Episode 207 - The Demand for Better Supply Chains with Justin Dillon & Wesley Lyons
Justin Dillon has been working at the intersection of technology and human rights for over a decade. While advising the White House, United Nations, Fortune 500's and even The Vatican about slavery in supply chains, Justin saw a gaping hole in supply chain transparency tools and began to build what became FRDM. Investor Wesley Lyons is a general partner at Eagle Venture Funds and he recognized the need for accountability as well, which is why he has partnered with FRDM to redeem the supply chain. Justin and Wesley join us on the Faith Driven Investor Podcast to talk more about the demand for better supply chains.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
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.
Rusty Rueff: Welcome back, everyone, to this very special crossover event. We have two super guests today. Justin Dillon and Wesley Lyons. Let me tell you about Justin first. Justin has been working at the intersection of technology and human rights for over a decade while advising the White House, the United Nations and Fortune 500 companies. He even advised the Vatican all about slavery in supply chains. Justin saw a gaping hole in supply chain transparency tools and began to build what became freedom. If you're looking at up, that's a capital F, a capital R, a capital D and a capital M freedom. This social tech company has at its mission to improve the world by improving supply chain transparency. In this pursuit, freedom is built technology to connect everyone's collective good work and build stronger commercial relationships. Some of the largest brands in the world use freedom as a compliance tool for modern slavery acts. Our second guest investor Wesley Lyons. He is a general partner at Eagle Venture Funds and WayMaker, and he recognized the need for accountability as well, which is why he has partnered with Freedom to redeem the supply chain. Justin and Wesley join us on this special episode to talk about the demand for better supply chains and how freedom can deliver.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. We've got a special edition. And yes, I say that most times, but you'll know why now. We've got in Faith Driven Investor with us in Wes Lyons and a Faith Driven Entrepreneur with us in Justin Dillon. And we're going to talk about Justin's story, primarily an incredible story of a Faith Driven Entrepreneur. But as the story evolves, we're going to talk about what it was that Wes Lyons, a Faith Driven Investor saw with Justin. But I'm gonna introduce you and say hi to both of you right now. And also welcome as always. My co-hosts and gosh, we're well into the two hundreds now on podcast and I love this. It feels like a family dinner. And we've got Rusty doing this from Louisville, Kentucky, as he makes his pilgrimage back east, as he does every year this time, Rusty, awesome to have you.
Rusty Rueff: As always. Great to see everybody.
Henry Kaestner: And William.
William Norvell: Yeah, it's good to be here. You know, it's funny you'd mention, I think two hundreds coming out and this will be post right two hundreds coming out next week and Justin's been hiding it from me. At least I don't know if he's been hiding it from everyone. So I have no idea what the 200th episode is going to be. But I'm like by tuning in and next Tuesday, I'm like, What's he going to drop? You know, it's been a fun journey, five years. Crazytown.
Henry Kaestner: I was born in 1969, so I'm dating myself here. But I was alive, of course, as Rusty was in 1976 for the bicentennial. Bicentennial, it's a big deal. I don't know. We going to do tall ships. I don't know what we're going to do, but we to do something. But we also have two awesome guests with us. And I'm going to introduce Wes first, even though we're going to hear from Wes mostly in the back half of this, I can't think of anybody who's been more of an encouragement to a guy who is doing it FDE and FDI, who gets it, who's all in and just has just an incredibly beautiful spirit to him in Wes Lyons. And he's an entrepreneur. He's an investor, but he's just an advocate for the space and the work that he has done to help advisors. I mean, the guy is he's a full time venture capitalist, but on the side is a part of his mission is to get out there and encourage advisors as they in turn talk to their clients about what it looks like to run portfolios that are biblically responsible. And that's what this guy does as a hobby. And so, you know why we love him. You know why we've got him on. Wes awesome to have you with us.
Wesley Lyons: Thank you so much for having me.
Henry Kaestner: And then we've got Justin Dillon. Justin's got just an absolutely awesome story. I'm going to get right into it. But Justin, thank you for joining us.
Justin Dillon: It's my pleasure.
