Our friend Frank Chen is the final guest in this 4-part series on the Faith Driven Investor. And he stopped by to talk about how he’s helping entrepreneurs change the World at the Silicon Valley Venture powerhouse of Andreessen Horowitz. As Frank describes it they are “helping entrepreneurs build software companies that are eating the world” (he’ll give you a little more info about what that means in our interview).

Frank Chen is a self proclaimed former product and user experience design junkie with specialties in venture capital, artificial intelligence/machine learning, fund raising, product planning, product launches, product development process, enterprise software, UX design, Web hosting, and managed services. With a breadth of expertise like that, you can see why we were excited to have him on the show!

But even after all of that, Frank let us in on what his heart as an investor looks like. He pulled aside the curtain a bit and let us see that investors aren’t so much the terrifying titans up on the hill as they are servant leaders who want to help others be successful.

It was a fun, enlightening and engaging conversation. We hope you enjoy it, and as always, thanks for listening.

Useful Links:

Marc Andreessen on Why Software is Eating the World

GDP/Capita over the last 2000 Years

Frank Chen LinkedIn

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

*Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

 

Henry [00:02:27] Frank, thank you for being with us.

 

Frank [00:02:28] Henry William, thank you for having me. It's such an honor and delight to be on the show. I'm a long-time listener and first time caller. So let's see how it goes.

 

Henry [00:02:38] You know, let's start off in telling people a bit about what you do and what you're an expert in on the investing side. You're in a space that's really interesting, artificial intelligence. There are a number of different things, you know. Well, there are other functions that you perform at Andriessen. We're going to talk about that and a little bit. But tell us about artificial intelligence. It's become a buzz word, a lot of us reading about it. Some of us as entrepreneurs are trying to figure out how to get involved in it and incorporate it into our businesses. Give us an overview.

 

Frank [00:03:08] Great. So why don't I start with what I do here at the firm? So we're a software focused venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and we invest in great entrepreneurs who want to rewire their industries with software. As you said, software eating the world. That was an op ed that Mark Andriessen, one of our co-founders, wrote for The Wall Street Journal. I think nine years ago now and it's been our North Star ever since. So my role at the firm. Here's the way I think about it. Entrepreneurs are trying to raise money and they will knock on our doors. And I have the great honor and privilege of opening the door and asking them, what do you want the money for? How will you use it? How will you build a great software company using not only our money, but our knowledge and our relationships? And I basically reach out, grab me by the hand and walking through our house. And, you know, a certain number of them will actually get funding. But even the ones that we don't, we want to make sure that we are really serving them on their journey. Look, entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things that people endeavor to do, right? The journey from 0 to 1, from nothing to something really mirrors the creative work there are God does. And it's one of the hardest things that people get called to do. And so all the help that they can get along the way, I think is appreciated. And we want to be part of that support system for entrepreneurs.

 

Henry [00:04:32] So that's interesting. You talk about this special privilege, about being able to talk to an entrepreneur and endeavor to understand what they're doing and how they'd use the money. Tell us more about that special privilege, because you're meeting with somebody. I'd been on the other side. I've looked to raise money from firms like Andreesen. And there's a moment of kind of like vulnerability. And it's a very pivotal time in an entrepreneur's life. And you're invited into that moment. You're a part of that. When I get a sense, you understand the gravity of it.

 

William [00:05:03] But for most listeners, you probably know that Henry went over 40 in this category. So he's still harboring a little resentment, trying to figure out what happened 20 years ago. Can I learn even now?

 

Henry [00:05:15] Well, there's some part of it. I've got to tell you, I don't think that any of the venture capitalists that we talked to back then loved on us the way that I think that Frank does. But yeah, I remember, you know, those are one of those those emotional memories of feeling exposed and feeling like you've got something that you really believe in and you want somebody else to believe in. It's a special time. Tell us more about that.

