EYL #215 Robert Smith on Being The Richest Black American, Wealth, HBCUs, & Private Equity

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Here's how we're going to change your compensation plans for your salespeople to actually incentivize them to give you more stable revenues or or or you know, more visibility into the future revenues and earnings of that business that you may not have figured out or may not figure out because you may not be in an environment a circle of people who have dealt with that before. And so that's why the expertise that we bring is often more valuable than the capital.

the topics that I wrote about was you. You had an art you had a cover of Forbes and thinking, my yet like three or four years ago, so I put the cover up and then I wrote like a three page, three paragraph description of the whole situation. And then my whole point of it was at that time, specifically, I didn't feel that enough people knew who you were.

is today, your role is even more important. So keep doing what you're doing and keep leaning in hard.

I mean, a lot of American culture is coming out of our experiences, and music, of course, is one of the principal drivers of that. You know, I always say I grew up in a beloved community, and you know, it sounds like you guys grew up in that as well, a place where in my case it was completely segregated community. But you know the needs of the children in that community were being satisfied by the adults in that community.

In those needs of love and guidance and instruction and everything from learning how to play at the piano to learning about science and in my case like rocketry and in learning sports. I mean that came from the members of our community. But you also saw the adults in that community defend the community and also try to make

more progress. And the Five Points area is the area one of the first areas that was settled by African Americans in Colorado as we moved across this country, and typically it was you know, at the end of you know, the emancipation period. My family, many of them went into Pueblo, Colorado, but they came from you know, Oklahoma or Tennessee, right, and you guys are all familiar with Greenwood, and part

of our family tree comes out of there. Some of them actually owned the you know, one of the pool halls and one of the one of the hardware stores. And as that happened in the early nineteen hundreds in that massacre, they moved into Pueblo, Colorado and then from there. So I'm fourth generation from Colorado, and so my family are families of teachers and educators and nurses and doctors. Think about that, right, you know, providing I'm the fourth

generation of my family to go to college. Wow, right, There's very few families in America where it's fours generations that have gone to college. And so what I saw growing up was a community that had a lot of wholeness but was again being attacked on any size. But I saw the adults like my parents, my father and my mother, you know, pulled together organizations not just a fan to defend, but to advance. And one of the

most important areas of advancement was of course education. You know, being educated it was critically important to success and to creating you know, financial opportunity and to frankly create stability in the community. Both my parents were teachers, elementary school teachers. They both ultimately ended up getting doctorates in education, both in them being principles. But I look also to the work they did civically in our in our in our family. Back then, it snowed a lot in Denver. You know,

it's the whole climate change dynamic. I don't think we're addressing in this. We can do another. And so so we as kids always got excited about snow days, right and stay home. Our parents didn't why because at that time, our neighborhood wouldn't get the snowplow to come through it for three or four days after it's snow. Now you think about it, where your parents are trying to go to work, but they can't even get down the street.

They can't get to the bus stop, they can't. You know, for those of us who had cars, you couldn't even drive because it was just snowed in. So I saw my father lead an effort and it created a civic association and they literally went and campaigned and lobbied so that we at least got snowplows the same day as other communities in you know, in our city. I remember,

and then they put one stripe. They'd come down and do one stripe down the main street, and we still had to get to the main street and you would get out and then okay, great, we got on a bus to go across town because they were desegregating schools using bussing, and we'll talk about that in a minute. And you'd go to the neighborhood where the better resource school inner streets were clean and dry, snowpiled up on the side are gone, and are still had just one

strip down the center. So when you talk about economic disadvantage, systemic economic oppression, these are the things that you don't think about on the one hand, but if your community can't get to work, it has a major impact. And we had a lot of wage workers, so it wasn't like, oh, everybody was on salary. You were wage workers. If you didn't show up that day, you didn't get paid that day.