Henry Kaestner: So we have another great friend in common, Tom Bleasdale, who's just one of the guys out here in the Bay Area, one of the most successful venture capitalists out here, very, very serious about his Christian faith, great friend, great encouragement himself. And he said as he knew that we're going to be talking to you, make sure you do not miss the origin story. So, Justin, that's where we're going to start. Who are you? Where do you come from? How did it start?
Justin Dillon: Wow. I mean, that could start a lot of places. Who am I? I am the CEO and founder of FRDM, a software company that helps companies identify risks in their supply chain, like modern day slavery. That's what I do. That's the day job. I've lived all over the Bay Area. I've lived in the Bay Area my whole life, so I'm one of those that they're actually left. I don't think there's not too many of us around anymore, but actually born in Los Gatos that you spend most of my life and now I live in the Far East in a little town called Danville.
The Far East.
Henry Kaestner: Why would you leave Los Gatos?
Justin Dillon: I was six months old. I didn't really have a choice
Henry Kaestner: Okay, so I say this. Our audience probably doesn't know that I live in Los Gatos. Okay? They don't care.
Rusty Rueff: He left to be closer to his mother.
Justin Dillon: It's good.
Henry Kaestner: That's good. Good. Yeah.
Justin Dillon: Our relationship yet.
William Norvell: And Henry lives in the deep south you know.
Henry Kaestner: Los Gatos is indeed. Indeed. Okay. Justin, how did FRDM get started?
Justin Dillon: Yes, FRDM got started because I was frustrated that I couldn't see any solution in the marketplace that could help me understand. Talk about origin stories, what the origin story of the products that I was buying from. So I had learned years before about modern day slavery and human trafficking and then did some more research and did some work and started to identify that forced labor and child labor is in a lot of the goods that we consume. And really just it came out of a desire to want to first build awareness around this issue, which I spent years doing work with government and UN other places, building movies and TV shows and digital campaigns. But what was missing was that there was no world tool for business to be able to address this. So about five years ago, we created our MVP of the product, bootstrapped it and took it out to market. And I think our first customer was Boeing.
Rusty Rueff: I'm going to jump in because I want to understand this better. So, Justin, I want to talk about the supply chain. That's a term that most of us didn't know unless you were inside of business and, you know, you had a supply chain to deliver. Now, everybody knows the supply chains disrupted the world, but the supply chain that you're talking about, which is the same supply chain, these gaps and these holes that could cause slavery to be perpetuated. I think you're going to have to take us through an example of it to really understand how that might happen.
Justin Dillon: Yeah. And maybe a good way to get to talk about where I am now, because running a B2B fast company is a far cry from where I started off in my origin story. I started off as a musician and I was a touring musician for a big part of my life. I'd grown up around faith circles, and justice was a big part of what drives me. And so I was a touring musician doing record labels and tours and all that, and learned about human trafficking, I think, from The New York Times or something like that. I wrote about it and I was actually making a record in L.A. and I learned about human trafficking, and I was just like, Gosh, this is so this is probably in the mid 2005, I think it was 2004. I'm reading this article by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times and going, I just can't believe that people can be bought and sold in and used in brothels and supply chains. It just doesn't make any sense to me. And you know what I was thinking to do with an article like that, to kind of put it into the shelf of things that don't effect my life. Awful. But I don't know what to do with that. I think certainly as Americans, we have a lot of those shelves in our hearts and in our minds of things that we'd like change if we could. But we don't feel like we have any connection to it any way, any leverage. It was a few months later that I was actually doing a tour in Russia, which I doubt I'll ever get to do again, where I was just talking to the kids after the show. So I started hearing stories similar to the ones I was reading in the magazine article just a few months before. Stories about how brokers would come to town and offer impoverished individuals opportunities for jobs, and they would, of course, exploit their labor and then all the rest of it. And so I think for me, reading about something being moved by it and then having just this bizarre opportunity to come near it myself, in my little like world that I was building, which was as a pop singer, a pop writer, I thought, this is something that I need to pay attention to. I need to do something with it. I don't know what to do, but I decided that I was going to try to lobby my community, which was L.A. and musicians together to do something for it. And that was really the only plan I had. During Grammys week, I rented out a recording studio with my own money. I asked a bunch of musicians to come that were coming in town for the Grammys to perform performances. And I think the hope was that we would use these to build a YouTube video or something. It was 2007 What that one impromptu filming recording session turned into was a motion picture that went to theaters in October in 2008. It was a rockumentary film called Call and Response that was about Modern-Day trafficking and the origins of how slavery started its way into the tools and trade that I used to write songs with just chorus and verse, and it just became this really beautiful, powerful film that went to movie theaters all around the world. And what I found was that I was I'd become a spokesperson for this movement, but I was only trying to help from behind. And so as I'm going around the world talking about the film, the