating towards it, and so I just
decided to keep doing it and be consistent with it.
And it's really the consistency of it. And then also
like you know, the content I'm I'm I'm talking about,
I'm always trying to help people, and so I have
(35:50):
the majority of people on my time. My majority of
people who follow me are of the same mindset. They're
looking for help, but they're looking to help others and
you know, not as many of the trolls. The trolls
still happen, like trolls like get haters, like it happens,
but like that's not what I do it for our
door for all the people that help, and then you know,
let's let's be honest, do it for me selfishly, right,
(36:11):
Me growing a president on Twitter helped me raise my
fund right, like I'm still fundraising, but like me putting
my presidents on Twitter and growing that like definitely helped.
You know, there are there are people who I admire
and look up to who know me now because of Twitter,
which is like the coolest thing ever. Well, it seems
like you're in the right place right time too, because
your name is Mac the VC right, Like you've branded
(36:33):
yourself right and we're we're going through a moment here
where we're having a lot of cultural awakenings about wealth gaps,
specifically between black communities and just other communities will call it.
So have you leveraged that to try to, you know,
advance the cause here? Because you know, wealth gaps concern
all Americans, not just black Americans. I have, but I
(36:58):
also I pushed back order because people talk about venture
like it's supposed to be the answer to the wealth gap.
And the problem with that is that assumes that most
companies are going to be successful, or that a lot
of large swamp of these companies are gonna be successful,
and naturally most of these companies aren't. Most of these
companies that I see are coming up are going to fail.
(37:18):
They just just the numbers, the status. This is what's
going to happen. And so knowing that when you think
about what it takes to close the racial wealth gap
or just the wealth gap in general. You know, one
of the things that happened as I was getting the
fund up and growing and started to make investments was
one of the companies that invested this is really fast growing,
(37:40):
high growth uh start up a silicon bats standard Silicon valley.
You know a founder who had started two companies they
both exited. You know, he's been done really well, this
is third one. This is gonna be the big one.
So that company went from like zero to sixteen million
in revenue and like seven or eight months something crazy right,
raised a whole bunch of money, and so I got
(38:03):
my best friend, who was my former CTO from my startup.
I got my best friend a job as an engineer
at that company. He's one of the he's one of
the first like three black people they hired. He's one
of the first fifty employees. They paid him more money
than he ever made in his life. They gave him
better benefits than he had ever had, and they gave
him more stock than I own in the company as
(38:25):
an investor. And so when this company does well or
does like a quarter of what everybody thinks it could be,
he'll become independently wealthy, which means my godson will never
have to worry about paying for college. That means my
godson will probably have a trust account, you know, for
(38:45):
when he turns eighteen. Right, my friend and his wife
will be able to do more real estate investing. That
means the next generations of their family will actually have
money to generate. Wealth that had nothing to do with
or has everything to do with access. Because the only
way you ever get a job to a company like
(39:05):
that is you've got to be in these circles. And
so now a big thing that I'm working on is
how do we give access to those types of jobs
to more people, because it's not just going to be
the founders, it's also going to be the employees. And
so how we really have a diverse employee pool where
people can become one of the first fifty to a
d employees at the next uber Because if you were
(39:26):
one of the first one hundred employees Ober, you're rich today.
So of course, talk about a viral app uber. But
you know what you're suggesting to speaking of virility is
basically culture is infectious. So you place your friend there, right,
he's gonna make some money. He's gonna, you know, lead
(39:47):
to different decisions at the company. Right, his descendants are
going to have a different situation than he did. And
it's kind of like, that's kind of how you change
things correct, having a very long term view on things.
That's how you change things. It's the long term view.
And you know, when people ask me, you know, most
my most proudest things I've done having started my fund,
(40:11):
one is investing the woman who became a Serican mother.
But two is getting my friend that job. Like I
always felt bad at the starter we had when as
biggest we thought it could be. But this is my
chance to like give him that, to give him that
access and to change his family's life and trajectory. And
that's completely separate from what I do, where I say,
(40:34):
you know, this is how we're going to change the world. Like,
let me just get my friend the job, and he
got two of his friends jobs there, right, Like that
that helps and that makes a difference. And so you know,
some of his money and some of his access, and
hopefully I'll be able to bring a little bit of both.
So when you take these startup founders, right, and you
find them, right, you found this seventeen year old, right,
and then you kind of just stick them into this
(40:56):
new ecosystem, what's it like? It's scary for them. It's
a lot to learn, there's a there's a huge learning curve.
There's a bunch of skills they got to pick up
along the way. But that's the stuff I can help
you with, right, Like I can I can teach you
how to do a financials I can I can teach
you how to put a pitch deck together. I can't
(41:17):
teach you how to use a vimo hack to get users. No,
that's pretty novel. Right, So, like, I know there's a
bunch of stuff that we take for granted that a
lot of vcs just want entrepreneurs to already have. I'm
okay if you don't have that stuff, because we can
get you there. It'll take some time, but we can
get you there. Um because you know, a lot of
(41:37):
them are gonna be no scared, they're not going to
trust investors. Like it's just all these other things that
come into it, and a lot of that just has
to go with like cultural competency, Like I'm okay giving
these founders grace with like you don't need to know everything.
That's okay. You know you're you're gonna make mistakes. That's fine,
we can work through them. They're not like these aren't
the most astronomical things to get over, So you know
(42:00):
that's was like, you know, you don't just throw them
into the wolves. You kind of hand hold them as
much as you can, and you know, you give directions
when you can. Isn't it crazy with telecommunications and you know,
mass travel, that we've developed these bubbles of culture and
we kind of don't talk to each other, and like
this creates all sorts of you know, hilarious and serious
(42:23):
problems in our society. Like, seriously, we don't talk to
each other. We all we all live here, we all
pass each other in the street. Like how do we
not speak the same language because we don't grow Like
we're all in the same communities, but we're all in
(42:45):
different we all experience different cultures, right, and so it's
very easy to not speak the same language when we
are some combination of nature versus nurture. If you asked me,
you're a little bit of both. But like then the
nature you're in and forms the way you view the world.
Like if you live in a community where the cops
(43:08):
are always helpful, where you see people in your community
like go to dunk and Donuts and buy coffee for
the cops, and you're always happy, and it's always pleasant,
and they're around at the local fairs. You've only ever
seen good from them. It's really hard for you to
fathom somebody telling you that they see cops as the enemy,
(43:29):
that they come from a community where cops don't care
about them. Where I tell you that the first time
I had somebody pull a gun on me, it was
a cop when I was a kid, Right, the first
time I was stopping at first, I was thirteen coming
back from playing basketball. The only time I had my
jaw broken as when I got pistol with five police
officer because a good friend of mine was dating a
white woman. Like if I tell you that, you're gonna
(43:52):
look at me like I'm crazy and not have two heads.
