Jim Roberts | Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington

Welcome to the Amplified CEO with VC and serial entrepreneur, Richard Stroupe. Today's guest is Jim Roberts, founder of the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington, a dynamic organization dedicated to fostering a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in the greater Wilmington, North Carolina region. We discussed Jim's current assessment of the entrepreneurial market in Wilmington.

His background in supporting North Carolina's startup economies and his future vision for Wilmington and North Carolina.

Jim Roberts. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. Thank you for stopping by. How are you doing? Your lovely town of Surf City. Topsail and Surf City. Well, it's good that we finally got you out of the big city of Wilmington. That's right. Well, welcome to Surf City. We were glad to have you and swing by and you should come more often.

Yes, definitely. There's a lot going on here. There's great seafood here. A lot of awesome [00:01:00] restaurants, a lot of really cool activities. The beaches are great. You know, it's not as crowded as Wilmington. I drove by a retail store with a big gator right in the entrance. That's my kind of place. The gator mouth.

That's right. Cause you are a gator. I am a proud Florida gator. We are obnoxious. Yeah. Or. Not, not so much this year in football though. Had to bring that up. I see how it's going to be. Let's just get right into it. Right, right. So tell us about growing up in Florida. Your family's original from the Midwest, but you guys migrated to Florida and you went to University of Florida.

Yeah. So, uh, we're a Chicago family. You can tell from my nasally accent, if I spend any time around my mother, the nasally gets much stronger. When my father's parents moved from Chicago to The Tampa area, my father followed them down. It's a really interesting story. He wanted a job near their house, but the job that he was pursuing [00:02:00] was filled by someone.

So he went to the high school that that guy left. And that's how we ended up in rural Bushnell, Florida. Bushnell. Is on 75 between Tampa and Gainesville. Okay. It's an hour and a half either way. It was more cows than people. Did they not like my, my Northern Yankee ways? Oh, I'm sure. In this rural little bit of culture shock.

Oh, it was both ways. Yeah. Yeah. Like you talk really fast. Yeah. Like, okay. They were not basketball people. They were, it was a football town. Right. So old sound. There was no priority S on basketball at all. Right? Yeah. And, uh, so it was, yeah, it was culture shock. And it was a very good high school student and, uh, was lucky to get into Florida, as most of my friends say.

We're not sure we'd get into there today. That's how much it was recently ranked the number one public university by the Wall Street Journal. Right. And it was very tough school. So. [00:03:00] It prepared you for, um, lots of things, but I learned a lot of social skills at the University of Florida through my fraternity, and that was probably the most, really the most important thing for me.

Now, going through high school, you played basketball, right? Your dad was a basketball coach. My dad was kind of a, if I may, kind of a Bobby Knight protege in Chicago area where he would, Bobby Knight would have summer camps and invite my father to be one of those coaches at the summer camp. Wow. And then there's a famous basketball camp called Five Star, but there was a second camp called BC All Stars and it was a guy, Bill Cronauer was BC, Bill Cronauer.

And dad was a coach at those summer camps and it was a can, A Converse shoe camp, so it wasn't sponsored by Nike, but it was sponsored by Converse, so all of the rookies from the NBA who got Converse contracts would show up at this camp in Milledgeville, Georgia, which is really in [00:04:00] the middle of nowhere, but it was the cheapest gym they could find, that's what I assume.

Right. And I guess those guys flew into Atlanta and drove up to Milledgeville, um, so. You know, Charles Barkley would be there, Magic Johnson, Isaiah Thomas, and you know, these are people that you see on TV that you never thought you would meet. So I got to go to these camps with him as a middle schooler.

And then when I got to be a sophomore, I got to go to this camp. It's one of those really humbling things where you think you're the best player in your little town until you go to this camp. Right. Right. Yeah, humbling story. And you come back and you're like, okay, I've got a, if I want that college scholarship, which is the dream, then you've got to step up because there weren't many juniors.

Uh, there weren't many, there were, I may have been one of two sophomores at this camp, otherwise it was upperclassmen. Right. Mostly juniors. Okay. And, uh, I learned quickly. I had a lot of work to do. Yeah. Yeah. It must have been very impactful for you to [00:05:00] be around such high talent. Well, it was until two weeks later I tore my ACL in the summer league.

And that was kind of the end of that dream, but I still played my senior year, but I I missed my whole junior year of Just from surgery, yeah. I couldn't, I couldn't run for a year. I had a cast on for six months. Oh my god. You know, it's a different surgery today. Yeah. Ended my dream. My, my most valuable asset is, uh, I got three letters from Dean Smith.

The UNC basketball coach, and they all said the same thing. Sorry to hear about your knee, hit the books, beansmith. Yeah, right. It was like, you know, my dad called in a lot of favors and college coaches that he had some relationship with. Wow. And, uh, yeah, I had a shoe box full of letters. So you were destined to go to college to play basketball, you know, at a high level I imagine.

Well, I had a 3. 7 GPA, I was a coach's son, and I could shoot [00:06:00] from anywhere in the gym. And you were tall. I could shoot over guards as a tall guard. Right. I didn't play much inside at all. Which is surprising. Yeah, I was the tallest player on my team. I just, that's not where I played. And you're out shooting from the front.

Yeah, from the front. Yeah. Three pointer. Yeah. The three pointer came in right when I got into high school, so yeah, that was a big plus for me. Yeah. So I guess your dad was very influential with you as a, as a child. In every possible way. Um, in the seventies it was very odd in a divorce to be given to your father and I was given to my father.

So, I was raised by my father and he was Single for a couple of years and then remarried. And yeah, so yes, uh, if you see me around my father, you know, before he passed away, we're, I'm a replica of him. Okay. [00:07:00] Did he have like this Bobby Knight type personality? Indeed. Do you remember? Oh my goodness.

Nightmares of that. Yes. I'll never forget. Down to the red plaid ugly jackets. Um, I mean, really copied. We watched every Indiana game. Okay. Um, I don't think I missed one that was televised for a decade. Right. You know? Yeah. Um, so, yeah. Down to the, you know, the temper, if I may say. Um, he once disagreed with a, um, a referee and started saying M I C K E Y M O U S E because he didn't like the ref's call.

And the whole gym heard it and he got teed up and thrown out. That was his favorite moment. One of his favorite moments of coaching. He didn't throw any chairs on the court, did he? No. No, not that I'm going to say in public, no. I'm still waiting for that. Like, you know, you have to one up Bobby Knight. You can't throw a chair on the court.

Maybe throw a chair at one of the refs. I don't know if those guys would get hired anymore if they had that [00:08:00] kind of temper. Not in today's times. Right. Now I understand you a little bit. Yeah, it's an Irish German family, you know. Stubborn on both sides, right? Yeah, but just your passion and your energy level that you bring, you know, you saw that from a young child, you know, and your father and that mentality it kind of wore off on you and now you bring that to the, To the Wilmington Market.

A laid back Wilmington Coastal Market and you've got this intense German, Irish, passionate guy who doesn't know the word chill. Like, I don't, I'm not apathetic. I'm the opposite of apathetic. I am going to push every day because I'm Right. Something I've been thinking a lot about recently is, I have the same ambitions that any entrepreneur has, it's just a different, I'm just doing something different, like, I fully consider myself an entrepreneur, I just do it in a non profit way, you know, [00:09:00] so, when someone looks at me like, why are you pushing me so hard, cause well, I'm I need you to do what you do so I can achieve the things that I'm trying to achieve.

You know, we are now the number one ecosystem in the world. Right. Who would have thought that in 2013? It's a tremendous achievement, you know, for you and everything that you have completed. But let's dial it back. So, before you became Wilmington, let's, after you left. Florida. So tell me a little bit about how you started your career and how you ended up in North Carolina.

Like everyone at the University of Florida, we moved to Atlanta as soon as we graduate because we don't want to work for Mickey Mouse and when you're in Florida, you think that's the only job there is, right? Because at the time Miami wasn't an innovation based economy and Tampa was not really growing on an economic basis.

You know, innovation, you know, that was the home of the Buccaneers and they were terrible. That's the only thing you knew about Tampa. And again, we didn't go to Tampa from this little rural town, you [00:10:00] know, we stayed in our lane. So our vision of the world, besides my experience in Chicago, the people around didn't travel much, so they had a very limited view on their opportunities in the world.

So, I moved to Atlanta as soon as I graduated from University of Florida. I waited tables for a while and did some retail, like worked in a CD store. And then I worked in this really odd thing called The Internet Store. And it was a retail environment for things you needed for the internet. So you would buy a modem, because at the time computers didn't come with Modems.

I sound like a dinosaur. This is 96. Yeah. So was it like RadioShack? The front of it, I guess, looked like a retail RadioShack with internet things only, with books about the internet, discs of downloading the browsers, the routers, and But in the back was more of a classroom. So we taught how to use the internet.[00:11:00] 

We, we taught HTML 101 on how to design a website. And that's not what I was doing. I could teach the how to use the internet class, but I wasn't, wasn't a coder by any sense. And I did that for a while and ran my own store for a little while. And that was right in the middle of Buckhead. And then, um, I got contacted by the guy that I was renting my apartment from in a sublease, and he's like, hey Jim, I got some bad news.

You gotta move out. Oh no. Because the apartment wants to sell that apartment during the Olympics. Oh, wow. Yeah. And they're going to charge an arm and a leg, and you got to go. It didn't feel like a very welcoming, you know, place. So this was 96? This is literally 96. Yeah, I remember that. This is July of 96, right?

The Olympics are coming soon. Then they had the bombing, right, at the Olympics? That was, yeah. Yeah. And so I chose between Jacksonville, Florida, where I could have gone back to Florida, and I had some fraternity brothers that lived in [00:12:00] Jacksonville. Yeah. And Jacksonville had just started their NFL team, so there was a sign of some kind of economy that could support an NFL team.

Or Charlotte, and the funny story is my fraternity brothers had just come back from the Final Four that was in Charlotte. Charlotte, yeah. And they had a great time. Well, what they didn't know was all the great bars they went to were fake storefronts. Those were dead stores that they just made into bars during the final four.