If you didn't get paid that day, you were now trying to figure out how to you know, make groceries and pay pay you know, ensure that your kids ate or clothed and those sort of things. And I saw the community say this, we're that's not going to stand

right and make take a stand of that. I saw my father also pull together resources so our local y MCA, our kids had a chance to go to summer camps and to go into the mountains, and we raised money to build a gym so we could actually have a place, you know, where our kids could actually you know, recreate in peace and also with facilities. But it was them taking that on and making a community project in us. You know, going out and selling candy and all that,

you know, to to ensure that that happened. And it was i'll call it a spirit of self determination that very much was part of the fabric of that community. And you saw people looking out for the kids. That wasn't perfect, like everything, you know, nothing is perfect, but you felt loved, you felt cared for it, you felt protected, and you saw adults coming together for the betterment of that community, not episodically when something bad happened, but on

a regular basis. And that's what I remember, and those are the things that really inform how I like to live my life. And I have an opportunit do it a little bigger platform than growing up there. But it's also i'll call it rich with community life. You know, the music, the you know, we'd have the Friday night fish fries and you guys too young members. We used to do these people take slide pictures on slides and slide projector you guys left.

going to desegregate schools. How are you gonna do that when everybody lives in segregating neighborhoods. So it was in Denver many other places. It was a thing called bussing, right, they called it force bussing, but it was bussing. And so now you know, the cities took here. They bought a bunch of busses, started figuring out, Okay, who from this community, who goes to this local school? My dad was a principal at the local school, and now you're

going to rebust across town to another school. All right, Well, right before this was to happen, some racists didn't think This was a good idea and burned like a third of the buses.

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talked about better resource schools. And when I look at the kids who were on that bus versus the kids who were two blocks away, okay, when it was bus number thirteen, like I say, ironically right, it was those kids have a higher percentage of professionals went to Ivy League schools became you know, doctors and professors and scientists versus a blocks of just a few blocks away. How much down there were some professionals that came out of there, but a much lower percentage. I mean, it is a

stark contrast. And it's because that K in that case K through six education was so different than what you saw in our local neighborhoods and because they were still you know, separate, equal, but it wasn't you see, to mean the teaching, the capacity, the care, you know. And we had some phenomenal teachers in our community, and some of the teachers through that also ended up in those

better resource schools because it was that as well. And I remember Missus Olivier third grade teacher, African American woman and you could only after American teacher in that school, but she looked at for every kid of color in

that school. And I'm telling you that's one of the most important things that made a huge difference in our educational upbringing and gave us a chance to launch and go into the high schools and go into the colleges that we ended up in because we had great fundamental education K through six.

get together. We'd read I mean, like, okay, we weren't just watching football because you know, we had a book club, but to African Americans, you know, we had a book club back then, reading different things. And one of the guys brought to kind of the book club a Black enterprise magazine and on that were a bunch of blacks on Wall Street the first time, like, well what is Wall Street? Because I was I had no idea what

Wall Street was. And they had all these guys on Wall Street and it had you know guy you know, John Newton Dahl, this guy you know, Ray McGuire and Stan O'Neill and George Vanantum and and I'm like, well, who are these cats, and what's this Wall Street all about? And why are they undercovers this magazine? Right? What's that? And so we start reading and understanding and talking about it.

I mean that's importance of community too, where you can kind of bounce some ideas off and what's this all about? And started really understanding that there was a whole different world outside of engineering, which is what I thought the world was, right, And so I started thinking about, well, maybe I should go to graduate school. So as I started looking at different you know, ELM Men's. Business school looked interesting, law school looked interesting. Uh, And I decided, well,

I'm going to go to Columbia. I went to Cornell undergrad and I started looking around and decided Columbia it was a good place for me to go. It was fortunate to get in.