thing that I kept focusing on was the direct connection we all have is to the slavery and the goods that we use, the minerals that go into our phones, the sparkles that go into our nails, the tomatoes that go into our tomato paste. These are all commodities that are tainted with different levels of slavery in different parts of the world, from palm oil in Malaysia that make 60% of the goods in the grocery store, just the solar panels that are coming out of northern China to the cobalt that's going into your iPhone. It comes out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The reality is, is our supply chains as you go deeper and deeper into this. Full of exploitation. And that to me, just felt like the thing that I, as a consumer, as an individual, could have the greatest impact on is my buying power and leveraging my buying power. And that really started a journey for me to be able to rally consumptive power in the direction of justice. And the first thing we did was a letter writing campaign to companies. This is coming out of the film, wrote letters to companies saying, Hey, everyone wants to see the film. You want companies to be aware of what they're buying. And the first letter we sent, I sent it and actually sent it to Steve Jobs because I thought they'd be interesting back when he was alive and asked him, did he know about Cobalt and the iPhone? And of course, didn't expect a response back. But 4 hours later I got an email back that said I had no idea. I'll look into it. Signed, Steve, growth hacking at the bottom up up for my iPhone, which I thought was funny. And so for me, I felt like it was just this journey of opportunities and digging into how can we build awareness, how can we build consensus? And I just believe that there is an algorithm of change. Change is will plus way multiplied by timing. If we want to change anything in the world, it requires will requires a way to do it. And then the thing you can't control, which is timing. And it felt like ten years ago this was the time to transform the way that we buy things in the world. And it's been a journey from sending emails to companies to building an online platform with the Obama administration and Google to now doing a SAS platform.
Rusty Rueff: That's very cool. Can you give just scope it for us of the consumer supply chain? What percentage of those supply chains have this problem? How big is it?
Justin Dillon: Well, I'm going to make it really easy for you and for your listeners. The easiest way for you to understand your own connection to this is to go slavery footprint.org, which I created with the Obama administration ten years ago, which was only supposed to reach 150,000 people. We built it to reach 150,000 consumers. It's a lifestyle survey. You tell it everything you buy, not brands, you know, you buy alomnds. You buy bikes, you own bedsheets, you put everything in there, only takes 5 minutes. You can take the survey and at the end of it. It's going to tell you how many slaves are required to produce your lifestyle. I have 43. It takes 43 exploited individuals to produce my annual lifestyle, and that's built with data and algorithms and multiple different reports looking at how much slave labor is required to produce different goods that go to support our lives. When we launched that ten years ago, first of all, I didn't think anyone wanted to know the answer to the question or the website, which says, Do you want to know how many slaves worked for you? So we hoped that we get 150,000 people to want to know the answer to that question in a year. We got that goal in an hour after launch, and it went to the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, everything they went, NPR went everywhere. And I think 40, 50 million consumers around the world and almost every country in the world know the answer to that question. And when that happened, this was 2011. When that happened, I went. There's something here. There's got to be something here. And what the success of that, which of course, I was doing promotion for that and going around the world and talking about supply. Now I'm talking about supply chain, talking about imposter syndrome. I'm talking about supply chains. And I remember speaking at this one conference passion in Atlanta, they invited me to come talk. And it's like all these college students, like 20, 30,000 college students in the Georgia Dome. And I'm up there talking about slavery footprint, we did this. Now we did that, I said, and I'm talking to college students, and I know how to put college students to sleep just to talk about supply chains. I know the sound of 30,000 college students falling asleep, which is I said, you know the answer. I think if we're going to solve these things as consumers is we have to solve for supply chains. Everyone's like, What's that? I'm like, I don't know. It seems like something we need to solve for. But it turns out that there was this one guy, Ben Kelly, who was a chaperon and he was sitting up way in nosebleed seats. Somehow I'll figure it out he knew my brother, who's a pastor in Chicago, text my brother and says, Is this your brother on stage? My brother's like, Yeah, that's him. And give me his number before I walk offstage, he e-mails me and says, Hey, my name's Kelly. I work for this company called Ariba. We do supply chains and I'm like "What's that?" and he's Is like let's get together. And within two months, I was getting my Ph.D. in supply chain from Ariba and then eventually SAP. And so my life's been this journey of these just like, almost calculated mistakes or just just curiosity of, like, going into something, because I feel like there's something there and it really does tie into. I wasn't raised in boardrooms, I wasn't raised in corporations. I've never had a resume. I've always been working with legal gangs called bands to go out and create something and put it into the world and build a movement around it. And actually, it turns out the same muscle groups that it takes to be an artist or an activist or an entrepreneur, they're all the same muscle groups. You're make believing that something is there and getting other people to go on that journey with you. That is what a startup is.
