Zachary Kushel 9:07
It was the, still probably the most incredible experience of my life. Those 18 months on the campaign, I left my job on Wall Street in July of 2007 and at the time I was working at Citigroup, and that stock was trading at, let’s call it $55 a share, and I joined John McCain’s presidential campaign as a full time volunteer because the campaign had no money and they couldn’t hire me, and everyone thought that, you know, he had no chance of winning. So I was one of 11 staffers in the state of New Hampshire that worked on, you know, Senator McCain’s campaign in New Hampshire. And, you know, I think you know, it was a piece, a small piece of engineering, kind of one of the, the most incredible comebacks in political history, when he ultimately won that New Hampshire Primary and became the nominee for president. And it was, you know, incredible. Like, six months later, right?
Senator McCain’s the nominee for president, and cities trading at $1 a share. So everybody thought I’d made this parade of a century, if only I knew, and because we obviously had the big crisis of oh eight and I before that happened. But yeah, I mean, an absolutely incredible experience. I started that campaign as a driver, literally driving the senator around and ended it as the deputy director of North Carolina in a key swing state in that election. I mean, only on a presidential campaign can you go from being a driver to being, you know, a critical staffer in the span of 18 months. And it was definitely a meritocracy in terms of, you know, showing up, working your butt off, but also, you know, being loyal to the candidate and being loyal to that cause. Because as a campaign progresses and as a campaign goes from a primary campaign to a general election campaign, all of a sudden all these people that didn’t support you and didn’t want to work with you, all of a sudden want to work with you.
So I think having folks on board that were there from the beginning and who folks know are loyal is a big piece in running that campaign. Yeah, obviously, Senator McCain was defeated in that election 2008 so instead of getting to go back to the White House, my consolation prize was the Harvard Kennedy School, so I gotta go with a good backup plan. Yeah, it was great. I mean, my boss on the campaign was an alum and wrote me a letter of recommendation, and was lucky enough to be admitted. So I spent two years there and through the most formative years of my life. And you know, again, wouldn’t have created any of it. Yeah, any experiences?
John Corcoran 11:30
You know, I went to New Hampshire in 2000 mostly because I wanted to experience it. I went in January of 2000 which, of course, January is right around the time that the New Hampshire primary occurs, and it’s just, if you work in politics, which I did for many years, it’s kind of the Super Bowl. It’s just where all the excitement happens. And so I just wanted to experience it. And, you know, I imagine today, the work that you’re doing now draws on some of the work that you did back then, organizing. Really, it’s like retail politics, 101, it’s like organizing groups of people and getting that, no, it’s a great analogy.
Zachary Kushel 12:03
I use the word, you know, when we were completing our fundraise, I said we’re gonna be barnstorming throughout the North Bay. And I had a few people say, What the heck’s barnstorming? Like? Yeah. I mean, look the way, I raised this fund, and we could talk more about it, but like, I was kind of going one backyard at a time, you know, talking to groups of three people or four people or 10 people, whatever audience folks would give me, and talk to them about, you know, the what we want to do for the North Bay community.
And there’s so many parallels to a political campaign, for sure, instead of asking for votes, we were asking for capital. But yeah, the nuts and bolts of it are the same. And that’s, you know, it’s why I think being in politics, working as a political organizer, as a young person, it’s some of the most incredible training you could possibly have, and it absolutely translates into startups, into business. Convincing people who are hiring that it translates is difficult, but actually getting that job is the hardest part. Once you’re in it, the training is absolutely second to none, and there are certainly tons of parallels between what we did there and what we’re doing here.
John Corcoran 13:05
And while you were at the Kennedy School, you actually ended up having a startup, which was called I Ponty. Tell us about that.
Zachary Kushel 13:12
Yeah. So on the campaign, I met a gentleman named Mario Diaz, and we co-founded a company after the campaign called I ponte. And this was a user generated video opinion platform. So the whole idea was, you know, this is a place you would go, you know, the morning after, there was a big game the night before. And, you know, turn on your online video and talk and debate with strangers about the game. Kind of your own version of, you know, pardon the interruption if folks know what that show is on, ESPN, so, you know, that was kind of our vision. And, you know, I was, you know, knew I was going to go back to school, and Mario was our CEO, and he came out of the news media, and we spent two years, you know, building this website and building this platform. You know, the problem was, neither of us were technologists.