 

Frank [00:05:35] It is an incredibly special time, and vulnerability is a great word to describe it. And when we start training for everybody, that opens the door on our side. Entrepreneurs who are knocking, that's the way I begin the trading, which is you have to understand this meeting that you're about to go into and you especially have to understand, even if you're doing it at volume. Right, which is you might be doing this 5, 10 times a week or maybe five times a day. And so let me take you into the heart of somebody who is on the road raising money. You're absolutely right. It's very vulnerable. You've heard a lot of knows you're walking up and down the street from people who are doing this at volume. Right. So there's a bit of the doctor's office. Hurry up and wait. And maybe I don't know what the next step is. Right. All up and down the road. And so you have to understand that psychology, because if you don't understand that psychology, then you can't really be an effective help for them as they're going through this process. And so first, understand the vulnerability. Right. It's no. All day long, you feel like you are trying to convince somebody of this grand vision, but none of it is built yet. Right. That you don't have proof. You don't have the metrics. You don't have in some cases, you don't have a product. And so all you have is a vision and you're trying to get people to come along for the ride. And it's deeply personal. In fact, one of the things that we look for in our investments is what we call founder product fit. So the question really is why are you building this product? So when we spend the first hour with an entrepreneur, we'll go 15, 20 minutes into their background, like their deep background. And I'll ask him, where were you born? What set of life experiences led you to building this company? Why are you uniquely suited to build the company that you're about to build? And what we're really listening for is deep commitment. Right. So you're sort of the way I think about here the bookends. Right. One is deep commitment, which is I am all in on this. You know, for people with a faith, they would think God has called me to this. For people who don't have the faith background, they're like, look, every big life experience has led me to this point and I have to build this company. I can't think of anything else. I'm waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning thinking about how this is a huge problem for lots of people that I need to solve and I'm uniquely qualified to do it. And the reason we're looking for that amount of commitment. So that's one end of it, right? I'm on the other end of it is, hey, I did this spreadsheet in my MBA class and it looked like the expected outcomes for this thing that I'm on and it's gonna be the biggest of all the things that I've looked at. All right. I kind of think of that as loose commitment, which is. Yeah. Maybe that's how I make a lot of money. So we're looking for the deep commitment. Your mind, body, soul, you're all in. And the only way to hear that is to understand the deep background, which is why we spend 15, 20 minutes talking about what sort of life decisions led you here. And it's funny because when we do this long journey, people aren't usually used to talking about their backgrounds in this way. And I can sort of see them twitching anxiously, waiting to get to the pitch idea and use the funds and all of that. But we say slow down. We can't invest until we understand why. And until we understand you and the why.

 

Henry [00:09:06] So founder product fit. I haven't heard of that before. Of course, most of the listeners will understand the product market fit. That's talked about a lot. But there's something deeply personal about the why. You just mentioned the question why? Why are you doing this? The spreadsheet is not going to help them through the valley of Shadow of Death.

 

Frank [00:09:26] That's exactly right. The hash and see what the people who did the expected outcome analysis and are only shallowly committed to their thing. They're the ones that are most likely to give up when the going gets rough. And look, the way I think about startups is you think this is the psychology of a founder, right? We're gonna be the biggest thing in the world. Like we're definitely Facebook. And then, oh, it's over. It's like it's done. I'm cooked. It's over. We're gonna be bigger than BMW for sure. Like I'm we're gonna be bigger than BMW. And then, oh, like, screw. It's over. Everybody's quitting. We're done. And then you go and have lunch. Right. Like that's the life of an entrepreneur is that you're on this incredible roller coaster. And the only way to survive that roller coaster and get to build a durable company, which is what venture investors want to fund, is that you have sounder product. Right. Which is you feel uniquely equipped and called to build this company.

 

William [00:10:23] So get you through the rest to take us into the odds of a founder. So when you're looking at it from an investment perspective, how many investments you make? Why this is so important? Because the odds that an entrepreneur faces to build a company and how you look at it from putting a portfolio together.

 

Frank [00:10:39] Yeah. I mean, that's one of the hardest things in the world. Remember, I took our kids to the Sacramento Valley one summer and we. We're looking at some exhibit about the life of salmon. And, you know, millions of eggs hatch and the astronomical odds that a salmon has testified to get back to their breeding ground. And entrepreneurship is like that. You're swimming upstream every day against great odds. And so to put some numbers on it. You know, we'll need a couple of thousand entrepreneurs that year. We will write something like 30 to 50 checks, write of the checks that we write. Maybe 40 percent of them fail. Right. And so, like you think of this extreme, when we write thousands to 50 and then 50 to like 40 percent of them don't, you know, give us the capital back. So there is an extreme winnowing effect that entrepreneurs go through. And so, again, this goes to the why are you building this company? Right. Because this is one of the most difficult and unlikeliest things for people to do.