named of John Newtondhal. And you know, they go and give my background and all that sort of stuff, and you know, my award, I get that at the end of the thing. You know, he gives his speech and pulls me and I says, hey, hey, hey. He said, you have an interesting background engineer. All. So, he said, have you ever thought about a career in investment banking. I'm like, well, I said, you know, there's a bunch of investment bankers in my class. I don't like any

of them. And he says, well, he looks at me. He's like, well why not. I said, well, they think they know everything, and they're pretty arrogant. I said, I'm an engineer. We do know everything. It bothers us, right, And I thought I was a jokester then, but and I said, in all honesty, I said, I don't really know what y'all do. And he said, well, why don't

you come have lunch with me? I said sure. And being in Columbia, one of the advantages of being at Columbia business schools, you're you know, a subway right away from Wall Street. So I go down and sit with John, and I'm expecting, you know, half hour forty five minutes. This guy's aren't gonna give me any time. And we just start talking. He's asking me my experiences. I'm telling them all the stuff I was inventing and doing and all that sort of stuff, and I guess he thought

I was entertaining. But at the end of it, he said, let me introduce you some people. And he picks up the phone and he calls, you know, Ray McGuire. He picks up and he calls, you know, George van Anson, picks up the phony calls you know. Stand O'Neil's like, hey,

there's a guy in my office, really interesting background. You guys ought to interview him and talk to him about a career investment banking and so, you know, as a scientist with what you do is you analyze data and try to come to some conclusion and then act upon it was with some activity. So now I'm entering my fall of my second year business school, and I'm trying

to understand what this investment banking thing is all about. Sure, I'm taken classes of finance and marketing and doing well, obviously you know statistics and accounting, but I didn't understand the industry and the business of it. And these brothers all brought me in and had conversations with me and introduced me throughout the organization. I ended up having over one hundred interviews with people on Wall Street, Goldman, Sachs, you know, Morgan Stanley, you know, it was called a

place called Banker's Trust the time JP Morgan. And through that, I said, Wow, the business that I really like is mergers and acquisitions, right, Okay, because if you think about M and A, it's board level discussions, it's CEO level cut discussions, and it's how assets move across this planet. Right. So I said, well, that looks really interesting to me. And this is another one of those life lessons. This is something you don't learn in school. It's an apprenticeship business.

Someone has to decide that they're going to make you an apprentice in the M and A business and teach and train you how to do this. You can read all the books in the world, but you actually have to practice it, okay. You actually have to develop a set of skills that have to be honed through a set of interactions that create fact patterns that you can

rely on to make judgments going forward. And so from that I said, at the time, they are only really maybe four principal M and A shops, Goldman being one that I thought actually that you can get better training there than anywhere else. And Goldman at the time had really prided itself on this teamwork dynamic, and some of these other firms at the time, if you worked for a partner in M and A, that's the partner you worked for for the next four or five six years.

And if you were favored, then you do great, and if you were not, it'd be tough sledding, right. And you look at those departments, there are very few people who look like y'all and me and say, well will I get that experience? And while Goldman was not perfect, like no place is, you would work for multiple partners, so you work on a deal with this partner, and a deal and this partner at the same time, so it was you'd have six seven different partners or vice

presidents that you worked for. And so there you had a chance what I call build your fat pattern of experiences through the lens of different practitioners. And I thought that would actually enhance my ability to be expert at that craft. So that's why I went to Golden Sachs.

all these things. Before they started, what was that like trying to explain to the investment the banking side, like, hey guys, this is my expertise.

Goodyear or craft. Very few companies then were actually you know in well, they wanted to, but they didn't necessarily have the investment resources to implement computing capacity into the environment. So you guys are digital natives, Okay, my generation are digital immigrants. And so at the time, if you wanted to use the computer, it was like one thousand dollars

for a half hour of computer use. You'd have to sign up for it, and you could go use it, and it'd be somebody standing behind you waiting for your thirty minutes to come up, and then they'd come on and you have to go sign up again to use the computer because it was that scarce of a resource. And so one of my early projects, for instance, I was working uh and running a plant in in you know, Niagara Falls, New York, and I was responsible for implementing

some computer systems and computer control systems. So the way systems work before that were analog and there were individuals. So what would happen is, you know, you're going to run a process and you're going to charge the reactor with you know, with the reagents, with the catalyst, and you kind of you know, put the steam on and stir it and then the reaction would kind of take off, right, and depending upon the rates of change and all that, you sometimes you need to cool it or heat it up.

