Raising money is extremely tough and sometimes ends in failure, but it’s also one of the most important parts of starting certain businesses. To learn more about what experts have done to raise their money, we spoke with serial entrepreneur and investor Jamey Harvey, DataTribe investor and entrepreneur John Funge, and Modscore founder Mike Modica.

ABERMAN: So, what makes fundraising such a painful process?

MODICA: One of the reasons I started Modscore is, the thing that makes it the most painful is that most founders and entrepreneurs don’t realize they’re in a buying/selling process. You’re not literally selling your company, but you’re convincing people of the concept, and you have to understand your buyers. And over time, back in the 90s, buyers were looking for product, a little revenue, and some other metrics. I’d call them financial investors. Over time, the guys in San Francisco have kind of taken over, and they’re closer to what I’d call market investors. They’re looking to throw bigger money at owning a market, and they’re not looking at the same metrics financial investor look at.

So particularly here in this area, I think people pitch their deals, and for me, there’s something happening. There are so many seed companies being funded now across the world. Thousands and thousands. But the data will show you the data for A and B rounds, which they really need, is going down. But the amount per round is going up. So, big funds, big capital, the partners haven’t changed so they need to deploy more capital. So, what you see is this bifurcation, a huge hole in the market. Lots of seed, lots of later-stage growth, but the middle growth is a lot harder to get.

ABERMAN: So the big pain point for an entrepreneur is that they’re growing a business to satisfy customers, but having a business that’s a financial asset may be a different thing? Jamey, what’s your experience?

HARVEY: I think what people don’t know about raising money is, while you’re raising money, you’re investing your life. All your time and passion, and all attention you could be spending on family or your well-being, you’re pouring it into going out and talking to people who don’t understand what you do, and having them tell you no all the time. So, that creates a kind of stress people don’t understand. When we got our first big break at my first company, Digital Addiction, while we were in the process, two painful things happened. One, the guy I worked with, his virtual CFO company got crammed down in the round, so my friend got 30,000 dollars taken away from him. Another is, an investor’s cockatoo bit me in the middle of my presentation, and took a big chunk out of my hand. At which point they said, you’re funded, the bird loves you. So it was funny. The bird liking me was a big part of connecting with that investor.

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ABERMAN: So for you Jamey, it was really the personal aspect, giving up your life, the sacrifices, and dealing with, frankly, eccentricity, to get money?

HARVEY: And delivering bad news to people. Like when you invested in one of my companies, and I had to tell you it was shutting down.

ABERMAN: And I bit you!

HARVEY: All kidding aside, I know founders who’ve killed themselves, or ended up institutionalized. It’s tough.

ABERMAN: Exactly. Startups and entrepreneurship are such binary spaces, and they attract binary personalities. That’s one of the biggest challenges I had as an investor, separating people who were a little off-the-wall enough to take a challenge from people who were truly off-the-wall. Part of the due diligence is ensuring an entrepreneur is sane.

HARVEY: And if you’re a woman, unfortunately, you’ll probably even be sexually harassed. If you’re a person of color, you’ll probably face discrimination. And I don’t mean by everybody, but out of the thirty angel investors I dealt with in the 90s, at least two have been exposed as treating people this way.

FUNGE: Entrepreneurship, there’s a side to it that can’t be fully rational. If you’re purely rational, you probably won’t be an entrepreneur. From my experience, I’ve had a unique opportunity to be on both sides of the table. I’m a multi-time entrepreneur in the DC area, and then a few years ago I began working at DataTribe, and we’re a venture investor, startup studio, and foundry, primarily focused on cybersecurity and AI-intensive companies. It’s interesting, I think one thing that makes it challenging for entrepreneurs is, by and large, founders are super passionate, knowledgeable, deep in certain discipline, but not necessarily deep in venture.

One only needs to look at the NVCA docs, which I encourage any entrepreneur to do. There are some very clever people that work in finance, as we know, and they’ve been tinkering on deal structure– even in this conversation, you guys are using terms the average, starter entrepreneur may not even know. There’s this massive knowledge asymmetry, so one of the things I’d encourage is that entrepreneur needs to target their investors. One ounce of targeting will save you massive amounts of effort. The other thing is, try to understand the business of venture. I’ve raised money for a few different companies, and my eyes have only recently been opened to learning so much about the inside view of venture. The better you can mutually empathize with what the VC is trying to do, the better you can align with their goals.

ABERMAN: That’s something said at a lot of podiums a lot of times, and I think entrepreneurs are reticent to listen to who they see as rich people on that. But at the end of the day, from my perspective, Amplifier never wrote a check for more than half a million dollars. And I’d get emails saying, we’re raising a ten million dollar round. Good for you! I help start companies, I don’t go do later-stage funding.

MODICA: Part of the reason I started Modscore is for that. When I was consulting, I spent 80 percent of my time telling people most of the stuff they were told is a myth. That’s a real problem. So, there are buyers and sellers. If you’re an entrepreneur going to a buyer, and they’re telling you, you shouldn’t raise more than 3 million dollars, but there are funds that write checks bigger than that, it’s a lie. They don’t know how much you actually need, and you shouldn’t necessarily listen to that.

ABERMAN: They’re telling you what you need based on what they can give you.

MODICA: Right. So, the industry is almost a monopoly on a lot of stuff. Now, people like you and your company, you’re part of the problem right now, in a good way. You’re creating this huge amount of really, really well-run companies. They’re well-run, getting capital, half a million, million, two million dollars. Which is creating this huge demand for these A and B rounds. When I talked to Barry Eggers, who was head of the NVCA, he said: We don’t do 8 million like we used to do. We’re doing 25, or 2.

ABERMAN: What’s really interesting is, the venture capital industry is so bifurcated in that way. There are people still very interested in garage inventors in that way. We’ve never ha more money in this VC space, but it’s going into larger and larger funds that need to invest in WeWorks and other huge projects, hundreds of millions at a time. If you’re an entrepreneur, what do you really have to do well to raise the capital you need?

HARVEY: You have to get out and have a lot of conversations. There’s a bit of a random walk element to it. I see entrepreneurs encouraged not to talk to this kind of person or that kind of person, and you do have to be careful with your time. But sometimes I’d get invited to talk to an investment bank, and clearly they weren’t in our asset class, but they want to get educated about virtual objects, which turned into a billion-dollar industry we invented.

ABERMAN: Often, an entrepreneur can have a great idea at the wrong moment.

HARVEY: Exactly. We were always too early. They’ll write that on my gravestone. But those investment bankers helped us make introductions, introduced us to people. There were a lot of random connections that got made that led to raising money.

ABERMAN: So, take a lot of meetings?

HARVEY: I later tried not doing that. I didn’t get the kind of benefits there that I got that I had make through networking so hard earlier in my career. It became a problem.

ABERMAN: But that might run counter to what Mark is about to say: that you have to be tactical.

MODICA: Yeah. So, there are three problems. One is data. There’s a lot of bad data. Financial models are bad, decks are bad. Those are all for financial advisers, but we’re doing something different. We’re creating new data where there is none, because that’s what I saw being bought in Silicon Valley. They were buying vision, the ability to go really big, then go really small and extrapolate from simple data. So, we’re building a system around being able to create data someone wants to see. Two is speed: you need to be fast. Harvey may have down a random walk, but he did it fast, and it’s getting harder and harder to do that.

Especially because the bigger money is concentrated, and we’re trying to get to a place where it isn’t so much like that. Three is connectivity. Are you connected, targeting the right stuff? There are funds in Silicon Valley you’ve never heard of that would be all the capital in D.C. There’s this weird bifurcation separating normal funding from these supergiant rounds. How do you get to that if you have this big idea? Because everyone you invest in is going to say they have a big idea. They’ll all say it’s a billion-dollar idea. So for us: your deck sucks, no one is funding a deck. Your financial model is outdated, no one is funding that. You need something different.

ABERMAN: So we should go broad, but you need a tactical view. John, my experience as an investor is that I want people showing up at my door early in the process and taking money from me.

FUNGE: Yeah. One thing that’s important to keep in mind is when you are entering this relationship, you’re putting together hundreds of pages of legal documents that bind you together until the company exits or goes bankrupt. So, there is a kind of courtship that goes on, and it’s important that the chemistry works and you work together well. There’s a mutual evaluation going on. Like Jamey was saying, you have to go hard at itm but I’d add one thing: you need a lot of targeted, quality meetings. If it’s possible, talk to people who have the authority to make a decision. A lot of people are relatively junior, don’t have much authority to actually make decisions, and they can waste a lot of an entrepreneur’s time. As an entrepreneur, there’s a little bit of theater.

While I was prepping for the show, I thought, of the myriad entrepreneurs we’ve met at DataTribe the past few years, who really stood out? There’s a bit of a show involved. The VCs are looking at that and asking, how can they compel me, and therefore compel customers? Part of that is being prepared, and understanding who you’re talking to, your market, your competition. It’s really not good if you’re in a meeting and someone with a light understanding of what you’re doing can pull up a competitor you didn’t know about. That’s basic homework you have to do before you enter the process. Realistically, it’s very dynamic, and you can’t always be fully prepared. But you want to be very targeted, and prepare the best you can, and have a little showmanship with how you do it.

HARVEY: When I said random walk, at the end of the day, you’re doing that so you can find the right person. I’ve found the wrong people before. When I met you, Jonathan, I’d targeted you.

ABERMAN: You were kind of stalking me.

HARVEY: Totally. Because you were the only investor in the area that made the kind of investments I needed. But, I knew that because I’d talked to thirty other people and they’d all told me the same thing. At the end of the day, you’re trying to get to the right relationship, because those wrong ones, you ask yourself, how did I end up with them? I went to an investor group, a breakfast, and my deck breaks down. I say, I’ll just do the pitch off the top of my head, and I do my best pitch I’ve ever done in my life. No deck. Everyone ran to invest.

FUNGE: Oftentimes a conversation, no presentation, can be the most effective.

MODICA: I don’t think this is the way to do it. I think it’s completely wrong. There are thousands of companies out there, I’ve been doing pitch competitions for 20 years. I can’t take someone and teach them to do what Jamey does with theater. It shouldn’t be about that. It’s important, but it shouldn’t be about theater. I’ve had people get 25 million dollars in funding because my CEO and my investor both had fathers in Vietnam. And that connected them. At Modscore, we’re doing video pitches. We’re scripting you out so there’s no random chance that you have a bad pitch. And by doing that, and showing seven simple questions, even when they go off and do their own pitches, now they’re prepared and they know how to do it.

The second thing is, 100 percent, entrepreneurs don’t understand that you’re selling your company. So, you only need to know one thing. Doesn’t matter how much of the company they’re buying, there’s a thing called protective provision. A VC, you can’t raise capital, sell the company, or do anything without their permission, whether they own ten, twenty, or forty percent. And if you get the wrong guy with the wrong fund, and the wrong amount of money, who puts you on the wrong trajectory, you’re dead.

HARVEY: Even if you’re in a smaller fund and don’t have those provisions, if the person calls you every day and rides you about specifics, and they haven’t done anything on the internet before, and they’ve only run a factory, they may actually pull you down. And if you end up with six of those guys, you’re dead.

ABERMAN: An entrepreneur who isn’t thoughtful, isn’t tactical, is sloppy and goes about things in a halfway manner is not likely to raise capital.

FUNGE: I think that’s right. You see lots of these. Theater and presentation is important, but being a founder is really hard. It can be very frustrating. One of the very basic tests, though, is: can you really do what you say you’re going to do, at a high quality level? It comes across in small, subtle ways, and the details matter. You just have to pay attention to the details, and not everything has to be super fancy or polished, but you have to pay attention. It’s super easy to say to just go out and raise money when you’re ready, but how do you know when you’re ready? And so, there’s a delicate process of bulletproofing yourself with trusted investors or entrepreneurs to harden yourself and find out.

MODICA: I’m a contrarian. Around the D.C. and East Coast, it’s all about revenue, and they say you can’t raise funds without it. I’ve broken this several times, and seen Silicon Valley funds spend way more on similar projects. So, there’s people who are winning out there, and the winning guys are going big and doing things based on a future vision.

While just starting a business can seem like an exhausting task, the real hard part comes with building and growing it. On this EXTRA episode, we speak with Pat Sheridan, co-founder of Modus Create; Bobby Christian, COO of deepwatch; and Glen Pendley, CTO of SecurityScorecard about how to ensure your business can actually scale.

ABERMAN: When you all started out your businesses, what was the hardest part about starting?

CHRISTIAN: I think just making the decision. Usually something happens. In my case, I was with a company that had been acquired. We’d built a successful services division, incredible margin, we were growing rapidly, but it was part of a public product company. So, that product company decided to basically shut down the services business. So, that became an opportunity for me to go back to the CEO of the company and say, there’s still a market need and demand here. It may not be good for your margin, but that led to an opportunity to actually start a company to fill that void. So, it was almost like a forced situation, more than just an opportunity to start my own company.

ABERMAN: Certainly not the stereotype of a guy, a dog, and a business plan.

CHRISTIAN: Exactly. In fact, each of us has been a part of very successful companies. I’ve had some incredible mentors who built companies I was a part of, and I was a sponge. One of my biggest lessons learned was, when you see someone doing something well inside a company, come alongside them and ask them to mentor you. Just beyond what your normal job function might be, seek out other people that can help you build a capacity you may not have.

ABERMAN: How about you, Pat, Glen? Does your experience match the stereotype?

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SHERIDAN: No, not at all. When I talk to other folks who have founded companies, or to Jay, my business partner, we always use the term “accidental CEO.” So, for me, I hit this point around fifteen years ago into my career being very much on the emerging tech side, where you start to realize you know a lot of stuff. And, you know a lot of people who have gone on from early startups you’ve been a part of, and you have this network you didn’t realize you had. What I realized is, I knew a lot of people who wanted to do work with me. And so, the hardest part was just becoming self-aware and realizing okay, am I an LLC? a C-corp? How do I pay myself? We often have our areas of domain expertise that are core to the business being successful, but being able to do the things that enable you to have a business can be the most challenging when you’re getting off the ground.