And might sound obvious, you know, 15 years later, but in hindsight, obvious in hindsight at the time, you know, it didn’t seem crazy to us that we were two people who knew nothing about technology, building a technology company, and we had the vision, we had the ability to, you know, Mario knew a lot of people who were very well known in the sports world. So we had some celebrities cutting videos for us and promoting us, but we couldn’t fully build the platform. And we partnered with someone who was able to get 80% of the way there. We never completed that last 20% and, you know, we kind of ran out of our personal funds that we were using to fund the project. It was really interesting. It was my introduction to VC and Sandhill Road. So we actually threw some introductions, came out to the Bay Area, went around town, pitched for capital again, I think in hindsight, I had no idea what I was doing. Didn’t even know what VC was.
John Corcoran 14:52
Do you have a lot of times when you hear people you know, with their first experience raising money, they are either like, embarrassed. Saying or uncomfortable experiences. Do you have anything like that where?
Zachary Kushel 15:02
I didn’t know enough to be embarrassed? And that makes sense, like again, looking back, if I was watching the video of it, I sure I’d be embarrassed. But we were two folks very genuine about what we were doing, who had never done it before and didn’t come from the world where people have done it before, right? That wasn’t our work, that wasn’t our world. So, you know, I would say it was eye opening, but more eye opening in hindsight, but it was also very important for me, because it showed me that I could do it, if that makes sense, right? I was able to see a vision, you know, turning something that was just purely an idea, purely a vision, turn that into a reality and how damn hard that is.
So, you know, my background was essentially, in that case, right, trying to build a pre seed startup company, raise some capital, you know, get to your first major launch, and we kind of died before that even launched. So I saw how damn hard that was. You know, I worked at Glassdoor, which was a Series G company trying to get public. And I saw how hard that was. I spent RX. I was a series a company, you know, learning or trying to get to become a series B Company. I saw how hard that was. So I came to the startup world, not as a serial founder and entrepreneur, but as someone who had worked in the trenches at all these different stages of startups and their different life cycles, and just understanding with great humility, how hard it is at every stage, how unsexy it is, and how, you know, how difficult it is to get there, which I think, you know, really clues in. You know, when I meet with founders, kind of how I approach what they’re doing, and do they have the same naivete that I had as a 24 year old? Or are they smarter, wiser, beyond their years than I was?
Because, you know, we probably weren’t investable in hindsight, right? Yeah. And we also quit, right? So, you know, my co founder, the CEO, had a young family, and, you know, didn’t have unlimited personal runway, and I had a great backup plan, which was getting this masters from the Kennedy School and opening the world to me after that. So, you know, the pain wasn’t big enough for us to stick it, stick it through. So we didn’t. And
John Corcoran 17:02
That’s one of those x factors that really can make a difference. You know, is this, when you look at a founder, Are they someone who’s just going to keep on going no matter what, when everything’s against them, you know, it’s often what you want to tell me about?
Zachary Kushel 17:15
Is this their life’s work? Right? And I think, in hindsight, it probably wasn’t our life’s work. It was a great idea. We were excited about it, but we weren’t willing to sacrifice everything to make it work. So we didn’t.
John Corcoran 17:26
So after Kennedy School, you end up going to Cisco. And what did you do at Cisco? Now, of course, as a very large company, you work for the biggest of all, the federal government, and now you’re working at a huge technology company, yeah, and Cisco’s amazing place.
Zachary Kushel 17:39
So, I worked on the global government affairs team. And, you know, I kind of, the analogy I would use is, I kind of almost ran an internal State Department at Cisco. I was in charge of dignitary visits for the company. So any given week you come to Silicon Valley, and there are, you know, there’s 30 elected officials from around the world, right? Three members of US Congress out here visiting companies raising money, right? You have the finance minister of Turkey. There’s the Crown Prince of Belgium leading a 200 person Belgium delegation. And they go and make the rounds, right?