Right. And so what they promoted was the social district was not at all. Right. Right, so I just, I chose Charlotte and I lived there, 96, and one of my first jobs I worked for, oh, an ISP, an internet service provider, so they're the ones that provided you internet service, but they were also doing web design.

That was really interesting because of my training, or my experience at the retail store, I got the job simply because I was the only applicant [00:13:00] who emailed my, Resume and everyone else was faxing it in. Mm-hmm. Or mailing it in. And I got the job simply 'cause I knew how to do an email attachment. Right.

Like you're hired. Yeah. , like I didn't really have any sales experience. Right. You know, outside sales, if somebody knocks on your retail door, of course you can sell them something. But Right. Going out to the world and networking and finding prospects and clients is a whole different experience. I was just one of those people, as you know, I'm a networker, I'm a connector.

And I went to every networking event the Chamber of Commerce had to the point where people thought I was an employee of the Chamber. Wow. And there's a very famous salesman in the, uh, Charlotte market named Jeffrey Gittimer. And he once said, if, if there's a hundred butts there, your butt better be there too.

Yeah. And I took that to heart. And a year and a half after moving to Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer, the biggest newspaper of the flagship newspaper, wrote an article that I was one of the three best networkers in the whole city, and I [00:14:00] guess they had reached out to the chamber and says, you know, Who is this guy?

Who is, who, who do you know that is an efficient, effective networker? Right. And somehow my name got to the paper. You know, people their whole lives have never been in the newspaper. Right. And here I am, you know, 18 months in a new town. Yeah, I'm in the business journal or the Charlotte Observer. Yeah. And so, um, that's how I got into the internet and into the technology space.

And I got recruited to other firms because I was a connector and because I was. Right. I wasn't a high impact person, but I was an influential person that could make things happen. Right. And I kept getting recruited to better and better jobs because I was visible in the tech community. And I worked for a very small firm that had like four or five people.

This was around 2000, and none of my prospects had any money. Because [00:15:00] this is the dot com boom when you're reading about Atlanta, or Austin, or Silicon Valley, or New York, or in Boston, and all these dot coms are filling up the magazine of, you know, here's Mark Cuban building Broadcast. com and selling it for two billion dollars.

Like, well, why doesn't that happen in Charlotte? And so since none of my prospects had any money, I had the idea to come up with an event where my prospects could meet investors like yourself, right? Or they can meet the media people and get their story in the paper and maybe that way. Or they could meet a lawyer that could write their patent really all the people they needed to meet.

How do you create one room where one entrepreneur can meet everyone they need to know in the ecosystem? Right. And that's how I started doing what I'm doing now, 25 years later. Wow. And that organization was called First Round. Okay. And it got so successful that every six months we had to move to a bigger [00:16:00] restaurant.

Because I would call the restaurant on a Tuesday, hey we want to have an event. They're like, great, because Tuesday is the slowest night and they really struggle on Tuesdays. And if I took over their restaurant, They got all the beer sales, they got all the liquor sales, they got all the food sales. I just wanted the sponsorships of the law firms and accounting firms, so the restaurant had no extra cost because we were there, they were making money that they normally wouldn't make.

Yeah. And so we just kept moving bigger and bigger and bigger. And you know what happened? The dot com crashed. Right. Right. The Y2K is over, the dot com crash happens. And really a lot of the interest in building kind of this technology economy, this technology. You know, the internet economy, all that went away.

And then 9 11 happened and that got even worse where all the sponsors that I had in the law firms and accounting firms wanted to move upstream to work with bigger companies, they didn't think there was going to be much [00:17:00] of a startup economy for a couple of years. So you had a lot of energy coming into the year 2000.

From the technology push and there's some, some big technology gains. Yeah, I mean, in Charlotte, we had Doug Lebda who started LendingTree, which was a big, you know, big success story and he told a great story. Hey, Charlotte didn't welcome me because the banks didn't understand what LendingTree was trying to do.

They thought we were trying to steal their loan business when in fact we're trying to. You know, broaden the choices of the clients, of the, of the people coming into our website. They now have more choices. That's a good point. So as you're in the middle of kind of like creating this ecosystem or networking effect in the year 2000, was it mostly financial based since there's a lot of banks in Charlotte?

No, not really. The, the FinTech thing had not really taken off yet. So Doug was really one of the first ones. Right. There was a second company that started that we didn't really know who they were, but [00:18:00] they were coming to our events and it turned out that was Michael Prager of a company called Avid Exchange.

Okay. Which is another fintech company that had an IPO and they took, they took a long time. It was. That was a 20 year Right. Ideation. The IPO, so, so what was some of the industries at that time, in the year 2000 in Charlotte specifically, that you were seeing kind of bubble up before the the.com bus? I mean, it was infotech, it was retail, you know, how do you do retail website?

Yeah, right. So it was all basically commerce, online commerce. Yeah. Yeah. Most of it. Yeah. So I was. Living with my future wife. And after, after the 9 11 thing happened, I really decided to close down this organization because I was. I was really, my sponsors were dropping by the day, and I was like, I can't, while this has been fun, it's had a lot of energy around it, I'm not making any money on trying to start a family, buy a house, all these things that adults [00:19:00] do, right?

And three days, although I hadn't told anyone, three days after I decided to close it down, I got a call from Asheville, North Carolina, and they had an economic development organization called Advantage West. Um, you may not know this, but there were, there used to be seven regional economic development organizations in North Carolina, and they got money from the legislature every year, a big budget, millions of dollars to do economic development.

So instead of relying on the state, to kind of assign a new company that was the lead that might want to be in your region. Right. These eight economic development organizations could do their own recruiting and their own economic development, but they hired me to, to start an entrepreneur's council to Basically create your own entrepreneurs, create your own companies and that way you're not recruiting a company that five years later when they get another incentives package pull up roots and they go to another city.

This was let's build our own and keep them [00:20:00] around. So before the big push to kind of recruit or build your own network, economic development, you know, Previously, they would use those funds to recruit businesses to build plants and bring their business. Yeah, what we call buffalo, buffalo hunting, which were exactly their salary incentives of you get your salary taxes back as a company.

And the state is kind of refunding salary taxes to the company. If you create a thousand jobs and the jobs are two times the average wage of the county, then you get these incentives for three to five years. And then you hope that the company stays right. You hope that the executives have grown roots and their kids are in the schools and it makes it hard for them to move away.

But the fact is the companies love these incentives. So then Asheville recruited you for your networking capability and success to kind of start an entrepreneur support [00:21:00] organization. This is 2002. This is late 2002, 2003. I think I moved in 2003. My, um, future, future ex wife, however you want to say this now.

She was from Santa Fe, New Mexico, so moving to Asheville was a dream for her. It was a very good fit for her. She didn't like Charlotte. No, it's very different. Yeah. Did you live in downtown Charlotte or like the suburbs? I lived a mile and a half in an old neighborhood called North Davidson. It was kind of the mill town part of Charlotte where the old mills were.

Was that north? It is north. Yeah, between, between the university and downtown. Okay. It's 36th Street. So, you know, it was one of those things where the, the artists move in and they're fixing up the old houses and the mill village had gone away. These things were boarded up and people come in and invest in kind of, how do you reuse what's existing there?

And it was a very interesting place to live. You know, it was very different than, you know, Kind of the [00:22:00] downtown banking steakhouses and banker's hours and those kind of things. This was more of the where the artists lived and there were galleries and great restaurants around and, you know, it was an interesting place to be a young professional.

Right. It was a, you know, an interesting place. And she didn't, she didn't care for that. No, the politics of Charlotte are very different than the politics of, you know, Santa Fe, New Mexico, which they match Santa Fe and Asheville are often seen as kind of sister cities, right? So. So she, she much enjoyed Asheville.

Well, it is called she ville for a reason, right? So it's very female friendly. Yeah. Um, you know, I'm, I think you diagnosed me pretty quickly. I'm, uh, kind of a type A personality, go, go, go. Just a little bit. And so Asheville was. Hey man, you know, we like our five o'clock beer, you know, around here and I'm like, five o'clock, you should be calling the West Coast.

It's lunchtime. They're still open. Right. You know, just like, what do you mean it's, that's not quitting time. Right. [00:23:00] You're an entrepreneur. There is no end of the day, you know. So I'm push, push, push. And it was kind of a, it was, I was a bit of a fish out of water. Right. You know, but we had great events there.

You'll love this event. We had our big venture capital conference. It was a full day conference. We called it Carolina Connect. So we were trying to connect Greenville and Asheville to make it a region, an economic region. So instead of calling it the North Carolina Connect conference, it was Carolina Connect inviting Greenville, South Carolina.

We had the governor's advisor on science and technology policy was the moderator And a venture capitalist, his name was Steve Nelson, he had a venture capital fund, Wakefield Group out of Charlotte, and a kid that he invested in that was 18 year old and he put 3 million into this company called Pinpoint Networks.

Okay. And the kid was still at the school of science and math when they invested. So this kid's in a high school dorm. Yeah. And he's the [00:24:00] king of the world because he just raised 3 million. You know. Three million bucks. Three million bucks. So I had this conversation on stage in the middle of Asheville, and you could have heard a pin drop.

Because people in Asheville couldn't believe that this was happening somewhere in North Carolina. Yeah. Right? Steve was from Charlotte. But the kid was from Durham, and so, for whatever reason, they trusted me enough to fill a room, and those guys traveled for four hours out to Asheville, and we had a room of 250 people.

And that, that was good credibility of, one, you could convince those people, but what they said on the stage was, this is how it works. We need to make this work here. And I got a lot of credibility across the state that we were building something in Asheville. Right, that you're starting a movement. Yeah.

Yeah. And what a place to live. You know, my, my vision, if I will, was I was trying to make Asheville into Austin because I had fallen in love with [00:25:00] Austin. I had watched this TV show about the best parties in America, and they talked about the South by Southwest, Music and Interactive Festival. It was a full half an hour on these people just having a great time in Austin, Texas.