PENDLEY: I think my opinion’s in line with both Bobby and Pat on this. And to touch on something Bobby said in regards to mentorship and being around experts, I’ve been very fortunate in my career to be involved with founders of companies who have been successful in starting, in some cases, garage-like startups versus serial entrepreneurship. In my experience it comes from the network, the people you know, and taking advantage of that sort of mentorship.

ABERMAN: I think network’s a big thing, and I want to come back to that. Before we go there, I am curious what your life experience has been. Is it harder to start a business, or scale it, and when did you realize one was harder than the other?

CHRISTIAN: Making the decision to start something is probably one of the hardest things to do. People delay it, even people that really want their own business, so I think making the decision and actually starting it is harder. I think if you find the right people to surround yourself with, find the right mentorship and advisory board, I think they can help you with each of the steps along the way. But I think making that decision psychologically, to do it, is actually harder, quite frankly, for me, at the beginning.

ABERMAN: That’s surprising, I feel the exact opposite. What about you guys?

PENDLEY: I was going to say, I actually feel the exact opposite on this from a tech and product perspective. Assuming that the business is in place, the very quick hack-things-together, do whatever you need to do to get the next deal, you don’t need as much discipline in place to continue to get that next deal closed. Once you start getting critical mass, and have to build things for scale, and put in a discipline process, and really start growing out? To me, that is astronomically harder than just beginning.

SHERIDAN: I think about how I actually met you, Bobby, and I was five years in with a company I’d started as an independent consultant, we had about ten people, I’d just finished business school and thought I knew all the things as it related to business. And after meeting you, and the companies you were involved in scaling, I realized: in order for me to grow, I’m going to have to fire myself, or get a company to see value as a complementary piece to what they’re doing with the business that I couldn’t get above ten people. And being able to surrender that, and help accelerate someone else’s run, you can’t imagine what you’ll learn and the experience you’ll get. And I think as it relates to the scaling side of a business, on the service side, like I said before, I think it’s easy because you’re good at something. If people want it, a computer and a network can keep you in business, but may not get you above ten people. But at a certain point, all the MBA stuff, when you get to five million in revenue, all of those things about discipline, as Glen mentioned, of running a business matter. And I think for where we are in the scaling, at Modus, essentially we had to fire ourselves to move to a more corporate structure, whereas before everything was going through the founders. You have to make the switches from hero to systems power. When I’d heard and witnessed from my network here in D.C., that a lot of people exit after ten million, or they exit between ten and twenty, many times it’s because that’s where you’re shifting from hero to systems power. And that can be a very painful thing, and you have to invest a lot in it.

ABERMAN: I think that’s the biggest challenge that many entrepreneurs face: we start a business that interests us because we see an opportunity, people come and join because they want to work with us. But you reach a point in an organization where you literally don’t have enough hours in the day to communicate with everyone all the things that need to happen. So, you have to have organizational structure. HR, strategy, product managers, and all these things. A lot of us don’t like that kind of structure, which I think is why a lot of people sell. How did you all get over that, not knowing everyone that works for you?

CHRISTIAN: Patrick said something interesting, I’ll tell a little story about Patrick that relates to that. What I find fascinating is, he started his company because he was really good at what he did. People were drawn to him. He got to ten people, but Mike Tyson says that a great strategy is phenomenal until you get punched in the face. And so, I think Patrick was getting frustrated, because he got punched in the face. He couldn’t quite get through the threshold of ten people. So when we did meet, he knew he didn’t have the sales side of the equation nailed, so to his credit, when he said he fired himself, he asked: what structure do I need to put in place in order to scale this business? He was interested in and passionate about growing a business, versus the thing he was doing. Which is very different. You can be really good at something, have a lifestyle business, make a ton of money and be very successful. But if you truly want to scale a business, you need all the components, from finance to marketing to sales to operations. And so, to Patrick’s credit, he fired himself, we actually acquired his company, and for about 12 to 18 months, we literally went up and down the corridor selling together. And he knew, at a certain point in time, when he got to the point where he knew he could do this as good or better than I could, he was out! And 18 months to the day, he came in, we got a cup of coffee, and he said, I’m out. And now, he’s been incredibly successful in his next venture, Modus, and I’ve been a part of that and watched him scale that.

ABERMAN: So effectively, he fired himself, then he fired you.

CHRISTIAN: Exactly. And it was one of the best moments of my life.

SHERIDAN: I remember talking to Glen, when I met him, and I asked, look, how do you be part of a company that gets acquired by one of the biggest companies in the world, and come up with ideas? And in this area, what I love about D.C., is that it’s a medium-sized pond with a lot of big fish. It’s a small city with a lot of big impacts. So, I remember talking to Bobby as I planned my next move, and he was like, have you heard of Mindshare? Or things like Foundercore, networking opportunities where I met you, Jonathan, for example. And then, part of that implicit contract is that the interview is the first year. The interview isn’t the interview, it’s seeing what happens. And so, being able to tap into his network as I was trying to build an advisory board, or I needed someone to lead sales, or asking, who have you worked with that I’d know? And I think that’s one of the hardest things for any entrepreneur, understanding the human side.

PENDLEY: For me, maybe it’s just the engineering side of me, I try to look at things as logically as possible. And scaling a company, millions of companies have done it. It’s a solved problem. And while every company has nuance and a unique experience, there’s no real reason to reinvent the wheel on this. So, I’m very data-driven, and I apply different things. If it’s not working, be open to change and try to be as efficient as possible, communicate as much as possible. So, with the success I’ve had, I just try to take a more logical approach and do what’s necessary to work.

ABERMAN: So, how do you know if you’re doing a good job scaling an organization?

CHRISTIAN: I’m addicted to the graphs that go up and to the right. If you’re scaling, the curves should be going up and to the right. They’re very easy metrics. What’s our revenue growth, gross margin, net profit, headcount, revenue per headcount? You look at that every morning when you wake up, then you go to the sales side and ask: what’s my total pipeline? Look at that funnel. It’s so easy to measure that, and that’s one of the things I love about growth: the problems have been solved, all you have to do is emulate the best, and ask what the dashboard’s telling you. You’ll know if you’re doing a good job, because at the end of each month, it’s X or Y, and it’s black or white.

SHERIDAN: I’ve been saying a lot to my team: there’s strategy by default and strategy by design. If the macroeconomics are in your favor, as Bobby said, your graphs will go high and right, but not because you’re doing anything. There are just a lot of folks who need what you have, and you’re not being challenged by someone who might be out-thinking you. I think there are certain rules of thumb, and one of the most important is that you need a co-founder. If I didn’t have a co-founder, there wouldn’t be a Modus right now, because I would have taken us over a cliff. So for me, I think about good problems, like if we don’t have enough people, or things that indicate that what your business was optimized to do is no longer working. And so, you have to start rethinking, and I think the faster your growth rate is, the faster you need to do it. And for us, since we’re a people-based business, we’ve seen this explosive headcount growth, and all of a sudden you’re replicating entire structures and getting close to one of those numbers that will drive when we need to do a big rethink. But what I try to do at the end of the day is say, how do we incorporate that into a management cadence? If there’s good or bad happening in the company, will they be identified in time to address them formally?

PENDLEY: At the end of the day, no matter what you’re building, you have customers. As long as everything you do internally is focused on driving customer success, the best possible customer experience, the growth will continue. You can organize your company around ensuring that the efficiency and execution that continues to drive those customer outcomes are in place, but the growth will continue as you continue delivering, and setting yourself up for success by focusing on customer outcomes.

ABERMAN: It’s fascinating. As I’ve taught entrepreneurship and scaling, when I ask, where does growth come from? I get a million different answers. I say back, guys, it’s really simple: growth comes from more people wanting your stuff than you can currently deliver. So, scaling opportunity comes from having a product or service people want to buy. I often think a CEO or founder is best evaluated by whether or not the lowest-level employee can explain the reasoning for the business, how the business executes, and have the words coming from them be consistent with the founders’ vision. What do you think?

SHERIDAN: I don’t know if that’s the case, because I think about the role of the CEO as being future-oriented. I need to excite the customers about what I’m investing in and building to match their needs, even the ones they don’t know they have yet. And when I often talk to folks, I get an answer relevant to the part of the company they see. If you’re in sales, you see it this way, another way in the client work. From my perspective, if you’re in client work, that may be the world where you need to understand the value for what you’re doing there. The bigger-vision things can become super esoteric, especially for an engineering-oriented business. Your outward-facing message speaks to the customer, and your internal message is to your team.

PENDLEY: But I do think that even from an engineering perspective, truly understanding a customer problem, having empathy for the customer, that’s where innovation comes from. Every vertical within a company has different goals and outcomes, and their vision is a little different, but I believe that if everyone is aligned to understand what problem the company is trying to solve, and what that problem is for the customer, good things are going to happen, growth is going to happen.

CHRISTIAN: Glen, you’re also in cyber, an incredible space right now, and I am as well. So, deepwatch is a security service provider, and Charlie Thomas is probably one of the best CEOs I’ve ever met in my life, and we’ve worked together on multiple companies. He’s the CEO, and I’m the COO. And going back to Patrick, I knew that he was doing a phenomenal job building Modus because of the questions he would ask me, and the problems he was solving each step of the way.

ABERMAN: Give me some examples.

CHRISTIAN: Absolutely. In the early stages of growth, they were more people-oriented, internally-focused. But as time went on, even in our last conversation, he started talking about making an impact globally, and how his model could be built out globally. He was talking about being outwardly-focused, and wondering how he could impact the community. How can this be connected to universities, so we can actually start building people inside universities? So, I think the problem he’s solving now is not, how do I scale my business? It’s about how he can make an impact.

PENDLEY: I know we keep praising Patrick here, but when I first met him, I was at McAfee, and I reached out to him, and the offerings and things Modus has at the time, just seeing him evolve over the last ten years, you could tell success when you know you have to evolve with the problem space. You can’t just have your heart and mind set on one specific problem, and it’s been really interesting seeing Patrick and Modus evolve with the needs of the market.

ABERMAN: It’s important to say, we can tell many similar stories in the tech community. And I think that’s probably the most important lesson: we all build networks not by “networking,” but by executing. People are always watching. A friend of mine, a lawyer, told me 18 months ago that I should meet Bobby for a particular reason. And I spaced until he walked into the studio and I remembered. That’s the kind of thing that happens. So, as an entrepreneur in this area, the most important thing is to establish very early on that you deliver, you execute, you don’t make stuff up, you don’t lie, and you’re honorable. And ten years later, you can tell a story about somebody, and that’s the ability to network.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. That’s so true. As big as the world is, this is a pretty small community. You only get one shot, and integrity is extremely important. So, think about deepwatch. It’s growing 100 percent per year right now. That’s the growth side of it, but there’s also the delivery side. You can get customers in, but part of scaling is actually delivering successfully and retaining them. If you don’t do a good job for your customers, you won’t be scaling effectively. So, it’s two-pronged, especially above 25 or 50 million in revenue. You could do two shows on this: how you grow, but also how you keep it successful.

ABERMAN: What’s your best advice for an entrepreneur getting ready to scale?

PENDLEY: So, one of the cofounders at Tenable, Renaud Deraison, invented one of the most widely-used security tools at 16. As Tenable was growing at the rate it was, there was a lot going on, and he told me: just don’t give an F. Which sounds odd, but the context around it is: there’s always so much going on. You can’t boil the ocean, you can’t solve ever problem. So, being able to really prioritize what will make the most impact on the business, is the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

SHERIDAN: Like I said about being an accidental founder or CEO, people who aren’t one of these think you have some magic knowledge. But my definition of a good founder or CEO is, your job is to not let your success outgrow your ability to run it. I think that, in many ways, with peer mentoring and earning new degrees, you have to always be learning about the next needs of your business.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah. There are a million things going through my mind, but one is this quote: brilliant tactics executed marginally will never outpace not-so-great ideas executed with passion. That always gave me the opportunity to say, no matter how brilliant someone else is strategically, I can always outwork the hell out of anyone. So, that’s probably my best advice: get ready to work your butt off.

While energy efficiency and renewable resources are incredibly important for the continued growth of business and the economy in the near future, it’s not considered very cost-efficient to take advantage of it. One of the people working to smash the assumption that renewable energy sources provide less bang for your buck is Daron Coates, co-founder of ThinkBox Group.

ABERMAN: What is ThinkBox?

COATES: ThinkBox develops sustainable projects, whether that be infrastructure, technology, or community. Sustainability, to us, is a promise to be here tomorrow. So, your building needs to be here, the people in the building need to function at a higher level. That’s what we’ve been able to do. We lower costs from utilities, and use that savings to finance capital improvements and community benefits.

ABERMAN: In the way that real estate developers develop properties, you’re like an energy conservation development.

COATES: We are. We’re able to go into a building and give them back money that they would ordinarily give to utility and repair companies. We find that very rewarding, and it’s also a lot of fun.

ABERMAN: Fun is important. How did you get into this?

COATES: It’s the only space that I’ve known. I was walking across campus at Morehouse College many years ago, and our legendary career placement director, Benjamin McLaurin, asked me to interview with Honeywell. I got a job there as they were just figuring out the space, got lucky, did really well. I ended up in D.C. running a business unit from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. They sent me to GWU’s business school to make me a better CEO candidate, and halfway through I quit and started this company.

ABERMAN: You’re coming to a theme I think is under-discussed here in town: you mentioned you learned about this field working at a few companies. So, we tend not to think of entrepreneurial people as developing their skills in companies, we tend to think of them as people who just start businesses. But that’s not a view you share.

COATES: I’m on the cusp. I’m a Gen X-er. I started in corporate, and everyone, when I was coming up, wanted to be in corporate. And then the world shifted, and utilities deregulated. So, that gave us a very unique opportunity. My partner is a physicist, who was working down at Night Vision Labs. So, with his help, we were able to see an opportunity and grab it, and get some traction.

ABERMAN: Does it ever frustrate you when you go off to a pitch event, where everyone is saying you have to be an entrepreneur, you need to live on ramen and live the dream? That’s so not how most of us become entrepreneurs. Does that frustrate you?

COATES: I don’t have time to be frustrated by that. I have enough to be frustrated about. But it’s certainly annoying, because I think, while the tech space is different, for us in the non-tech world, where profits and infrastructure still matter, it really helps to have a foundation of how you do things, how corporations are built. There’s a reason that corporations work, and there are some great things in them in terms of organizing and managing and mentoring and growing. And then, you can get a feel for where innovation can take place.