They go to Facebook, Google, Cisco, HP, Oracle. So I was kind of in charge of hosting those gatherings for Cisco, kind of being that core liaison between the executive staff and their teams and the delegations themselves. Even, you know, I became best friends with the Secret Service folks who were, you know, they do all the protection stuff there, who were based in the Bay Area. So it was kind of like, you’re kind of on the circuit a little bit so, you know. But the best part about that job was, you know, I was able to be a fly on the wall. Our CEO and Chairman John Chambers, was a mentor to me, and I was able to be a fly on the wall when he was hosting heads of state, you know, at Cisco, I was, what.
John Corcoran 18:59
Did you learn from him when you saw him hosting heads of state coming to visit?
Zachary Kushel 19:03
I learned how it’s done at that level, right? I learned what it means to, you know, have a conversation with someone at a strategic level, not at a transactional level, but doing so in a way that could help advance your goals as an organization ultimately helps advance transactions. And I think as a young person, you kind of, you’d sit in these meetings and be like, Why are they spending 20 minutes talking about that, right? What does that have to do with Cisco’s business?
What does that have to do with bringing a factory to their province? Isn’t that the goal of this delegation, right? But you know, you kind of, again, you sit there and you learn that everything in life and everything in business is about trust and trust building. And I just got a first class education in being able to watch, you know, one of the legends of Silicon Valley do it. It was, it was a very, you know, informative experience for me, and one that really opened my eyes to Silicon Valley. Which was, which was great, yeah.
John Corcoran 20:01
And then Glassdoor, of course, is a different type of company, not a public company. You said it was series G, I believe, yes. And doing something really kind of do and new and different at the time, when they came up with they were coming up, yeah?
Zachary Kushel 20:14
I mean, it’s, I was out here, and I realized I was going to stay out here. I’d met a California girl and realized I was probably spending the rest of my life in California.
John Corcoran 20:24
New Jersey Boys, they’re gonna stay out.
Zachary Kushel 20:28
you know, and quickly realize that, you know, I wanted to kind of get closer to the business of the region, right? I mean, you, you look at a company like Cisco, right? 10s of 1000s of employees, and there’s three people doing government affairs in San Jose, right? So this is a weird intersection where the government meets business. Was very much a niche role, and it wasn’t something that I was, you know, I was, it was enjoyable, but I wasn’t excited to go down the kind of corporate lobbyist path, which is kind of the path if you want to remain in the government affairs function over the long term. And I wanted to get closer to startups, because I had all these friends out here who were working at young companies, you know, that were kind of building the future.
And I was working at a very big, very mature company, which was doing great stuff. But, you know, it’s very hard as a young, ambitious person to advance in a giant organization, right? Everybody knows you have to kind of go smaller to advance more quickly in your career. So I wanted to move from a large company doing government affairs to a small company doing a business role. And it was really, really hard to do. Everyone said, it’s impossible. You have to do it two moves at a time. You could stay in your function and go from a big to a small company. Or, you know, you can move functions, but it has to get the similar sized company or in the same company, but you can’t do it in one fell swoop. And I ended up taking a meeting with a guy named Jim Buttimer, who ran Business Development at Glassdoor, and he grew up in DC, so he understood how the political world and the business world intersected and looked at me and said, Yeah, you could, you could do this.
I couldn’t teach you how to do this job. So he gave me a shot, which I’m forever grateful for. Ended up coming into, you know, probably the most successful startup to come out of Marin County the last 15 years. And nine months after I got there, he called me up and said, Hey, I got two pieces of news. He said, number one, I’m retiring. And he said, number two, you know, you’re getting my job. Okay, so, you know, so I ended up running the business development team there for about two and a half years. And, you know, got a first class education in working at a mature startup company, and what that was like. And, you know, to this day, you know the best friends in the world came out of Glassdoor. MSIV wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that glass door experience, because it’s kind of what brought myself and my wife to the North Bay.
John Corcoran 22:48
And what? So where did the idea of starting a venture fund focused on this region, which you had been in for two, three years? Yeah, at that point, you know, What? What? What inspired you to create a venture fund and build a community around it dedicated to the region?