And keep Austin weird. Well, Asheville's plenty weird, right? So can we just steal their game plan of having these big events? And if people travel there, how many of them stay there? My joke was I'd been, I've been the 10 South by Southwest festivals in Austin and it's, it's 20, 000 people go to an interactive conference and they take over the town and every afternoon you see these really pale white people from the Midwest land on their airport from Ohio and they get off the bus or they get out the Uber.

And the sun is shining in the middle of March and it's 80 degrees and these people are dressed in black and they're, cause they're dressed for [00:26:00] Ohio and suddenly they're, you know, wait a minute. It's March and I don't have to wear 17 layers of black. And so they're enjoying the weather. They're enjoying the live music and oh yeah, they're there from a business conference.

I was like, I can do this. I actually reached out to the people in Austin and said, can we have South by Southeast? Cause there was North by Northwest in Portland, North by Northeast in Toronto and South by Southwest in Austin. Well, the one missing piece is the Southeast. And he looked at me and said, you know, we've tried this before with other cities in the South.

And the guy was so frustrated. He's like, if you think you can do it, Bless you. Kind of a bless your heart. Get out of my way. Do you think there's bias? I mean, because I've, I've kind of seen this before, like in certain markets, you go to New York or Boston or Texas or California, and they're like, where are you from?

North Carolina. And they're like, Oh, you know, like what? There's nothing wrong with North Carolina. No, I think, I think the guy was [00:27:00] overwhelmed. Like I'm asking him on his busiest day of the year. Like, I don't know who you are. Yeah. Why are you asking me this big picture question when I need to focus on making I'm sure that Charlize Theron is in the, the film panel, you know, when she's supposed to be there because that's why half of the men are in this room is to see her.

Yeah. Right. So I think he just didn't take me seriously. The thing that changed was the organization that I worked for Asheville became the, the They became the trophy sponsor for the film festival. Okay. And if you do that long enough and you're writing that check on an annual basis, you start to be taken a little more seriously.

Right. So I guess around 2007, the other financial crisis starts, the housing crisis starts, and I end up leaving Asheville. And I, um, I moved to Raleigh. So I kind of dropped that dream of making that possible. But I'll come [00:28:00] back to that because in 2013, when I opened the CIE, my first speaker at the one year anniversary of the opening of the CIE, my first speaker was the director of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

Okay. So when I called him up and I said, Hugh, you remember me? I bugged you and bugged you and bugged you. He's like, I'm now at the beach. How would you like to come to the beach for a couple days and be a speaker at what we're trying to do now? And he's like, he's all in. Just buy me an airplane ticket and a hotel room and I'll not charge a speaking fee or anything.

And he came. So you were recruited out of Asheville. So before you left Asheville. Well, I left, I left Raleigh. I left Asheville to come to Raleigh. We just moved. I didn't have a job lined up, but I moved. Eventually those regional economic development partnerships lost their funding from the state. All of those basically went away and had to become independent.

Was that because of the financial crisis? It was because a different party was in [00:29:00] charge of the legislature. Okay. They just ended the regional partnerships and said if you want to continue you have to be independent and raise your own damn money. Okay. Which is really hard to do in Asheville, right?

Right. So that kind of went away. The organization went away and I was in Raleigh and I started working for the North Carolina Department of Commerce in the International Trade Division. So how do you help North Carolina companies export? And that was my next job. Well, going back to the Asheville comment, it's extremely hard in the Western North Carolina to kind of help seed companies.

Cause I mean, there's a lot of good ideas. Like I can remember working at App State, their entrepreneurship program, they were initially focused on helping seed companies or ideas for Western North Carolina or have a Western North Carolina theme. And of course I'm like, well, what's that? You know, what kind of industry?

So it just, there's not a whole lot there, you know. Well, we had one company, it was called Builder Radius, and Builder Radius was kind [00:30:00] of like, if you want to buy an existing house, so somebody's already lived in it, it may be a hundred years old, it may be ten years old. Before you buy that house, you could go onto this database and search the permits that have been pulled for that house on what's been added.

So suddenly this house has a, Very nice screened in porch, but you look at the permits and that wasn't done under permit, right? So that's what this house would, this, this website would do was not just a Nashville, but it was a nationwide organization and, but they were based in Nashville and headquarters.

Yeah. And that's what, that's what this builder radius company did. So they were kind of the, the first company that had, you know, a dozen to 25 employees that we worked with. And that was based in Asheville, or? It was, it was one of those, one of the first companies that I remember working with that literally had the keg in the office at five o'clock.

Yeah. You know, the tap [00:31:00] went on at five o'clock, and obviously that's commonplace now, even in great companies like Pendo. Um, Downtown Raleigh, they kind of make it a priority to have a beer window in the kitchen of the business. Right. There's a little one by one window where a nice little cold pint can come right through.

 A lot of the Triangle, um, tech executives have their beach house. in the area. That makes it easy for me to invite them down to come and speak at our events.

Right. It's a real plus for us because I'd have to say it's probably something Greensboro doesn't have, right? They don't, they don't have, oh, come to your, you know, come to your second house and enjoy a weekend. It reminds me of a story. I had breakfast with a prominent lawyer in Wilmington earlier this week, and And he's part of YPO, Young Presidents Organization, or at least he was, and um, he mentioned the same thing, where he rented the uh, battleship for July 3rd, and he [00:32:00] had, I think it was a pig roast or something, some kind of an event, where he invited some of these people that he knew they would be in the area on vacation, Right.

And a lot of YPOs were here at the time, and he had a huge turnout, and it was successful in what he was trying to accomplish. Well, that's the same thing we do during Azalea Festival. That's when we have our investor conference because we have things for them to do other than our event, right? So if I just had a, an event in the middle of a random week, I don't think I would have had 67 investors come to our event in April from out of town, out of state.

We had an event last year. We had people from eight different states come to Wilmington for one of our events. Wow. That blows my mind. Yeah. Okay, that shows you're bringing real talent that they want to hear from. Yeah. It's not just, Oh, we're in a beach town. No, these guys could have gone to any beach town, but it was the quality of the, the speakers that we had for that event.

So [00:33:00] taking the success that you had in Charlotte, taking that momentum to Asheville and then levering that into Raleigh, now you've kind of done a circle in the state and you've, you've touched different aspects within legislature and the private sector and public sector. And then you come to Wilmington.

Did you move to Wilmington to start the CIA at UNC Wilmington? So if I can go back one step, I worked for the North Carolina Biotech Center. They had a spin out organization called the Center of Innovation for Nanobio. Okay. So how do you use nanotechnology to deliver drugs, especially to the brain, because it has to be that small to be able to penetrate the blood brain barrier.

We eventually broadened it out to nanotech for anything. Because nanobiotech just was too, the pun would be too small. Nanotech was too small to have an organization just around nanobio. And again, I just had great events. Even, I was telling somebody recently, we actually had a former [00:34:00] FDA, director of the FDA, as one of our speakers at a VIP breakfast that I held.

And that was gold because everyone wanted to not just be there, but they wanted to sponsor it. They, they would do anything to get into that room. It wasn't part of the full conference. It was a VIP breakfast event before the bigger event. And the guy wasn't going to be at the bigger event. So if you wanted to meet him.

You had to be, and that helped me sell sponsorships. It created that buzz, that FOMO, if you will, the fear of missing out. And one of the sponsors of that was a gentleman by the name of Brian McMurdy. And Brian McMurdy is from Wrightsville. He's actually a Notre Dame grad. He's a Midwest guy, but he lives here.

And he had a recruiting firm, and it turns out he put, in his recruiting firm, he put the chancellor of UNCW into that position. Like, they hired him to find a chancellor, and he was Like a search committee. Yeah. So I knew that [00:35:00] this CIE was coming. I knew they needed a director of entrepreneurship, and they were creating a co working space incubator accelerator.

They were using all the terms, right? Yeah. And I wanted that job, right? Because who doesn't want to live at the beach? Again, as a Florida kid, who doesn't want to live at the beach? Even though I'm Irish and pale and heavy and all bald and all those things, right? So, I was applying for this job, but I wasn't getting anywhere.

And what turned out was the job application required an MBA. And I didn't stick around Florida to get my MBA. So I met Brian at one of our events and he's looking at me, he's like, Jim, what are you, you look really down, you look, what's wrong? You look really sad. And I'm like, I'm really trying to get this job at UNCW.

And his eyes lit up. He's like, I can get you, I can get you an interview tomorrow. And so that's how I got to UNCW was he reached out to the chancellor that he obviously had a personal relationship with [00:36:00] and got me an interview. And so I was a finalist. And, um, in my final interview, I gave the Chancellor this book called Startup Communities by Brad Feld.

Brad Feld is the founder of Techstars in Boulder, Colorado. And I said, Chancellor, you don't know me very well, but when I tell you this, I want you to believe it. If in this book, if this is what you want to happen in Wilmington, I'm the right person for the job. And I got the job the next day. Awesome. And so, you know, he saw the passion, right?

That we're, you know, we're talking about it right here. Yeah. It's the passion that I have for entrepreneurship and he saw it and that's what I guess made the difference in the final round of interviews. So what year is this? This is 2013. Okay, yeah. So you got hired at UNC Wilmington and you're launching the CIE.

So they bought, they bought an old real estate building that was also a real estate [00:37:00] school. So the interview, the room where you had your event with me for the deep dive at the CIE, that used to be a real estate school. Okay. And it was a pretty ugly building. It was not an attraction. It was almost like a strip mall right, right in front of King.

Yeah, I mean, there's a mattress store right next door. There was a Burger King. There's a, you know, a fossil of a Kmart store. I mean, there's the only thing that's alive is the Chili's down the street. Right. I'm not sure how much longer that's going to last, right? So yeah, so it wasn't, you really had to add the energy to the building.

It wasn't a building that had its own energy. It's right on College Road, so it's visible. You can tell people where it is, but that doesn't mean people know what it is. Like, are you the thing next to the Burger King? And so, um, you know, so we had, I was telling somebody else, we You know, they had to fix it up, and they let me have my vision on what I wanted to do.