ABERMAN: It’s funny. I get frustrated when I hear people like Peter Thiel say not to go to college, or seeing people saying you don’t have to know anything, you can just figure it out as you go. That’s not been my life experience.

COATES: Again, maybe in tech. But for me, and Paul, my partner, it’s been fun working through the old school of figuring things out, failing, getting back up and putting models, processes and strategies in place to take advantage of market opportunities. And hopefully, do some good.

ABERMAN: Speaking of opportunities, tell me what you’re doing here in town to make a difference.

COATES: We work with the largest utility consumer and the largest landlord in D.C., the D.C. Housing Authority. They had about half a billion to a billion dollars in deferred maintenance they needed capital for. Paul and I were able to find about 130 million of that from their energy bill. So, we’ve been able to put that capital into stuff that’s very important: chillers, and boilers, and pumps, and motors, and fans. We’re working on one of the largest solar projects in the city with the Housing Authority. And their leadership has just been really helpful, from the board to the executive director. Working with them on sustainability for 20 years, being able to put together this groundbreaking project, they’re one of the most sustainable housing authorities in the world, and they’ve been very open to working with us to get there.

ABERMAN: Is this the corporate or development analogue to the companies that had me put solar panels on my roof, and then would reimburse themselves by the money they saved me by putting them on the roof?

COATES: Absolutely, but it goes deeper. What we’ve found is that single-measure contractors are great. Solar guys, and lighting guys, and finance guys. But as you start getting more and more need in terms of capital, you really need to find every dollar. So we look at everything, from pipes to repairs to equipment, and we’re able to bundle that together to get more bang for your savings buck.

ABERMAN: This seems, to me, like one of the biggest no-brainers in history. So, why wouldn’t anybody want to do this? Why isn’t this ubiquitous?

COATES: I’ve been asking that question for thirty years. The market has grown, now it’s annually a multi-billion dollar industry. There’s four trillion dollars of deferred infrastructure investment needed in the United States, and this is a really smart way to do it. Governments, I think, have taken to it a lot more quickly because their budgets are a lot tighter. Private sector folks, commercial real estate guys in particular, they have a lot of money. They know financing. So, we’re still trying to understand why they don’t want free money. Especially if it’s their money, that we’re taking back from utility companies and giving to them. We have been successful, Dantes Partners here locally is a very big, progressive, innovative affordable housing developer.

We’re also working with Vester Corporation, which is another national real estate organization, they’ve been great to work with. So, we think the traction is starting. There’s been a new thing recently called PACE, which is Property-Assessed Clean Energy, where now you can finance these on the asset value of your properties. So, we think that will help real estate guys be able to get in and out of projects more quickly, to have more flexibility in financing, increased asset value, and not have liquidity issues at close. So, we think that PACE will start to take off. It’s only been a few years that PACE has been going, but I think they’re already up to a billion dollars in financing nationally. We think that will break it open, but there’s no reason not to do it. I think it’ll become normal in the next few years, recapturing otherwise lost resources.

ABERMAN: It seems it’s not much different from a leaseback or a finance transaction, you’re capturing costs and rebating them. Is there some possibility that renewables or energy conservation efforts have been so politicized that people are shying away from them?

COATES: It’s interesting. This is the only space I’ve known, and I’ve never sold a project based on the environmental benefits. We’ve been able to take the equivalent of about 12,000 cars off the road since we’ve started here locally, we’ve reduced water use and carbon emissions. But primarily, at the end of the day, we’re saving you money and helping you put capital in your building. That’s how we approach it, and we think if we stay there, capital tends to be apolitical, so we’ll be in a good spot.

ABERMAN: I think that’s right. Capital goes where there’s returns. Money doesn’t create opportunity, it follows opportunity. So, what’s next for you and ThinkBox? It sounds like you have some interesting opportunities in front of you.

COATES: We do. I think capital is starting to find a space now. We have access to 2-3 hundred million dollars in capital this year that we’re trying to get committed by the third quarter, nationally. This is money we’re recapturing from utility and repair costs. So, that’s one of the biggest things. These are complex projects as well, so it takes some time for people to get their head around it. So, we need good people for that. We’re looking for very sharp people who can communicate, who are innovative, who can talk to decision-makers. That’s always challenging to find in our space. And then, I think a lot of our talent has gone to tech. When we were coming up, a lot of smart guys went to engineering and law, but I think now you’re seeing many people going to tech and finance. So, there’s a dearth of talent a little bit in our space, but I think that’s an opportunity for us.

Despite being one of the country’s havens for cybersecurity company development in the United States, D.C. is currently experiencing a dearth of VC funds catered specifically to raising them up for federal work. To learn more about one company that is taking charge, we spoke with Seth Spergel, vice president of emerging technology at Merlin International and team leader at Merlin Ventures.

ABERMAN: Well, tell our listeners: What is Merlin Ventures?

SPERGEL: Merlin is a company where we have partnerships with a lot of the leading cybersecurity companies, to help get them into the federal market. So, these are larger companies, some of which are public, some of which have been around for years. And what we saw was, there were a lot of earlier-stage companies that weren’t quite ready to work in federal, but potentially had really interesting technology that, when packaged with those larger companies, could really solve some interesting problems. So we set up a venture arm to find those companies, invest in them as a VC, pull them into our portfolio and be able to bring them to market together.

ABERMAN: How does a corporate venture investor look at things? Is it based on return, like a private fund, or are there different views?

SPERGEL: I think it depends on the firm, and also what it says on paper versus what they actually do. I think when you talk to a lot of corporate venture funds, in theory, they’re purely strategic. They’re looking for companies that have innovative technology that’s going to change the way they do business, companies they want to keep tabs on, companies they want a foot in the door with. When you actually sit down and talk to some of the people doing the investment for those companies, though, yes, that is their general charge, but they’re really trying to also find companies that are going to have outsize returns. And then, they back into how it fits within the company.

For us, it’s more of a balance. Obviously, we are doing this for financial reasons, but we’re really trying to find companies that match very well to our portfolio, because from our perspective, if we can’t sell the product, even if that company does very well with their exit, it’s something of a failed investment for us. We’re really looking to companies we can add a lot of value to on the sales side.

ABERMAN: From the standpoint of traditional VC models, it’s putting money to work with the expectation of making more, but arguably maybe you’re making better investments that are additive to the business strategy, because you have to ability to do due diligence within the industry, have domain expertise, and also have a ready selling channel.

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SPERGEL: Right. From our perspective, we can put the thumb on the scale. We can find companies that we think will do well, but then, if we can execute on the sales side for a startup, if you can add a few million in revenue for them, that can be a significant return for that startup on the investment side when they eventually have an exit.

ABERMAN: You were at In-Q-Tel previously, and that’s their model as well. So, this is pretty familiar to you.

SPERGEL: Yes. That was why I liked this opportunity. It was a chance to do what I had done at In-Q-tel, which I really enjoyed, but put my own spin on it, make some changes and improvements. And so, that’s why I jumped at this.

ABERMAN: So, what kind of investments are you making through Merlin Ventures?

SPERGEL: Merlin as a company is really focused on the cybersecurity space. The furthest we get from that is identity and access management. So, we’re really looking for things that fall into that space and complement that. A lot of our investments, because of the markets we sell into, are driven by what the federal government is looking for, and so, the CDM program, which really defines a lot of the cybersecurity strategy for the federal and civilian market, drives a lot of those investments. So for instance, an upcoming phase of that is around data security, so those are the types of things we’re looking at right now. There’s obviously a lot of federal initiatives around secure developments, SecDev ops tools, and then of course the better mousetrap. What is the better way of securing networks? Those are always of interest to us.

ABERMAN: What’s your model? Are you investing in earlier-stage, on your own, 500,000 dollars with other people? What does investing from Merlin Ventures look like?

SPERGEL: We’re pretty flexible. Our real requirement is that it’s a product we feel we can actually bring to market. So, we typically look for series A or B companies, where they’re mature enough to have a product that’s ready to be used in enterprise, but not so mature that our investment is meaningless to them. Our investment sizes have ranged anywhere between one to ten million, it really depends on what makes the most sense with that company, and with us, and our relationship with them. But our structure is that we find those companies, we invest in them, and then we pull them into that sales portfolio and help take them to market.

ABERMAN: A lot of corporate VCs won’t lead a round, they’ll only invest alongside a private fund. Is that your approach as well?

SPERGEL: Typically, yes, although we have led a few. It really depends on what makes the most sense, and how strategic an investment it is for us. For ones where we really see it as an opportunity to build on top, and use our in-house integration capabilities to build something builder, those will go on a little larger. But others, we’ve absolutely followed them instead of leading.

ABERMAN: You’re like a scout team.

SPERGEL: Exactly. We’re trying to find where the market is going, and find the technologies we think will help push it there.

ABERMAN: Many of our listeners are entrepreneurs, I’m sure more than a few are starting cybersecurity businesses. Why, from their perspective, would they want to take your investments instead of a traditional private VC firm?

SPERGEL: That was one of the things I thought was really interesting about this model. The challenge with being a VC right now, unless you’re a top-tier VC, is that it’s hard to get above the noise. There are just a lot popping up everywhere right now. The idea behind what we’re doing is, we’re not just giving you money and walking away, it’s more the sales channel that comes with it, and the exposure to these larger federal markets. And actually, for some of our earlier-stage startups, we even bring them into commercial markets as well. It really depends on how much presence they have and where they want us to invest. But it’s really that piece of it: that money is nice to have, in terms of helping you get to the next level on the engineering side, but it’s the sales acceleration that we see as the real value of our model.

ABERMAN: So, if done well, it’s the best of why I’d take money from a corporate venture if I was in business. It gets me into a pipeline, it gets me someone who’s interested in my success. It makes a lot of sense. I’d think you’re finding a lot of interesting businesses to invest in, but what is your view of the local cybersecurity startup market? How does it differ from New York, or Austin, or California?

SPERGEL: I think because of the government presence, things like the intelligence community, NSA folks leaving and starting their own companies. So you do have a really strong cybersecurity presence. I think if you look at the types of companies popping up in D.C. relative to other areas, cybersecurity really pops out. You also have companies that understand the government, and have really thought about that market as they design their product. We’d like to think we can take most companies into the federal government, but it’s a question of how heavy that lift is. With federal, I think you’ll find that just because entrepreneurs have experience with working in that market, they’ve thought about it ahead of time, and have designed their product in a way that that lift isn’t as heavy. So, it’s worked out well for us in that respect.

ABERMAN: During the Obama administration, there was a lot of focus on contract innovation, finding ways to get garage inventors into the government. From my perspective, a lot of that has dissipated. What’s your perspective? Is this administration as interested in working with startups and new technologies?

SPERGEL: I don’t know how specific it is administration to administration, but I think actually, if you look right now, there is still a lot of activity popping up from the federal government. It seems like there’s a pretty healthy ecosystem of federal support for startups getting access to government.

ABERMAN: Where are you on what I’d call edge technologies? Quantum computing, AI, things that are clearly where cybersecurity is going? Are you investing ahead of the curve, or does it have to be something that’s more quickly sell-able to the government?

SPERGEL: We’re talking to those companies, we’re tracking them, but from our perspective, it’s a little bit early. When I was at In-Q-Tel, we’d look at those types of things, and even there, they tended to be early for us. Here, we’re very focused on what we can sell today. So, quantum cryptography isn’t really there yet. So we’re not going in heavy on that, but we’re keeping tabs on where the industry is heading.

ABERMAN: As you talk with entrepreneurs that are doing interesting things here in town that could be part of the pipeline five years from now, what do you tell them to do, from the standpoint of starting a business, if they’re not able to raise venture funds?

SPERGEL: You do have a lot of the accelerators, or incubators, that have started up to help companies do that exact sort of thing. We do a lot of work with Mach 37, which is one base in Virginia. They’re looking for these very early-stage companies that are more of a technology and an idea than a full-fledged business, to help build that out. So, that’s one option. The tried and true way of doing it in D.C. is to start a consulting company and build something out, and eventually turn that into a product. That’s another. It really depends on the resources the entrepreneur has, and how dedicated they are to this opportunity, and what type of opportunity it is.

ABERMAN: I think you’re right. Consulting then converting to product is the way to go. I think that federal R&D and small business innovation grants are good ways to go. Even looking at things like Siri, that came directly out of DARPA grants.

SPERGEL: Right. So much of the technology we use has come out that way.

In recent years soccer has finally grabbed a full foothold in the minds of American sports fans, and one of the most prominent leagues for the sport is the National Women’s Soccer League. To learn more about the league, and the strides that one team is taking to inspire women across the country, we spoke with Steve Baldwin, owner of the Washington Spirit team.

ABERMAN: How does a successful IT entrepreneur, a government contractor, become the owner of the Washington Spirit?

BALDWIN: I came to the game really through my daughter. My younger daughter is a player, she currently plays in Europe, and I saw the impact that the game had on her in making really positive impacts in her life. My daughter has seen the world through the game, she’s gotten a great education through it. So, when the opportunity arose to take over the Spirit at the beginning of 2019, I took it.

ABERMAN: Your daughter played clubs sports in school, though, she wasn’t a professional athlete.

BALDWIN: Yes. So, she played here in D.C. locally for the Braddock Road youth club. Then, she spent a few years at the University of Tennessee, she almost went pro out of high school. And then, decided to leave school early to go pro. And now, she’s been over in Europe now for three years.

ABERMAN: The interplay between having a professional league and kids’ sports, there seems to be a very strong vertical integration. What do you think it is about having a professional league that’s important for people who are playing sports as children and young adults?

BALDWIN: I think it gives them a path, or inspires them to a unique opportunity. I think back to when I was a kid, when a pro league for girls didn’t exist in soccer or in basketball with the WNBA at the time. And now through some of these leagues and team sports, girls, as they mature into women, now have an opportunity to continue their passion. I think the real challenge that we have in our league, in our sport, is to raise the economic situation for the players.

ABERMAN: That’s something that was highlighted in the last World Cup, for example.