 

Henry [00:11:39] So one of the things that I love about you, Frank, that is unique, which makes me wish that you're doing what you're doing now, 20 years ago when we were trying to raise venture capital, is that you're not just focusing on the 20 to 30 or 30 to 50. You said of the checks you're going to write you in the process that you lead at Andriessen are focused on how do you delight and how do you serve the rest. And knowing you and your character, I know that you view this as a ministry of sorts. Tell us how you do that. And thinking about the m.p.'s, I'm thinking about how you are able to lean in to this vulnerable moment, even when you are working with or maybe especially when you're working with an entrepreneur that really doesn't have that type of founder product fit. And yet there you are. You're with them in this vulnerable spot. What do you do with it and how do you measure it?

 

Frank [00:12:32] Yeah, that's a great question that I've been thinking about for the almost 10 years that I have been doing this. I have no claim to perfection, but here's a few things that I have learned along the way. So one is you have to understand the psychology, the vulnerability, the unlikeliness of it that you're hearing knows all day. And so if you get yourself into that mindset, then you're going to have a much more. Productive and fruitful meeting with an entrepreneur. Then if you come to it thinking, hey, I have a checklist of things that I need to get through to get the investment committee informed about whether we're going to move forward or not. Right. So it's the heart mentality as opposed to the checklist mentality. And you have to sort of blend those in the way that we've basically kept ourselves honest on this, which is if our goal is to deliver a great experience every time an entrepreneur knocks on that door and do that thousands of times a year. The only way we know how to make sure that we're doing that is to measure and keep people accountable, delivering that great experience. And so one of the things that I started doing early here for the team is measuring net promoter score. So it's the exact same question that Apple or Comcast or your bank will ask you. Right. Would you recommend us to friends.

 

Henry [00:13:45] And tell us who would tell us that some member of our listeners aren't going to know exactly what Net Promoter Score is?

 

Frank [00:13:50] Ask the net promoter score is a measure that mostly consumer companies use to measure the satisfaction that people have with your product. And the way it works is you ask this question would you recommend us to friends and family? So I just got an iPhone. Would you recommend it scale from 1 to 10, 8, 9 and 10 or promotors and Cameron or exactly how the scale works? They're sort of neutral in the middle and then there's detractors at the end. And the way the m.p.'s measure works, it's the percentage of people who are promoters, minus the percentage of people who are detractors. So if you are world class in delighting customers like you're an Apple or a Costco or a USAA, you're in the 70s and 80s, right? You are mostly promoters who are saying, yes, I'd love like you've got to have an iPhone or you've got to subscribe to this USAA, a credit card. And then if you are not delighting your customers, if you're an ISP or a wireless carrier or a bank. Right. It's literally possible to be like negative 10. Right. You have more detractors than promoters. And so we use this as a way to basically make sure that we're delivering a great experience to every entrepreneur, every time we meet. And so every person on my team, after they meet with an entrepreneur, the entrepreneur will get the survey question and we track and measure that over time. Of course, we look for comments that will help us get better at delivering a great experience and having looked at hundreds of comments over the last decade. There's really no secret. Here's the straightforward thing that you can do to quote unquote, wager. And yes, you show up on time. You understand the heart and the fragility and the psychology of your entrepreneur, and then even if you're going to say no to funding, you give them something actionable and useful for their business. Because the great privilege we have is we're meeting lots of entrepreneurs who are competing and building companies in that space. And so what we can do is reflect back, you know, a mind without giving private information. Here's what's happening in your space and here's intelligence that you might not have. I kind of think of you're playing this video game and you have these video games. Some of them start with a map where you can only see where your character is and you don't see the rest of the world. So what we can do is basically lift that fog of war or show you more of the map than you might otherwise see because of this privileged position that we're in. And so if you basically give people that back, then they're going to be delighted with the experience. What is your net promoter score? So mine has varied over time. So, you know, I'm hoping to consistently do 60 or 70. Now we have some new kids who start out and they're like still at 100. You know, I'm waiting for their first neutral or detractor. And so, you know, the training is working out. Well, I have to say, like confession. There was a period where it got as low as 10 or 20. And that was sort of a real crisis moment for me, which is we did training practice. We did rehearsal. We did best practices. We now have this archive of if you're going to close the loop with somebody in email on a no decision, here's a template here. And here's sort of the example. You know, we have dozens of examples and the examples get built when we send an e-mail and then we get an email reply back saying, honestly, that was the best rejection I have ever gotten like in life, not just not just in fundraising. And so we enshrined those, as you know, here's an example of how you can really be a servant, a servant leader to the people that you come into contact with.