So we [00:38:00] knocked down some walls, we made a co working space, we added walls, we made clear glass walls that you could write on, you know, so people could see inside, but you could still use that as kind of a whiteboard, although you were writing on glass, right? And I thought, you And somebody said it looked like a baby nursery at a hospital because you were looking in like it was a baby incubator instead of a startup incubator.

And maybe we made some bad decisions, but it's still mostly the very, the same. Really the only difference now is the big video board in the, in the classroom. Right. Right. That's really the only big, big, big difference. So. Because it was under renovation, I had six meetings of coffee meetings across the street because the Harris Teeter had a Port City Java.

And I would, that's where I had our meetings. And that's actually where I met the Taylor family that had a company that they were just starting. It was a father and son team. And they had a company [00:39:00] called NextGlass. Have you heard about NextGlass? So NextGlass was, George was a wine drinker and he was tired of overpaying on restaurant menus because the wine, the price made it sound like it was a great glass of wine.

The description on the menu made it sound like a great glass of wine. But when you pay a hundred dollars for a bottle of wine and it's terrible. You can't really get a refund on that, right? So he decided to create an app that would help you, if the wine list didn't have a bottle that you knew that you liked, and you liked the year, and you liked the vintage, the app would tell you the likelihood of the wines that are on the menu, say, there's an 80 percent chance that you'll like this bottle of wine, based on what you've had in the past.

and other people's description of this wine, there's a really good likelihood that you'll, you'll enjoy it, which delivers value to you, right? And that's how Next [00:40:00] Glass was started. So I met the Taylor family at that coffee shop, and then they paid the monthly fee like a tenant, but they actually had their own offices.

So they, they helped us by being involved in what we were doing, but they, they never really had an office inside the CIE. And they were the big, First success story of the, the Wilmington ecosystem that wasn't related to Live Oak, like Encino had started, really the reason the job at the CIE was open was because they had an internal council at the business school, the Cameron School of Business at UNCW, but the guy left that job to be the marketing, the VP of marketing at Encino.

He was one of the five founders of Encino. Okay. So Encino was launched around about the same time CIE was launched? Probably six months before, but it was really under wraps. Like no one knew, they knew they were using Salesforce. They knew it was FinTech [00:41:00] related. They knew it was related to loans. But no one really knew, they knew it had real potential because of the smart people that were involved.

So this was 2012 13, right before the big AWS, you know, cloud movement started happening. Yeah, so that's why, that's why the job, I mean, maybe if that guy doesn't start Encino, maybe I'd never make it to Willington. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Maybe he, he's the guy who, his name was Jonathan Rowe and he's the guy that starts CIE.

Yeah. I met Jonathan. Yeah. He's, I've seen him over at HANIFI a few times. Super smart guy. Yeah. Yeah. It's brilliant. All right. So you launch CIE. You get it off the ground. Yeah. Yep. And the very first event that we have is the grand opening, and it's on the week after Labor Day, because I believe in having events right after holidays, because no one has anything on there.

Everyone tries to cram things in right before the holiday. [00:42:00] No one has any idea what the, what's going on afterwards. So we did it the Thursday after Labor Day. September 8th. And it was packed because everyone was curious about what this was, because they loved the council, they loved the Entrepreneur Council when it was on their business school, but this was going to be a whole different beast.

So it had the, UNCW is very influential around town. They had, they could really get the articles written to promote things. And, um, there was a lot of anticipation on this. So it was a full house and I was nervous because I didn't know. This is not my event, right? These aren't my people yet. I don't know any of, I know the chancellor and my friend, the chief of staff, and I know some of the people, but there's 99, 95 percent of the room that I have no idea who they are or if they're going to like me or if they like Yankees or they don't.

My first opening speaker was the same guy that was on the panel in Asheville as the moderator when he was the governor [00:43:00] of science, uh, the governor's advisor on science technology policy. And I had him. talk about this report he had called the Innovation Index, which shows how is your county competing with other counties in North Carolina on patents earned, venture capital raised, what part of your economy is based on technology jobs, what is the average pay of those jobs, and this data kind of shows The maturity of your innovation ecosystem, and it was not a very positive report there, that's why I was hired, right, was to change this because There weren't many patents around Wilmington, because I don't, I don't think we had a patent lawyer in town.

Like, why would that person exist? Like, why would they be in Wilmington? Because it's not an innovation hub. Right? Supply and demand, right? Right. So, um, and there really wasn't a venture capital firm. There was Uh, an Angel [00:44:00] Investor Network, the Wilmington Investor Network, WIIN, had been around for a long time, but they did not have a lot, have a lot of local deal flow, right?

What were they going to invest in? So they were happening, they were investing quite a bit in out of town. They were very involved in the Angel Capital Association. And so they could invest in deals in other groups. They could contact Boston and, Hey, Boston, what kind of deal flow do you have? And we'll send our money up there.

Yeah. And that's not what you want, right? You want it to be invested locally. And so these are all things that we've got to work on, but I wanted him to table set and say, if your expectation, if you think we're the number eight ecosystem because we're the eighth largest city in North Carolina, the fact is we're 24th in some of these rankings.

Like, we're behind very small cities that are two hours from any university. Why do they have more going on in, in those cities? And so I, I had to set [00:45:00] that expectation. I had to set that understanding because if you think we're here and we're doing things that are below that, then you would get very frustrated that you're not seeing progress.

I need to say, we're down here and this is how we're gonna. show progress and we're going to make an impact. Well, like a basketball coach, you have to set a sense of urgency. The basics. Right? Yeah. This is where you're at today and this is where we're going tomorrow. But that's a very good point. Mike, when we moved to Florida, the team that my dad inherited, the best shooter, walked.

Every time he shot the ball. Mm-hmm . He took a shuffle step. My dad's looking around going that, that's a travel, that's a walk. Yeah. That's not, we're not, that's the turnover every time you touch the ball. Right, right. Yeah. Those are the things that he had to change. Well, I had to change some of the, the basics of an ecosystem.

The basics of understanding what investors want. Yeah. The basics of understanding of what it takes to make an impression on investor. Yeah. You know, what, [00:46:00] what does the market want outside of Wilmington? Yeah. You know, to scale a company, you can't just sell in Wilmington and New Hanover County, you got to sell to Charleston, to Atlanta.

Yeah. How do you get into those markets? Yeah. Well, just speaking on the basketball analogy, um, it sounds like your dad was a big fan of Hoosiers. The movie. Yes, yes. And there, there's a lot of like parallels in the startup community, you know, and the big thing in Hoosiers was. You got to tear it down, build it back up, you know, you've got to just reset the whole thing and sometimes you have to lay people out and, you know, bring others in and change the culture and set the expectation.

We call it an ugly baby. Your startup is an ugly baby. We need to change the outfit that the baby is wearing. We need to, you know, put on some skin cream to Take off the visible pimples, you know, there, these are things that we got to do to make you more presentable to the marketplace, right? And we can get into that [00:47:00] later, but we do have an event called the Tough Love Event.

And that's exactly what we do is they come in with a practice presentation that we've given them everything we want to see on these 10 slides. And then they come in and they do their version of it. And they've ignored most of the advice that are, you know, How many events do you actually sponsor? We have an event per month, usually.

One a month? One a month. Um, sometimes they're private events, so they're not audience events. It depends on, you know, if there's a lot of, uh, venture capital conference coming up that our entrepreneurs have applied for and maybe been accepted into, then we'll have this private event. investor presentation skills event.

That's not an audience event. We're not there to embarrass the entrepreneur, but we also have to get our message through very directly that that presentation that you think you practiced at home, right? That's not going to get through. The deal done. Right. So we have to break it down slide [00:48:00] by slide. Yeah.

We call that our tough love event. Okay. Now, did you start this at CIE or? The tough love event actually started in Asheville. Okay. Because they were very frustrated that they weren't, the entrepreneurs were frustrated that they weren't raising capital. And we all knew why they weren't raising capital.

Because the pitch wasn't great. Right. So I brought one of my mentors from the Raleigh market. And he, I, paid him a nice little daily stipend and the four companies that had been raising, trying to raise money for a year, but had not raised much at all within six months had raised, you know, 1. 3 million.

And so I knew that this, this training would really have an impact. So it's just come with me at every stop, you know, of, of every city that I've gone with. How long were you at CIE? Again, I was hired before the building opened, so I was hired in April 2013 and left in May of 2015. Okay. So in [00:49:00] that two year period, you had it launched and now your system was, was up and running and you left to start the network for entrepreneurs in Wilmington.

So in, in the Raleigh market is actually one of the original entrepreneur support organizations in the world. It's called the CED. They've recently changed their name to the Center for Entrepreneur Development and it's a non profit that's meant to nurture entrepreneurship to the point where it is entrepreneurship development is economic development.

So it's, I think we all know that Raleigh is, Raleigh Durham is one of the top 10 most innovative cities in America. and a very strong startup ecosystem. And can I do that on an independent basis as an independent nonprofit in Wilmington, outside of an institution? It's pretty brave to do it as an independent when you have a well recognized institution like the Wilmington Chamber or [00:50:00] UNCW or an economic development organization, but can you do it and build enough sponsor support to do it independently.

And that was really difficult to do. And it's a big challenge. Still difficult now. Right. So that was the goal and the target. So how, what was the initial steps though? Well, the initial step was I tried to recruit a co working space from Raleigh to expand to Wilmington. And I actually got an agreement.

They agreed to do it, but they didn't really agree to pay me a salary that was worth, because the UNCW job was a really good job. It's, it's, it's a great job and a great salary and a great benefits. And the, uh, the co working space wanted to pay me less than half of what I was making at UNCW. Not for nothing, but Wilmington's not a cheap place to live, right?

You can't, can't live on that. Was it your decision to leave the CIA if you had a great career? No, there was a, there was a break that's [00:51:00] never been explained to me. So, uh, but there was a break. So they, they went a different path. Yeah. Yeah. And so I actually kind of stuck around to kind of stick it to them.

Right. Because I, I knew what I was building. I knew the progress. Even though you didn't see job announcements of 50 people, I knew what Next Class was building. I saw the determination that I mean, you still have a great relationship. George Taylor would, I would see him leave an event at night and drive to Richmond and pick up an angel check and come back to make payroll.