Rusty Rueff: That's really cool. Okay, so you launched this website and obviously overnight, you know that there's will because you said, well, plus wait times, right? So you know that there's Will. So then you had to create way. So we want to hear about FRDM and then really curious about how do you multiply timing?
Justin Dillon: Yeah. So the way was again, bootstrap and MVP of the supply chain analysis tool. And when we looked at the marketplace and I would talk to chief procurement officers. That kind of gives me that kind of LBJ excuse of like, I got all the responsibility but none of the power. You know, none of my suppliers will listen to me with supply chains. A big, scary place I can't control. I can barely get a good deal. And so I went, okay, that's probably not the best way to go figure this out. But what was great about working with Ariba, they introduced this thing called spend data, which is basically invoice level data. That's what Ariba is built on is spend data, right? The whole thing is like companies tell you what they're buying, you handle all their procure to pay work. Well, I started digging into spend data and they would give me associates that play around with looking at how all this data is organized. And I went to my team and said, if we can create an analysis top of this, because every company has this, every company has invoice level data, it's ugly. It's not organized. But even there, what a great opportunity, because it's going to need to be organized at some point. So what if we were to take this data and be able to build mappings of supply chains for them without ever touching suppliers, not even needing to get suppliers to come along in the journey? Nothing against them, but it's just one more obstacle. And so we built an MVP that we could ingest spend at our invoice level data and provide an analysis. We built these things called product genomes, which essentially it's predictive bill of materials for any different good that you might be buying. And we started showing this to customers and started selling it to a few customers and realizing that this was something that was going to become more and more valuable over time. That took time to build the business. We built it slowly, but as more and more customers use it, it was Accenture, it was Virgin, it was know. It was just this weird companies that you wouldn't think would have grouped together did something like this where we're coming to us and getting value out of it. So that told us there's something there.
William Norvell: Justin I'm curious about this part of the story and I could be wrong. I've seen the software, so I want to give you a chance to explain the software too. But the switch. I want to talk about am I, right? You started it as a nonprofit and then moved it to a for profit. Yeah.
Justin Dillon: Yeah.
William Norvell: And I just think that's really curious because I don't think we've had anyone on the show that has sort of gone down that route and said, Oh, this actually should be a for profit business. Can you talk to us about how you started it and how you moved to that was a better route for you as an entrepreneur?
Justin Dillon: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was running a charity called Made in the Free World, which was running that Slavery Footprint website and then also doing special projects, which I got to go and help start projects for kids coming out of slavery, went to do all kinds of in-field stuff. But then we started with the side project called Freedom F R D M Inside of the charity. Exactly what I said. We built an MVP of the product and went to market, and after the first couple of big companies signing up to use it, I went to the charities board and said, This wants to be a business that doesn't want to be inside of a nonprofit. Let's move this out into a C Corp. And really, we were really blessed to have some amazing, amazing lawyers helping us do this, but we were able to create a fair market value for it, for which the charity is actually got founder shares in the C Corp and it has a spot on the board. So we're kind of a de facto mission based startup just for the fact that we have a charity, that a board seat that's keeping us on mission and founder shares as well.