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BALDWIN: Correct. And if you look at the history of the sport, there’s been activism around equal pay pretty much every World Cup. I’m an advocate of our players, and our league actually making more than the men, but I want to achieve it through the market. And I believe it’s really incumbent upon us as owners and as a league to market ourselves differently, sell the excellence in our product, and in doing so, over a period of time, we will achieve the outcome of the minimum salary in our league higher than their male counterparts.

ABERMAN: So, the mission of providing a pathway for women who want to be professional athletes, and being paid fairly compared to their male compatriots, in similar situations, that to my mind is emblematic of the whole issue of equal wages for equal work that’s running through corporate America right now. It strikes me, though, that there’s something else behind this, which is the aspect of providing positive role models. And one of the things I’ve always wondered about is the obligation athletes have. I remember Charles Barkley famously saying, I’m not a role model for your kids, and how people rejected that, and were very unhappy with him. I think he was trying to make the point, don’t be like me, but it fell on deaf ears. Why is it important for young women to have role models, and how are the athletes on your team role models for our young women?

BALDWIN: If you look at women leadership in executive positions in corporate America and government, nearly 80 percent of those women participated in sports growing up. And so, you can establish a direct link between participating in sports, the lessons you learn from sports, the ability to deal with adversity, learning how to fail, and overcoming those things, I think are lessons that girls get through that participation, and it helps them as they mature into women and pursue their careers. I think our players feel that responsibility as role models. And what is nice about our players is that that aspect is really wired into their DNA. If you look at the players in our sport and in our league, how they interact with kids, it’s completely different from what you see with their male counterparts. Our players routinely line the field after a game, spending an hour or so signing autographs, doing selfies. And you see the entire team doing it. You see these kids lining the field. The thing that’s been interesting in my year of doing this now is the number of boys that are actually attending our games, wearing our players’ jerseys as well. So I think we’re starting to see that transformation of kids, and how kids view women’s sports, and their interest in them, and our players do feel that responsibility as role models, and the things they do on and off the field to help inspire these girls as they mature.

ABERMAN: A few weeks ago, you and I had the chance to talk some about some of your players. And I’ll say, one of the things I was struck by was how accomplished they are.

BALDWIN: Yeah, they sure are. Our club has five graduates from Stanford, and we’ve also had players from Georgetown, Virginia, North Carolina, Wake Forest, you know, some of the best schools in the country. And the women in our club are very accomplished in the majors that they have. Business, engineering, computer science, things like that. I like to say that I have the best collection of well-educated athletes on the planet. So, these players are not only in the top one percent athletically, they’re in the top one percent in terms of their education status, the brilliance that they have.

ABERMAN: I lived overseas for a while when I was younger, and soccer is of immense popularity there, and around the world. Here, it’s not captured that level of mind-share. Why do you think it is that soccer is not as important in the American sports mind as what our foreign friends call American Football?

BALDWIN: Part of it is the tradition and history that is really, from a soccer perspective, maybe only has one generation in our country. I think the demographic changes that are taking place are changing that. I think what’s unique about our league is, we’re the only professional league in this country that can say that it’s the best in the world. And I don’t say that to downgrade MLS, but it’s really to put a spotlight on the excellence we have in the league. And that’s really the opportunity we have as owners in this league, is to take advantage of the increased interest in soccer, particularly women’s soccer. You saw it with the most recent World Cup. We have to take advantage of that exposure, and really work to continue to elevate the status of the players, so our sport does become the best women’s sport in the country. And I think we have the opportunity to do that, and part of that is just more exposure. I think the other thing that you have that kind of holds our sport, and women’s sports in general, back, is a lack of corporate partnerships in it. Basically one percent of marketing dollars in corporate America, that they spend on sports, goes to women’s sports. Imagine the difference if just 20 percent of those dollars came into women’s sports, what that would do socially, in terms of elevating the status of the players, inspiring the girls, inspiring more kids. Because as I mentioned, the boys are taking much greater interest in our sport and our game, and I think that combination will raise the status of soccer in general in the country.

ABERMAN: I know you spend a lot of time right now building corporate sponsorship, that’s your background, and I’ll be watching that with great interest. I’m very excited about this. Before I let you go: if people want to come to a game, how do they get tickets?

BALDWIN: In 2020, we’ll play at three venues. We’ll have four matches at the Maryland Soccerplex in Germantown, four games at Segra Field in Loudon County, and four games, including our league and season opener, at Audi Field.

While entrepreneurship is still a useful and popular philosophy for the D.C. region, there are some that hope to expand their view of what can be done to help society. Instead of starting with a market-based solution and finding a problem to fix, Donna Harris, venture partner and founder of the Builders and Backers initiative, hopes to mobilize people to start with the problem they want to solve and find the right solution to fix it.

ABERMAN: Tell everyone about your new initiative. What are you up to?

HARRIS: So I’ve been quiet the past three years, but I’ve been busy researching, testing and experimenting, and launching an initiative called Builders and Backers. Our objective is to mobilize our country around the concept of buildership, that we can all see problems, solve problems, and make a difference in our communities. And through buildership, we can solve the problems that actually matter. So we need to be builders, and we need to be backers.

ABERMAN: You’ve been around what we used to call, or talk about as, entrepreneurship. How does buildership differ from the entrepreneurship that you and I have talked about for years now?

HARRIS: If you circle back to where we started with Startup America and 1776, we had a very real problem around getting people involved in high-growth entrepreneurship because our country needs the jobs that these businesses can create. The challenge is that really well-intended efforts to create ecosystems have ended up in ecosystems that revolve around venture capital. And so people that have ideas and want to pursue them, end up going down the pathway of creating a venture capital-backed business. Which is great for some concepts, and for some entities.

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But it isn’t great for some other ones. It’s nto the vehicle for everyone. And so, we need to be teaching entrepreneurial thinking and doing to everyone, not just people who want to start a venture. It’s not a means to an end. It actually is the thing that we all need to be excellent at as a country, whether you’re a mayor, you’re running a not-for-profit, you’re working inside a company, you’re a parent of a student. We all need to be able to be builders, and that’s the word we call entrepreneurial thinking and doing.

ABERMAN: I have been around the venture capital industry for a long time, and I agree wholeheartedly with what you’re saying, in that, in a lot of ways in our country, we’ve created almost a lottery, where if I play this game I might become a billionaire. And it’s true, if you play well, you may become a billionaire, but you’re an outlier, and it doesn’t provide a road map where the many people that aren’t going to be billionaires can contribute. And it also focuses on economic outcome in a very narrow way. So, I’m with you. What is it about entrepreneurial behavior that you think we have to trigger in our communities to make a difference in our society?

HARRIS: If you think about what you just said, we have put venture first. I’m a venture capitalist, I’ve invested in companies on five continents. And when you start by saying I run a venture capital fund, you narrow your aperture to the ideas you can invest in. And you might come across fantastic people with amazing ideas, that can actually make an impact in their community, but they don’t fit your investing model. So what if we flip that around and say, why don’t we start with the problems that we want to solve? Let’s look at the promising practices that are out there, everywhere, and by the way, we don’t care if that promising practice is a not-for-profit or a high-scale venture, we care if it actually solves the problem.

Then, we put the funding in alignment with what that promising practice needs to scale. So we’re flipping that around. And if we can do that, then it becomes an imperative that we teach people how to look at the problems around them, to understand and unpack the problems, get to the root, to be able to find out-of-the-box solutions, and then have the courage and tools to experiment, in really small ways, to solve the problems. And in essence, that’s what we’ve been teaching entrepreneurs for the last decade.

But we’re doing it through the lens of, it can or should only result in this narrow kind of company that I can back. So, in terms of communities, if we look at the vitriol, the political backlash, the divides, and I don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on, we’re harshly divided in a time where we have serious problems that we need to fix. So while everyone is focusing on who is in office, and elections that are or are not happening, we focused on, what if we taught people how to actually do this, and unleashed them across the country? Could that actually not only help solve the problems, could people come together by building together, and purposefully tested that concept. And it turns out, the answer is yes.

ABERMAN: Implicit in your thesis is that there are other places to find resources and money, other than venture, to support problem solving. So, what are those other sources, if it’s not coming from selfish people looking to make lots of money?

HARRIS: I’m one of those selfish people. I run a venture capital fund, I’m an angel investor, I have a fantastic portfolio of amazing entrepreneurs that I’m backing through a venture lens. I also am a philanthropist, I make donations, I’m an adviser and mentor, and sometimes I think about lower-return vehicles I can use to back the companies. We have literally trillions of dollars in capital as a nation, if you look collectively at the philanthropy dollars that are sitting in donor-advised funds. If you think about it, our country is one of the most generous in the world. The capital is not the problem. The vehicle-first orientation of that capital, in terms of, because I’m a philanthropist, I use these vehicles; if I’m a venture capitalist I use those vehicles.

If we flip that around and say, well, it doesn’t matter what label I put on myself. What do I care about? What do I really think is broken that I want to be able to invest my resources in? Now, let’s go find the promising practices, and let’s go put the right vehicle around that promising practice. There’s trillions of dollars available, and that’s not even thinking about government funding, corporate initiatives that align around some of these challenges that we need to address. If we think about the issue of distressed communities, we’ve got an entire swath of country of communities that are falling behind in this race to be a digital economy.

A lot of companies care about that, not just mayors, not just the people who live there. They care about that because that’s their customer base. So, there’s a lot of stakeholders that care about the problems, we just haven’t structured the right way for those stakeholders to actually be able to back solutions to those problems.

ABERMAN: So over the last couple of years, as you’ve done various things around this issue, what’s the project that you’ve worked on that has provided the best use case for why this new model makes sense to you?

HARRIS: We’ve done a lot of experimenting in discreet pieces and parts of this. Can you teach buildership? Can you mobilize people to employ buildership around problems that matter? Can you find backers that are willing to embrace this model? Can you structure investments around this model? And all of those were fantastic proofs that this thesis was correct, and that this model works. We, over the last nine months, have been working in a pilot community, particularly aggressively over the last six, in North Carolina. Working in Winston-Salem, Piedmont region, Greensboro, High Point, and all the communities to the west, like Boone and Wilkesboro.

They’re in some cases distressed communities, and in other cases small to midsize communities as companies move and jobs move to bigger cities. And we were able to mobilize builders across the western third of North Carolina, we found them, they were very excited about this concept of buildership, embraced it immediately, came together for workshops around, how do we actually employ it? In a single four-hour session that we had with them in December, they generated over 1500 ideas around solving the economic challenges that vex the region. And by the way, we were able to feed those challenges to one of the largest corporations in the world, who has actually begun solving with them some of those challenges.

Because we’ve been able to connect all the stakeholders, and the backers who care about those problems, to the ideas, and the builders that generate those ideas. And so, we’ll be showing a documentary film soon that shows that work, and it highlights the people that are in every community across the country who actually can be builders, if we actually structures the tools and ways to mobilize them and back them.

ABERMAN: I’ve known you a long time, we’ve worked in many different projects together. I know you’re a very purpose-driven person and you have strong faith. How do you think that faith and entrepreneurship interrelate, and what do they have in common?

HARRIS: What a great question. Personally, it is an important intersection for me. As a person of faith, I view entrepreneurship more through the lens of a tool I understand how to use, and I can use purposefully in the world. And there’s nothing wrong with making money as I do that, but I’m aiming it at problems that matter. I’m aiming it at the idea that every single person in this world has a gift, and what a shame it is that we don’t actually unlock all those gifts. And, what are we missing in this world because we haven’t? To me, that’s purpose, that’s my calling, that’s my why. Though I do it through a variety of lenses, secular and spiritual, and it’s not about taking my faith, and going out there and saying my goal is to convert people.

I’m called through my faith to be a person who loves my neighbor. And I define love as love in action. And action for me means yes, I want to get out and serve, I want to volunteer and donate to that immediate need, but I also want to solve. I went to Haiti right before the dot com crash, and I saw the magnitude of the problems. And I met a little boy, no older than my son, who by the way is turning ten today. He was living in squalor in a garbage dump, and he had no clean water, no clean clothes, and I’m there on a trip painting churches and doing wonderful, good work. And I was aggrieved because I didn’t actually solve the problem that led to that little boy living in squalor. And we have some of the same challenges emerging now emerging in our country.

With water and poverty and homelessness and education, and communities falling behind, and economies that are struggling. And I want ot be someone who serves, but I really want to be someone who solves, and I want to help other people not just call them and say, hey, we should go solve this. We need to teach people how to go solve this. And if we use the word entrepreneurship, it closes peoples’ minds to thinking that they need to go create a company. But the word buildership, to be a builder, we all can be builders. And we all can be backers, if we think about what those words truly mean.

The rise of the internet and social networks has been an undeniable boon for the state of the world at large, but can such easy and open access to anonymous communication have a downside? To learn more about what happens when people become the targets of anonymous online ire, we spoke with Richard Levick, founder and CEO of LEVICK; Steven Nardizzi, partner at Paragon Strategic Insights; and Simon Newman, CEO at CMG Innovation.

ABERMAN: Well, Richard wants to tell our listeners what we were talking about the other day and why this is such an important issue for us to be thinking about.

LEVICK: You know, Jonathan, it’s always great to be on your show, because we know it’s going to take two seconds to get into Plato and Socrates. But here we are in Plato and Socrates, who posed the question two millennia ago, which was, is the death of democracy too much democracy? And we’re testing it now. Now that we all have our own soapboxes, we’re on the Internet and have this ability to communicate with each other. But rather than seek our highest selves, to seek out mercy and understanding and listening, we’re much more about cancel culture and accusations. And I’m afraid that we’re finding that the difference between mob rule and democracy is the rule of law. And when we stop being civil, when we stop abiding by rules, we get to this time and age and moment where it is so easy to destroy people’s lives and careers.

ABERMAN: Is that democracy, or are you talking about technology?

It’s really hard to determine what the difference is right now. Do we actually have the right to vote anymore? And that question has come into focus in the 2016 election, and we’re worried about that in 2020. The folks over at Turbine Labs talk about the fact that since algorithms are what creates the Internet, are we in control when, we get to the keyboards, or is the machine in charge of us? We wonder, do they really know what we’re thinking? Or does Facebook and the other big Silicon Valley companies know so much about us already that we have no independent thought?