So there'd be what I call there would be an you know, a an episodic observation of the event, and then you'd have an episodic you know, intervention. So you change something and it would change the control dynamic. And like I said, if you weren't the control or operator, wasn't at lunch or you know, talking about football or whatever it is, every dynamic was different because it wasn't consistent because you had that human engagement as the actual

control system. Well, if you put a computer system in, it's measuring those observations thousands of times a second, and you could also then put in systems of control where you could have interventions thousands of times a second. So you went from control dynamics that look like this to control dynamics that look like this. And for mathematicians, everything

under the curve is waste. Right, So now you look at that and like so and first implementation I did of that of the plant, increase the productivity of that plant by twenty six percent. Okay, that's a whole shift a day by putting a control system. So now you understand the power and the productivity that software actually brings to a plant. Now take that and put it in an office managing an insurance claim. You're an insurance adjuster.

You know, the car is wrecked. Back in the day, you'd have to go to a place and they kind of take pictures of it and write it up, put it in an envelope, send it to somebody in the home office, and maybe you were on vacation, sit on that desk for a week, maybe got to the right person, and then you say, well, you know, you didn't do some right, so you got to send it back to you and ask more questions. And that happened back and forth, and from that you to justin and say, okay, here's

here's how much the you know, approximate value is. You send me a check. I get mad because it wasn't enough to fix the car. And that was the whole process. How things now introduce a computer in that environment?

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So software is now the most productive tool introducing our business environment last fifty years on like we will be for the next fifty. So now I go to Goldman Sachs. They're now in the process of you know, we're using different spreadsheet programs. You guys don't remember because you've used Excel all your life, haven't you. You've been paying Microsoft thirty years for a project for a product that you

use back in the day. There are five or six others, the one called Lotus, there's Multiplan, there's Physical Asterisk, a bunch of different and so there's always a fight ask to which one of these programs you would use. But once you consolidated on one, the efficiency of not having to move you know, my project which I did in Lotus to yours as didn't Excel because we're working on a team together. That's another efficiency that came out of

the system by consolidating. So I'm now at Goldman, I'm now working on a bunch of different M and A deals and started to see what I'll call the recognition

of efficiency that can come from consolidation on platforms. One of what we would compare these to put these things together called common stock comparisons, where you get up in the morning and you'd have to put together forty five different stock comparisons for work that you're doing, and you're sitting across the aisle working on or you know, down the hall working on something similar and you're doing exact same work he's doing. You just don't know that you're

doing it, and you're both see all the inefficiency. Whereas now, once you have done that, how do I share it with you? And how do you you know you can do this part in you that but it makes it much more efficient. Well, computer systems do that. So now we're getting more efficient and how we're processing deals and applications in all industries and so now it's the dawning of what is technology being mainstam stay in real So the head of our department calls and he's like, I

think I want to start a tech group. He's like, would you like to be part of that? I said, yeah, So where is it? We're going to do this in California? He wanted to do it in LA. I said, no, the suit in San Francisco. He lived in LA and I'm like, well, Samcisco's kind of you know, Silicon Valley all that sort of stuff. I said, that's where I go.

So we agreed. I was our first M and a banker on the ground focused on technology for Golden Sachs in San Francisco, Okay, and so so from there I advised, you know, like I said, build companies like Apple Computer and Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard and eBay and Yahoo. And what was amazing to me because again it's the dawning of an industry. That's how they all did things differently.

In the world of a chemical engineer, if you went into almost any production facility where they're you know, an ortho cracker where they're taking oil and making different types of fuel and gas, they're all pretty much the same because over years they figured out what's the most efficient way to do it. But that's not how the software industry was. Everybody did it differently, their go to market, their product development, okay, because.