Henry Kaestner: It's a great place to bring Wes in. Wes, as I mentioned before, a long term friend, big believer and encouragement to the movement. Wes you found out about Justin and I think that part of what you found attractive about the FRDM story is obvious. But tell us a little bit more as you started to look in to the business about why you thought it was going to be a good investment, because you see hundreds of investments each month. Tell us more about the process of discovering Justin, what was attractive and how you got involved. And then maybe also as you have the stage just a little bit about what Justin just talked about, which is a little bit of a different structure, not much different, you know, just another shareholder. But maybe there is something different once you riff on all of that.
Wesley Lyons: Yeah. Thank you. We actually got to connect from our prior to Eagle Days in around 2016. We'd originally connected and heard about this amazing idea. At the time, Justin was a little bit early stage and we didn't quite get him into that earlier portfolio and kind of just been watching for a number of years from a distance and the idea of what Justin was doing was so compelling. What if you could clean out supply chains? And it was actually through the marketplace that I think of. Their pilot is like, hey, have you heard what Justin's doing? And or Tom Bleasdale was also involved and the marketplace got us connected again and talking. And he had made so much progress between 2016 and 2020 of both creating the product and really selling it to channel partners. We got really excited when we started to see that Justin was building out a team and had gone from being a one man show to really starting to build a team. His pipeline was growing and the channel partners were very exciting and we're really thrilled. Tom has done a really good job of walking with them as well. Sometimes for us, we really like to walk with entrepreneurs closely and being Texas based and Zurich based, the bay is really far away for us. And so really camaraderie with Tom and his role of walking with Justin was really significant to be comfortable with walking with an entrepreneur so far away.
Henry Kaestner: So it's coming a little bit about the structure and likely not that big of a deal anyway. But you know, you have invest in a company that start off with a missional purpose and has this mission of ending something which is absolutely awful. Modern slavery. Do you ever see that as an investor conflicting with what you have promised your LPs in your fiduciary responsibility of delivering return?
Wesley Lyons: We see it as a compelling advantage. Actually, many of the companies that we're investing in have parallel structures where they're doing the for profit side, and there's really often a nonprofit side of it that needs to be executed. So we're more often coaching the entrepreneur that, hey, there might be a nonprofit that you need to spin up alongside. Justin came in where he had started a nonprofit and spun up the for profit. But parallel we're seeing more and more often, especially when you're working with trafficking or poverty. There just parts of it that need to often get run, either run by a parallel nonprofit or find nonprofit partners that can do that part of it. So we think it's a compelling advantage. There's no other way to land the top 10% of the Harvard graduating class or Stanford graduating class, other than having an incredible mission like ending modern day slavery. And that's just one tailwind that you have from a highly missional company.
William Norvell: So I want to dive on missional topics. I love both of your responses, so I'm going to use your specifically, but I'm try to bring it into generalities a little bit too. So when you hear a great mission minded company, right? I've seen Justin software work. He's been gracious to show to me before my questions. Like every time I say I go, why doesn't everyone in the world use this? Right? And I feel like that's for a lot of mission minded companies when they create like this is obviously a problem. Everyone knows it's a disaster. Everyone's heartstrings are tugged when they see this. The product works, right? So like, and I know you're growing the business to more and more people are using it, but what challenges do you face when you're selling it as a product? Right. Because once again, this isn't a nonprofit which sometimes, you know, people get along that ride for something different, right? There's a [...] product, but it's still a mission minded. Everyone gets it. You know, I'm just I'm just befuddled. Sometimes it's like, why wouldn't somebody buy this?