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ABERMAN: Well, what we’re talking about today is how these particular platforms allow for people to get in the middle of situations that have a tremendous and rapid adverse effect on their livelihoods. And so, Simon, I’ll ask you: I know that this has been your life experience recently. What happened to you, and what was it like being subjected to this phenomenon?

NEWMAN: It wasn’t fun. My story started when I was elected the 25th president of America’s second oldest Catholic university. I was hired by the board because they were looking for a nontraditional leader to help turn it around. It had failing fortunes. It lost money for most of the last decade. It had junk bonds. It had three times the level of debt that was considered prudent. It had declining enrollment and a discount rate that was above 50 percent. So it was a challenge, but I loved it. My background was in turning around and revision visioning companies. And so we got a lot done quickly.

We started five new programs in the high growth areas with the help of some really good faculty. We got a deal done with Cambridge University. So we’re going to teach Cambridge courses in America, which was a great prestigious thing for the university. I spent nine months negotiating to have the largest donation in the university’s history, which was well over 100 million dollars worth of assets, to be donated to the university, which would have provided a transformational donation.

ABERMAN: But we’re not here today talking about, that? In my own academic background, that’s a tremendous track record of success for a university president. So why are we not talking about success today?

NEWMAN: When you make changes in an organization, particularly something as old as a university, the people who have power, the old guard, get upset. So I was attacked by a group of professors and their agents who came from the worst performing departments in the university, philosophy and languages, mathematics and history. And you know, this started with gaslighting, making it very difficult to do things, hiding the ball constantly, coming up with accusations of wrongdoing internally, and events escalated into having this toxic narrative put into a student newspaper that was fed to these students, which claimed completely defamatory accusations, that I was trying to kick out students for struggling, that I was trying to use a survey to figure out which students to kick out in order to goose the retention statistics of the university. Those were all false.

ABERMAN: So what ended up happening there is that the technology, the rapidity of communication, ultimately allowed an echo chamber reverberation of these accusations or these statements.

NEWMAN: I think that’s exactly right. They put up a web page, a closed Facebook group, where they recruited fellow travelers, to use the vernacular of the Russian counterintelligence operatives. So in active measures, you recruit fellow travelers to believe the same general sentiment. And you inflame their passions, and make them very active by feeding this toxic narrative of false and defamatory information.

ABERMAN: Which is something that, you know, frankly, we see in many different parts of our political discourse now, and in various places. Steve, how about you? How did this impact your career?

NARDIZZI: Sure. Well, my experience is very much similar to Simon’s. I helped found a charity, Wounded Warrior Project, right at the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was in 2003. I took over as CEO and we quickly grew from a startup charity to one of the largest charities in the country. Four hundred million dollars, program offices all around the country, helping 100,000 warriors with some really deep programming, mental health programming. We had expertise in employment. We created a hospital network. We were providing in-home care. So really, really great programmatic things happening in the organization. And we grew it during the recession. So think about that, going from zero to 400 million through the worst recession in history.

And then the music stopped when two hit pieces came out. CBS News ran one, and The New York Times ran one as well. And those stories were generated very similarly, to Simon’s experience, from some former disgruntled employees. We had a number of individuals that, after, and this is the way I think social media can get weaponized, after they left the organization, a few of them stayed in touch. They created a closed Facebook group, and then began recruiting. So, they would look for other individuals that were fired. They would bring them in this closed group. And therein you created this echo chamber of negativity. And then, one or two of them were PR people. And they reached out eventually, and got a hook into a reporter. And that’s how these stories really got legs.

ABERMAN: After Richard and I talked about this, I went off and talked with some people that I know that are involved in the Internet. And their initial response was, well, if there’s so much traffic, there must have been something there. How would you respond if you saw somebody who said that to you?

NARDIZZI: I’m very fortunate in that there were a host of investigations, deep investigations, that were done after these stories. So there is a nonprofit expert and journalist himself named Doug White, who actually did a multi-year investigation, wrote a book that, you know, sort of categorized how these stories were made up, all the falsehoods that were carried in the initial media stories. And then there are multiple investigations. Groups like the Better Business Bureau did a very lengthy investigation after these stories came out, and said they found no evidence of all of the things that are being claimed here. So I’m fortunate in that I can point to these external validated reports that say, look, it’s not just Steve saying, this didn’t happen. This really didn’t happen this way.

NEWMAN: Well, when these accusations hit the student newspaper, I actually asked for the board to do their own investigation and investigate me as well. They did. And they concluded that none of it was true. Apart from, you know, I used some salty language. I called a professor an idiot, except with perhaps a few old English intensifiers, too, because he was an idiot. He completely mischaracterized a perfectly good program that was designed around preventing students being recruited to the university, and being kicked out, or academically dismissing 30 students around Christmas time each year. I put a program in to prevent that from happening, but then got accused of kicking students out for struggling, which was utter defamation. And so I had the board report, and then it was investigated by middle states. Even the cabal that attacked me even got Brian Frosh, the attorney general of Maryland, to investigate some aspects of this survey that we did. It was all above board. Nothing happened. There was nothing wrong there. But it didn’t get reported in the news that way.

What you both experienced is not new. This is the inevitable challenge. This is what happens in organizations is always an antibody. But it seems that there’s something going on here that technology is creating an amplification, which is highly troubling. That’s what I will talk about. We come back after the break.

ABERMAN: Richard, why and how is technology making what, frankly, has always been a situation of people getting upset about change become such a mess?

LEVICK: Well, first of all, we’ve monetized. We have heard stories from Steve and Simon about how when you make change, you make people uncomfortable. Suddenly uncomfortable, which used to be an opportunity for us to grow, and is now a cause of action. Glassdoor actually monetizes that discomfort. If you leave a company and you didn’t like it, you’re encouraged to post there. And Glassdoor actually will then go to the companies and say, hey, if you advertise here, we can make sure you get better reviews, or the bad reviews go down the page. So we’ve now monetized these complaints, too. And I think this is a real challenge. You know, people often ask, well, how do you tell when you have people who are alleging false accusations, versus, the I’ll call them oftentimes, self-righteous accusers? And it’s that the victims are often self-aware. What was the mistake that I made? Should I not have used the word idiot in referring to a professor? I wasn’t perfect.

Should I have been more sensitive during that fundraising? The self-aware are always looking at themselves. The self-righteous aren’t, because it’s always easier to accuse others. And we really have to work on being better human beings. The question is, you know, Mark Twain had said that a lie would make it halfway around the world before the truth had its sneakers on. And that is so true today that it’s very hard for us to include in our counseling, what’s the prophylactic? How can you prevent it? All we can say is what you can do after. It happens too quickly to really be able to prevent it. So then finally, the tool that was often used in the early days of organizing, Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, making it personal has now also become monetized. We see doxxing all of the time, and that is putting personal information out about people who are not public figures. And that is, anyone now who runs a company in any position of authority, no matter how anonymous they previously were, are becoming public figures.

ABERMAN: So, Simon and Steve, I’ll turn to you. Let’s start with this. What would you ask people to do? What would you ask our citizens to do when these things occur? How would you like people to react?

NARDIZZI: Take time to read and reflect before you jump on the sort of virtue bandwagon, right. The self-righteous bandwagon. I think we’re all guilty of this at some point. And certainly social media has fueled this. You know, it used to be you’d see something on the news, if it was a horrible story, you might go, oh, that’s terrible. Somebody did something awful. But there was really nothing you could do about it. And now I think we all feel inclined, well, we can do something, right. At the very least, I can go out and pop off on social media, and say something negative and re-share the story, and then I’m validated for that. Right. Somebody comes on and likes my post. Somebody else comes on and likes my post, re-shares it. And so we’ve really trained ourselves to just hone in on those 140 characters that are out there, the tiny headline, and put it out there.

And I think we forget that there is context, usually, behind the story. And I think we also forget that the people being attacked are real human beings. So, they are not just the sort of caricature that they are portrayed as in a headline, in a soundbite. Nobody is. They’re real human beings. And also, your posting and sort of inflaming on communications, on social media, can have real world consequences. I don’t know if Simon, this happened to you as well, but it did not stay on social media. I had actual death threats. I had people looking for me, coming to my house. Police involved. So your activity online doesn’t always stay there, and you can really inflame others. And people need to be more thoughtful about that.

SIMON: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And Steve and I both talked about this. I think the character assassin’s weapon of choice is something I call a toxic narrative. And a toxic narrative is something which contains a few sprinkling of facts, some salacious past sentence, a quote which implies wrongdoing or malevolence. Then statements of outrage, which users intensify. And then it’s this explicit or implicit accusation of wrongdoing. That narrative is like a character assassination weapon, because you cannot respond to it once it’s in the public domain, without talking about the toxic false narrative and the defamation in it. You need to be very aware of these. You don’t share them. And so forth. So the thing to avoid if you’re a listener is premature cognitive commitment. It’s being lured into sharing and saying, this is just another example of whatever your prized sentiment was, and sharing it with your friends. In GRU terms, the Russian influence model, you’re being a useful idiot, so don’t be a useful idiot. Don’t share things that are false. That will be the best advice I could give.

ABERMAN: This is so similar to the conversations that we’ve had in prior shows around the politics and integrity of elections and privacy and so forth. It seems to run four-square into: people get hurt when lies are told. Our legal system is designed to give people the benefit of the doubt. You have to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, meaning that sometimes guilty people go free. We accept that as a society. It seems like the Internet is now the reverse. Everybody is guilty, and innocent people suffer. Even if a small number of innocent people suffer, that seems to be okay. It leads me to think, Rich. I know you’ve given this a lot of thought. There’s got to be, or shouldn’t there be, some sort of policy answer to this?

LEVICK: I don’t know where policy is going to come from. We have the Chinese model where the government is in control; we have the American model where Silicon Valley is in control. Neither seems to be very helpful for any of us. But I do think as citizens, we have a responsibility. You know, if we look to identify maybe some Ten Commandments for working on the Internet, communicating on the Internet. Don’t press send. I mean, let’s start with not pressing send. And just think about things, too. Let’s think about being Buddhist. That is, what is the other perspective? I may have a strong opinion on the impeachment, and may not agree with Alan Dershowitz, but I want to understand his arguments.

Our epistemology has changed. We want to first get to gather information before drawing conclusions. Understand what we’re doing when we practice cancel culture. When we turn around, say, you’re racist, you’re sexist, you’re Islamophobic, you’re anti-Semitic. What we’re doing is practicing prior restraint. That is, we’re saying: nothing that you say has any value anymore, because I’ve already labeled you. You need to be looking at these things in terms of how you communicate.

ABERMAN: The underpinning of democracy’s exchange of ideas, there’s always been an understanding or implicit part of societal approach to democracy, that people have responsibility for their own actions. There needs to be some sort of policy approach. When you both dealt with this, were the people online spreading these things anonymous, or were they people that were standing behind their statements?

NARDIZZI: It was mainly anonymous. We did find out who many of them were. They had recruited somebody into their Facebook group.

ABERMAN: But there was no accountability. There was no legal responsibility to prove the truth of their allegations.

LEVICK: We have Internet courage, where people who would say and do things on the Internet because of its anonymity, that they wouldn’t do if they had to communicate face to face.

NEWMAN: Yeah. Wolfgang Gertz said a coward only strikes out when they feel safe, and the internet provides anonymity. People as trolls, they mob, they get a whole group of people together to actually attack someone. That’s what happened to me. I was a target of one of the worst academic mobbings there’s been in America. And how that happens is, people are influenced at the emotional level. They’re sold this toxic awful narrative. It had a bizarrely uniting effect, because I was hated by all ends of every political spectrum. And the conservatives hated me. The liberal press hated me. But it was designed to be that way. And I think behind all this, something that I think your listeners should know, is a tremendous amount of planning by the cabal, the group that attacks you and Steve and I both. You had notes on this.

We both have perfect records of what happened in each of our cases. I had a whole forensic study. They were meeting for months and months plotting this, collecting toxic narratives that they planned to launch. And the phrases used were: the media is in our back pocket. They knew they could get people in the media to write those narratives exactly as they wanted them. And they used students. They used students, put them in harm’s way, to communicate that to the media. So when you look at this, what should change? This type of attack, what happened to Steve, what happened to me, is intrinsically evil. You don’t need to have a great theory to say. You deliberately go out and attack someone’s character to get them fired or removed from their office. That is intrinsically bad, and there needs to be repercussions for this. The professors that attacked me, and their agents, all got promoted.

LEVICK: And you know, Simon, productive people don’t have time for all that planning.

ABERMAN: My conclusion from today is that we have another example of why and how it is that the current structure of the Internet has gone wildly away from an optimistic view that the creators had. There is no doubt it could be a tool for good or a tool for ill. But clearly we’ve got some work to do as a society right now to create better rules for the road.

While it can feel like the world of ruthless salesmanship gives little heed to the actual needs of customers and clients, integrity and honesty are make-or-break qualities for successful entrepreneurship. To learn more, we spoke with Ian Altman, B2B growth expert and co-author of Same Side Selling.

ABERMAN: Integrity is core to your approach to sales and business growth. What exactly do you mean by integrity?

ALTMAN: Well, the funny part is in our book, Same Side Selling, which I co-wrote with a guy named Jack Quarrels– most people can guess by his last name, Quarrels, that Jack spent two decades in purchasing and procurement. And so oftentimes, you see buyers and sellers at odds with one another. And the reality is that if we’re all looking to achieve the same end goal for the client, then we avoid that adversarial trap that pits one side against the other. So with integrity, it means that we’re as committed to the outcome for our clients as they are. We’re not just focused on making the sale.

ABERMAN: Is integrity honesty?

ALTMAN: Let’s hope so. But ultimately, it’s making sure that not only you’re being honest, but part of it is evaluating: can I deliver what these people need? So, for example, you wouldn’t go to a doctor who says to you, I’m going to do this procedure, but in their mind, they’re thinking, well, it’s probably not going to help, but I’m going to make money from it. It’s the same thing in business.

ABERMAN: Interesting. So you’re using integrity as a screen for what my granddad used to always say: just do the right thing.