And you're like, that can't be true. I know cops.
All the cops I know are good people, and they've
only ever done good things. And I'm telling you the
truth is somewhere murkier than that. I don't think there's
this idealized corps. But here's the thing. You say that,
(44:13):
But I had this exact conversation with somebody like I
literally had this exact conversation with somebody who told me.
He'd like, I don't believe you. All the cops I
know were good people. Why would you be scared of
the police that they're here to help us? And it's
because he wanted to ask some police officers from the
from some directions and I was uncomfortable. He's like it,
(44:34):
what's wrong with you? I was like, yeah, we don't
don't deal with police like I had that conversation with
a white counterpart of mine, right, And so that's how
we end up speaking to different languages because we all
experienced the world very differently. And then when you have
difference of experiences and try to come to a consensus,
it becomes really hard because if I've never experienced it
(44:55):
that way, then it's hard for me to understand what
you've gone through or even the leave you. No, It's true,
our experiences do shape who we are, and we do
view the world very differently because of our experiences. I
guess I try to see things that you know, the
truth is much murkier and messier than our experiences would suggest.
(45:17):
I mean, I agree with you, Um, I just wish
more people do too. So how do you, uh, how
did you get past you know this? This? How how
did you grow up in these surroundings and one day
just decide, you know what, I'm gonna make it, And
not only am I gonna make it, but I'm gonna
(45:37):
help people make it as well. I have really good parents.
I have really good parents, and I had a really
good father who always instilled in me one the idea
of entrepreneurship and ownership, and who who let me know
that it was okay for me to chase my dreams
because he didn't get a chance to chase his right.
(46:00):
And so having my parents, they're really helped. They give
me grounding and then you know, just hard work and
luck along the way, right, um, and then also recognize
me like to your point, the only reason I'm here
today is because to all the people helped me, and
so I would be doing them a disservice if I
(46:21):
didn't help others. Well, I think it again, it sounds
like you're the rare breed. There's a little something to that.
There could be a little something to that. Where do
we find out more about Go ahead? Mac? I was
gonna say, I guess I look for founders who remind
(46:41):
me a little bit of myself sometimes, isn't that right? Yeah?
It's sometimes it's hilarious that we look for talent and
a lot of times we're looking for different versions of
ourselves because we understand that we don't understand people who
don't resemble us. Um, where do we find out more
about you? About rare breed and about Mac? The VC
(47:02):
so you can find you can check out rare Breed
dot vcs our website, or you can find me on Twitter,
is I'm at Matt Conwell at m A C C
O N W E l L. So check me out
on Twitter. Uh, Mac the VC, I'm pretty active. Yeah,
I saw that and we'll be Well. You're inspiring me
to get on Twitter, because to me, Twitter is this
(47:24):
garbage camp. It's really hard to find good stuff on Twitter.
So thank you for inspiring me to spend more time
on Twitter. Mac, absolutely and looking forward to tweeting back
and forth. Which so we live in the world where
bigger has been better for quite some time. We live
(47:46):
in a world where everything is tooled toward big business,
but really small business is the future. They're innovators, they
create more jobs, and they really have more disruptive potential.
But we see local and state governments pretend it's still
the seventies, eighties and nineties and really, like the music
stations tell you, we're in today. Right today, you need
(48:09):
home grown businesses, specifically technology businesses. That's where most of
the future wealth of tomorrow is going to come from.
So we need to have our policies reflect that reality.
When you have under investment, when you have brain drain
in your area, whether you're in an urban area or
rural area. You need home grown technology firms. When you
(48:33):
create local venture capital funds to invest in local businesses,
you're building in your tax base of tomorrow. And really
we don't see that. We saw our guests talk about it,
and how you know one company in Birmingham, Alabama can
make all the difference because in the end, culture and
economic growth is infectious and whole swaths of the country
(48:55):
are being left behind. And the only way to reverse
that is really to you the power of the purse
to make investments in people who already live there. We
can't always import prosperity. Prosperity has to come from the
ground up. So let's stop giving subsidies to big companies
to relocate jobs, which in the end that doesn't create
more jobs, it just shifts them around the country. Instead,
(49:18):
let's empower local entrepreneurs to create solutions that makes sense
in their communities. And I think that's a much more
practical way to do things in America today. Thanks to
all of you for joining me as we followed the
profit with mac the VC. What an interesting way to
disrupt the way we're doing things, and as we all
know today, we need a lot of disruption and many
(49:40):
corners of our economy. A shout out to our team
of producers who work hard to make this happen. I'm
David Grasso. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us
five stars and give us a review so that others
can learn what the show is all about. Follow The
Profit is a production of ging Ridge three sixty and
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(50:01):
you get your podcasts. You can also view us on YouTube,
part of the Gingwich three sixty network,
I'm David Grosso, and you're listening to follow the Profit
Today I'm joined by someone who has a pretty interesting
perspective into raising money and to getting businesses started. His
name is Mac the VC, otherwise known as Matt Conwell.
(00:20):
He's joining me today from Maryland. What's up, Mac, how's
it going? David is good to be here, man. So
when you meet people in the elevator, what's the elevator pitch?
You give them? What's the elevator pitch I give them?
I tell them give me your money. I'll make you
more money. Well that's pretty convincing. Tell me more. That's
(00:40):
the point of elevator pitch, right, you want to get
to the point where somebody says that actually more. Um No,
so um at rare brief ventures, you know, we look
to invest in companies with rare brief founders that can
be found anywhere, not just the major tech hopes. So
we're looking for the opportunities that are overlooked and counted out.
(01:01):
So let's talk about that money gets distributed to tech companies.
Basically in the Northeast and in California and everywhere else,
it's just absent. Why is that? Um? I don't know,
well I do know. It has to do with the
density of where the venture firms and the capital are.
(01:21):
So you got Boston, but Boston's because that's where the
life science help bigs and so there's a density of
capital life sciences. You got in New York because that's
the financial capital. So that's where all the big pe
firms are financial firms, and they got interested into doing
venture investing. So it's a big, you know collection there.