Justin Dillon: That's what I say. When I wake up every day, I just yell it as loud. Why won't somebody you know it, kids? It's interesting because we talked about the algorithm change. Will, plus we multiplied by timing. Timing has actually picked up on this by the regulatory tailwinds over the last five years, some of which we helped get started ten years ago, like when we were doing campaigning and working slavery footprint that actually helped close some like trade loopholes that are now being leveraged, you know, not just here in the U.S., but all over the place. So the timing that actually picked up in the regulatory and the compliance issues. And again, it takes years for companies to pay attention to much less interpret compliance, right? So there is a gestation period between the passing of legislation and its effect, but I've been privy to watching it obviously from day zero to now. And supply chain transparency is no longer a vitamin. It's absolutely a painkiller. Obviously, the pandemic taught us that from an operational standpoint, but from ESG compliance, the CDC is putting out new requirements now that are going through multiple stages of comments. We're not going backwards. Supply chain transparency and the understanding not just of environmental social risks, but operational risks is just becoming the new normal. And it's to answer. Your question, we do get a lot of inbound. We're usually the first supply chain transparency technology if anyone was ever purchased, so there's some benefit and wait to be the first. That doesn't mean that this work hasn't been going on internally inside of companies, but it's usually been Excel sheets, consultants and lots of emails. Now, the ability to federate supply chain data and get insights ahead of time is just a new thought. And so it's starting to pick up. But I agree with you. I think for us, as this picks up and as we're able to federate more and more insights and bring more and more companies together because we run freedom of movement, I don't know how to run anything other than a movement. That's all I've been doing my whole life. And the movement building we're doing here, there's a movement in the marketplace so the companies can come together and buy better choosing vendors that follow their values for sustainability, ethics and also transparency. And what happens over time. The network effect of people buying better actually just make it harder and harder to win in the marketplace when you don't align with those values. I love solutions that don't require altruism, that don't require a charity or government. They just become something that's good for you, like putting your seatbelt on or not smoking in an airplane. They just become something that everyone goes, Yeah, isn't that how the world should work? Shouldn't we know? The tomatoes that we're putting on our spaghetti tonight were picked by Uighurs laborers in northwestern China under duress. That seems logical. And it does. I could take anyone on this podcast flying around the world and introduce you to the kids who are picking your sparkles, or the Cambodian fishermen who are pulling out prawn of the ocean to go on our side. These are real people and all the rest of it. I think this is a podcast about faith. Faith requires us to look at the problems in the world through a lens of parity, not pity. We've never been called to pity. Never once did Christ in his amazing short time on Earth go just pity everyone. He literally saw everyone with parity, and that's what people of faith are called to. So we don't get the luxury of going "oh, it's just so sad that children are being exploited for my fingernails or for the electronics that I get to use. That's just so sad." It's not sad. It's a requirement for us to step in and build solutions for that. That's what parity is. That's looking at the Cambodian fishermen going, You went down to that dock to get a job, just like we try to get jobs in Silicon Valley, elsewhere. You wanted to better your life to protect your family because you are so poor and stateless. You got thrown in a boat for seven years and couldn't get off. That's what we're called to. And the marketplace is just a tool to be able to do something that most everyone wants to happen anywhere.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I love that. And thank you, because my next question was going to be how your faith is not only informed, but how it's driven you to tackle this problem. And, you know, I'd like to hear more about that from both of you guys. You know, I mean, God's obviously put this on your heart. This is not a problem that likely will be solved in your lifetime. And you're up against something that the other side of the faith equation is pushing against hard. You know, so talk to us about the faith that you've put forward in the effort, the challenges that you're up against, and how God answers those challenges and from you as well. Wes.
Wesley Lyons: I mean, we're just praying together as a team this morning about these words like the Lord just talks about this is what religion and seek justice, love, mercy and walk humbly before your God. And and he just burns for justice and looking for opportunities. Well, I mean, you talked about kind of this. Do you lead with your cause or you do you lead with a pain point? We passionately believe you always lead with solving a problem. But if we can take pain points of corporate America like freedom is doing with regulation and things like that, and produce the justice in the world that our hearts cry for. We're so excited that Justin is not alone. We're investing in other companies that are helping to feed data into the freedom system, and we're looking at other companies that are taking the regulatory angle at this problem, other companies that are looking at trauma informed employment, job placement, where there's entire themes around social justice, where we're seeing several companies at a time coming in with these justice motivated by their faith and the creativity they receive from the Christian entrepreneur. To express the heart of God in business is absolutely incredible. It's really exciting to see the ability to express. The closer we get to God, we kind of just overflow with the sense of we want to see justice in the world because the world is not the way it ought to be. And we want to see the Kingdom of God come and then tell that amazing city come out of heaven. We want to see a bit of it come here on earth. It's just a hard cry that overflows and the closer we get to God.