And I was like, Okay. That dude gets it. Right. Right. Yeah. So I wanted to stick around and can you build an innovation economy at the beach where people want to live? You know, with all due respect to Raleigh Durham, it's not a fun place to live. If you're a young adult, it's, it's a great place to raise a family.

There's great schools and all that. And if you're an NC State grad, or if you're a UNC grad and you graduate, you can [00:52:00] actually live in that apartment. As long as you want to, probably until you get married with your three roommates, right? So, it's pretty affordable, but the beach is not a cheap place to live.

So, I just wanted to kind of bet on myself, if you will, and like an entrepreneur does. And, and that's why I stayed, because I knew what I was building. I knew it was going to be, I knew it was going to work because people were coming from other cities to attend our events. Our entrepreneurs are starting to win the North Carolina Technology Awards.

Um, I tell that story where George Taylor and Kurt Taylor from NextGlass, they were nominated for, um, Best Startup of the State of North Carolina from the North Carolina Technology Awards. And it was really one of the last awards of the night. And so the person who's doing the narrating of the event says, from Wilmington, North Carolina, there's an app that can tell you what wine you will like.

And I, you know, these tables are terrible. [00:53:00] one or two bottles deep. It's the end of the night. So they've been drinking probably bad wine. Right. Right. You can hear people take out their phone, get up from their chairs and try to download the app in the middle of the awards event. And I was like, I know that we just woke up 800 people on the potential of the beach and having an innovation economy at the beach because we're just two and a half hours from Raleigh Durham, which Somebody recently said, we've developed an umbilical cord from the biggest ecosystem to the beach.

So our entrepreneurs can use that same ecosystem. And it's not, Hey, you're not from here. You can't use our stuff. It's, I came with those relationships with those organizations from Raleigh when I moved to Wilmington. And so our entrepreneurs were welcome. I try to point this out to other people when they're developing ecosystems.

Those people have quotas too. Right. They have to sell sponsorships. They have to fill [00:54:00] seats for those events. They make money. That's their fundraiser. So when I bring up 20 people from Wilmington for an awards event or an investor event, that's another, you know, You know, 500 a ticket, 20 people, they appreciate that.

That's real income to them. Absolutely. So tell me, what's the current economic situation of, of Wilmington as far as your ecosystem? Like, where are we at today? We've come a long way. What used to take us two years in venture capital is now done in a quarter. Okay. So companies like Ohanafi, companies like Simply, companies like Aperture, companies like OPAID.

Companies like Boreas Monitoring, companies like Nareem, those are all raising money, they're all growing, they're all employing people, they're all paying good wages. And we're now the number two ecosystem in North Carolina, behind Raleigh Durham. Okay. Past Charlotte at 875, [00:55:00] 000 people. How did you do it?

Like, what's, what's the key success factor? Well, I call it the coastal corridor. I call it that, that umbilical cord. Opiate is challenge raising money because they're not, they're not serial entrepreneurs. They haven't really done this kind of scalable company before they, instead of raising money, they need an SBIR grant from the federal government.

So an innovation, a small business innovation research grant, and that can be 250, 000. Or, uh, 2. 5 million, right? Depending on what phase you get. So if you're struggling to raise money, but you have something that's novel, the federal government is probably looking for a solution on the opioid crisis, which they are, cause it's a top five problem in America.

And you have a novel solution to that. You can go to the government and get one of these grants, but it only has a 13 percent chance that you win it on your first application. Right. So. [00:56:00] There are experts in the Raleigh Durham market. There's actually a woman who has a consulting firm that's a Fortune 5, 000, kind of Inc.

5, 000 winner. And that's all she does is consult with companies on SBIR grants. And so I've used one in Texas. The First Flight Venture Center, which is in Durham, which is actually the second oldest building in the Research Triangle Park, is their kind of, Uh, Hard Science Incubator, so it's life sciences, hard sciences, it's the stuff that we don't have around here too much yet.

They have a consulting contract with this lady who does SBIR consulting, and they brought a workshop to Wilmington at my invitation. Hey, I know we don't do this a lot, I'm really good at filling a room, if you'll trust me, Bring this workshop to Wilmington, and we'll, we'll make the most of it, right? And David attended that workshop.

The fire went off, the [00:57:00] light went off in his head. He began traveling up to First Flight for more and more workshops, and eventually he wins this 250, 000 grant, which leads to later a 2. 7 million grant. Okay. So he, that's real money, right? So he went the Sibra route and used the funds. So instead of, if you're getting a 250, 000 grant, that's like raising money from 10 angels.

And who knows how long that takes in Wilmington. Right. Right. Right. But if you get one of these grants and you invest the time and you do it right, and then the validation of the grant leads to more interest from the investors. Do you believe there's bias from a venture capital point of view, where they only want to put money to work in their remote areas?

Yeah. Yes, but not only that, it's also in, if I may, the conservative South where investors are very conservative, not like the Silicon Valley or the Boston or New York is they love serial entrepreneurs that they know they can get the band back together and, [00:58:00] you know, two months, two years after an exit, they start another company and the investors put their money right back in because they know seven years from then they'll probably get another exit.

That's it. And that really makes a lot of common sense, but it makes it really difficult to be a first time founder. Even in today's remote work environment, you still believe venture capital would like to keep control over their funds and have it somewhat close by. Here's a story. So, a company we invested in, I did personally, Seed Funding, they were based in Maryland.

And about, I would say 13 months later, they got an A round. From some ex Sequoia Capital guys who were recruited by Governor Acacia at the time to go to Columbus, Ohio. I think it's called Drive Capital. And anyway, Drive did the A round, but one of the requirements was you have to move to Columbus.

because there's tax incentives. So the, the governor obviously wants to bring business to the state. So I think if, if [00:59:00] North Carolina ever became serious about, you know, trying to build up a venture capital network that rivals something like Boston, New York, or, you know, Silicon Valley, or even Austin at some point, Is they have to provide incentives, have to, you know, build in some type of ideas where, okay, VC, you'll come in, you'll, you'll make your, your investments, but I want you to bring that company here.

Right. To generate tax revenue? Well, something our investors really want is we had an investor, angel investor tax credit that was a 25% write off right off the top of, of as a tax credit from your taxes, so your state taxes. And 2016, the state legislature got rid of all those advantages and we wiped our.

Investor credit out. There's been a fight every year to try to get it back because our surrounding states have it. They, uh, South Carolina, I believe went to 35%. I think Maryland's at least [01:00:00] 50%. We would really like to have that back. That would make a difference, a small impact. Well, I think there's, there's a negative condensation to government spending, whether it's state or federal, like, Oh gosh, you're spending this money on what?

You know, really these, these, these crazy ideas or, or. I wouldn't say wasteful, but I guess it just depends on the opinion of the person, whether, you know, I wouldn't spend the money on that or not, but I think we can all agree providing incentives for startups, you know, even the first, you know, couple of years, just getting off the ground where they can write off some of those early investments and, you know, Try to become profitability, because you've got that J curve, right?

You go down, you're negative for a period of time, but then you turn a corner and become profitable. And, you know, that J curve really drives the valuation and, you know, whether you get an investment or not. I think that's where the state needs to focus some of their attention going forward, is that they really want to build that type of economic powerhouse, you know, from venture capital.

And they have to do some more [01:01:00] incentives that way. I think some states actually match some venture capital investments. Meaning if a firm puts money in, the state won't do it by themselves, but they'll match the investments that the firm makes. Right. But just legislators really, they just don't want to be in the business of picking winners and losers.

I mean, they get really scared about that because Here's the objection is mostly in rural areas. We don't have these kind of innovators in our backyard So this tax credit only benefits the urban areas, right? Yeah centralized talent Yeah I mean counties and states are used to giving tax Abatements and incentives to bring factories and to bring companies here right to build their factories and employ You know, certain number of, you know, people like you mentioned before, there's no reason they couldn't do something similar to create a company.

I think it'd be interesting if they found an innovator that maybe was from their town and they found a way to [01:02:00] recruit them back, like a kind of a homecoming of, okay, I'll use Scott Wingo as an example, you know, Scott Wingo is actually from South Carolina. What if South Carolina reached Wingo and said, we'd love to have you back in South Carolina.

You know, make a certain investment into your next company if you, you know, come back home, because Brain drain is a really challenging problem for these cities. That's what's been so great about Wilmington is those people are now coming back. The UNCW graduates are flocking back to Wilmington because they never really wanted to leave.

Well, it's cheaper. I mean, if, I mean, think about today's time. If, if a college graduate wants to take a job in California, New York or Boston, they're going to pay X dollars for rent. food, water supply, and you have salary, then what money they got left over after 401k or whatever, now they can get a similar job.

Maybe the salary is a little bit different here, but your lifestyle is much [01:03:00] better, it's cheaper, and you're close to your environment. Well, it's easier if you've married, probably had a child, and the family's here, and you know, grandma can help with the Child raising. Right. You know, um, that's really what happened in my family is I had a lifelong agreement with my mother.

As soon as I had a child, she would move to the area and help me with my son. Yeah. So, that's a lot of what's happening in Charlotte. There's a lot of young professionals in the Charlotte area and the grandparents are moving to Charlotte to be near the kids. Wilmington. So great success that you've had so far.

What's not working in your opinion? We still need a lot more entrepreneurs. We need to find the hungry entrepreneurs that want to live at the coast. We have a lot of people that want the coastal lifestyle. But do they really have the fire in the belly to grind out scaling a startup of that [01:04:00] relentless, that call at 6pm to the West Coast when all your buddies are already at the, at the bar for happy hour?

Who's going to be the guys and women who, you know? make three extra calls to land a new prospect, to land that big client where it allows you to hire five to ten new employees or, you know, that is, we're still struggling to find those gut hungry grinders that, you know, if you follow, I, I love following our entrepreneurs on LinkedIn because people like Scott Monroe has a company called Essential Personnel and they sell software to fire departments and police departments and you see them on the road And you see that once a week announcement, Hey, we've got a, we want to welcome the Boston Fire Department to the essential personnel, and nothing makes me happier, right?