ALTMAN: Novel concept, right? So the idea is that I’ve done research with over 10,000 executives on how they make and approved decisions. And so across that, what people ask is: anytime they’re looking to make a decision to buy something or spend money, there are three questions they ask. They ask: what problem does this solve? Why do we need it? And what’s the likely outcome? And if we know that, then what happens is, when people are trying to sell something, and you’re not focused on the result or outcome, the client starts thinking to themselves: wait a minute. You don’t even know what we’re trying to achieve yet. You’re telling me we should buy this thing from you. It sounds like B.S. And so, we want to make sure that we’re a little bit more clear about that. We don’t fall into what I call Axis Displacement Disorder. It’s a condition you may have heard of. That’s when the seller believes that the axis of the earth has shifted, and now the world revolves around them.

ABERMAN: I hate to tell you, I don’t see that just in people trying to sell things. You know, it strikes me that when people talk about the need for integrity, or the need to do the right thing, it runs counter against the perception that I must maximize profit, and I must close every sale. How do you counsel people to, frankly, be brave enough to walk away from something, in order to get something better later?

ALTMAN: Well, it does on its surface sound counterintuitive, but anybody in business and anybody who’s selling anything to anybody knows that the client who’s not a good fit, the client who you can’t actually deliver the right results for, ends up being the bane of your existence, and you get sucked into the vortex of evil. So instead, if what we can do is look and say, OK, is this someone who has a problem that I’m really good at solving, and can I deliver the results that they need? And if that’s the case, we’re probably going to have pretty good success together, which will lead to repeat and referral business. Almost anybody involved in any type of business has at one point said, oh, wow, I really need the revenue, so I’m going to sell this thing that maybe we shouldn’t be selling. And inevitably, they regret it. But at the time, it seems like a good idea. So that’s what we have to avoid. Because if we don’t do that, that’s when we fall into these terrible traps.

ABERMAN: How did you come to this world view? Did it hit you one night like a lightning bolt, or where did this come from?

ALTMAN: Well, I think in running my businesses in the past, we would look at those clients who we have that kind of Spidey sense about, that said maybe this isn’t the right fit. And you’re thinking, oh, but it’s a big client. So we’re going to we’re going to keep working on this. And then all of a sudden, they weren’t happy. Your team wasn’t happy. Everybody was butting heads and it became adversarial. And looking at that, I said, man, you need to have enough discipline to not get into those traps that aren’t a good fit. Then in writing Same Side Selling, it was interesting. The way Jack Quarrels, my co-author and I met was Jack actually attended a training program I was doing because he went to find out, gee, what’s the enemy teaching other people? He said, wait a minute. Ian’s teaching that you should be focused on the results with the client. And then we had this conversation. He said, you know, I don’t think there’s ever been a book written on sales from the buyer and seller’s perspective. And we did that. Now we have the second edition, and it’s been, obviously, wildly successful.

ABERMAN: How important is empathy and doing homework about your client to practice this type of approach?

ALTMAN: It’s absolutely essential. If you don’t have empathy around what they’re trying to achieve, if you’re not listening to them, then you’re probably suffering from that Axis Displacement Disorder and you’re just focused on yourself. So what we have to do is pivot that. And one of the best ways to do that is, when you’re meeting with somebody, a potential client. Oftentimes people who are selling something, they start by saying, look, we have the greatest thing ever to fit your needs. What do you need again? And it just totally lacks any integrity. Instead, what you want to think about is, OK, has this person, my potential client, convinced me that they have a problem that’s worth solving, that I feel we’re really good at addressing? And if so, we have something to talk about. And if not, not so much. And what I find with my clients is that less than half of the potential clients that they meet with are actually good fit for what they do. So, if you know that, your goal is to find that out as quickly as possible.

ABERMAN: How much does this overlap with this current trend and in society policy to so forth where people say they’re craving authenticity?

ALTMAN: Well, you know, I think there’s a lot to it, because what happens is, our brains are acutely aware of stuff that just doesn’t make sense. So when somebody is purely advocating one side of an argument, we think to ourselves, well, the world isn’t that black and white. You can’t just take that one position. So in the world of politics, when somebody says, oh, those people are absolutely insane, and you can pick whichever side you’re on, you will be convinced the other people are crazy. Instead, what we have to do is think to ourselves: why does someone feel differently than I do? What’s the common ground that we can find together? And part of it is disarming the notion that you’re just there to sell something.

See, it’s just like if you walk into a store and the hyper ambitious salesperson walks up to you and says, may I help you? What’s our default response? No, no, thanks. Just looking. Why is that? Is it because we prefer to go rummaging through the store by ourselves? No, it’s because we don’t trust their intentions. So one of the principles we teach is this notion of disarming. So when you meet someone, the first thing is, look, I don’t know if this is for you. I don’t know. I don’t know if we have the right fit. But I’m happy to learn more to see if we might be able to help. That conveys that notion that you just described as empathy. And now we’re trying to figure out, do we have a fit together, versus, can I ram this thing down your throat? Maybe if I speak long enough, you’ll slip into a coma and then you’ll sign something. Not a good long term strategy.

ABERMAN: You’ve been a principal, you’ve been a CEO. You’ve grown businesses. Now you’re advising people, entrepreneurs. What makes someone suited to be a counselor or adviser, versus a CEO? How do you make the change?

ALTMAN: Well, it was interesting. So in my prior business, I started from zero, grew the business to a pretty good size, and then had an investment banking firm in New York that acquired my company for cash and stock and said, hey, will you serve as managing director? We brought the value of that business from one hundred million to two billion in less than three years. And candidly, I burned out, and I thought, what am I going to do now? And I was talking to some friends and said, I don’t want to build the exact same business again. They said, well, why don’t you help other people on how they can grow their companies? I said, what do you mean? They said, well, you always seem to enjoy helping our businesses more than your own. If we called you up and said, hey, we’re struggling, you would abandon your business and help us. And I said, what do you mean? Because I didn’t realize there were people who did that. And now I have the good fortune, I travel around the world. I speak to audiences on really fundamental principles on how they can introduce integrity into their sales process, and actually shorten sales cycles, shift the focus from price to value, and get on the same side with their customers. Kind of a novel concept.

ABERMAN: People do tell me, and I do agree, it’s much harder to be a coach. How do you react when somebody’s just doing something that is just so mind numbingly dumb, you just want to grab them by the neck?

ALTMAN: It’s just like anywhere else in life. We might see our clients doing something that we think is really dumb. We might see a CEO doing something that we think is dumb. And what we have to ask ourselves is, why are they doing that? What’s motivating that? What makes them believe that that’s the right choice? Because rest assured, they’re not thinking to themselves, you know what? I’m looking to do something really stupid. Here’s an idea. And then they do that. Instead, they think it’s a good idea. It’s just like the person who sells somebody something that they don’t need. And they say, oh, this is great. I get short term revenue. Next thing you know, their reputation’s in the mud. If we think about the story of your grandfather and the clothing business, here’s the thing. Back then, if you didn’t deliver great results for somebody, they might have told one of their neighbors or friends. Today, if you deliver something that doesn’t work for the client, they’ll tell millions of people they’ve never even met.

ABERMAN: So you’re here in D.C., the center of spin and networking and all the rest of it. How do you spread a message like yours, and how do you think it fits with a lot of networking I see around here, which feels like anything but integrity driven?

ALTMAN: Well, I think one of the flaws a lot of people have with networking is, it gets back to that notion of just focusing on themselves instead of asking people, like for starters, what’s interesting about them? What are they doing? And also describing the problems that you solve rather than what it is that you do. So most people at a networking event, someone says, what do you do? And the person says, oh, I’m an attorney. Oh, I’m a government contractor. And it’s just something that means nothing. But instead, you can describe the problems that you solve. So when someone comes to me and they say, what do you do? I don’t say, oh, I’m a keynote speaker. You know, I come in and develop sales organizations. I say, well, my clients come to me when their sales cycles take too long, when their clients focus on price instead of value, when their message falls on deaf ears. Those are the types of problems I solve. And then the people who have that need instantly pick up on it. The people that don’t have that need, well, I can be genuinely interested in what goes on in their world.

ABERMAN: I would say the biggest problem you solve is people being insecure about their product and selling off strength.

ALTMAN: Well, it could be that too.

In the decades since the invention of the internet and the lessening of regulations on cable news networks, many have noticed a distinct change in the way that people speak to one another. Online, conversation seems stunted, partisan, and rude. But has much changed in society? Or have we just not noticed we’ve always been like this? To understand more of what’s happened to civility, we spoke with Alice Stewart, CNN political commentator and communications consultant; Michael Zeldin, TV legal analyst with experience stretching back to the Clinton impeachment proceedings; and Richard Levick, founder and CEO of LEVICK.

ABERMAN: Are things different now from, say, the way they were 30 years ago?

STEWART: I will jump in here and say, yes. When we talk about civility in politics and the civil discourse that we have going on, I’m often reminded of something that Ronald Reagan said. It’s that someone that agrees with you 80 percent of the time is your friend and ally, not a 20 percent foe. And unfortunately, people have gotten away from that mindset. They are so single minded in this. It goes on both sides of the aisle. Oftentimes, if they see that you don’t agree with them politically, they are automatically going to put you in the foe category without having a conversation. And I’d like to think at some point we can get back to the mindset where, let’s just agree to disagree, and find out there actually are a lot more things to talk about than politics. And that’s that’s a great focus, and that’s a great goal to have. I think we’re a long way from there. But that’s why I believe we’ve gotten to this mindset, because people think that if you’re not on the same page ideologically, you can’t be on the same page. And that’s unfortunate.

ZELDIN: So I agree. I think that really there has been a slow death of civility over the years. I think there are a lot of things that account for it. On the Hill, for example, it used to be that members stayed around on weekends. And on weekends, they actually got to speak to one another in social settings and they got to form friendships, and those friendships carried over to policies that, to Alice’s point, they could be 80 percent friends, disagree on 20 percent, but move forward. You saw that, you know, historically with Teddy Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, good friends who were able to accomplish things together, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, friends, they could accomplish things together, though they disagreed on some fundamental policy issues. We don’t have that anymore. There’s a lack of sort of underlying friendship that, therefore, denies them the opportunity to find consensus on policy. So I think it’s a problem. Yes.

LEVICK: And Michael, you know, you’re absolutely right. Although we did see some of the undercurrents of the absence of civility, even going back to Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy as Orrin Hatch, who was criticized for attending Ted Kennedy’s funeral. We started to see it at that time, but it was still on the outskirts. Now it’s the center of our politics. We’ve really become NASCAR. You know, NASCAR is just traffic, but for the accidents, and now it’s accidents all the time. We seem to want that Hollywood on the Potomac, we’ve become all about television, entertainment, even this impeachment is the televised impeachment. It’s also, I think at every level, when we were kids, when we were young adults, we would read columnists. As a liberal growing up, I would read George Will. I would disagree with him on everything except his baseball columns. But I would read him, and realize, I’d better get my act together. I’d better know my arguments. And now what we do is, we have a cancel culture and just dismiss the other side as opposed to learning from it.

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ZELDIN: Well, I think that is in some measure a responsibility of the way the media has divided itself up into camps. So when I was a kid, there were three news stations and I listened to CBS News, and Walter Cronkite told me the way it was and Eric Sevareid gave me his commentary at the end. And we also agreed on a basic set of facts, and that drove our decision making. Now, you can’t even decide on what the facts are, because different camps argued different facts, and therefore we can’t even find that agreement. And so, it’s problematic.

STEWART: And this goes back to the adage, there’s three sides to every story. There’s yours, mine, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. But a lot of people don’t want to subscribe to that theory. I have a story. I used to have a radio show. It was a political show. It was from a conservative standpoint. But I welcomed conversations with people across the aisle, and I wanted to do a fun segment about food. And this was in Little Rock. Reached out to some of the local foodies that were huge food bloggers. Asked them all. Hey, I’d love to do a segment on food every Friday. One of them outright said, absolutely not. I know who you work for. I know what you stand for. You’re against everything I stand for. I would never come on your show. And I said, I’m sorry you feel that way. I would love to just talk about food. And then he got back with me and said, you know, I’ve done some research on you. I know some of your friends. I apologized. They came every Friday for the rest of my show, and it was probably the most enjoyable part of the show because we realized we all totally politically disagree. But we found a common interest, and a common topic, and developed relationships based on that, and put politics on the backburner, and talked about something that was actually enjoyable. And it was a really good way to demonstrate to people that you can have civil conversations if you actually just put a lot of disagreements aside, and find where we agree. Because in the end, we all probably agree on more than we disagree on.

ABERMAN: I find it’s really interesting when we start to talk about this, and it raises to my mind the question is, is the media a mirror of society, or vice versa? Is the lack of civility we’re talking about media-led? Is it led by human behavior?

ZELDIN: I think a little of both. I think that human behavior drives media, because the media has to make a profit, if you will. We’re not all NPR, and so, they reflect what is their demographic opportunities. And at the same time, they drive opinion, and thereby create these these camps. I think there’s a little of both here. I don’t see media as the blame, or people driving toward a Fox network that didn’t previously exist. I think there are opportunities, and they each rely on one another for support.

LEVICK: You know, after Hertz and Farnsworth, with the invention of radio and television waves, we felt as a society that the airwaves were sacred. They were public. They were limited. And so we had the Federal Communications Commission that would oversee the distribution and the use of this limited resource. We had a fairness doctrine until the mid 80s, but no more. Not only do we have, as Michael referred to, the 500 different television stations, all targeting a demographic of about 100 each. But we also have, now, the airwaves, if you will, the Internet is being determined by the FAANG: Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, Netflix and Google. A very limited number of companies are determining how we communicate, and what’s fair. And as a result, we’re also finding, in part as a result to Michael’s point, it’s both. It’s both where politics and media have gone. But it’s also where we are. We’re not particularly civil with each other. It’s said that the meanest place on earth is Twitter. And how we treat each other is only proving what Plato and Socrates said about democracy, that the death of democracy would be too much democracy. We treat each other with anonymity, and an absence of appreciation of difference of opinion. And we’re looking for, as Alice said earlier there, 20 percent we disagree with. And then we excoriate.