Zachary Kushel 23:09
Well, when I got to Glassdoor, which was this incredible company that was employing 500 people in Marin, right, yeah, I was trying to figure out, why weren’t there 30 more of these up here? I mean, the North Bay is probably the most beautiful part of the Bay Area. Marin and Sonoma County, two of the most affluent counties in the entire country. You have some of the highest levels of intellectual capital of anywhere on planet Earth. But if you look at the modern incarnation of Silicon Valley, geographically, it’s stretching from San Jose in the south to the Presidio of San Francisco in the north. Last decade, I went east to Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley. If you look at that 101 corridor from Sausalito up to Healdsburg, it’s kind of been that left behind corridor when it comes to startups and job creation. So given my background in politics and in government affairs and where really my background was, where government technology, you know, communities met, that was my background.
When I got here, I kind of had on that hat I brought from Cisco, my economic development hat, because I was hosting these delegations from all over the world. And I was saying, Well, what the heck is going on in the North Bay? This community had everything going for it. But, you know, if you look at the metrics, right? It’s a community that’s lagging in terms of net new job creation, right? All the jobs that came to the Bay Area and the 2010 decade didn’t come to the North Bay. They came everywhere. But so I was trying to figure out why that was so I ended up, you know, meeting with, you know, people that have been around this community a heck of a lot longer than I have, right? Natives, people have been here for 1020, 30 years, leaders in the business community. Um, so I did that, and, you know, I was asking them, like, why aren’t there more glass doors here? And all the answers I got, John, I found wildly unfulfilling, right? Like there was all this conventional wisdom that had kind of cropped up, that you couldn’t build a company up here, and that the community didn’t want companies that were grounded in like.
Some speck of reality, right? But increasingly, it was not relevant to the age we were in. Because what happened was that in the 2010 decades, San Francisco became the hub for startups, in place of Palo Alto, in place of, you know, the peninsula region of the Bay Area. So what that meant was that for the first time ever, the heart of Silicon Valley was commutable from the North Bay. And it was never going to be commutable from the North Bay if the heart of Silicon Valley was Palo Alto, right? That’s an hour and a half drive. And some people did it, but it’s not like I did it for one year. It’s not fun, and it wasn’t fun. So you get it right. So I moved here. I had a young family at the time, and I would meet all these people in the community, and they would say, you know, I tell everyone I work at Glassdoor, this unicorn startup company in Marin. And they would go to me, Oh, my God, you’re living the dream. I wish I could work when I got started in Marin County, and I had that conversation 300 times.
And I’m not saying 300 as hyperbole, I’m saying literally 300 times. I had that same conversation, so I said, this is odd. You have all these people here, you know, increasingly, that have this incredible skill set. They love this community, and they moved here because they didn’t want to be in Silicon Valley or San Francisco. They intentionally wanted to be here. And you had all this capital in the community, and yet, all this intellectual capital in the community, yet all of it’s being invested in San Francisco, New York or London startups, instead of startups in our own backyard. So I said, that’s crazy, like, why are we not investing locally? So I, you know, got this idea, and I tried to figure out who was leading the community forward on this issue, who was trying to usher in the next era of economic development in the region, who was saying, Hey, if you’re a local entrepreneur and you want to build the next great North Bay Company, we care and we want to help you, right?
I was looking for these people, and quite frankly, like, to my chagrin, they didn’t exist. Um, the community was very static. It was, you know, we’ve been doing it this way for a very long time. And for those who don’t know, the North Bay, right, is a local economy almost entirely reliant on wine, tourism and agribusiness. And if there’s anything the last seven years have shown us in the North Bay, after six years of mega drought, three incredibly devastating fires and a global pandemic is that a local economy entirely reliant on those three industries is one that is not as insulated from the ravages of climate change, and one that is not healthy and one that is not going to meet the needs and interests of the next generation of people. So I figured out that there was a giant community gap, and I figured out that nobody was leading on the issue.
And I also figured out there was a giant business opportunity because of all the incredible people that were going to be building companies up here. So when you see a community needing a business opportunity, that should scream to you, social enterprise, and yeah, you know exactly what. What inspired me. So I said, Well, if no one’s building this and the community needs it. Well, shoot, that’s gonna be my life’s work.
John Corcoran 28:05
And you actually said and what you went around and you actually talked to others who’d done this in other parts of the country. So Vermont, Montana, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Boulder, Colorado, Alabama, all these different places. What did you learn from those conversations?