And then you got to look on Valley, which is
(01:41):
his own unique thing. But in the early you know,
nineteen hundreds, when we get around the times of World
War two and even a little earlier, you had a
lot of government money going in to support the war
efforts and support all this creation of new technology, which
led to this boom of technology companies and led to
(02:04):
a boom of capital that just kind of centered there.
And so you just got this density of technology and
capital which attracted more and by the time everybody else
would figure out what was going on, they had a
fifty year on so dense pockets. So how did this
happen though, because you know, even when we were little kids, Matt,
because you I'm gonna assume you're about my age. There
(02:26):
wasn't really a big difference in cost of living and
in jobs across the country, right, And now there seems
to be two America's, right, these hyper expensive technology forward
America and then this left behind America. How did that happen?
That happened as when you get past the great migration
(02:50):
in the sixties, and then too the nineteen seventies and
nineteen eighties, you had this proliferation of people leaving out
of the rural parts of the country and going into
the metropolis, into the metropolis and major cities, right, and
as you have people chasing the American dream. What we've
seen over time, what we've seen time and time again
(03:11):
is that money leads to more money, right, and so
the rich get richer, and as they do, they start
to leave more and more people behind. That's how you
get a minimum wage that's been left behind for free.
Damn their generations at this point, because the folks making
money are only thinking about how to make more money,
(03:32):
like we see this in Mars tech firms where. But
that's why the show was undercover Boss is so interesting
to me because you have all these I've seen it,
the CEOs who work at a point where they're detached
from the day to day work. So the way they
see people spreadsheets. And then on the spreadsheet, every person
has equates to dollars. And so if we can say
(03:54):
fifty cent here here or a dollar here, that's saving
a dollar and every person here ease to us, saving
millions and aggregate. So yeah, let's start to cut things,
or you have things like shrinkage. So like over time,
as inflation goes up, the sizes of products go down
because it's easier for a serial company to shrink the
size of a box that it is for them to
(04:15):
make it cheaper and so or make it more expensive.
So instead of chaining and making the price more expensively,
just make the boxes smaller. And those little things add
up to Moore money. Because greed is undefeated, right, So
that's what happens. It's really all the smell greed. But
in the end, MAC, we know that most job creation,
most big ideas, most economic growth doesn't come from people
(04:39):
who make cereal boxes. It comes from small business, right,
It doesn't come from these big conglomerates. In fact, these
big conglomerates, by these small businesses, they gobble it up
to guarantee growth. So how do we support small business
We support small businesses by shopping and spending our money there, right,
and you support with your capital if you want to
support small businesses, the small businesses, right, Like you know,
(05:03):
instead of going to the major jewelry store and your
local mall, go to the local jewelry store down the
street from your house. Right. You know, the way you
support small businesses is you fund them. You give them capital,
You give them the opportunity to give you that high
touch feeling. Because like once you get to the big companies,
you know that that white glove, you know, community feel disappears,
(05:26):
and they all try to do it. They all come
up with like department so their their their companies to
try and do community outreach and community touch, and it's
never the same. Right, It's like going to a Delhi
where you know the owner and you've known them for years.
And so the way we support them is we give
them capital. The way we support them from like a
venture standpoint is we don't like unfortunately a lot of
(05:48):
small businesses do not fit the financial model of venture capital,
which is why venture capital is only one portion of
the financial stack. Right. I think very often people look
to vcs and be like, hey, you need to solve this.
You can't just do the big tech companies. You gotta
do these small businesses to the business model isn't fit
for that. And the problem is we haven't innovated to
(06:11):
allow other new financial products or to really pump up
other financial products like revenue based investing that really do
fit the small business models. So we need more people
actually innovating and creating new financial products to support small business.
We've gotten to this point where everybody's just like, well,
this is how things have been done, has been this
done this way forever. It's like, no, we can do
(06:32):
new things. This is this is what we're about. We
create things to solve problems. This is a problem we have.
Let's create something to solve it. And I don't feel
like enough people are spending enough brain power to solve
these issues. Now we just try tried and true formulas.
That seems to be the problem across society. But I
want to push back on you, Matt, because we always
say that like, oh, you should shop at a small business.
(06:55):
But I'm a millennial. I'm just trying to make it
here economically, I'm not responsible for the aid to the world.
I like my Starbucks points, I like my five percent
back on my Prime card. I like my predictability. I
want to save money. And as much as I care
about small business and want them to succeed, I also
care about myself. So how do I balance those That's
(07:17):
the personal decision. You gotta decide what matters for you, right,
does your small the small businesses of your local community
matter more than you're getting that Starbucks coffee. If you
have to pay an extra fifty cents more to get
coffee at you know, Jenny's coffee shops, where are you
going to go? And those are the personal decisions that
we have to make every day. And to your point,
(07:38):
you know you just want to say money, you're just
trying to just trying to make adman. There are a
lot of small businesses that actually offer better price products.
We've been conditioned to believe that, like, oh, all the
places we go now give us the best prices. In
the actuality, we actually stopped searching for the best prices.
We just got lolled into just going to the same
place as we always go. But at the end of
the day, like those are personal choices, like where you
(07:59):
go to show where you spend your money. You get
to decide that. And if you just want to go
to all the places to save the most money, fine,
But if you really want to support your small businesses,
then you've got to do that. You can't say I
support my small businesses, but then they'll spend your money
there and then you don't really support them. Just now,
just being a performative. You're just being a performer, right
you virtual? This is how you get clicks on twitterly.
(08:23):
Now you make a really good point about big business.
They have convinced us that they are the best deal,
but oftentimes they are not. That is an excellent point.
So let's talk about the proverbial, you know, low income neighborhood.
We'll call it, some people call it the hood, whatever
you want to call it. How do we change that?
Because you know, we have this idea in our society
that poor areas are poor because you know they deserve it,
(08:46):
or I don't know, or because of historical adjustices, or
you know, name your basket of tropes about bad neighborhoods.
So how do how do we make it better? We
need to stop discarding portions of our communities. Um, I'm
(09:06):
from Baltimore, right san Chester, Win towns of a part
of Baltimore where the median income it's seventeen thousand dollars
a year. That's like a fraction of the media and
income in America. That's that's that's basically a middle income
country right there. But that's per household. That's not per person.