Charles Davis has a company called EasyVote Solutions, and they, they have software for the voting process. It's not online voting, [01:05:00] it's the process of running elections. And the brother is out there selling Ron Davis, and he's, We'd like to welcome, you know, Sumter County, Florida to the EasyVote family, and I love that.

I like it, and I try to repost it every time I see one of those, and it just, because I've worked with those guys, as I said recently. In what I do, the entrepreneurs become my friends because I'm spending so much time with them. I'm invested in their future. Right. So they're, they're not just my professional colleagues, but they're, you know, let's go celebrate that contract.

Let's go have a beer. I'll buy dinner. Right. So do you think the founder, the CEO doesn't have the same drive? I think it's a very different personality that lives at the coast, that lives in the urban cores. Or is it the employees? Or both? No, it's, it's the founders. Okay. Yeah. In my, because that's who I work.

I don't work too much with the [01:06:00] everyday employees. Right. I may, See, the salesperson, you know, the VP of sales, like a Brandon Walker was at Untappd, but I'm mostly dealing with the founders. I don't, I'm not, I'm not traveling to their offices. These are entrepreneurs that are coming to my events. You just don't think they have a sense of urgency.

I wouldn't say all of them. I'm not saying that's a blanket statement. I'm saying I need a plane load of those entrepreneurs to. And that's why I do so much meat on media relations. That's why I'm trying to get the word out in Atlanta that we're the number one ecosystem. Well, if you're stuck on I 40 or, um, I 85 for three hours on the way to work and three hours after work, you're probably going to look around going, can I be somewhere else?

And I'd rather do something for the other, those, those hours I'm stuck in traffic. I'd really rather do something else. How do you, how do you relate to the people? You know, like, there are some high profile individuals that [01:07:00] work in other areas, whether it be Raleigh or DC or Atlanta, and they come to this area for vacation.

So they come here to unwind and to kind of, you know, unplug to so to speak. But at the same time you want to tap into their energy and their network and their capability into helping kind of grow this thriving market. You know, how do you balance that? Well, they're usually coming to Wilmington because they know somebody here.

Like, they're vacationing with an old friend that they went to college with that lives here, that's why they're coming to Wilmington. They're not, they're not throwing a dart at the dart board going, I'm going to go to Wilmington. We don't have the same social options that a Myrtle Beach or a Charleston has, so to come to Wilmington, you're probably visiting somebody that you know.

So, yeah. Those are the people that say, Hey, my buddy ran this VC firm up in Boston, or he runs a big software company. Would you like to join us for a beer or a coffee or breakfast? And that's how I usually meet those people or [01:08:00] somebody. Somebody's looking to relocate, they reach out to me, they read my stuff on LinkedIn, I get reached out to LinkedIn.

You're very active. Probably not as much as you do as an investor, but I get a lot of, yeah, hey, I'm a North Carolina native. I've been in Florida for 25 years and Florida is crazy. So we're thinking about what are called half backers, you know, we're thinking about coming back to. halfway back to the north, or I'm coming back home.

I like what you're posting. I mean, I'm pretty out there as far as often as I post, but I'm not, I'm not lying about our accomplishments. I'm, I'm saying, here's the proof as the kids say, here are the receipts. You know, you know, When these big rankings came out, that's not data we're supplying to Startup Genome and Startup Blink.

They're finding their own data, so I'm not lying about the things that we've accomplished. And you've had some high profile VCs like Steve Case's group come through. Yeah, Revolution Capital, Rise of the Rest, and when they [01:09:00] post about their visit to Wilmington in their newsletter, and that newsletter goes internationally.

Do they actually deploy any capital here? No. Do we know why? I mean, they're not going to just. have a dinner and drop a check while they're in town, you know, there's relationship building. Can we, can we get them to get to know the people at Canopy? So maybe Canopy invites them back to Wilmington when they have their FinTech at the Beach event on an annual basis.

And maybe they come to one of my events and they speak at one of my events, but they get, you know, involved with other people. We have some very high people. We have a guy here named Steve Vafier who is an investor in Facebook and Airbnb and he's got real credibility. He wrote a, a great post. He did a great podcast on how Live Oak Bank has, has impacted the city of Wilmington and Encino has an IPO and Aperture is on the same page.

Track and Canopy Ventures is, by the way, the largest venture capital fund in the South at [01:10:00] 750 million. You know a city with 125, 000 people has a 750 million dollar. That's 

 Underwood, right? Yes. Is he anchored Canopy out of Washington or Wilmington? It's Wilmington. I think they do it Washington for political reasons Like a remote office.

He's, uh, Neil's a big UNC fan and he's a great personality. Yeah, but he's, he's also an investor in Ohana Fine. Yeah. So, given the success of your achievements in your career, you kind of build that momentum and bring all that synergy, plus the CIE and the impact UNC Wilmington is trying to do with entrepreneurship, which is phenomenal.

And I told my App State folks, I'm like, you really need to The first day I went and met Heather, I took some pictures and I sent some to my buddy. I'm like, you guys need to look at this. Like, like they're, they're doing it right. You know, they're really bleeding entrepreneurship throughout the entire university, which is awesome to get it, you [01:11:00] know, young kids really thinking about it.

Plus Live Oak Bank. And Canopy and Encino. So in Aperture. Yeah. So there's a lot of like groundswell momentum. That's really helping some of these other smaller companies. Well, it helps when somebody visits and they're driving down front street and they see restaurant, restaurant, bar, bar, Honefi software, like what does that company do?

And, you know, that's. One of the nicest offices downtown. Well, it was. And it was a nice little rooftop. They moved out. Yeah, I know, but I mean, that's, that's the old untapped office. Yeah. Right? Right. You know, there's a hundred young professionals working in downtown making between 85, 000 and 115, 000. Right.

And they can go to whatever nice restaurant they want at lunch and dinner. Right? It's not, it's not if I made the, you know, the service economy tourism jobs where it's paycheck to paycheck. Right. These are real jobs and jobs that UNCW [01:12:00] graduates want to stick around for. Right. Well, me personally as an investor, I get a lot of questions, you know, back in DC, like, what in the heck are you doing investing in Wilmington?

Right. Like, what did you see, you know? Well, let me tell you, there's some really bright UNCW students who learned under the best management you can imagine at Live Oak Bank and Encino, and they've got a new company, so. You know, it's kind of a bargain. When I read about the article of Ohanify, which, you know, was from a connection that you made in the Raleigh Business Journal, I'd always been looking for something software related down here because it was all real estate, you know, from my point of view.

Right. And, you know, I was very impressed from day one. Whenever there, talked to the founders, talked to the management team, talked to some of the developers, looked at the code. You know, the application itself was just phenomenal. And now after spending, you know, time with them and really understanding the employees, super impressed with the graduates of UNC Wilmington.

And of course they are, I mean, they're very vocal in your support of 105 more than most people, most investors I see [01:13:00] talk about portfolio clients. You're very optimistic about their long term success. Yeah. But just, just the, the people that they hire, you know, whether they're from NC State, UNC or UNC Wilmington, because I mean, you know, Being from Northern Virginia or, or relocating from Carolina to Northern Virginia, you see a lot of Virginia Tech, UVA, JMU, Penn State, Maryland graduates, and you get accustomed seeing, okay, well, that's their quality and what their level of output and knowledge and skill set.

And then you come here, and you're like, oh my god, it's just as good. Well, UNCW doesn't have a very high profile. You know, there's not a football team that you see on Saturdays, right? The big win was last year beating Kentucky in basketball, and most people don't know that, um, the Kentucky basketball coach.

played one year at UNCW, John Calipari, who's now at Arkansas, but last year UNCW got a little revenge game in Kentucky and won. I know, I saw that. That has to be the biggest thing [01:14:00] that's ever happened at UNCW, right? Kind of like App State beating Michigan. Right, well, very much the same level. Very much the same level.

And Texas A& M. Yeah. One of the recommendations I, I would make UNC Wilmington is they need to be more active in like hackathons, for example. So they need to profile their capabilities, you know, having these little events to kind of really shine on the level of talent and the engineering that's coming out of the schools is really, really phenomenal.

Well they do, they are having some success. I'm on the advisory board for the e sports. So they're having some success there. I don't know if you've come across Carl Risnick yet. Dr. Carl Risnick is a professor at UNCW. He's got a very successful little company called Lapidus Solutions, and what they're doing is they're matching the insurance industry with facial recognition software.

They have real clients in Asia that are a little more lax on the privacy issues, but they're doing, they're [01:15:00] getting multi million dollar contracts, and they're hiring some of the Best brains that are in Dr. Arisnik's classes. And he goes, Oh, well, I got a little job for you. Why don't you come on over to Lapidus?

Right. Yeah. I think it's a modesty issue is that Wilmington doesn't promote itself very much. You sure as don't hear as much about Wilmington as you do about Myrtle Beach. I mean, Myrtle Beach is like a 30 million budget to do tourism marketing. Right. You just don't hear the Wilmington. Yeah. doesn't have that kind of budget to, to get the word out.

Again, that's why I'm so active on LinkedIn and, and any kind of media relations that I can do is we have this, uh, great relationship with a, an Atlanta startup news website called Hypopotamus. We invited her here. She drove all the way on her own dime from Atlanta and wrote A couple stories, and one of the stories was the second most read article of the [01:16:00] year in Atlanta was, how is Wilmington building this ecosystem without the typical innovation resources that big cities have?

The people that Live Oak knew in Atlanta, the people in Atlanta were reaching out to Live Oak Bank going, why am I reading about Wilmington in Atlanta? You know, my degree is from the journalism school at the University of Florida, but it's in advertising. It's not in journalism, but it came through the journalism, right?

So I just use those skills to promote what we're doing because You know, again, we don't have a marketing budget, so can I get the press to tell our story instead? So from a Wilmington Market point of view, is Canopy, they're more fintech related? They're exclusively fintech. Okay, and are they funding fintech startups in this market?