Zachary Kushel 28:20
Oh, my God, so much. So the first thing I did when I got this idea to launch MSIV was, you know, Brad Feld, who folks know from Foundry Group TechStars, part of the Boulder Colorado kind of tech scene in the 1990s wrote a book called startup communities, right? And it’s kind of a handbook on, how do you build a local startup community, a local, entrepreneurial ecosystem. So, you know, that kind of became my Bible, and I was doing this research, and I kind of discovered that there were all these efforts all around the country doing these things. So I reached out to Fresh Tracks Capital in Vermont, which was on funds like four or five. They’ve been doing this for 20 years.
And of course, you know, we reach out to people cold. You know, you’re always surprised at who responds. So this gentleman, Kern Cross, the nicest guy ever, you know, got on a call with me. So let me tell you how I did this in Vermont. And you know, will price in Montana, has a fund called next frontier capital investing in Montana businesses and is building an entrepreneurial ecosystem there. So he got on the phone with me and talked about that. I talked to Michael Basch in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at Atento Capital, who was telling me all about what they’re doing to drive, you know, Tulsa’s economic growth via startup companies.
So I talked to these folks, and what I learned was that there was no one way to do this like those three efforts I mentioned, they were all born in different ways, and they were all funded in different ways, right? Some have a single LP. Some have foundation funding. Some have private funding. You know, the role of the government’s different in all these different places. So what I quickly realized is that I had to figure out how to get this thing going. You know, for the North Bay, I can’t just take the Vermont or Montana playbook and adapt it here. I can use their lessons with them. Bible of startup communities at hand and figure out what’s going to work here. So that’s kind of what I did. And I figured out how to go our own way, in a way that made sense for this community.
John Corcoran 30:10
And then, so that’s kind of like your Bible, and then you go about, I guess shortly after that, I got to raise some money here. And so what was that experience like?
Zachary Kushel 30:18
That was really hard. Yeah, I joked that, you know, it would have been helpful if I had, you know, run a venture capital firm before, or maybe worked at a venture capital A lot of times.
John Corcoran 30:29
That’s the case, right? It’s a VC who’s been a VC at some other fund, right? Start a new fund based on their track record.
Zachary Kushel 30:34
That’s right. But there’s no one way to get anywhere. So, you know, maybe I went at it a harder way, but that was, that was the path. You know? What’s interesting is, I was all set on launching MSIV. I knew exactly what we needed to go do, and the goal was to go bring fund one to market in April 2020 good time, 2020 Yeah, I’m sitting there in April of 2020 and I’m, I don’t know what to do, because the world stopped, and I’m helping my wife out at her law firm, I need to stay busy.
John Corcoran 31:02
How were the checks cleared? Or were you, like, you had people that were ready to write a check and then, oh, no, I heard a lot of stories like that, where people I wasn’t that far along, like I was just talking to people conceptually I hadn’t even gone to.
Zachary Kushel 31:10
Like, it wasn’t like I had a commit that didn’t come through. I was about to start hitting the pavement in April, okay? And I said to myself, I can’t raise money now. Like, what the heck am I going to do? And then I realized, well, shoot like, I can do everything I’m trying to do without raising money, except for two things. One, I can’t pay myself, and two, I can’t write checks into companies. Putting those two things aside, everything I was talking about in terms of building the local entrepreneurial community, entrepreneurial community, building an ecosystem here, leaning in, excuse me, and helping local founders in any way I possibly can. I didn’t need money to go do that.
And luckily, you know, again, my wife has a great job. She runs a law firm here in Marin County, and you know, so I had some personal runway where I was able to say, All right, I don’t need to take a salary immediately to put food on the table. I’m going to go do that. So I said, let’s just go build without raising the money. Let’s just go help people. So I pulled five founders together for a meeting, and I said, Hey, if I built a founder community here, you know, would that be interesting to you? Would that be helpful to you, or would that be a waste of time? And all five said, No, this would be a great idea like go build it.