STEWART: The liquid courage of social media is really astounding. The people that get behind their profile of a cat and say outlandish and horrendous things is really unfortunate. And it it has grown simply because people are not held accountable for statements that they make. And often the more an anonymity they can claim, the more outrageous their comments are. But with regard to the news media and and how they contribute to this, the reality is that journalists, by and large ones that I have dealt with, whether I was in news or now in politics, they are out there to present both sides of the story, and let the viewers or the readers decide. They are fair and impartial. But the news business, in the end, is a business, and they operate on the law of supply and demand. And if viewers out there want to hear something of a more liberal slant, they will provide that. If viewers want to hear something of a more conservative slant, they will provide that. So you have to realize, they’re putting out what the people are asking for, and so it’s really back and forth. Whether it’s what came first, the chicken or the egg. People tune in and turn in to what they want to see.

ABERMAN: Richard, I’ll turn to you. What are you thinking?

LEVICK: Alice, you said media is giving people what they want. And I think this question is, ultimately, as easy to separate as iced tea and sugar after you’ve already mixed them. They’re so interrelated. The thing that concerns me about the Internet, this invention by Al Gore, is: where are we going? When we sit down to the keyboard, I think right now we wonder, well, you know, am I in control or is the computer in control? And the folks over at Turbine Labs, who do a lot of analysis on this, say that the race is already over, the algorithms in the Internet already help us. They not only know what we want to buy, they’re helping us decide. And it’s very hard, I think, for us to separate ourselves from these machines that are omnipresent. Some rules, I think when we get on the Internet, we ought to treat it like the sidewalk, not the highway. When we’re on the sidewalk and someone accidentally steps in front of us, we don’t flash the bird or yell and scream at them. We say, excuse me. When we’re on the highway, we feel we’re anonymous, and we honk and we tailgate, and we treat them with extraordinary rudeness and sometimes danger. If we start to think of ourselves as a community, as a civil society, as a voluntary one, where we all voluntarily stop at the stop signs for a well-ordered society, and treat each other on the internet as we would with an in-person conversation. We’ll take a huge step towards civility.

ZELDIN: So I think that’s a great way of approaching it. But I have a little bit different way of doing it, which is I’m not on the Internet. I have decided that it’s not a medium for adult communication. So I don’t tweet, I don’t Instagram. I don’t do any of those things. I have a legacy Facebook page where I post particular songs that I like to listen to. But no politics, no discourse. What I’ve found is that the Internet isn’t as upsetting to me, because I’m not present on it. I don’t have to listen to the trolls, and I don’t have to, you know, suffer the slings and arrows that are present. I sometimes think that if only people would take a step back from using that as an adult communication vehicle, maybe we could return a little bit closer to the civility that Alice and I long for.

STEWART: I am on the Internet. I do Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I’m really not hip on a lot of the new younger generation places on the Internet, but it’s part of my business. I need to get on there. But what I have found is that, whether I have written an op ed, or whether I’ve done a television appearance, and people go on Twitter. you can generally tell when you get a lot of feedback. They’re complaining about something. But oftentimes, if it’s someone that is credible and they’re giving a constructive response, or constructive criticism on a point that I’ve made and I engage with them, we often come to the idea that, OK, I disagree with you, but I see where you’re coming from. I appreciate the feedback. So I look at it as an opportunity to engage with people. I never expect to change anyone’s mind, but at least engage in the conversation, because if we don’t do that, we’re certainly not going to to take any steps towards civility. There are others that have the cat profiles that are just profane, that I just ignore. But you have to get to the point to where you engage with those that seem to want to have a conversation, and others, you just tune it out.

ABERMAN: Do you think we might get largely where we want to get to if we just made it that nobody could be anonymous on the web?

ZELDIN: I think that would help. I think that when you are accountable for yourself in a public domain, then you think longer and harder about what you’re going to say. I think anonymity is a wonderful way for people to behave badly, and it would be nice if that was a possibility. But I don’t think it’s a possibility, which is again, why I don’t participate in it, because I don’t like the prospect of being anonymously trolled by people who need a life.

LEVICK: In Stephen Covey’s seminal book, Seven Habits, he talked about our personal and professional trust banks. And when our trust banks are high, we can hear things from people, whether it’s shorthand or limited communications, and we interpret it in a safe and effective way. I don’t know if Michael really meant to say X, but this is what I’m hearing because I know Michael, high trust bank and we used to operate with high trust banks. Now we operate with extremely low trust banks. So we’re looking for the -ism in everything, the homophobia, the racism, the sexism, whatever it is, the 20 percent that we can disagree with. And we feel somehow that we’re hyper ethical if we call people out. And what it’s really resulting in is prior restraint. It’s a new form of prohibition. When people are attacked on the Internet, even if the mob only represents 5 or 10 percent, the bullying wins, because others, who are fair minded, are afraid to get in. Here’s the prior restraint. They’re afraid to be allied, because they know that they, too, will be attacked. The number of people we have either represented or had in our office who have been falsely accused, and you look in their eyes and you realize off the record, people will tell you, I’ll stand up for you. But I’m afraid to go on the Internet. And facts, whether it’s independent law firms, or board minutes, or whatever it is that can show proof of the point, are dismissed as just so much hyperbole.

ABERMAN: You know, I’m listening to this and I’ve never thought about this before, and I’ve done prior shows, and I’ve been really hard on the tech economy. It’s democratized everything. The real issue here is people are putting up with this. This may be a situation where literally we are reflecting when enabling bad behavior. And this really won’t stop until people get disgusted with it.

STEWART: The problem is, so much of our society now is focused around social media. What we have many times, whether we’re talking about social media, or if you’re frustrated with the way you were treated at a restaurant, you’re going to have the silent majority and the vocal minority. The people that are in the minority oftentimes are the most vocal about being critical. Being condescending, being negative. And those are the people that get on social media and say hateful and hurtful things. And that’s where you have to just tune it out. Some people obviously choose Michael’s plan of just avoiding it altogether. But there are places you can go, and people you can engage with, that are your way of saying, I’m mad as heck and I’m not going to take it anymore. But you just have to know the right places to go. And I view a lot of the communication I get from people, and we have this conversation. Look, I’m not as concerned with what your true north is, but that you have one. And if you want to be consistent in that, and that is your core value and your conviction, I respect that. And hopefully, you’ll do the same with me. And that’s where you have civil conversations.

ABERMAN: That’s what citizens should do, frankly. We’ve got a little bit of time left, a minute or so. If I made you each dictator for a day, and you had all this power, what would you do to change the situation?

LEVICK: I think your point about removing the anonymity, but remembering we’re all in a community and we’re all neighbors. Let us start treating each other that way, and we’ll be, I think, a much better society.

ZELDIN: Well, I think that is exactly what I was going to say. It does, you know, sort of take a village in a sense, and it takes people to behave as if they live in a village. And the anonymity that the Internet allows for, I don’t think it actually is the democratization of communication. I think it is a tyranny of communication, because people are not accountable. If you think about the town square in the days of old, people showed up in the town square. They weren’t hooded or anonymous. They stood there and they argued their point, and people argued about it. That was what the First Amendment was about. It wasn’t about anonymous trolling of people. And so I’m very concerned about this exact point of anonymity, in the communication vehicle that allows for an end of civility.

STEWART: A couple of things come to mind with regard to the Senate trial. Last week, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out to those on the Senate floor, stop your being petty and underhanded, and let’s work together. Respect where you are. And I think we can take that across this country as well. Stop being petty and underhanded. But more importantly, what I’m going to take away from what we have heard on the Senate floor is what the Senate chaplain said to start off one of the days last week, where he said: there are patriots on both sides of the aisle in this room, and that is true across the country. We just have to realize there are patriots all across this country. We all may be on different sides, but at the end of the day, we’re all Americans. We all have a common goal and common interests. And let’s have a more mutual respect for that concept.

ABERMAN: I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks for summing up today’s show. This was a really interesting conversation. I think the big message I’d like all of you to take away is: if you’re unhappy with the lack of civility. Be polite. Let’s start there.

D.C. is easily the most storied and historically significant city in the country, especially in a government context, and with that comes a bevy of important architecture. But what does the shape of a building matter beyond its use? What effect does architecture have on the daily lives of citizens? To learn more about its impact, we spoke with Gavin Hughes Daniels, Principal and Co-founder of Wingate Hughes; Deane Madsen, freelance writer and founder of BrutalistDC; and Ken Biberaj, managing director at Savills North America.

ABERMAN: What does architecture mean to you? How do you apply in your daily life?

DANIELS: Architecture means everything to me. I’ve been on a journey for 10 years now with Wingate Hughes Architects. In a lot of ways, Jonathan, we bring optimism to our country, to as many people as I can. I believe architecture has a real power to enable people to see things in a different way, and to inspire them to be better people and do more.

ABERMAN: Deane, what about you? I noticed when I was reading your bio, you’re a photographer. You’re a founder of BrutalistDC, which is a type of architecture. You seem to be a pretty strong observer and critic of architecture, as it were.

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MADSEN: Sure. Yeah. I did a Masters in Architecture at UCLA, and then transitioned into architecture journalism, and have been observing and writing about the architecture of Washington, D.C. for the last eight years or so. And the city has a wonderful collection of brutalist buildings, and I might be the only person in the room that thinks that. But there is some value to all of that concrete that we have here in D.C., in addition to the other, more readily known and widely appreciated neoclassical buildings.

ABERMAN: We’ll come back to brutalism and neoclassical architecture when we continue our conversation. Those are two, I think, signifiers that maybe people don’t realize are the themes of a lot of the buildings that we see everyday. Ken, you spend a lot of time these days, helping people find the right real estate, and get themselves located here in the region. How does architecture relate to what you do?

BIBERAJ: Well, it’s one of these things that, at Savills, we’re solely focused on representing tenants in the market. And when we develop the criteria of what we’re looking for for tenants, it’s not only about the economics or the location, it’s really about the environment you’re creating to attract and retain talent. And the workforce today is really in a position to appreciate some grit, some character, something unique about the physical space.

So from the moment we’re walking down the street to see a building, expectations and opinions are already being formed by what the building looks like on the outside, what the landlord has done to preserve the character of the interior lobby. And then as we walk through the building, it’s not only just about that individual office that you’re going to occupy every day. It’s about the entire ecosystem that your employees are going to inhabit for you. So a lot of this is now more important than maybe ever before, and something that we’re putting as a deal point as we evaluate options on behalf of tenants.

ABERMAN: So why does look and feel of a place matter so much, guys?

DANIELS: The look and feel matters, of any place, because it can directly affect your mood. It can affect your attitude. A lot of times, one of the things we really work on at Wingate Hughes is to try to let architecture get out of your way. You’ve all been in spaces that are too small, that don’t quite feel right, that something’s off, and you can’t quite tell what it is. When the space gets out of your way, or when the space makes you feel a certain way, something good can happen, and great architecture can do that. I love Deane’s point on brutalism. Brutalist buildings get out of the way, and they are true and authentic to what they are. They were built with all the exposed pieces to them, much like a lot of the trends that we see right now in current interior architecture.

ABERMAN: Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, definitionally, so our listeners can get inside the tent with you. Brutalist, neoclassical. We see a lot of neoclassical buildings here in town without realizing. Deane, what is neoclassical architecture? And then let’s talk about Brutalist, so people can start to get an idea of the terms we’re using as we continue our conversation.

MADSEN: Sure. So, neoclassical architecture kind of takes cues from ancient Greek temples and the kind of ruins that you might see, like the Acropolis, are kind of form givers for places like the National Archives, the Lincoln Memorial, and to some extent, the Jefferson Memorial. There’s a strong tradition in Washington architecture memorials, especially of drawing from classical precedent, with oversized columns that are repeated in several rows. And those types of forms are the kinds of things that the founders of the city deliberately chose as signifiers of the seat of government.

ABERMAN: Well, neoclassical, when I think about it, having just recently come back from Italy, for example, neoclassical harkens back to the Renaissance, harkens back to early Romans, to ancient history and ancient democracies. And so, it’s not surprising when we sit in an imperial capital like Washington, D.C., that you’d have a lot of neoclassical architecture. But now, let’s talk about: architecture seems to be migrating away from signifying an imperial capital to something different. How does Brutalism fit into that?

MADSEN: Well, that’s an interesting question. I think brutalism was kind of an offshoot of that impetus to provide stature to the government through building. And in many cities, Boston, D.C., especially, the government was taking these new forms of concrete, which is readily available material at the time, and using that to create massive buildings to house thousands of government employees over millions of square feet of building space.

ABERMAN: So the Federal Trade Commission building downtown, or the Pentagon would be examples of this type of architecture.

MADSEN: Yeah, the FBI building to some extent, the HHS building and HUD. So, the Hubert H. Humphrey building, those two in particular are by an architect called Marcel Breuer. At the HUD building, Marcel Breuer was using precast concrete to create a repetition of forms that he had also done in several other headquarters buildings around the world. And this is something that allowed for efficient construction, and mass production, in ways that could make a big building quickly and relatively cheaply, which is something that the government was interested in. And that was actually the first building of its kind in D.C.

ABERMAN: So, Gavin, I think about what I’ve heard so far. Sounds to me like a lot of the architecture, the older architecture that surrounds us, occurred because it was a government town in a lot of ways, to signify that it’s a seat of power and so forth. Comparing our city to, say, New York, you know, where there has been for years, architectural innovations, various cutting edge things. Now we’ve got condominiums rising into the sky in slivers and so forth. What’s happening in D.C.? How is architecture developing in D.C.? Are we becoming more like a New York, or are we still an imperial capital?

DANIELS: What’s fascinating about D.C. is the community based feel of D.C., and the individualistic nature of D.C. We have a lot of buildings that can stand on their own. And together, they all go together to form this amazing community we have. I was just in Houston last week, and thinking about all the different pockets of development that Houston had. You might have a beautiful development that has some townhomes, has your different retail amenities. Little bit of office, maybe. And then you have ten miles to the next one. Here, it all comes together, and you’re within blocks of that next, quote-unquote community. D.C., I think is continuing to look like D.C., it’s not starting to look like anywhere else. Because we have so many different cultural influences that have come to this city since its beginning, and left their imprint here. And I think that’s an important tradition that we need to continue.

ABERMAN: I agree with that. I do wonder, Ken: I know you spent a lot of time in the suburbs with your job. I wonder how this is going to play out, where we’re now having neighborhoods pop up next to metro stations. I was on the toll road just the other day, driving into D.C., and it looks like there’s going to be some in downtown area Reston, and a downtown area just everywhere there’s a metro. Well, do they have a different character or what? How is this going to unfold?