 

William [00:17:35] Didn't read a story. I'm going back years ago. I'm pretty sure with Ender's NORAD's. Don't you guys find your employees for being late to meetings?

 

Frank [00:17:42] We do. This is the thing. Marc and Ben stood up in the early days and you know, the design point for the firm for them was they wanted to design a firm that they would have wanted to raise money from. And one of the things that frustrated them with some of the other firms that they pitched is, you know, you to sit in the lobby and you wait just like a doctor's office until the doctor asked him for you. And look, when you're an entrepreneur, one of the things that is true is you're in a race against time. Like you don't have time. Like that's the one thing you don't have. You will eventually get funded. You will eventually find customers. You will eventually build a product. You do not have more time. And so to be cooling your heels in a venture lobby until the general partner has time for you is endlessly frustrating. And so they said, look, how do we program against that real simple. Ten dollars a minute if you're late for a meeting with an entrepreneur. We charge you ten dollars a minute. And that got set in the culture. We collected the fines more than a couple of times. And, you know, once people get fined a couple of times, they'll stop that behavior. And so to this day, 10 years in meeting, start on the dot.

 

Henry [00:18:49] Oh, that's great. That's beautiful. And I can't get over the fact that you guys are getting such positive net promoter scores from people who you don't invest in. So you said no and they still like you. That's awesome.

 

Frank [00:19:02] Yeah. We like to sort of maybe this is too snide a joke, but we like to say we're revolutionizing venture capital with common courtesy, which is if you step back and think about it like we're not doing anything that dramatic. We're just saying, look, let me understand the heart of the person coming in. And let me make sure that we deliver a great experience to common sense. It's common courtesy.

 

William [00:19:22] Let's shift gears for a minute. I know you've gotten a chance to invest in an artificial intelligence is a big part of what you do as an investment philosophy. Could you take us into that world a little bit and why you think it's so interesting to invest in right now and just maybe some general overviews of what you're seeing in the space, but as an investor and also from a Christian worldview?

 

Frank [00:19:41] Yeah, fantastic. Let's talk about that. So the first thing that I'll say is that if you read headlines about artificial intelligence or machine learning, you'll read primarily one of two headlines. Headline one is the robots are coming for your jobs. And so we're all going to be unemployed in 10 years. And then after the robots have all the jobs, then Skynet comes for your children.

 

[00:20:04] In other words, the computers get so good they decide that human beings are superfluous or counter to their own aims and they self-actualize. And so those are very scary headlines. We have no idea how to build any of that technology. And so the way I think about artificial intelligence is it's a set of very useful computer science techniques that's getting inside all of the software. Sadly, the same way that database technology got inside all of the software beginning in let's call it the nineteen fifties, the really accelerating in the nineteen eighties with the advent of relational databases. So if you think about everything you do on the Internet, buying something from Amazon, going to Starbucks, booking a room, all of that is based on a database somewhere. And it turned out to be this incredibly useful set of techniques that got better and better. And artificial intelligence is like that which is computer science techniques, not Skynet. And the things that computer science techniques are enabling us to do are things that databases could never do. So if you had a database, you could ask the question, hey, how many e-mails did Henry send yesterday? Great database question with artificial intelligence, we can say of the emails that Henry wrote. Which ones is he nervous about? Wow. That is fascinating that we could ask and answer that type of question with algorithms. Or another example, I'm looking at a picture. What is inside this picture or I'm looking at somebody who's just applying for a loan? How likely are they to repay the loan? Give me an example. Here is we had a investment in a company called Branch that makes loans to people with no credit backgrounds. Right. So if you or I apply for a loan, they'll search our credit bureau history and they'll decide whether you're loan worthy. There's lots of countries where that infrastructure doesn't exist. So if you are in Mexico or Tanzania or India, there is no credit bureau record about you. And so what this company does branch is look at your behavior on the phone. And it turns out that if you received more texts than you send, you are more likely to repay your loan than somebody who has that reversed or if you're careful with your battery. In other words, you don't burn through it and you're done by lunch. You're more likely to repay your loan. And so they're looking for these behavioral clues as to whether you are more creditworthy. And it's this type of question that artificial intelligence can now answer. That databases couldn't. And that's just going to sweep through all of the software that we write and make the software that we write better and better. And that's definitely something that we are very bullish about as investors.