(09:28):
That's per household. So devastatingly poor. Yea devastatingly poor, but
it's not from lack of effort. Like these are people
who get up every day go to work. These are
people have to catch two and three buses to get
the work and get home like they're trying. Like think
about the people complain about being in traffic trying to
get the work and it takes you forty five minutes
and traffic to get the work, where you just get
(09:49):
there in twenty minutes. We're talking about peopleho have to
take two and three busses where it takes them two
and three hours to get the work, sitting outside and
the heat, sitting outside in the snow. But yeah, we're
gonna say they're poor because they were to people, we're
not the only want to be poor, right, But when
you're young, and you're going and you're growing up in
a city like Baltimore, and you're you're in a household
where you don't know what it's like to have running
(10:11):
water or electricity every day when you're just used to
your water getting cut off, you used to electricity getting
cut off, you're used to not having you're used to
not having food. You will do whatever it takes to
survive and eat. And along the way, you don't have
people in your community showing you what success looks like.
You don't have people showing you like how you go
(10:33):
to school two, then go to college to then get
a career. Like careers aren't talked about right like in
these communities because everything about their daily life is survival.
They don't even have the they don't even have the
bandwidth to strategize a better future. And we don't give
them those support. The support we do give them, we
(10:55):
give them resources to live. So we give you food,
might give you shelter if you can get finance, if
you can get federal aid, but even within and then
we'll show you how to put a resume together. But
what's the resume when you haven't worked anywhere for like
four or five years because nobody will hire you, right,
And so what do we actually do to move these
people for We don't give them the opportunities to grow financially.
(11:17):
Like if you didn't make it in high school and
make it to college, just gotta let you go. It's
not like you can go get a job at Bethlehem
Steel and make fifty year and support a family that
didn't exist anymore. And that's why you know, we need
more programs. So like there's a company called Catalyite where
if you go there, they have a test. If you
pass their test or aptitude tests, they say they can
train you to be a software engineer in six months,
(11:40):
no matter who you are. You walk off the street,
take this test, six months, you have a job off revolutionary.
It makes sense we should have things like like this
for all types of jobs. Like you don't have to
go to college for four years to work in HR.
You don't have to go to college for four years
to be a media buyer. You can literally like we
have haven't thought about what the next wave of apprenticeship
(12:02):
could look like like so many of these jobs we
say you have to go get a degree, Like no,
you can literally set up apprenticeships where you can learn
to be a media by you can learn to do
you know, social media as, you can learn to do
that's all these things that we can learn, but we
don't give people the opportunity to do that. So you
have a whole swap of of our country who's left
(12:23):
out of the opportunity to grow economically. That's really interesting
because we make it rain in these areas with federal money, right,
and it doesn't seem to move the need all right,
So it's like these apprenticeships are a way to make
an investment instead of just blowing money that doesn't really
lead to better outcomes because the money that we're blowing
(12:45):
is just deal with your basic needs of just survival.
You need to get beyond survival to a place where
you can be comfortable enough to actually move forward. Like
here's a crazy stat the number one reason for people
dropping out of community colleges like community college where you
trying to do better, you're you're going away, can one
(13:05):
life of it? One life of it, and that one
life of it could beginning your car to because now
that you've got your car to, you don't have a
way to get to work, and you don't have the
money to get your car out of impound, and so
how are you gonna go back to school? You're not
like little things like that can throw somebody's life off,
But you're like getting your car. Told like, just get
your you don't have a problem. Like if you come
(13:27):
from a community where the meeting household makes seventeen thousand
a year, you gotta make a lot of hard choices.
And so we just give you and so we make
it rain and give you money just to go, just
to continue with the survival mode and survival mentality without
actually investing in the people to help them grow. Um,
that's just the way I think about it. But there
(13:49):
are exceptional people in these areas, and we see that
time and time again throughout history. Is that you know,
wealthy areas don't tend to produce more exceptional people than
poor areas. In fact, it's it's that's the one thing
that's equal opportunity. The one thing that is different is
environment and opportunity. So how do we empower exceptional people
(14:10):
that are not born into such luck to help their
communities change because the problem is wedify exceptionalism. You can't
view these communities through the prism of the folks who
were exceptional, because that's fundamentally going to leave out the
majority of folks. And then what you do is you
deify these folks who were exceptional and you put it
(14:32):
on them to solve the problems for their community when
it wasn't the problem they started to begin with. Right,
and so, everybody has decisions to bake in their own life.
And I can't fault anybody who says, like, look, I
made it out, I'm going to be happy. I'm not
going to deal with that stuff anymore. That's perfectly fine.
It makes sense, of course, but we're not setting these
(14:56):
communities up for true success. If all we want to
do is to a look so and so made it
you can too. Well. I'll give you an example. There
was a young lady who um, I was working with
the Robotics Club and the Inner City Baltimore. This one
young lady on the team was exceptional. She was doing
really great. Then all of a sudden she and you know,
(15:17):
she was on her path to being a computer science major,
going to college and everything. And one day she stopped
coming and then she stopped coming to school, and so
checked in with her to find out what was going on,
And what happened was she had gotten a job at
McDonald's to help her mom pay bills because they didn't
have electricity, and they hadn't had electricity for three months,
(15:38):
and she's like, I just need to help, and it's
like who whoa, whoa wha whoa. You were on the
path to real success to getting out in her whole
things like one, I don't know if I'm good enough
for college to I can't afford college. Three we need
electricity right now, And you shaid know you know what
we did. We got her an internship working for the
(15:58):
guy who was like the cold for the robotics team.
He ran a tech company, and through her internship she
was able to help her mom. She end up getting
scholarship with a full rider at the college and is
now a software engineer. She is an exceptional story. But
did you hear all the things along the way where
people had to step in to make sure she got there?
(16:20):
But we are all like that. If people hadn't stepped
into my life, I wouldn't be where I am today either.
We're on that situation we are, But then we need
more people like that gentleman who hired her as an
intern to help more kids like her, because the amount
of exceptional folks that are in these communities is much
larger than the amount of exceptional folks and actually make
(16:41):
it out. And that's the part that's getting missed, right,
And so it's like, how do we truly support all
of these exceptional people to make it out? And we
don't and we don't provide the resources for that. We
don't come like. It can't just be the exceptional people
who made it out to come back. It's all the
other folks in the community who care about the community,
(17:01):
support the local leaders, the local businesses, to really pour
into these young people in these communities and not just
the young people, their parents too. We don't do enough
of that. So, Mack, you're someone who you know still
(17:23):
goes to these communities. Is it demoralizing to be there?
These are violent places, these are places with poverty. Like
I feel like I get anxiety when I when I
go to you know, poor areas. So do you Because
I feel like I want to change it. I feel
like I want to, you know, make a difference, and
you know, and it doesn't seem like we know where
to start with this type of stuff I do my
(17:47):
I don't feel uncomfortable because like, I'm from those communities,
Like I know these people. These are like my friends
and my family members. These are people I grew up with.