Well, they just financed one called Sinplee. It's S Y N P L E E, Sinplee. of a 4. [01:17:00] 8 million seed round, which is pretty impressive. That's good. Um, so obviously Encino was a spin out. This is a spin out just like that. Aperture, by the way, is more of a joint venture with a bank out of Atlanta. Okay. Um, but I don't have banking roots, but they're not.

Some of the, like Honefi, they're investing in some of the former employees, even though it may not formally come through Canopy or Live Oak. It may come from the executives of the banks or. Funding the, the entrepreneurial dreams of former employees that they had good relationships with while they were at the, at those companies.

But we don't have a lot of independent fintech companies that are just getting started on their own and Canopy is funding that. We haven't built that cluster yet. But we could, I mean, that's certainly something we'd love to do. We'd love to be, we would love that to be a magnet. Like what if, what if Canopy [01:18:00] had their own co working space that incubated fintech companies that, but Charlotte's trying that, you know, with mixed results.

Okay. Incubators are, are really risky. Right, well, entrepreneurship is 90 percent failure rate, right, so all of it's risky, you know, but that's also kind of the juice of it. It's kind of the energy behind it. Right. But there's a lot of data that says 90 percent of them fail, but in fact, if you have an incubator that has programming, then you can actually flip that around to where more than 70 percent of the companies succeed beyond three to five years.

Right? So that's, that's the programming that we're trying to put on. We haven't found success on putting on, let's say, The entrepreneurs come to a class every week. We haven't found those kind of entrepreneurs. So we can't put on that kind of programming. So instead, we try to do the programming through our events.

Right. [01:19:00] Through our monthly events. And we have events on sales and marketing and how to raise capital. And really, I listen to the entrepreneurs in the ecosystem that say, I need to learn about this. And if I hear that three times in a week, then I put on an event. and we make it happen. And I call up whatever people that I know from around the state and say, you know, hey, we knew each other five years ago.

You know I can fill a room. Can I invite you to, on this Thursday night, to come down to the coast? You get really good turnout on your events. We have the highest turnout in the whole state. And I know that's really hard to believe if you're in Charlotte or if you're in Raleigh Durham. The thing is, in Raleigh Durham, there are 40 organizations that do what I do.

So it's very fragmented. There's 40. Okay. Think about every co working space, every incubator, every university has a co working space. They have events. You have, you know, All these different organizations, so, and then you, then they have vertical events. So in our, uh, [01:20:00] an event like Riot, so it's the Raleigh Internet of Things, their vertical is, you know, if you have a device that has data on it, come to our events.

So it's, you know, it's verticalized that way. We don't, we don't quite have a vertical industry, so our events are very broad to a broad range of companies and entrepreneurs. Of course. So there's other people within like Raleigh, Charlotte, Greenville, Asheville that do what you do as far as like really trying to incentivize and build out this ecosystem.

Um, do you communicate with those individuals or do you compete? Well, it's very interesting. Keep in mind. I started the first Entrepreneur Council in Charlotte. I started the very first Entrepreneur Council in Asheville So I've worked with these people for the last 25 years. And again, I'm a big Irish personality You can hear from me from across the room.

Yeah, you don't have to stand on us you know, to find me, [01:21:00] you can go find the guy, the bald guy, the big bald guy, or the guy in the hat. And I'm usually the only one of those two, right? Um, if you point and I'm tall and I'm bald, or I'm wearing my hat, I'm very, or you can hear me, as we said earlier, I'm very loud.

That's not intentional. It's just. Who I am. So, uh, I'm very visible at these events. And so these people, they kind of begrudgingly say, Jim's over there, go talk to Jim. You know, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's kind of that bullying friendship that men have of, you know. These people are my friends, you know, when I support their events and I ask them to support my events, it's, it's an exchange.

I mean, but, but look, North Carolina always ranks high in the CNBC, you know. Yeah, that's business. That's more mature business. Think about it this way, and this is something that needs to change is, 80% of the venture capital, and that's what matters. The venture capital in North Carolina is in the triangle.

Mm-hmm . And no matter how much Charlotte tries to change [01:22:00] that, it's still 80%. Mm-hmm . So how do we, not trying to take money out of the triangle, but we sure would like to spread it around through the rest of the state. Well, what's hap, why, why does triangle get 80%? It's a mature ecosystem, so they know the.

The lawyers know how to guide the entrepreneurs down the path. There's Is it a workforce? Because they hire from Duke, UNC, State, UNC? Sure, sure. I mean, well, the joke is that Duke people go back to New Jersey, right? That's the University of New Jersey at Durham. Yeah. Right. So they Duke, it's well known that But I think it's only 20 percent of Duke grads stay in North Carolina after graduation.

But the other two, they mostly are from North Carolina, so they're mostly staying. And again, it's very cheap for them. You know, there was no economy when I graduated from University of Florida in Gainesville. It was only the university, what do they call that, a land grant university, so [01:23:00] there's nothing around it.

Like, Energizer was the only company that I can even remember that wasn't related to the university. So you kind of had to leave. Well again, if you're, if you're a senior at NC State and you graduate. You can just keep your apartment. You don't have to move. And your cost of living is low. You get a job at Red Hat.

You're making six figures. You're living pretty good. Right. That's not what was happening here in 2013. Are there more, you know, resources for startups in Raleigh? Unlimited resources. I mean, again, the Raleigh Durham area, that organization that I rep, that I'm trying to replicate is 40 years old. They just had their 40th birthday.

Okay. Right. So they have added these resources that the ecosystem needed, but they're also there because of the universities. The universities have their own resources, so the [01:24:00] ecosystem can use that. The RTP, the Research Triangle Park, is the original research park in the world. The world has traveled to Durham, North Carolina, to see what this thing is called a research park.

And that is an unbelievable amount of talent that has stayed in the triangle. And that's the original purpose, that was the only purpose of the Research Triangle Park is Why do UNC and NC State grads keep moving away? I don't know if you know this, but when Research Triangle Park was designed and created, North Carolina was the second poorest state in the United States, behind Mississippi.

The second. And now it's the number one pro business state in America, right? It's changed. And Research Triangle Park has a lot to do with that. I sure would like that. some of that to come east, right? Right. And I, again, there's a new, new [01:25:00] organization, I'm not sure you're familiar with it, called NC Innovation.

They got 500 million dollars from the state legislature to commercialize more research out of, State universities, and they're actually using that money now. They've given a lab at UNCW The Wang lab, Dr. Dr. Wong. Sorry, it's spelled Wang, but it's pronounced Wong, Dr. Wong Which is where my favorite intern works is Carson Jackson You may remember during the pandemic, we were shipping vaccines over to third world countries.

The problem was they had no cold storage. So Dr. Wang is working on how can you ship these vaccines to third world countries without needing any cold storage. Right. And so some very interesting technology. So this NC innovation is now invested in that lab to develop that. More technologies that can be commercialized and, and again, enrich the coast of North Carolina.

So, [01:26:00] uh, how can you build an innovation ecosystem east of I 95? That's something we've tried to do, but this is a, with that much money, that can really have a bigger impact. RTP really was anchored by the universities. You know, NC State, UNC, Duke, you'd imagine. Yes, and one of the very first organizations is called RTI, Research Triangle Institute International, which I think has 2, 500 employees and 80 percent of them have a graduate degree, PhD level degrees.

So yes, they've done a great job of retaining and attracting brains. Do you, do you believe UNC Wilmington could ever replicate that and build its own research park if it had the funding or motivation from the state? One is, where would it go? Where the, I don't know if you know this, but New Hanover County is actually the second Smallest county of the 100 counties of North Carolina.

So, geographically, the smallest, the second smallest [01:27:00] county of 100 counties. So, where would that go? Two, again, where would the money come from? You know, we, uh, I should send you this article when I get in trouble every time I mention it, which is why I'm going to mention it. There's a great magazine called The Assembly.

It's a new magazine. It's probably the best journalist in the state of North Carolina, but When the new Hanover endowment was announced, the article said that per capita New Hanover County barely gives more than a thousand dollars a year to nonprofits Donations. If you compare that to the Winston Salem area, that was seven thousand dollars per capita.

I'm sorry That was Buncombe County And the Winston Salem area is more like 12, 000, which is old, I guess, old textile tobacco money, so it's a different level of wealth. But where would that money come from to develop these infrastructure pieces that are, that are needed? So no one has an answer for that, and we certainly need to [01:28:00] find who those people are that would have a vested interest in growing an innovation economy.

Again, something I get in trouble. If you look at the buildings at UNCW, chemistry building, the name on it is usually a real estate name. That's, that's how wealth was earned in this area for decades and a century, whatever, right? But we need a new set of industries that can create wealth that hopefully one of those people have a, multiple people have a philanthropic bent.

They go, you know, This area was responsible for me being successful, so I'm going to give back and pay it forward, so we, these bright minds here, you know. Eventually, it's an emotional appeal, like, do you want your grandchildren to live near you? So, you create the jobs that your children want, and they can stay in the area, so the grandchildren get great jobs too.

And that's really what we're [01:29:00] trying to do, is we're trying to keep the people here that want to live here. Do you think UNC Wilmington is teaching current curriculum demand? Like, for example, are they teaching Java C Or are they teaching Salesforce? Are they teaching Amazon Web Services? Like, are they using current technology?

I think they're doing a better job than they were before the CIE opened of learning what the employers, they're communicating with those employers on the skills that are needed. We got multiple calls from Encino saying, Hey, can you guys find someone to put on Salesforce classes? because we're overwhelmed with it.

So can we fund something at the university where you guys teach Salesforce? That's been a big problem. I, I believe based on some anecdotal data and personal experience that I've had, where you're talking to universities and you're saying, Hey, guess what? These are the skills that are needed in today's workforce.

You know, do you, are you teaching these? No. [01:30:00] Why? Well, because our tenured professor. Right. You know, is teaching the same technology that they taught 10, 15 years ago. Right. And it's fundamental. Like, okay, it could be fundamental, but it's not transformal. It's like, we have to have transformational technology today.