 

Henry [00:22:53] So tell us, what is the future of work? What does this mean for us? I'd like to look at it through two different lenses. One is, was it mean for us who have jobs that are out there to expand on that, about the, you know, the people from the sky coming and taking our children? So what does it mean for us? Is this the end of work as we know it and therefore, we just just have to hunker down? Or does it create new opportunities for us? What does that look like? And then what do you see? If I'm an entrepreneur or a business owner and I'm looking at this new development and this new revolution, where generally some of the opportunities that you see for the average business owner to think about bringing artificial intelligence to make their product or service better. So first through the lens of employees and then through the lens of a business owner.

 

Frank [00:23:38] Yeah, I'm really excited about the future of work because I think all of our jobs will get safer. We'll be equipped to make better decisions, will actually get superpowers in the physical world. So let me walk through some examples of how I think work changes once we have machine learning everywhere. So one example is, you know, look, there are lots of dangerous jobs out there that we can either eliminate or change the nature of. So here's a super obvious dangerous job. If you were a soldier and you are asked to run into a building that you've never run into before, looking for people, that's called clearing the building, that's what the Department of Defense calls it. It is the most dangerous job we ask you to do as that soldier. We ought to have drones do that right. We should not have 22 year olds with M-16s running into buildings blind. We ought to have drones do it. So that's sort of an obvious job that is dangerous, that will get automated. And then there are jobs that are not obviously dangerous, but turn out to be. So the most dangerous job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is long haul trucking, which is to say not only are you likely to get into some kind of accident driving the truck, but the health outcomes of a long haul trucker. I think about the long haul trucker that is in the cab all day, not eating well away from home stress. All right. So the obesity percentages of long haul truckers is through the roof. And so as a result, the health outcomes of having that job and there's a huge truck driver shortage in this country now because we're all addicted to Amazon Prime.

 

[00:25:17] As a result, young people are seeing the statistic saying, I don't want to be a long haul trucker. That is a dangerous job. And so eventually we will get to the point where the trucks drive themselves. And that's fantastic. So that's one area where the future. Work gets better. Another area, the future of work gets better is I think we can do more creative work as more and more of the routine work gets automated. So, for instance, you go visit your doctor. There's a lot of routine work where they're basically filling out your electronic health record.

 

[00:25:51] They're asking you all these questions. They're hunched over their laptop. They're typing and typing and typing. What I really want the doctor to do is pay attention to me and be creative and be thinking about all the symptoms that I have. I don't want them topping my blood pressure into a spreadsheet somewhere. And so if we have machine learning systems that are listening to the conversations that we're having and attached to the equipment that's in their office, all of the electronic health records can get updated automatically and the doctor can really pay attention to me. So think about the human interaction. Think about the creativity and the way I'll say it. This community is there's a bunch of stuff that will get automated, which is great. Frank Routine wrote work that's very rule based. The things that won't get automated are the things that we would call the fruit of the spirit. It's love and joy and peace and kindness and goodness and faithfulness. Those things we have no idea how to meet. And so more and more of our jobs will be about those things that are hard to automate.

 

[00:26:59] So here is a loan decision or a loan recommendation that comes out of a machine learning algorithm. On top of that, we overlay the fruit of the spirit. Let me understand somebodies background and see if this recommendation makes sense, because maybe there's a hardship, maybe there's a life circumstance that the algorithms didn't understand. And we now need to overlay our love and our compassion over a machine learning recommendation. And so I think more and more of our work will be how do we handle these exception cases? How do we decide if the learning algorithms are making a recommendation makes sense in this specific instance. And so I'm excited about sort of us being able to bring the things that make us like our creator, love and passion to the workplace.

 

William [00:27:49] And as we get nearer time, I also want to ask you, given a presentation before about some version of hey, technology has been blamed for taking all the jobs for hundreds of years. You know, it's every 20 years you can pull the headlines and technology's gonna take all the jobs and it happens every time. Right. And I remember you put up a compelling last one. Remember one of them, but maybe you could riff on a few more, which were things like, look, nobody knew that there'd be millions of drivers from Uber and Grab and Lyft and all of these types of organizations. No one knew that that would be a job, that you could make a lot of money 10 years ago. And that was technology that while it displaced some, it enabled so many more and created a whole new category that no one even knew existed. And maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of those.