It's a system. It's an engineered system. So my going out to Silicon Valley, like all things in life, you got to look at what informs you and what creates the basis for the activities or the actions you now bring forward into your work product, and that's what it is. How do you bring engineering efficiency to the management operations of software companies? So that's the narrative and that's what my actions have been against from a Vista perspective.

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We're going to put a process together to now communicate those ideas. Great, and so you start off and social media because it's free, and I say, well, how do I now push this out more broadly speaking beyond trying to get followers? And you may say maybe I should buy some advertising. Where am I going to get this money? Okay? The vast majority of investment capital even today is still out of the debt markets. So unfortunately, seventy percent of

our communities don't actually have a branch bank. So depend upon where you live, there's no bank that you have a banking relationship with. It you can go and say, hey, I need ten thousand, fifty hundred thousand dollars because look at how you know and they don't understand your business. I've got eight hundred and forty thousand followers, and if I had twenty thousand dollars, I could rent a studio okay, five times a month and get a million followers or

two million followers. And by having two million followers, I can go get advertisers who will pay me to have access to you know, my my people, right and if they pay me, I can now pay you back that money and then I can invest in more of my business make it growth. That's the capital cycle, and it's a virtuous one, but our community hasn't had access to capital. The next phase of that is like some of the banks are like, well, there's no hard assets because your

hard assets your hard work. So I'm not going to lend you any money. I'm not sure you're credit worthy, so you can't come to me. So enter the venture capitalists. The venture capitalists are designed to actually look at what it is you're doing in the markets that you participate in, and if you have more capital and in some cases know how and resources that they can hopefully bring to you because they've done this once or twice or one hundred times in that industry, they can show you. Yeah,

take that ten thousand dollars. Okay, don't buy advertising. But what I want you to do is actually build a platform where you can do your own streaming. It's more efficient long term and you make more money long term. And so that's advice you might get from them. And here's ten thousand dollars. Now, they're not going to necessarily ask for an interest rate like the bank spam you know, four, five, six, eight, ten, now twelve percent right in interest. They're going to ask

you for a percentage of the company. Say, and when you sell the company, you're not going own one hundred percent, You're going one hundred percent minus how much they bought.

That's venture capital. Okay. Now years later, you're now running a big platform, you got twenty million followers, you've got advertisers making eighteen fifteen million dollars a month in advertising revenues, and what you're not spending on your team and crew because you're going to give them all raises because they're phenomenal. You guys should I'm giving.

And you may say, well, why am I selling control of my business? Hey, you get the money, but be what you really want is my know how Why do founders come to us? Because we've done it so many times in enterprise software, I can bring remember those best practices. I was telling you, here's how you run your product development organization more efficiently, Here's how you run your go to market system more efficiently, Here's how you do your

contract administration more efficiently. Because you've never done that before, or you've done it, but you don't necessarily know the best way to do it, and we can share experiences with you that actually can enable you to do it now.

Not all private equity people bring that. Some just bring to capital and they say, I just want to own the business because if I buy the business and it's growing well over time, and they may put debt on the business, they're going to increase the value of that business. And then when they sell it, but they make the difference between where they sold it and what they bought it for, minus the debt that was in the company. So the way to think about got to think about

buying a house. If you go in, it's a house worth one hundred thousand dollars, I know you guys talk about this shell and a buyout person can come and say, all right, I'm gonna buy it for one hundred thousand, Okay, But then they go to the bank and they borrow sixty thousand, so they only have to put forty thousand in. Well,

because it's in a good neighborhood. Five years later, it's now worth two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand whatever it might be, right, or they fixed up the house, they went in, put a new porche in and put forty thousand in to really improve the value of the house. Now I can sell it for three hundred thousand. They sell it for three hundred, They pay back the sixty

thousand to the bank. They've been paying interest along the way right, and that difference they put it in forty The difference is what is profit and that's what profit equity firms do. Okay. As an owner of protty firm, that difference in value. If I borrowed the money or raised the money, I've got to pay by investors back and then I get a percentage of profits. So that's how that works. So it's just a different form of capital.