So then I pulled together a meeting a few months later with 14 local founders, and now that North Bay founder network, four years in, has 185 founders, CEOs of young startup companies that have joined this community in some way. So the community piece of this took off almost immediately, and then once the covid reopening happened? That I can get people in person, you know, I was able to restart the fundraise. And, you know, shocking that building a community based initiative gets easier when you can actually convene the community. Shocking that, yeah, who you’ve never met before, right? The right, $100,000 check. Shocking that it’s easier to do over a cup of coffee or in someone’s backyard than on a second Zoom meeting.
John Corcoran 33:05
So how? I want to know what other ways the covid, covid changed your approach. Because, you know, living in this community, I can tell you that there was a lot of change. A lot of people who, you know, like from Europe, who moved back home because they didn’t want to be so far away from their family, and then a lot of people who decided to move from urban areas into this community. So there’s a lot of changes. And a lot of people, all of a sudden could work remotely for different companies. So how did that affect your original, you know, theory about this, what this company would be?
Zachary Kushel 33:34
It changed it drastically, and it accelerated it drastically. So, you know, while the pandemic was certainly not a good thing for what we were trying to do. It made what we were trying to do that much more relevant, because for the first time, everyone was forced to stay home. So they were looking more locally. And a lot of these people, who were titans of global business, who were traveling the world, were stuck here and realized, oh my god, I have no ties to my own community. What the heck is going on in my own community, and we were able to be that bridge for that. The other thing that happened is that, historically, the North Bay was viewed as a very difficult place to scale a startup business.
So if you wanted to go, you know, go from zero to 500 employees in 18 months, an hour north of San Francisco, people would say that’s probably not the best idea to go do that. What happened with covid is that, you know, and the advent of remote work is that, you know, no one’s going to be scaling from zero to 500 anymore without hiring people remotely, without having satellite offices. So all the traditional barriers to building a startup here kind of decreased. They kind of went away. So the way I’d frame it is like a North Bay founder, pre covid, we had to convince them to build in the north they had not convinced in San and convince them to not build in San Francisco. Post covid, for a North Bay founder, they’re not building in San Francisco. They’re going to build here. They’re going to build nowhere.
They’re going to build a remote. So now we’re competing with remote, and I actually think that’s a. Much like an easier, winnable thing to compete with than building in San Francisco. So it certainly accelerated our thesis, the future of jobs, and our belief is hyper local. So my thesis is that the 90 minute commute is going away, but the office is not going away. So if you could give someone a global job based nowhere, sitting in their house all day, or an in person job 10 minutes from their house with people in their community that they like. You know, our thesis is that 95% of people you know, would take the in person job, because it’s not the being in person that people hate. It’s the, you know, I’m losing two and a half hours of my day to commuting, and I want to put that into my physical well being. So we are enabling a future that is hyper local from a job creation standpoint, and people are really resonating with that message and with that vision.
John Corcoran 35:52
So you do end up raising, I believe it was about $6 million in your first fund. Who did you finally get to buy into that vision and write a check for the fund?
Zachary Kushel 36:02
So it took us 24 months. We raised $6.6 million from 62 unique investors. 92% of those investors live in Marin and Sonoma County. So we basically passed the hat around the community and ended up with a super hyper local raise. It was all individuals and families. So we didn’t raise a single dollar of institutional capital. I pitched 662 people. I counted to get 62 yeses. So that was a 9.4% pull through rate, which is the reality of a fundraising funnel. So, it was really hard. And everyone says, Oh, I bet you. The hardest part was, you know, being resilient, because nine out of 10 people said no to you. And the reality is that nine out of 10 people didn’t say no to me more often than not. Nine out of 10 people just never got back to me, right?
So, yeah, when you’re fundraising from individuals, individuals can just go on with their life. You know, they don’t need to engage or respond or whatever. And you know, the other thing I learned is that nobody’s in the business of investing in a fund. One, yeah, I mean, like, right at 90% of investors are like, Why would I do that? So you have to find the right type of people who say, You know what, I pride myself on being early. I pride myself on being a leader, not a follower with my capital. And again, the reality is, most people are followers when it comes to investing. So that certainly has me feeling good about prospective future fundraisers, because now we have this track record to point to. But while I was in it, it certainly was a very difficult fundraise. And you know, again, I kept moving the goalpost back to make sure I could claim victory and get this fund going, which we ultimately, ultimately did.