But it is heartbreaking. But it's heartbreaking more so because
so many people don't under stand the true realities of
these communities. Right do you see the stories? You watch
the wire, You think that's all it is, But there's
(18:08):
so much more of the stories to be told. That's like,
these aren't lazy people. These aren't people don't want to work.
These are people who want to be poor. These aren't
people who want to live on the system. These are
people who are just trying to survive and they need
to figure out way to live life beyond just survival.
But we never give them that grace. We automatically put
(18:29):
them in these buckets. And so for me, I'm always
encouraged by the work that a lot of community leaders
are doing. And like, for me, you know what little
bit I can do helping You know, I'm a VC.
I'm investing in companies because I want to find companies
that can grow the unicorns and be worth billions of dollars.
But that's also why I invested in a black woman
(18:52):
out of Baltimore who was a single mom who had
an amazing idea for a product that nobody wanted to back.
I'm not backed her and her company is now growing.
You know what, she's employing and helping people from her community.
You know what else she's doing. She also has a
nonprofit where she goes into these communities and she teaches
young black girls and gets them excited for stim education
(19:15):
for you know, science, technology, and engineering through makeup and jewelry.
Last week she had a session where she had young
girls like elementary and middle school ages creating led ear rings.
They created ear rings that live up right. But like,
(19:38):
but like it's a young lady like that who's now
empowered to do more good works. And so you know,
that's how I help and hopefully one day I'll be
able to do more. But yeah, for me, like it's heartbreaking,
but moments like that are encouraging. So what is VC?
For people who don't know? What's the simplest term? Is
it just money that you invest in people and you
(20:00):
take a piece of their company. So venture capital is
a subset of private equity, which basically means we make
investments into private businesses. Right, most people know, like financial advisors,
they take your money and they invested into public companies,
they invested in stocks. Right, we do the same thing.
(20:20):
We just invest into private companies and in my case,
companies are just getting started. So I'm a glorified financial advisor.
Wealthy people giving their money and I put their money
behind companies to help me them make more money. So
your company, rare breed is the rare breed the founder
that you're referring to. Yes, rare breed is the founder
I'm referring to. So you invest in founders, you're a
(20:44):
people first company. What what do you look for in
someone who fits the rare breed? You know, ideal Every
company and every founders his own unique situation. But I'm
looking for one from a business standpoint. I'm looking for
people who are having a very unique and direct opinion
of WALM, how they do customer acquisition, experience of retention.
(21:08):
If you show me you know how to find customers,
you can get them to buy your product and they
can keep coming back, then you might have a chance
to actually win. And by having that mindset allows me
to take out my own biases where I don't have
to know exactly what market you're in. If I know
that you find customers, they love it and keep buying it.
They love it and they keep coming back to buy it. Well,
(21:28):
that's how we become the firm that never misses out
on the opportunity to invest in a copy like Spans right.
You can imagine you know when Spens is first pitching
to a bunch of vcs, like, there are a bunch
of folks who don't get it. But the moment she says, well,
you know, I go to these department stores and sell
it to women. Women love it, and most women are
going to buy four these a year, Like the all
(21:50):
need to know everything about this. You clearly figured out
a market that and something that's working, and then you
know it's it's sometimes it's the intangible. So like the
the woman I mentioned whore I backed in Baltimore. I
was working with her for like three years and nobody
wanted to invest in her. So what she did was
she became a Serican mother. She gave birth to twins
(22:12):
to raise the money start building her prototype. You can't
tell me that's a person won't do whatever it takes
and makes to be successful, you know, like that level
of grick most people will never be able to see.
And then on the flip side, I invested in a
seventeen year old kid out of Baltimore who basically hacked
(22:32):
them oh to get his first twenty five thousand customers.
One of the smartest people I've ever met in my life.
I just made the bet on him because he was
one of the smartest people I've met. Right, So, every
found in every situation is different, but it's those unique
things about them that kind of set them over the age.
We just committed to a company the other day where
we're talking to the founders a really cool company and
(22:55):
I know it's on lengthening that he ran this nonprofit
helping returning citizens or people who were returning out of jail,
and I asked him about it. He's like, yeah, you know,
my dad was a lawyer and he was a pioneer
in justice reform, and he's like, you know, really helping people,
supporting people is really important to me. And that's why
they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, you're definitely the kind of
person we want to invest in. Right. So it's those
(23:15):
it's those things that sometimes go beyond just the business
that we look for. And these are these are people
that the traditional venture capitalists would have never discovered because
they're not in Baltimore, they're not in your community, They're
not interacting with these people, and you're going to events
to meet these people. Correct? Absolutely? I mean before we
(23:36):
had a global pandemic, I spent a lot of time
in my community and other communities. You know, I spent
a lot of time in Birmingham, Alabama, and St. Louis
and Detroit. Where you get to meet these folks, you
get the Golden's communities. You go, you go speak at
a Chamber of Commerce event, you go speak at UM
Urban League event, you go hang out at the Lesbians
(23:56):
who Tech local meetups. I can't tell you how much
crap I got when I used to work for the
Investment on the State of Maryland going to the Lesbians
who Tech meet up there Like, why are you going
to this event? I was like, it says who Tech?
Like I'm looking for tech entrepreneurs, like I might find
one there. You don't discriminate equal opportunity here. That's such
a novel concept, right, um, And so I just learned
(24:19):
that when you go Wow, and you're intentional, you get
access to far more people the farm entrepreneurs, and you
do just waiting for them to come to you. Yeah. Well,
you talked about the seventeen year old kid right that
sent people a penny on Venmo to bring him to
scholar meat dot com. That's pretty interesting what ended up
(24:40):
happening to that seventeen year old. So that's seventeen year
old sami Um ended up getting some money from US
at the State of Maryland. Use that to go live
in New York and race five d thousand from a
bunch of ex Goldman Sacks folks. Ended up going to
y Combinator, which is the premier a startup program in
(25:01):
the country. Raised two point five million coming out of that,
got some money directly from the founder, and got led
by large venture firm, and now has a company that's
growing by leaps and founds and we'll have some major
updates coming out soon. He's now twenty one. He's now
twenty one year old black kid from Baltimore running a
(25:22):
company worth multimillions and it's on the pathway to being
a really large five fintech company. H So, scholar me
dot com check it out. Big things coming. So I
have all these investments been profitable for you? Because you know,
it almost seems like people would say, oh, you know,
you're just doing social good, right, like are you making money?