 

Frank [00:28:37] Yeah. And the overarching thing that I'll say before I launch into a couple of examples is our ability to sort of predict backwards to which jobs get eliminated is pretty good. Our ability to afford to see the new jobs that get created is pretty poor. So when you sell the Model T for the first time, you could very well conclude, wow, if you are a saddle maker, you are in trouble, right? Look, the car is going to replace the horse. That's pretty clear. There is no way that you would have predicted that the largest private employer in the United States would be Wal-Mart. But that happened directly on the back of the Model T, right. With no cars, there would be no suburbs. With no suburbs, there would be no big box retailers without big box retailer. It's a direct line. But our ability to predict those things because we are God is very, very limited. So some fun examples of jobs that didn't exist. And I'll do the sort of viewers jobs that didn't exist 30 years ago. Zumba instructor, a wellbeing coach, a wind turbine technician, an M.R. imaging technician, a genetic counselor. Right. These things just didn't exist 30 years ago. Flash forward 20 years ago. Things that didn't exist that are jobs that millions of people SAP now, blogger, search engine optimization specialist, data scientist, hydraulic fracturing engineer, YouTube content creator. And then flash forward 10 years ago, as you mentioned, you couldn't have been a lift driver or you couldn't have been an MP and host. You couldn't have been a college admissions consultant or a drone pilot. And so technology has its way of creating lots of opportunities that we have a hard time seeing.

 

[00:30:19] And so it's a lot easier to write the headline. The robots are coming for your jobs than it is to say here's brand new categories of jobs that we didn't even know we're going to exist. And then. One last story I'll tell about this, which is even with the jobs that we think are going away with technology, we turn out to be pretty poor predictors. And so one of my favorite stories from this is when we started putting the automated teller machines in the banks, you would have expected the number of bank tellers in the country to basically fall to zero. Right. Which is look, here's the cash machine. You don't really need a bank teller anymore. But it turns out that if you actually look at the data set, the number of bank tellers until very recently continued decline ever since the 1970s when the EMS got into the banks. And the reason for it was this, which is the banks decided that, hey, look, now that we can automate some of what happens in a bank, I can open a branch probably in your neighborhood. And so basically what happened from the 70s to today is banks fell over each other to open a branch near your house, and that would be how they would compete. And of course, every time you opened up a branch, you need a tie or tellers. Now, you'd have 80 teams in there for sure. And you could hire fewer tellers. But it turns out the number of bank tellers in the country increased even though we automated a lot of those jobs.

 

[00:31:44] And I think the nature of what a bank teller does now, I think, is about empathy and understanding you and looking you in the eye on loan decisions. And I think that's exactly what we want people do it, which is we are so far uniquely situated to understand each other's motivations and to understand each other's hearts. And that's exactly the situation that we want people to be at.

 

Henry [00:32:08] Wayne's going to take us to a close here in a second and ask you about what God is speaking you in your life through his word. Before we get there, though, I want to first say that was great. It was a terrific overview. I think it's really, really important for us to understand the role, the fruit of the spirit, not just necessarily as an investor. Most of people on this podcast aren't venture capitalists. And yet to think about how we might have an overlay in our jobs of the fruit of the spirit is super important, lest we otherwise think of the businesses that we do as transactions desired to be able to delight those that we serve, or even those we let down as a ministry is something I think that we can all take away from. One of the things that I want to touch on briefly is this ministry that you have with Josh KIWAN, where you bring together people at your church that are in the venture capital industry, other venture capitalist, to pray together and to share together. And I think that a lot of people will be surprised about that. Venture capitalist as a whole aren't necessarily thought of as the most warm and fuzzy and redemptive. Maybe, maybe, maybe not. But you've really leaned into that. What does that look like?

 

Frank [00:33:21] Yeah, I agree that the stereotype of the venture capitalist is where the guru on top of the mountain and an entrepreneur survives several life threatening challenges to get an audience with the guru. And when they arrive, we extend a hand and say, you may kiss the ring, right? Like us, the stereotype. The counter image or what we're trying to do here and with the other investors is reverse that and say, look, no, the investor is a servant leader. The entrepreneur is doing the hard work. And our role as an investor is to come alongside.

 

[00:33:54] And Henry, you would say love on them, to understand their heart, understand their journey, see how we can be part of their journey with introductions, with capital, with advice, with perspective, listing the fun bore. And that's how we need to think about our roles, which is as servant leaders, not the gurus on top of the mountain. So when we get together and pray, we're praying for opportunities for God to show us how to be better servant leaders to the entrepreneurs that we come into contact with.