John Corcoran 37:42
And I mentioned earlier that I attended your most recent event, which was something like 300 people. There 350 400 whatever it was, 330 amazing communities of people. And you know, having lived in this community for 20 years, it just really was amazing how many seeing all those people come together. But before we get to that, I think we kind of have like a formula here, because you said, you know, you started with having a lot of conversations, asking people, you know, what they wanted in this community, really kind of understanding what’s beneath it, why there hasn’t been some kind of local organization or fund to support a startup community. Then you got together five people, five founders. You got them together. You asked them, Is this what you would want? They said, Yes. You came back again. A couple of months later, 14 people with another event asked them what they wanted, and then you had a bigger event, and the event supported, I believe, the fund, and you ended up raising a fund. Is there anything else I’m missing that you’d put into that? You know, for those who are listening to this, thinking, Oh, I could do this in my community. What else would you add?
Zachary Kushel 38:43
Yeah, no. I mean, I think you nailed it. One of my mentors, my name is Paul Soli, who is a bit of a very successful business here in Marin County, you know, I was listening to him give a talk recently, and he kept talking about how he was building his business over the course of 20 years. You know, he just, he had a thing on his wall. It just said, TTT. TTT. Things take time. Things take time, and there are no shortcuts in life, and there are no shortcuts in business. And as a very impatient 35 year old, when I started MSIV, I could understand that intellectually, but I don’t think I fully internalized that. And I think now again, four and four and a half years into this journey, things take time. Like, if someone’s not ready to invest in a fund , like, come back, you’re not going to convince them, right? So it’s like, do your thing, right? And, you know, show, don’t tell, but you need time to show.
So I think the formula is right. Like, do your market research, do your user research? Talk to people what they want, build what they want, and then give yourself the personal runway and be kind to yourself and give yourself the time. Don’t say, Oh, my God, I gotta find a ten million investor in three months, or I’m a failure. Like, if that’s the metric you’re setting for yourself, you will be a failure, because that’s just a crazy goalpost. So you have. To Be generous with yourself, and if I, you know, have one big regret, maybe over the past four and a half years of this journey, I probably haven’t been generous enough to myself. I think everyone’s been very generous to me, and I’ve probably been really hard on myself, because, you know, as an entrepreneur, you’re never you’re never where you want to be.
You’re never satisfied, yeah, you’re never satisfied with that. You’re always pushing the Yeah, and that’s a healthy thing, but yeah, celebrate your wins more and right? And I have no idea how we’ve gotten here, John, what I mean by that is like, if you would have said to me four years ago, this is where we’re going to be, I would have said impossible, right? I have no idea how I’m going to do that. The only way I’ve gotten from A to B is just every day you show up to work and you put one foot in front of the other, and you try to get one win every day, and all of a sudden you wake up, it’s been four years, and one win a day adds up to 1000s of wins closer to where you want to be.
John Corcoran 40:45
And let’s talk about the event that you did so you had 330 people there before. I’ve done an event of about that size before, but I cheated, because I did it in conjunction with another event, a conference that had about seven or 8000 people. It’s a lot easier to get 300 people together when they’re attending a conference and looking for something to do, you brought people together on a random Wednesday or Thursday, and you had the founders of Serena Lily speak and equator coffee, and the guy who created a solar company that eventually became Tesla Energy, some some really amazing people that you had there. So just reflect a little bit on, you know, that event and how it ended up coming together.
Zachary Kushel 41:21
Yeah, it’s our third annual event. It was our biggest one. Our theme was builded here. So, you know that it’s a conference, but it’s much more than a conference. So after that we pulled off the event. I was talking to Elizabeth Murphy, our VP of community, my partner in crime here at MSIV, and you know, she was basically telling me, you know, she said to me, how many conferences have you been to in your life where you know, you sent an email to the conference organizer the day after saying thank you, you asked me this question. I looked at her, I said, I think zero made me feel like a bad person. I said, I said, usually they should be sending me a note, right? You know, thank you for buying a ticket and coming to whatever.