Justin Dillon: For me. You know, I've been chasing freedom since I was 16 years old. You know, I've been trying to help. There is nothing more intoxicating, more [...] than to help facilitate people becoming free. It used to be audiences in nightclubs. I mean, you write music and you create things. You want people to feel free. There is this chase and this pursuit of freedom that everyone wants, and I think I've been chasing it my whole life, but I've also had the privilege, the real sacred privilege. I've seen people become free, literally free from slavery, literal slavery for the first time. I remember doing a raid in India and we got a bunch of boys that were been kidnaped from Nepal and were working in a textile mill. And we pulled them out with the police, of course, and with a local group. And I got to sit with the kids afterwards and pass their names and get to know them. And I was able to talk to this one little boy who's ten years old about freedom and ask him how he feels and what he wants to do. And I could just I got the sense like it's the same sense that I had when my son was born. When I put my hand on his chest. I can't believe I got to experience your birth. But you don't. You're not experiencing your birth, your baby. You're not getting it. You don't know you're being born. And I'm experiencing what a sacred place that is. It's the same way when someone is becoming free. You get to experience freedom in a way that no one else can. And I think that we are all as human beings, whether we operate as consumers or run businesses or whatever it is, we are all looking to participate and to interact with freedom. Look at how we feel about the people fighting in Ukraine. We're just naturally drawn to chasing and pursuing freedom. And so for me, my job is to help facilitate that because I think that exists in people everywhere and that people want to chase that in any way that they can. And I feel like whatever I can contribute to the world is contributing ways which they can do that. And I can say that our customers get really excited about that. Yeah, they're just doing B2B software compliance and putting out the reports and the work we do is very technical and the reports are very important, but we try to remind them about how, you know, each one of these companies is bringing billions of dollars of spend into a marketplace to buy better and to change systems. And I tell you the same feeling that I have of meeting with the little boy. I have meeting with procurement officers that we work with, where I get to say you're participating in something bigger than yourself and the joy of getting to help companies become a part of that and get near that feeling of freedom is it's just the best.
Henry Kaestner: So I feed up on something that I'd love for you guys to both respond to, but you don't have to. And that is this two sided tension, maybe, if you will, or this this beautiful mix, better said of finding something that you just can't help not get involved with on one hand. But even better than that is this joy that comes out of picking up from you just in a healthy, selfish ambition toward joy, wanting more of the experience, the joyful, meaningful experience of putting your hand on the chest of your son or this boy in India. Or even as you talk about the procurement officer that you are after a pattern recognition of joy and purpose and meaning, and you found it in leading this company. And there is also this faithful obedience, right? You can't not do this. I mean, you find this out, you can't not participate. How might you just take that, put that in your own words and encourage an audience of faith driven entrepreneurs and investors that are struggling with what a search for peace, for joy, for freedom looks like in their own lives. What would you say to them?
Justin Dillon: It's hard to flourish without freedom. It leads to it. It's hard to have freedom without truth. These last few years have been really difficult on a lot of us. They've been the worst years of my life for sure, not just for freedom, but for lots of reasons, lots of loss, lots of challenges. And I think that it distills in us this desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves and just doing a startup. It's not enough. I mean, there are people far more talented, more intelligent, more successful than me to start us doing a start up in the middle of a itself. Building business is a huge thing. It's a Herculean task, but it's not enough to just build a startup or to just invest in one. You have to be putting something. Building something bigger than yourself is investing in something that you know you might not get a return on. Whether that's kindness or whether that's investing like is investing without a return. And it's in the space that we're in where the pressure is very, very high and the need to create higher growth companies is on you. The need to control and the propensity to control is very much there. I struggle with it all the time, but really when you're able to step back and go, my job is to facilitate opportunities for people to find something out about themselves or experience something or build something or be a part of something bigger than themselves. I would just encourage everyone to be looking for those types of properties that show up because they didn't just show up for me, they show up for everyone. I totally don't believe I'm special in that sense. They absolutely show up for everyone. The question is, are you going to be, it seems reckless to pursue ideas that you feel like you're just supposed to do when it doesn't follow the script, that you feel like it's put out in front of you. And I definitely wasn't following the script that led to becoming a SAS software. There was no script that led to this point, but it totally makes sense now.