 

Henry [00:34:24] So Origen on that also interesting, Hawass has an office on Sandhill Road, which is this road. Then when you talk about going up and down the street, this is road that Dave and I came out to 20 years ago and went up and down it and went, oh, for forty on it. And you talked about being the guru on the top of the mountain. Well, you guys are actually on the top of the hill where you're in a unique spot here in Silicon Valley to be able to see what's going on and trends in technology and generally in software and pretty much anything from your vantage. What do you see Guy doing? Are you hopeful? Are you concerned? What do you see guy doing in Silicon Valley, a place that is thought of as being hostile to the gospel? What are you seeing? How does the spirit of God working in Silicon Valley?

 

Frank [00:35:10] Henry I am very hopeful about what God is doing. And I have you to thank a lot for sort of opening my eyes to sort of what people are doing, integrating their work and their faith lives. I'm excited about organizations like Proccess. I'm excited about what you guys are doing at Sovereign's to sort of say, look, we can actually be invest. First on the one hand, and committed Christians, Christ followers on the other, and that's not a contradiction. I would say we've got prevailing headwinds. I would say there is a dominant religion in Silicon Valley, which I would call it techno optimism, which is to say that, look, technology is going to solve all of humanity's problems.

 

[00:35:48] And we're just one startup away from solving the deep, deep issues. And I would say, look, those are headwinds that we live in and we just have to acknowledge that for the entrepreneurs around us. That's probably how they're thinking about the world. And, you know, my counter argument to it is, look, I am a technology optimist for sure.

 

[00:36:08] You look at one of my favorite graphs in the world is just go look at per capita income since the time of Christ. So just go to Google that right now. And basically people had no real wealth until the eighteen hundreds.

 

[00:36:24] Right. Which is that of course there was wealth, but it was very unevenly distributed. Very few people had wealth. And so technology has made it possible for people to enjoy lives that are unimaginable to their grandparents, even just their grandparents. But going back generations and generations. And so I am a technology optimist, but I am also cognizant that technology cannot solve the ultimate problem. And it's not gonna solve this in nature anytime you have a technology. It will create new ways for this in nature to sort of unleash itself. And so you think about the telephone, telegraph and newspaper, eBay, Craigslist, all of these sort of ways to connect people. It created new ways for people to unleash, sit on each other and said, look, technology cannot solve the root problems that we have because that's not the way God set up the universe. But we have an opportunity to use technology to make each other's lives better and more connected and more fulfilling and more uplifting. And let's figure out how to do that. And that's how I think about my role here. On top of the hill, coincidentally, as you point out in.

 

William [00:37:32] One of the things we like doing close from the top of the hill, where's God taking you right now? Is there a scripture? Is there something in God's word that's maybe coming alive right now in the last can be this morning, could be the last few days, maybe the season that maybe you're looking at a little differently that he's driving you through right now?

 

Frank [00:37:50] Yeah, there is a verse. It's James, one 19 that has been particularly impactful for me in this season, says, no, this my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear. Slow to speak. Slow to anger. To the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. And the reason that's resonating with me now is it's kind of the antidote to the valley. The valley is do everything quick, right? Build things quick and break things and fail fast. And everything needs to be quick and go and go and go and go and go. And so for me, the antidote to that, which is I don't want to get in the way of progress and I don't want to get in the way of any ambitious entrepreneur who has that drive and energy. Right. We need the Moses Aaron combos in our world. But there's also a counterbalance to it, which is be quick to hear really understand people and understand where they're at. Slow to speak so that you can meet them and kind of be a counterweight to that. Look, I'm always in a hurry and I gotta go. So that versus been resonating with me.

 

William [00:38:52] I mean, it's awesome. I would love to say I'm slow to speak, but I'm pretty confident my wife would massively disagree. So I will meditate on that myself as well.

 

Henry [00:39:01] Frank, you blessed us and I'm grateful for our friendship. I'm grateful for your leadership in the valley. I'm grateful for the way you have model, loving entrepreneurs, because that's what we care about very, very much. And you do it in the context of investing and doing that really well. And just really grateful for your time this morning. Thank you.

 

Frank [00:39:19] Henry and William, it's been a great delight. Thank you so much for the opportunity and God bless.