five times already. Right, And now I bring that intellectual property into the company and say, here's how we're going

to design this a little differently. Here's we're going to change your compensation plans for your salespeople to actually incentivize them to give you more stable revenues or or or you know, more visibility into the future revenues and earnings of that business that you may not have figured out or may not figure out because you may not be in an environment a circle of people who have dealt with that before. And so that's why the expertise that we bring is often more valuable than the capital.

going through seven or eight different tracks. So if you're a CFO of a forty million dollar software company. You're sitting next to a CFO of a four hundred million dollar software company, sitting next to a CFO of a three billion dollar software company. You all are dealing with different things on the one hand, but you want to understand what you need to do to build your organization so you can support four hundred million dollars worth of growth.

And you want to understand what you need to do in your organization four hundred million so you can support a three billion dollar You're not going to get that anywhere else but at Vista, you see what I mean. Oh, and by the way, we do that for the product and technology groups as well, and we do it for separately, and we'll do it for our talent organization's talent development, and we'll do it for go to market. You see

what I mean. All of those are elements that are value add intellectual property best practices that we now share with the community of founders and executives in all of our portfolio companies. So it gets back into that efficacy, that efficiency I've talked about in engineering. Now I could hope that you could figure this out. I can invest in your company and hope you figure it out and if you don't afire you. But we don't take that approach.

We say, let me give you tools and systems, and let me actually equip your management team with tools in systems so they have a higher probability of being successful as opposed to let me just hope you get it right or you figure it out. You see what I mean. That's the difference in how we approach the market. And that's in some cases difference between i'll call it highly skilled tuned investors, either private acuity or venture capital, and those who are just providing access to capital.

I need to start doing this for myself. Was that always in the mindset or did that develop as you created more efficient systems and said, wait, I'm saving them this, I'm saving them this, maybe I can create this for myself.

an engineer. Okay, so I was working for a company who was actually a company called craft Urn the foods, and in that case I was responsible for changing and hopefully enhancing One of our best products was a company called Maxwehouse, which is coffee, right and coffee blended coffee

is made up of different forms of coffee. We talked about you know, rap coas or busses and maybe five or six different types of coffee roasted to a certain amount, ground to a certain amount that give you a flavor profile that you want to be consistent everywhere you go in the world, so no matter where you went, it tastes the same. Okay, this is backcnated when Maxweus was

the largest coffee distributor on the planet. Okay, Well, one of my projects was to figure out a way to an essence enhance the flavor profile at a lower cost. And I did that, and I'll spare you all the details. I told you got some of the details. Let your audiencity know all that nerdy stuff, but U And in doing that, I was able to save the company fourteen cents a pound on every pound of coffee that we manufactured. And we were manufacturing tens of millions of pounds a

month of coffee, okay. And I told you guys that I chuckled because I got a great little plaque out of it to give me a thousand dollars in an award. And that was wonderful. And I started to understand that Ernest checked this out.

all my young black entrepreneurs, you must tap in. Direct Deposit seeks to answer the questions, what's money going to do for me?

at the give get analysis. They're saving you ten, twelve, fourteen million dollars a year, and you know, I got paid the same thirty four thousand dollars a year whatever it was at the time, which I thought was more money than could ever make because that was more money my dad ever made in his career, Okay, as a principal, right, And so then you start thinking about is there a different utility of my time that I should be thinking about?

And ultimately what I actually realized. And you know, we chat about this so earlier through my interactions with with with John Newtondahl and Ray McGuire and these sort of folks the power of capital versus labor, And we just talked about labor and you all as labored to create this platform. At some point you realize if I had a different quantum of capital, you could reach more people on accident than you do flying around and doing events.