(25:44):
That's what's the point of the business, right, So I
have to ask, I have to ask the obvious question. Mac.
It takes a long time to get the money back
because here's the thing. Like, as a VC, when we
invest in companies, we get paid back typically one of
two ways. The company goes public or is acquired. That's
a really high bar that takes a long time. So
(26:05):
but I will say many of the companies that we've
invested in and that I invested in previously are still
doing well and are moving in the direction of being
very successful investments. I do not do this just for
the social good, Like, yes, do I care about diversity,
that I care about social goody? I do. But my job,
(26:25):
the point of my job is to make money for
my investors. That is my job. People give me their
give me their money to make the more money. So
every investment I'm making, I'm making it with that in mind. Now,
most companies are going to fail, I know that, but
that's why we invest in companies. That's why we're looking
for companies that are going to be worth a billion dollars.
(26:46):
That way, those successes outweigh and cover up all the
failures because it's running a company so fragile. So it's
this model of VC a bit more profitable because you're
dealing with all who don't have family access to capital
or friends and family. Typically when you start your own business,
the first money you get is from friends and family. Well,
(27:08):
if you're of a modest background, that's not possible, is it. No,
it's not possible at all. And so well I will
say about investing as early as we do, is it
can be very, very profitable with smaller dollar amounts because
when you invest in the company, you're basically putting money
in at a certain valuation. Right, You're at a certain
(27:28):
value and the value grows out over time. Well, if
you go out to Silicon Valley, you'll see companies, like
when they're first getting started, getting valuations of twenty million,
twenty five million, these very inflated numbers. You go to
like a Baltimore, a Philadelphia, Detroit, you might find an
early company where the value starts at four million, five million,
(27:50):
six million, something far more reasonable, something with much easier
to attain expectations. But then from the investor standpoint, the
opportunity to general it a lot more so, Like in
the case of a company of starts at twenty million
as their valuation and then they grow to a forty
million dollar evaluation. If you put money in, you now
to extra money. That's awesome. You double your money if
(28:12):
you invest in the company at a four million dollar
evaluation and then they go to a forty million dollar evaluation,
now ten extra money, right, So but the profitability goes
up very significantly from an investment standpoint, so it goes well.
So you know, there there's some real advantages to finding
companies outside of these overpriced, overcrowded hopes. Well, it seems like, uh,
(28:36):
the economy large, everything's overvalued and overinflated in certain markets
and just clinically dead and others. So speaking of that,
you worked for the state of Maryland and investing in companies.
Is it smart for the government to support you know,
small business in areas that need it. You know, the
largest purchaser in the country is the government, right the uh,
(29:01):
the the the company that has the largest amount of
money to spend in the United States is the government, right,
and so we want to jump start these communities if
we know, like, hey, we're we're we're lacking in jobs.
We need more jobs in America. You said it already.
Most jobs come from small businesses. But small businesses don't
(29:21):
fit the venture financing world or other kind of investment worlds.
Then where you get your money to go? The government
should be there the kind of supplement and in my opinion, right, um.
And then well, it's the teach a man to fish principle. Right.
If you teach them to fish, they'll go fishing by themselves.
If you just give away money, the money runs out
and then you're done. Yeah, but that's assuming that the
(29:45):
person you gave the fish didn't take that fish and
turn the bait to make more fish to go and
catch more fish, right, Like how it like that discredits
people's ingenuity, right, and people's want to do more. Um So, fundamentally,
I believe that in the state of Maryland, UM, where
(30:05):
I work, the Maryland Technology Development Corporation is the largest
fund of really states tech companies in the state of Maryland. Right,
here's an interesting fact. They were the first investor in squarespace.
Square Space is an amazing product that supports small businesses
every day. And there was three young men out of
University of Maryland who got their first check from the
State of Maryland. Now multibillion dollar company. They are based
(30:27):
in New York, but they don't get that money from Taco.
I don't know square space exists today. I will also
say that, and within that organization they have a fund
completely dedicated to stem cell research and commercialization. Because they
have been doing that work for the last ten years.
They are now companies being commercialized from the technologies that
(30:48):
they were investing in years ago. They are now saving
people's lives. That technology doesn't exists without, you know, the
funding from the government. So do I think the government
should be putting money in this, Yeah, I do. And
I think they should be doing programs like that all
over the country because then that's when you don't have
these like dense hubs and these three locations, but you
(31:09):
actually have strong ecosystems that both startups and small businesses
all across the country. Because, oh yes, I think they should.
Our economy seems to be engineered to attract big business, right.
(31:30):
It's very traditional for a big business to announce that
they're searching for a new headquarters, and local and state governments,
you know, whip out all these incentives. Why don't they
turn it on its head and invest in local people
instead of trying to attract business, because that's the way
we've been done for so long. You need a community
to see the value of a local business grow for
(31:52):
them to really understand. And I'll give you a great example.
So in Birmingham, Alabama, they have they have a tech
eco system is growing and it's growing around one company.
It's been called Shipped. Shipped is a company that basically
does grocery deliveries. Well, a few years ago, Shipped, which
is based in Birmingham, Alabama, got acquired by Target for
five million dollars. So half a billion dollars for a
(32:13):
tech company in Birmingham, Alabama. I promise you half a
billion dollars goes a much further than a billion dollars
in San Francisco, of course, But because of that they've
created all these jobs. They also have all these folks
who worked there who have seen how to grow a company,
who are now starting their own companies. You now got
a bunch of people who got wealthy through this funding
(32:35):
round or this acquisition, who are now becoming angel investors,
who are now investing in the local community, right, who
are now starting their own restaurants, right. Like a whole
bunch of things came out of this one central company.
And so now the folks in Birmingham are like, how
do we get another shipped? Like instead of us talking
about bringing Amazon here, let's let's have a homegrown company
(32:56):
actually cares about being here. How do we create more
more of those? And as we start to see more
communities have local winners like that, I think we will
start to see these things happening, Like that's really what
I want to see for these communities around the country. Well,
it's really funny you mentioned that because we just went
to Birmingham and Atlanta and talk about two cities that
used to be the same size, the same economic might,
(33:18):
and now Atlanta has the world's largest airport, is the
home of Coca Cola, Chick fil A, too many other
things to name, and Birmingham is kind of fading into obscurity.
I have friends who lived there, I've been there many times,
but this seems like the way out of their hole
for communities that have fallen behind economically. It definitely can
be a way out of the whole. But this also
goes back to something you mentioned earlier. Right, when something
(33:40):
like that happens, the founders and individuals who got wealthy
through those acquisitions need to pour back into the community. Right.