Henry Kaestner: Wes, how would you respond? Thank you. Justin that was awesome.
Justin Dillon: Sure.
Wesley Lyons: It really was. Justin, what comes to mind is the sense that we live and operate on a battlefield. The first ten years of my career were dedicated to the military, and I got to command the U.S. detachment to the Philippines a few years ago. And one day I was commanding the crew coming down through the clouds. And I check in and and the tasking I get is to hunt for children that are being used as bait in a trap. ISIS had taken over a city in the Philippines and they were using children as bait in the trap. And it was just absolutely sickening to see how evil that world is like. You kind of want to throw up at that moment. It takes a lot to process, but every square inch of this planet is claimed by Satan and counter-claims by God. And when we get to wade into the fray more purposefully with our investment dollars and the companies that we build to directly combat and engage in this spiritual warfare is really, really a life giving. We all have a sense that something's wrong in the world and and it's helpful there kind of reframing to see ourselves on a battlefield and getting to walk with entrepreneurs like Justin, who are just absolutely going toe to toe with in this battle. It's really life giving to frame it in that way.
Rusty Rueff: I'm going to turn it over to William because unfortunately, we have to come to close. But I just want to thank both of you guys. You know, we're just coming as we're recording this out of the Easter. And I heard a little sermon that at a church here in Louisville where the pastor said she was reading the resurrection story, which we've all read since the time we first became believers over and over and over, and that she was struck by five words while it was still dark. Right. Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and while it was still dark and Jesus had already risen. And how hard it is in a world is so filled with darkness to look to him and say, You're doing amazing work, God, and I know you are. And you know, I can't think of a place where it is more dark than the world that the two of you are spending time. It's a dark world. But you know, what you encourage me is to remember while it was still dark, he was there. And so, you know, keep up the great work, you know, I applaud. Applaud what the two of you were doing.
Justin Dillon: Thanks man.
Rusty Rueff: William.
William Norvell: What we love to do at the end of our episodes is try to bridge the gap between God's word with our listeners and our guest. And we just love to see how it can be coming alive in new ways and encourage people in remarkable ways. And so we love to invite you to share just a quick moment of maybe something you've seen in God's word that struck you a little differently. Could be something you read this morning, could be something you've been meditating on for a few months or even your whole life. But just want to invite you to share a little bit of his word with our audience and let God take over from there.
Justin Dillon: Sure. I mean, I'll go first. You know, I've been reading a lot of proverbs lately and kind of like, you know, the self-help books of the Bible. And the thing that I'm struck with more is just the pursuit of wisdom. And that wisdom is choosing to do now and you'll be satisfied with later, which is really hard to do when, you know, when you're running out of to start up the application of wisdom. And it is it's almost like a different seeking wisdom as an operating system, as a mental operating system is the thing that I'm learning, because everything is, you know, the tyranny of the urgent when you're running a company that's growing quickly. And I think that wisdom is the ability to do something, to take activities now that, you know, are going to be good down the road. So that's what I'm learning.
Wesley Lyons: I think for me, the first that comes to mind that we've just continually comes off our lips is unless the Lord builds the house, the builders build in vain. It's just so obvious that as you scale a company that he brings the breakthroughs. We put up a big picture on the wall of a surfer surfing a giant wave to remind us of the difference between being in the ocean and trying to make waves, which is what it feels like when we're striving. It reminds me, Henry, you like to talk about, from my perspective, kind of this idea of being faithful instead of willfull. And when we're being faithful, it feels like we're surfing. It's amazing the Lord is moving and and he's the one who makes the waves. And when we're willful, it feels like we're out in the ocean trying to make waves. So unless the Lord builds the house, the builders build in vain and being faithful instead of willful.