If you utilize that capital efficiently, you see to mean, And so that's kind of the next evolution. And yeah, right, okay, And in some cases you learn it. In some cases someone tells you right, and and if you get it right, you then can do it at increasing scale and efficiency. And we call it the unit economics of your productivity go up with every time you do it as opposed to down. Right, So those are the dynamics that informed

me on understanding capital. And one of the things we talked about, you know, capital markets are just basically equilibrium systems. That's what we learn in chemical engineering is understanding equilibrium systems. It's actually the same thing in some respects. You've got difference out of inputs and outputs, but what is the equilibrium system that you're actually evaluating and understanding and in some cases changing the dynamic of the control in those

equilibrium systems to make you more efficient outcome. So they're not as far apart as you think if you look at it through the right lens.

us the college, get educated, go manage this capital. But yet they don't get the capital to manage that, as you know, flows back in our communities at much higher rates than almost anything else, because as you do better, you typically are enhancing your community at much higher rates

than non people of color. So those are the things we you and me have to make people aware and drive these pension plans to make sure they're distributing their fair share to the constituency base that makes up those who are contributing point number one and in point number two to the highest performers, which when you look at we have a group called the NAIIC that's been doing this work for twenty years evaluating our firms perform at a higher rate, a higher level with lower loss ratios.

Can we talk about that, Yeah, sure so, I mean we've been doing this. When we do these studies, we have over the last twenty years, especially in the private equity business, returned more capital, had fewer losses, lower loss ratios than majority white firms, but yet we get less than one point four percent of the allocation of capital. We've got the studies and we go take these studies and we you know, it goes in shows. These consultants are in there and they kind of like, yeah, it's

going to take some time. Well that's a problem. Okay. Those are the things that destabilize communities if they feel there is injustice and the way people are treated and it's not a meritocracy. That's a dynamic that has to change, and there are certain leaders who are doing a good job of that. You know, somebody criticize Honestly, New York does a pretty good job of it. New York State,

New York City is to call out. And we're sitting here now right in understanding that, and you know, comptrollers and treasurers, you know, Adopotly being one and Lander being the newest one in New York City, understand that and have been driving the programs in that regard. And that's why some of the return to some of the highest in the US because they recognize that fact. And there's some states that don't recognize and don't do anything about it,

and they've got some of the lowest returning plans. You see what I mean. It's economic necessity at the end of the day, and it's fairness that's actually going to move our society forward.

are disproportionately affected by having board band deserts. Not a topic that I've heard discussed, you know, nationally or even in you know, amongst communities, about how that affects students long term and how it affects communities and EDGUC.

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years ago, twelve years ago? Okay? Digitizing everything every industry. This is again, this whole Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the economic landscape of this planet. But yet our HBCUs eighty percent of them are in broadband deserts. How are you going to participate if you don't have access to the tool of progress, the principal tool of progress today

in the economy. And that is a big problem. And that's one that we decided to take on, and I decided to take on and bring some partners to take on to go get after this. We have to enable all of our citizenry to participate in this next generation of opportunity. The US today, you own, our borders are basically closed, okay. You know, we've got immigration laws and political conflict that in essence, we are not importing labor anymore. And as we need to grow as society, we need people.

I just tell people the biggest issue, the most scarce asset we have on this planet today are software programmers. There's eight billion people on the planet, there's only twenty six million of us who write software for living, and it is that software that is required to digitize every industry on the planet. Automotive, healthcare, finands, banking, all of it is now requiring tools and systems that are digital

in nature. But yet one of the greatest infrastructures for training people historically Black college and universities eighty percent of them don't have broadband access where our kids can learn the tools of this craft in a way that they can participate effectively long term. And if we don't get this right now, eight years from now, ten years from twenty years from now, the market of change and opportunity and transformation will have been gone so far that we

won't be able to participate in this next way. We didn't get to participate in the great economic opportunity that was America in owning land, Okay, many of our families were unpaid labor okay, which created massive wealth. And then you had gi Bill Home Set Act, Southern Home Set Act.