Every time you have a successful exit like that in
one of these communities, and that doesn't lead to the
creation of angel groups, venture groups, new companies, new small businesses,
(34:01):
it sets a community back by a decade because you
get one of those, like what's the decade? But once
you get more of them, it starts to build on itself.
So it goes from once a decade to once every
five years. So now you're just getting a bunch of them. Well,
the moment you have one and they don't pour back
into that community, then it leaves a gaping void and
(34:22):
you have to wait for the next one. So I
see Twitter as a place where most trolls go to
bother other people. And somehow you've turned Twitter into this
hub for you know, finding talent and investing in people.
How the hell did you do that? Um, I don't know, man,
it was just luck, Like I just I was just
(34:44):
tweeting about I was. I started off just tweeting about
the things I learned in my you know, time being
an entrepreneur now being an investor, because there's there's so
many things that we take for granted in this in
this in street. They're just known, right, you just know,
you don't that vcs don't sign in the a's right,
(35:06):
you just know that, like valuation is don't really how
much to do with the business at the early stage,
far more about leverage, like or or reality for that matter,
reality for that matter, right, you just know, like to
get to vcs, you got a network and meet people.
You just know, like for a pitch deck, these the
slides you need. And there's a new first time founder
(35:26):
every day who doesn't. And so all I was doing
is just trying to give advice and like demystified venture capital.
And as I did that, you know, just more and
more people were gravitating towards it, and so I just
decided to keep doing it and be consistent with it.
And it's really the consistency of it. And then also
like you know, the content I'm I'm I'm talking about,
I'm always trying to help people, and so I have
(35:50):
the majority of people on my time. My majority of
people who follow me are of the same mindset. They're
looking for help, but they're looking to help others and
you know, not as many of the trolls. The trolls
still happen, like trolls like get haters, like it happens,
but like that's not what I do it for our
door for all the people that help, and then you know,
let's let's be honest, do it for me selfishly, right,
(36:11):
Me growing a president on Twitter helped me raise my
fund right, like I'm still fundraising, but like me putting
my presidents on Twitter and growing that like definitely helped.
You know, there are there are people who I admire
and look up to who know me now because of Twitter,
which is like the coolest thing ever. Well, it seems
like you're in the right place right time too, because
your name is Mac the VC right, Like you've branded
(36:33):
yourself right and we're we're going through a moment here
where we're having a lot of cultural awakenings about wealth gaps,
specifically between black communities and just other communities will call it.
So have you leveraged that to try to, you know,
advance the cause here? Because you know, wealth gaps concern
all Americans, not just black Americans. I have, but I
(36:58):
also I pushed back order because people talk about venture
like it's supposed to be the answer to the wealth gap.
And the problem with that is that assumes that most
companies are going to be successful, or that a lot
of large swamp of these companies are gonna be successful,
and naturally most of these companies aren't. Most of these
companies that I see are coming up are going to fail.
(37:18):
They just just the numbers, the status. This is what's
going to happen. And so knowing that when you think
about what it takes to close the racial wealth gap
or just the wealth gap in general. You know, one
of the things that happened as I was getting the
fund up and growing and started to make investments was
one of the companies that invested this is really fast growing,
(37:40):
high growth uh start up a silicon bats standard Silicon valley.
You know a founder who had started two companies they
both exited. You know, he's been done really well, this
is third one. This is gonna be the big one.
So that company went from like zero to sixteen million
in revenue and like seven or eight months something crazy right,
raised a whole bunch of money, and so I got
(38:03):
my best friend, who was my former CTO from my startup.
I got my best friend a job as an engineer
at that company. He's one of the he's one of
the first like three black people they hired. He's one
of the first fifty employees. They paid him more money
than he ever made in his life. They gave him
better benefits than he had ever had, and they gave
him more stock than I own in the company as
(38:25):
an investor. And so when this company does well or
does like a quarter of what everybody thinks it could be,
he'll become independently wealthy, which means my godson will never
have to worry about paying for college. That means my
godson will probably have a trust account, you know, for
(38:45):
when he turns eighteen. Right, my friend and his wife
will be able to do more real estate investing. That
means the next generations of their family will actually have
money to generate. Wealth that had nothing to do with
or has everything to do with access. Because the only
way you ever get a job to a company like
(39:05):
that is you've got to be in these circles. And
so now a big thing that I'm working on is
how do we give access to those types of jobs
to more people, because it's not just going to be
the founders, it's also going to be the employees. And
so how we really have a diverse employee pool where
people can become one of the first fifty to a
d employees at the next uber Because if you were
(39:26):
one of the first one hundred employees Ober, you're rich today.
So of course, talk about a viral app uber. But
you know what you're suggesting to speaking of virility is
basically culture is infectious. So you place your friend there, right,
he's gonna make some money. He's gonna, you know, lead
(39:47):
to different decisions at the company. Right, his descendants are
going to have a different situation than he did. And
it's kind of like, that's kind of how you change
things correct, having a very long term view on things.
That's how you change things. It's the long term view.
And you know, when people ask me, you know, most
my most proudest things I've done having started my fund,
(40:11):
one is investing the woman who became a Serican mother.
But two is getting my friend that job. Like I
always felt bad at the starter we had when as
biggest we thought it could be. But this is my
chance to like give him that, to give him that
access and to change his family's life and trajectory. And
that's completely separate from what I do, where I say,
(40:34):
you know, this is how we're going to change the world. Like,
let me just get my friend the job, and he
got two of his friends jobs there, right, Like that
that helps and that makes a difference. And so you know,
some of his money and some of his access, and
hopefully I'll be able to bring a little bit of both.
So when you take these startup founders, right, and you
find them, right, you found this seventeen year old, right,
and then you kind of just stick them into this
(40:56):
new ecosystem, what's it like? It's scary for them. It's
a lot to learn, there's a there's a huge learning curve.
There's a bunch of skills they got to pick up
along the way. But that's the stuff I can help
you with, right, Like I can I can teach you
how to do a financials I can I can teach
you how to put a pitch deck together. I can't
(41:17):
teach you how to use a vimo hack to get users. No,
that's pretty novel. Right, So, like, I know there's a
bunch of stuff that we take for granted that a
lot of vcs just want entrepreneurs to already have. I'm
okay if you don't have that stuff, because we can
get you there. It'll take some time, but we can
get you there. Um because you know, a lot of
(41:37):
them are gonna be no scared, they're not going to
trust investors. Like it's just all these other things that
come into it, and a lot of that just has
to go with like cultural competency, Like I'm okay giving
these founders grace with like you don't need to know everything.