Like, do you have an AWS? Are you teaching cybersecurity? Are you teaching data science? You know, some of the foundational skills that are going to be used tomorrow, you know, you should be teaching that today. But I think that needs to be a public private partnership. I think the company's got to put some resources to make that happen because if the, I mean, I don't know how well connected UNCW is to the state legislature to say, hey, we need an extra 2 million this year to build this program.

Right. And their thing is, well, NC State has that program. You know, we don't want you to conflict. The students with the engineering program and that's, and the things [01:31:00] that I hear, that's why UNC Chapel Hill doesn't have an engineering program because there's one there right there at NC State. So how politically lobbying, you know, how much strength do you have to make that happen on the state level?

You know, we're still trying to tell our story that, you know, the Wilmington economy has changed. Besides my posts about it, I don't, I don't think a lot of people are talking about Wilmington as the number two ecosystem in the North Carolina or the number one ecosystem in the world for cities under 300, 000 people.

I don't know that even our own legislators at the coastal area or the city leaders can tell you that stat. Right. But. I'm working behind the scenes to communicate to their people that they have the ear of those leaders to say, can you send them this new animation that I just had made that's 90 seconds long?

That's the attention span of a gnat, I hope, that if [01:32:00] you just watch how this 10 years, then maybe we can get some resources behind it because We're having an impact, we're raising the profile of the region. I think not only do we have these ecosystem rankings, but we were the number 7 city in America for job growth and salary growth.

And we were number 51 in America on a technology index score, which Number 51 may not be impressive, but we're the 158th city for population. So if you're number 51, you know, I'd like to say if you're the 10th biggest city, you shouldn't rank under 10th in anything positive, right? So if you're, number 51, but your population is at 158, then you're really doing something right.

And, and again, I like to emphasize that I know that Live Oak Bank and Encino and Aperture are doing the majority of that heavy lifting with Canopy, [01:33:00] but we're doing the companies of tomorrow and we're trying to get them to match that kind of growth in the future. We believe in opiate. We think that that could be.

If they got some additional funding, they could be a hundred person company that pays six figure salaries. Right. Well, it goes back to the original intent while you went to Asheville. Right. Instead of recruiting people to come, let's build out that ecosystem. And whenever you're looking at building the ecosystem of the future, it does start with the workforce and the skills and the capability that you're generating from that area.

And the pandemic, you know, probably did shift a lot of people's mindset, and now people working remotely, and maybe they're, you know, thinking about lifestyle a little more than they had before in the past. And that's not a negative to Wilmington, because if you can work remotely from watching the ocean and watching a sunrise and a sunset on the other side of the building, then We have a lot of remote workers, the challenge is, can [01:34:00] we engage those people to share their knowledge or if that job goes away, do we have a job for them when they're ready to work locally?

Yeah. For example, I met a very smart engineer at your event, you know, several weeks ago. He lives in North Topsail and he works as a semiconductor engineer, but he's remote. His job's in New York, you know, so he's dialing in from a computer every day in North Carolina to work a job in New York. So yeah, I mean, New York, I mean, North Carolina and this coastal region, absolutely is building momentum from people being able to work remote and use those technologies.

But the point is, is that we have to have cooperation from public and private. To make sure that we build the infrastructure and we have the capabilities and the skill sets and everything's in alignment. That your efforts are being matched by the efforts of the school and their efforts are being matched by the state.

And then, you know, that we're all buying into the same story and the same [01:35:00] energy. I think the majority of the messages at the leadership level locally is still about real estate. It's still about building. A hundred new homes, it's about building some new condos, about building some apartments, or it's about building a new strip center, and the message of the innovation economy.

again, outside of Live Oak because they can demand that kind of respect and attention. We still need to get our messages through and we've yet to really find a way to do that. Yeah. So tell me about your whale fund. I know matching some of the efforts of Canopy and Live Oak and some other things, you're also investing.

So we have a very small angel network. It's not a fund, but it's an angel network where the individual investors invest their own money. So we don't have a, You know, a bank account that has a million dollars in it that we invest, we We have a membership that the Angels pay on an annual salary, uh, an annual basis.

[01:36:00] And I find the deal flow, and most of it's local. The last four or five investments have been local. But we've made some invest, we've made one investment in Myrtle Beach, um, with a military veteran that got involved when I started the local Bunker Labs chapter for veterans who want to become entrepreneurs.

started coming to our events and one of our investors invested in that company. We've got a company, a couple companies, because I'm so involved in the Triangle ecosystem, these are deals that I thought were really good and maybe one of our investors had some experience in the industry and I approach the investor and say, there's a company, you know, um, that's doing supply chain.

They've got some real progress. So the guy with the supply chain company in Chapel Hill, that's our, actually our most experienced entrepreneur, has some gray hair. It's not a 23, 24 year old, you know, that just graduated that has a social media app, you know, so we've made 19 [01:37:00] investments and we try to obviously, encourage the investors to have some dry powder so they can invest in later rounds as well.

Do you have a minimum, usually, check size from your Well, the entrepreneurs really kind of set what the minimum is, and since we're still really young in this process, it is usually a 25, 000 per investor. Actually, sometimes the investors go together to create the 25, 000, but have certainly invested six figures in later rounds.

depending on the company's success. Does the investment come from the fund, your well, or the individual? The individual. I don't touch their money at all. So if there's, and I'm not an investor, I like to be really clear on that as we just discussed my 20 year career and none of it was adding up to much, much, uh, independently wealthy kind of status.

So I'm not an investor. I simply manage the process of Finding the companies, finding the individual investors, and communicating on a weekly [01:38:00] basis, uh, what's happening in the ecosystem within those companies. And I get their reports on a weekly or monthly basis. 

The process of going from ideation to exit has certainly been elongated, was a five to seven year process. It's probably now a seven to 10 year process. And if you add the pandemic to that, it's probably going to be longer. So It's of no one's fault, it's just the market is, that's what's happened in the marketplace.

Yeah, we're seeing a shift, you know, from an expectation of return of capital, you know, from like a three to six is now more eight to ten. Yeah, so it's people haven't become more patient for return of capital. And investors aren't very patient people, as you know. Just a little bit, which is why I'm not taking outside money right now, it's only mine.

Right. As a comparison to what you're doing, I joined what is a super angel fund. Right, where you have limited partners and you pull your money together. So your investment comes from one entity and the split is [01:39:00] 5 percent carry and 5 percent to the deal leads. So if you had a network of 20, then you would, you know, one or two would be the lead and they would be the one that would come back and report and give everybody the updates.

But the key is they get 5%, you know, they split between the leads and that's been pretty successful. I just don't want to handle the investor's money. I just, uh, I, we're, really what we're trying to do is we're trying to be the first money in. So our entrepreneurs can take and say, look, I did raise capital in Wilmington and they can go to the other markets because.

The biggest red flag for an investor in Raleigh is a Wilmington startup that says, I'm here to raise money. And the first question is, well, right. Who invested in Wilmington that I can call? Yeah. Is it usually C Round? If the answer is no, yes. If the answer is no, no one invested in Wilmington, that's a red flag because they, again, they know me and I'm going to be their call.

And why didn't you invest in this company? Well, they're [01:40:00] kind of known around town as being a Pain in the backside. So we've decided not to deal with that, right? We, we know that's a red flag, and here's some other things of why we didn't invest. And I get those calls on a weekly basis, you know, so and so reached out.

Well, this is why. They're not finding any luck in Wilmington. Cause I, I got to answer those people. Right. Like when I have a good company and I approach them, they need to know that I'm providing thorough information. If, um, if something backfires because I didn't tell them, then I can't go back to that investor.

Right. So what's the future? What do you, where do you see the next five, 10 years? What does it look like? I would really love to have a facility that I can run on a daily basis. That's, I'd like to get to a point where we have that kind of support that whether it's a co working space for the portfolio of Whale or a space that we can have our own events, because we have great events and [01:41:00] eventually, you know, people are getting tired of me taking the advantage of their free offering.

Sure, you can use our space, kind of thing. I would love to have a place where I can invite people to come and work for the day. And if an investor comes to town, I can say, Hey, we've got this coworking space. And if not, would you do some office hours? Would you hold three hours worth of meetings with Companies that are in the space that can sign up for time slots, and that's what I would like to do.

I don't see that happening, or I have no inkling that that's going to happen, but if I had a dream, I just went to an event at, um, this place in Raleigh that has a huge Office campus and they have their own event space and it was just this dream facility of it looked like a barn but it could fit 150 people and it had all the AV and Like, man, I, yeah, I sure wish I had that as an asset [01:42:00] for our organization.

Right. Um, we'd love to have an exit, obviously with Whale, we'd love to have someone within new, um, again, with all respect to Live Oak and their success, we'd love to have more exits just within the new membership. Right. Um, because, Again, that's more validation that we're doing the right things to take these companies from ideation to exit.

We've invested a lot of time in the companies and the portfolio and the members and really the thing that the market understands is that signage on the NASDAQ board that Somebody's ringing the bell today, and they're from Wilmington, and it raises our profile. I would love to be recognized as the second greatest ecosystem in our own state.

I would love more people to, hey Jim, I heard this today. Is that true? I can say, here's the proof, you know. But I, it's gonna be interesting that um, next week is the NCIDEA Ecosystem Summit. So all the ecosystem nerds like [01:43:00] me, are all from across the state, going to be at, in Charlotte or Concord, North Carolina for the annual ecosystem summit.

Right. And I would love to, Hey Jim, I heard that data, you know, why are you poking fun of Charlotte so much? I'm like, well, you know, I think I've earned the right to make fun of Charlotte. And, um, you've been very instrumental to this market one way or another. I mean, you, you brought all your success and energy dating back to your dad.

As a kid and the coaching and the leadership and all the other success and momentum. So it's very well recognized. So congratulations on all that and we look forward to seeing future success in this market. Thank you. You bet. Thanks again for coming. Yes, sir. Thank you so much. Amplified CEO is produced by Topsail Insider.

Edited by Jim Mendez Puget and sponsored by Cape Fear Ventures. For more information about Amplified CEO [01:44:00] Richard Stroupe or Cape Fear Ventures, please contact Christa at 910 800 0111 or christa at topsailinsider. com.