We didn't participate in that proportionately. We didn't get a chance to participate in the asset accretion in real estate because of redlining in those dynamics, and so now here we are Corporate America started to expand, it has taken a while for us to get and we're still not even there. Fair shit year of opportunity to participate as professionals environment and now you're going through the fourth Industrial Revolution. If we don't participate here, it's going to be the

same dynamic. That's why it's so essential that we equip our children and our communities with the tools, and they need to insist that those tools be provided and insist that they learn and train and develop ways to participate in this economy, in this digital economy. What percentage of your viewership you think is listening on some digital device or digital ablement. Yeah, your business relies on it, So why shouldn't your community participate in it? And right now

those schools are being starved at those resources. You can say conscious, unconscious, whatever it is, but the fact is

it is there. That's what we have to do about it. Look, I'm going to do my part, and you guys got to continue to do your part and make sure that your viewership demands that our HBCUs have access to broadband, every one of them, not just the big ones, every one of them, so that our kids could learn and participate and have the ability to now take what they know and deliver business systems solutions into their community to make their small and medium businesses in their community and

the education of the kids in our community more effective than what it is today.

so that doesn't create the burden in that process. What I learned is over sixty percent of African American wealth goes towards servicing student loans. Okay, you come out, You've got sixty eighty one hundred and twenty thousand dollars with the student loans. Now you're paying interest on those loans. Something happens in your family, don't use your job, whatever, And now that compounds and it can be decades before

you've paid off those student loans. That inhibit your ability to buy stocks, bonds, a house, invest in a business, you see what I mean. And I was like, well, that's just unconstable because most of the student loans are paying back to the United States government. Yeah, African Americans paying money back to United States government to pay our student loans. How y'all feel about that?

much as corresponding white students. So let's make sure that the interest rate is below. Parent plus loans at a minimum, at a minimum and every now and you have life interruptions. Okay, Well, if there's a life interruption, you know, parent ailing, we've got to go back take care of that parent. Then we can actually stop those payments in that period of time. Parent plus now you're gonna pay whether you work it or not. And then compounds and all that, so you

can stop it during that period of time. And if you decide to go work in a community to be a teacher, like you work right, okay, and you're making below a certain amount, but you're doing good for the community. You do that for twenty years and that's forgiven. But rather than pay that money back to the government, it pays back into the fund, and then that fund can

relend that capital and that's a virtuous cycle. Okay. So that's a Student Freedom Initiative is okay, And so that our students can borrow from this fund and they pay back into that fund, they can be reborrowed. So now you're taking care of your own community through your work in that regard, that's what it is.

enable the equitable opportunity. And listen to the words equable opportunity in the communities that support your business. Right, if you are in a healthcare business, for instance, so why not take that and invest that in telemedicine solutions for communities don't have access. Right. If you're in the banking business, invest that in digital banking in the communities that don't have banks. My community that I grew up in didn't

have a branch bank. Okay, if you're in the supermarket business, two percent of that to go to providing access to high quality foods low costs. In mention, my community I grew up in did not have a supermarket. Still doesn't think about that. Right, We had to drive across down or go to local communience store where the prices are

three four five X. You see what I mean. So that's what the initiative is designed to do, is to bring a consciousness to how you can actually enable citizenry to have opportunities to participate in that case, in our economy as full citizens. That's what it's designed it.

continue to expand your voice. And we talked about this earlier this morning, the importance of you thinking about bringing scale to this platform and leave behind so that the youth that hear you or the parents that hear you can point their youth, do your messages, your tools, and bring build systems for people to get more financially literate and enabled to be more effective in achieving their goals, which most people want financial independence and some freedom in

their lives. Uh. And you all have a wonderful and great platform and I sincerely mean that, and I congratulate you. Just continue to think about how you scale it effectively inefficiently. So good luck on that. And if I can never be helpful, you know, just a text away. Sure.

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