That's okay. You know you're you're gonna make mistakes. That's fine,
we can work through them. They're not like these aren't
the most astronomical things to get over, So you know
(42:00):
that's was like, you know, you don't just throw them
into the wolves. You kind of hand hold them as
much as you can, and you know, you give directions
when you can. Isn't it crazy with telecommunications and you know,
mass travel, that we've developed these bubbles of culture and
we kind of don't talk to each other, and like
this creates all sorts of you know, hilarious and serious
(42:23):
problems in our society. Like, seriously, we don't talk to
each other. We all we all live here, we all
pass each other in the street. Like how do we
not speak the same language because we don't grow Like
we're all in the same communities, but we're all in
(42:45):
different we all experience different cultures, right, and so it's
very easy to not speak the same language when we
are some combination of nature versus nurture. If you asked me,
you're a little bit of both. But like then the
nature you're in and forms the way you view the world.
Like if you live in a community where the cops
(43:08):
are always helpful, where you see people in your community
like go to dunk and Donuts and buy coffee for
the cops, and you're always happy, and it's always pleasant,
and they're around at the local fairs. You've only ever
seen good from them. It's really hard for you to
fathom somebody telling you that they see cops as the enemy,
(43:29):
that they come from a community where cops don't care
about them. Where I tell you that the first time
I had somebody pull a gun on me, it was
a cop when I was a kid, Right, the first
time I was stopping at first, I was thirteen coming
back from playing basketball. The only time I had my
jaw broken as when I got pistol with five police
officer because a good friend of mine was dating a
white woman. Like if I tell you that, you're gonna
(43:52):
look at me like I'm crazy and not have two heads.
And you're like, that can't be true. I know cops.
All the cops I know are good people, and they've
only ever done good things. And I'm telling you the
truth is somewhere murkier than that. I don't think there's
this idealized corps. But here's the thing. You say that,
(44:13):
But I had this exact conversation with somebody like I
literally had this exact conversation with somebody who told me.
He'd like, I don't believe you. All the cops I
know were good people. Why would you be scared of
the police that they're here to help us? And it's
because he wanted to ask some police officers from the
from some directions and I was uncomfortable. He's like it,
(44:34):
what's wrong with you? I was like, yeah, we don't
don't deal with police like I had that conversation with
a white counterpart of mine, right, And so that's how
we end up speaking to different languages because we all
experienced the world very differently. And then when you have
difference of experiences and try to come to a consensus,
it becomes really hard because if I've never experienced it
(44:55):
that way, then it's hard for me to understand what
you've gone through or even the leave you. No, It's true,
our experiences do shape who we are, and we do
view the world very differently because of our experiences. I
guess I try to see things that you know, the
truth is much murkier and messier than our experiences would suggest.
(45:17):
I mean, I agree with you, Um, I just wish
more people do too. So how do you, uh, how
did you get past you know this? This? How how
did you grow up in these surroundings and one day
just decide, you know what, I'm gonna make it, And
not only am I gonna make it, but I'm gonna
(45:37):
help people make it as well. I have really good parents.
I have really good parents, and I had a really
good father who always instilled in me one the idea
of entrepreneurship and ownership, and who who let me know
that it was okay for me to chase my dreams
because he didn't get a chance to chase his right.
(46:00):
And so having my parents, they're really helped. They give
me grounding and then you know, just hard work and
luck along the way, right, um, and then also recognize
me like to your point, the only reason I'm here
today is because to all the people helped me, and
so I would be doing them a disservice if I
(46:21):
didn't help others. Well, I think it again, it sounds
like you're the rare breed. There's a little something to that.
There could be a little something to that. Where do
we find out more about Go ahead? Mac? I was
gonna say, I guess I look for founders who remind
(46:41):
me a little bit of myself sometimes, isn't that right? Yeah?
It's sometimes it's hilarious that we look for talent and
a lot of times we're looking for different versions of
ourselves because we understand that we don't understand people who
don't resemble us. Um, where do we find out more
about you? About rare breed and about Mac? The VC
(47:02):
so you can find you can check out rare Breed
dot vcs our website, or you can find me on Twitter,
is I'm at Matt Conwell at m A C C
O N W E l L. So check me out
on Twitter. Uh, Mac the VC, I'm pretty active. Yeah,
I saw that and we'll be Well. You're inspiring me
to get on Twitter, because to me, Twitter is this
(47:24):
garbage camp. It's really hard to find good stuff on Twitter.
So thank you for inspiring me to spend more time
on Twitter. Mac, absolutely and looking forward to tweeting back
and forth. Which so we live in the world where
bigger has been better for quite some time. We live
(47:46):
in a world where everything is tooled toward big business,
but really small business is the future. They're innovators, they
create more jobs, and they really have more disruptive potential.
But we see local and state governments pretend it's still
the seventies, eighties and nineties and really, like the music
stations tell you, we're in today. Right today, you need
(48:09):
home grown businesses, specifically technology businesses. That's where most of
the future wealth of tomorrow is going to come from.
So we need to have our policies reflect that reality.
When you have under investment, when you have brain drain
in your area, whether you're in an urban area or
rural area. You need home grown technology firms. When you
(48:33):
create local venture capital funds to invest in local businesses,
you're building in your tax base of tomorrow. And really
we don't see that. We saw our guests talk about it,
and how you know one company in Birmingham, Alabama can
make all the difference because in the end, culture and
economic growth is infectious and whole swaths of the country
(48:55):
are being left behind. And the only way to reverse
that is really to you the power of the purse
to make investments in people who already live there. We
can't always import prosperity. Prosperity has to come from the
ground up. So let's stop giving subsidies to big companies
to relocate jobs, which in the end that doesn't create
more jobs, it just shifts them around the country. Instead,
(49:18):
let's empower local entrepreneurs to create solutions that makes sense
in their communities. And I think that's a much more
practical way to do things in America today. Thanks to
all of you for joining me as we followed the
profit with mac the VC. What an interesting way to
disrupt the way we're doing things, and as we all
know today, we need a lot of disruption and many
(49:40):
corners of our economy. A shout out to our team
of producers who work hard to make this happen. I'm
David Grasso. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us
five stars and give us a review so that others
can learn what the show is all about. Follow The
Profit is a production of ging Ridge three sixty and
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(50:01):
you get your podcasts. You can also view us on YouTube,
part of the Gingwich three sixty network,
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com