And she said, how many emails have you gotten in the last 24 hours? And I said, like, 40. Wow. And she said, What does that mean? I said, I don’t know, but it means something, right? So it’s not a conference. We call it a conference, but it’s, it sounds hokey, John, but it’s like it’s neighbors gathering. And that goes back to the hyper-local thing. We couldn’t have done that in San Francisco. You couldn’t have done that in New York. You couldn’t have done that in London. It wouldn’t have the same feel. But when you do it in a hyper-localized community, and the North Bay, as you know, is a collection of 10,000-person small towns, even our biggest city, Santa Rosa, with 180,000 people, feels like a 10,000-person small town when that’s the vibe you get and you’re accentuating into that. And the people you put on stage are locals.
So we didn’t, we didn’t import speakers from San Francisco who are famous people to come in and speak to every single person we put up on stage. And we put over 30 people up on stage, they’re all locals. They all live in this community. They’re all neighbors. So the whole idea of the conference is like, come meet your neighbors and see how we can help each other. And that’s what resonates with people. Because when folks show up and they feel like that’s not just talk, that’s the actual vibe of what you’re building, they want to be a part of that. In a way, you don’t want to be a part of a conference. Because conferences are, you know, can be stodgy and impersonal and transactional, right? And what we did is, it’s a community gathering.
John Corcoran 43:29
Yeah, that was great. You did such a great job on it. And I’ve been to a lot of conferences before where I’m mindful of the clock. We’re almost out of time. So I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude to those who helped you along the way. You’ve mentioned a bunch of names so far, but who would you want to shout out and thank for helping you in your journey?
Zachary Kushel 43:48
Oh, my God. I mean, where do I start? I would say specifically with MSIV. Look, the one person with an idea. It’s only this thing has only happened because I had multiple people go out of their way to be successful. So I would say, our kind of founding team of advisors, Steve Fox, the CFO and Every Man Jack was the first person to put his name next to mine on this thing and and lend his credibility to MSIV, Craig Nelson, Beth Stelluto, Gabe Turner, Jeff Morgan, Greg Castle, Mike Lewis. And this, the OG group of advisors that kind of pushed me to keep going when this wasn’t easy, we wouldn’t be here because of them. Obviously, Elizabeth, who runs this incredible community, we wouldn’t be here without her.
And literally hundreds of people, I mean, this is, you know, I talk about MSIV as a local movement, and I really mean that, but literally hundreds of people in this community have gone out of their way to make this thing successful. I’m lucky enough to be, you know, the one in charge here, but you know, I couldn’t have done this by myself. You know, I’m one person, and I’ve only been in the community for eight years. So because, you know, this has resonated, resonated with folks as much as it resonates with me, the mission, the vision. And they’ve learned it. So those are just a few people that I have to call out who have made this possible. And obviously my wife, the ultimate original investor, called herself, yeah, we wouldn’t be here without her.
John Corcoran 45:16
Yeah, That’s great. That’s great. And so we’ll just wrap there. And for anyone who’s listening to this from Asheville, North Carolina or Jacksonville, Florida, and wants to replicate this model in their local community, where would you point them to and how would they look you up and learn more about you?
Zachary Kushel 45:35
Yeah, so get that book about startup communities, that’s what got me started, and then talk to other communities that you think look like yours, demographics-wise, size-wise, don’t think you can take the Silicon Valley model and bring it to Asheville. Look for a place like Asheville who’s ahead of Asheville from that standpoint, and model that. And I love talking to folks around the country where it can be helpful. So my contact information is on our website, MSIVfund.com, and go build. Go build and go improve your communities. I think every single community out there should have a local startup community and should have a local fund. I think we need more buckets of place-based impact capital here in this country. And I would encourage everyone to feel inspired to do that.
John Corcoran 46:13
And I know you’ve announced a few investments you want to put a plug in for any of those.
Zachary Kushel 46:19
Yeah. I mean, today, we just announced our ninth investment, Sageville ai, out of Sausalito, California. Michael Pepe and Drew Batshaw are very excited for them to be building the future of corporate learning. We have an incredible portfolio of 10 startup companies, nine of which we’ve announced. And you know, we have incredible companies. So shout out to all of them. Go check them out on our website and see how you can partner with them and help them and help them.
John Corcoran 46:43
Zach, thanks so much.
Zachary Kushel 46:44
John, thank you.
Outro 46:49
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.