BIBERAJ: I think there’s a couple of things to think about in this region. Because of height limits in D.C., D.C. doesn’t go up like New York would. It kind of goes out. So when you look at the last 10 years, one of the things I think you’re going to see is new neighborhoods in D.C. Navy Yard, Noma, have have really exploded with new architecture, new businesses, a new ecosystem and identity of their own. That then kind of continues outward to what’s happening at national landing with Amazon, and Tysons and Reston really coming into their own as their own ecosystems where people are going to live, work and play in those areas.

So, I think it’s incumbent on a lot of public-private partnerships and dialog and discussion between all stakeholders, about how you create that kind of environment and don’t rush to just build towers to occupy, but actually be thoughtful about the community that you’re creating. And I think that’s one of the larger macro trends that’s happening in real estate in general, because this is a very strong tenant market. We have millions of square feet that have delivered, and are slated to deliver. It’s the fact that companies are listening more to their employees about what they want, in terms of an ecosystem in space, whether it’s more light, natural, this environment that they actually inhabit. And now, landlords are being very responsive to the tenants.

ABERMAN: Sounds to me like we’ve got to get it right for our economy and our community to really grow properly. What’s your thoughts on that?

BIBERAJ: Well, I think diversity is one of the things that we should always be keeping in mind, right? The workforce is changing in D.C. It’s not just a government and legal town. We’re seeing a ton of innovation. Stuff that has actually really been here for a long period of time. I mean, the Internet started in northern Virginia, tech companies had been here, but they’re getting a lot more attention, both from landlords, developers and the community at large. I think appreciating the diversity of talent that’s coming here is really important, especially for them to react on the architectural side.

ABERMAN: How do you do that? I mean, how does architecture signify diversity?

DANIELS: There’s a lot of things that go into that. At Wingate Hughes, we really look at the workforce, look at the goals and the mission of the company, and think about what you want to get out of your day every day. Employers are starting to look more for how their staff can grow personally. When you have a staff that’s learning every day, they’re collaborating, they’re communicating, they’re working together, they’re innovating, they’re learning for themselves and focused on that, then great things happen for your company.

The key to that, from our standpoint, is to provide enough diversity of spaces. I think EverFi is a wonderful example, up on the west side. Wonderful leading tech company, education tech. This is our second office that we’ve designed for them. The array of spaces that we’ve given them, not just for conference spaces, you see, it’s not just about there being room label to certain things, so I know how to use it. It’s about giving them an array of spaces that they can figure out how to use, that they can apply different types of use to. That gets you more motivated.

ABERMAN: So architecture, in your context, is about setting the right mood, or socializing people, employees, to act the way you want to act. Which makes enormous sense to me having managed organizations. If you want somebody to collaborate, you don’t put them in a bunch of cubicles that are really dark. But pulling it back, Deane, you know, BrutalistDC, you’re looking at architecture, it seems like more of a bigger place-making thing, right? I mean, if the buildings are large, if they hulk over, if there’s nothing to look at in the ground floor, it alienates people.

MADSEN: Sure. And since you mentioned activated street level, the FBI building is kind of a wonderful example of how crucial that is to have, in the sense that there was actually an activated storefront retail level planned for that building that was later scrapped, with security concerns. Now, that building is seen as impenetrable, and that’s largely by design. But it’s viewed as this kind of hulking monster on Pennsylvania Avenue. And until recently, it was viewed as a tear down. Whether or not that will still be the case remains in question, with the current administration.

However, I think that it’s important to note that it’s such a big building, there’s so much embodied energy in the concrete that was used to construct it, that that is energy we won’t be able to get back. Producing concrete is a chemical process, and you can’t recycle concrete. So, I would propose that an adaptive reuse for a structure like that would be a much better use of resources, which we now find are limited, to produce a better living condition and the city of the future.

DANIELS: Deane, I think you make a great point. You hit on a real trend that we’ve seen in D.C. People are rediscovering buildings, rediscovering the beauty that a building already had that might have been covered up for years. We see that at Uline, we see that the Hecht warehouse, we see it at any building that I’ve designed, and around the city, where people say, oh! There’s brick behind that drywall. Well, let’s pull that out. I want to see it. I want to get back to the authentic, real nature of the building. And there were so many buildings that have been beautifully designed, that all of a sudden air conditioning and other mechanical, electrical and infrastructure of the building took over in a disgusting way, just to make the building serve, quote-unquote, modern needs. Now, we have better ways to do those things, and it’s allowed us and enabled us to go back and rediscover the beauty.

BIBERAJ: I mean, just to piggyback on that, one of the things that you’re noticing in a lot of the buildings are an immediate rush to amenities. Landlords are putting roof decks, taking advantage of space that may have been underutilized, adding gyms, conferencing, coffee shops. So the building itself is becoming its own ecosystem or community. And tenants in the marketplace are expecting that. So there’s a rush to amenities being provided, and tenants having a lot of leverage in demanding, basically, of landlords to provide even more to them.

ABERMAN: I would argue, hearing your discussion today, that what we’re seeing is a return to architecture as being in existence to service the individual, rather than architecture being in place to educate people to be citizens. Does that feel right?

DANIELS: I think it does. You could ask a lot of people to describe neoclassical architecture, and they might get close to it. They might have a feeling of it. But I think gone are the feelings of: this type of architecture is supposed to mean this type of thing. Architecture and design are so fluid right now, and we have a culture that is more educated in design than ever in our history of humanity. We have more people that understand, and have a better sense of design acumen, than we’ve ever had before. And I think that’s a positive thing.

ABERMAN: And it’s interesting, they get it by osmosis, right? I mean, very few people are getting the training, but we know. Why is that?

MADSEN: I’m not sure I know the answer to why people more people are getting it. But I just wanted to say a quick anecdote that, yesterday, I was scrolling through Twitter. And Metro had posted an influencer using the Metro itself as a backdrop for a fashion shoot. Which is really interesting in a lot of ways. Like, we’re experiencing architecture in different ways. And Metro is this beautiful example of the grand scale of Washington architecture, and it’s all underground. Thus, the stations are longer than the Washington Monument is tall, and they’re beautiful. And here, we have an appreciation for its aesthetic being used in a new way. And I think that’s just going to become more of the norm, as people find buildings as places to find themselves within the larger urban context.

BIBERAJ: And just one thing on that, I read an article that Deane wrote, actually in, I think, Architectural Digest, about a hip hop architectural camp that took place in D.C. And as I read that, I was just struck by the nature of what we’re crowdsourcing, where we’re asking more people, we’re spreading and trying to engage the community into really having a culture. But I thought that was a great piece, and it’s exciting to diversify who is at the table in making these decisions, and thinking about architecture and design.

ABERMAN: Well, it feels to me that there is an architectural character that’s emerging that’s unique to this area of the city, the broader region. And we’ll have a different look and feel 10, 20 years from now. Got you for just a couple more minutes. What’s it going to look like 10 years from now, 20 years from now?

DANIELS: I think architecture 10 to 20 years from now is going to look better. I think it’s going to be more accessible to everybody. And I think that, if I look at some of the infrastructure pieces that are happening, whether it’s 5G put in, whether it’s Verizon working with City of D.C. to make sure that we have infrastructure put in for the future, we are going to be a lot more connected. There’s going to be a lot fewer breaks. And I think that there’s going to be a lot more optimism about what we can do. We have more of everything in the world than we’ve ever had before. And it’s time that we start doing more with it.

BIBERAJ: I think how we work will continue to evolve and change, with smartphones and devices and the ability to work remotely. I think that’ll continue to be captured in a sense of hospitality in the ecosystem, that landlords and tenants are receiving and providing. So that’s going to continue. I think the tenant friendly nature of the market will remain, especially here in the D.C. metro area. I think we’ve seen regional collaboration in a way that’s never occurred in this area. I think the D.C. region will continue to be a magnet for companies and for talent in a way we don’t really appreciate. Now, I think Amazon was just that first step, and I think it’s only going to continue to grow.

MADSEN: It’s interesting to try to picture the city in 10 years. My kids will be teenagers then, and I worry about what that will bring. I think the city is going to have to do a lot of reckoning with its coastal nature. We forget that we’re bordered by two rivers, and the Tidal Basin is more increasingly at high tide. So, I think there needs to be some planning around that, which the city has already started to look at. But I guess to Gavin’s point, also, about our having more and more of everything. We also have fewer and fewer resources with which to build. There is a shortage of good sand for making concrete, for example. There’s a shortage of metal that we use in our phones and everything else. And so, I think that we really need to focus on keeping the buildings that we already have, and not tearing them down when they could be repurposed.

ABERMAN: So, we may look a lot more like, when you go to Rome. It’s like peeling an onion. It’s every year and all years at the same time. Is that where you think we’ll get to?

DANIELS: We’ve been good friends with the folks over at Douglas Development. I think Norman Jamal is going to take that company even further. And they’ve been a wonderful example in the district of taking old buildings, bringing them back to life, and adding something new to them. I think we’re going to see more examples of that. We cannot just keep building buildings, tearing them down and rebuilding new ones. I think there’s going to be more of an emphasis on doing just what you’re saying, peeling back the onion, finding something beautiful, and then adding something new to it that has to do with our technology.

BIBERAJ: And because of the vacancy rate, tenants have so many options that they really want to have some kind of grit, some type of character. Right. It’s not like we’re in a market like San Francisco, where we’re just so desperate for space for tenants that any building will do. The world is our oyster if you’re a tenant in the market.

ABERMAN: It’s fascinating to me. We keep coming back to this grit, reality, authenticity. What we’re really saying is that the millennials, and millennial tastes, are shaping what is expected. Because I’m old enough to remember when pocket protectors were cool, and everybody would live on the moon, and boomers wanted modern, modern, modern. Right. And now we’re talking about authenticity. I think it’s a very interesting testimony of where we are as a community. Last thing I’ll ask, quick one, each of you, before we go. For listeners, what’s your favorite piece of architecture that you think somebody should go check out when they’re walking around town?

BIBERAJ: I think one of these things that I notice in New York all the time is that people are always walking with their head in their iPhone. And I was in York for 12 years. And now that I’m back, I love just opening my eyes and looking. There are so many monuments and statues and things in D.C. that you never even notice, or take the time to read what that’s about. I love 1500 K Street as a building, because they preserve the facade, and then they just redid the entire interior so it’s state of the art.

DANIELS: The National Portrait Gallery has always been my favorite. I love Norman Foster’s roof that they put over the atrium. And I think the inside of the building is so well preserved, and just amazing. Second to that, I have to give it to Apple and what they’ve done over at the city museum, and the way that they’ve integrated something new and fresh into an old building speaks exactly to what we were talking about. They left what was authentic and improved it, made it better.

MADSEN: I actually produced a map of 40 buildings around D.C. It would be hard to choose a favorite amongst those. But if I had to, I think my favorite building in D.C. is the Hirshhorn Museum, which is this concrete donut that lands on the National Mall right at its midpoint, and provides this awesome round counterpoint to everything else, like the Air and Space Museum next to it, and all of the larger government buildings behind it. It’s a great place to visit, a great place to take shelter when it’s raining on the Mall, and it has great art as well.

With consumer debt reaching a staggering 1.5 trillion dollars, it can be extremely difficult to know when one’s personal debt is surmountable, or if it’s become a life-changing issue. To learn more about the options someone in debt can have, who to avoid, and who can help, we organized this EXTRA episode. At the table to talk about that today are Rebecca Steele, president and CEO at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, Bruce McClary, vice president for communications for the NFCC, and Richard Levick, founder and CEO of LEVICK.

ABERMAN: Let’s explore what are some of the factors that have led to the growing consumer debt level. I think it’s over one trillion dollars now. What’s been the main catalyst for this borrowing? Should we be worried about it? What do you guys think?

MCCLARY: One of the things that’s top of mind for me is, you know, we’re coming out of the holiday season. And I was looking at some of the statistics of how much debt people added to their already significant debt load over the holiday season. The average American consumer added thirteen hundred dollars in debt to their existing debt load during the holidays. So that debt, if you make minimum payments to pay off that debt, assuming it’s credit card debt, being charged at the average interest rate of 18 percent. That could take six years to pay off that debt given that amount of money. And then there’s one in 10 that are still carrying debt from the 2018 holiday season.

But that’s a small piece of the puzzle. So, there are a lot of other factors that are also influencing the current debt levels. We’ve got a significant lack of savings in this country. We’ve seen all the reports about the 400 dollar threshold, a significant portion of Americans not having at least 400 dollars to cover an emergency expense. So, where are they turning? Of course, they’re turning to debt. The available lines of credit that they have, they’re turning to borrowing to fill that gap. So that’s another area of concern as well. That’s leading to this significant amount of debt that we have in this country.

And it’s actually 1.5 trillion dollars of unsecured debt right now in this country, which is really going toe to toe with some other significant areas of debt, like student loan debt, and auto loans, and other things like that. So you think about the fact that 1.5 trillion is unsecured debt. Unsecured debt comes at a higher cost of borrowing than some collateralized loans and student loans and other types of credit. So that’s another problem as well. The money that people are borrowing in these situations is coming at a higher price.

STEELE: And I’d just like to add to that, since is Bruce is exactly right. It’s hard to get out of debt. That is one of the major problems that we have. There are less choices for workouts and settlements and moving your balances from card to card. That is very, very difficult. The other fact is that many consumers have more than five credit cards, and they’re switching between these credit cards to make ends meet. This is a huge problem. So it makes it more complicated. It’s not just about calling your credit card company and renegotiating the balance. It’s really about, now you have five major creditors to call and to try to work out these balances.

And it’s hard to get a hold of those credit card companies. And there’s a lot of predatory options out there, which are really bad and destructive for people, too. So when there’s cash in debt, you know, predators come out of the woodwork. So, you have to be very, very careful. And I kind of call it the wild, wild west of debt. You know, you can’t shop. You can’t do it yourself. So, where do you turn? So, there’s fewer options than we need today. And that’s one of the reasons why nonprofit credit counseling is a really important step to learn and educate, and understand budgeting.

Because it’s not the super prime and prime. It’s really subprime. And subprime is growing. And we remember the housing crisis just 10 years ago. It seems to me like it was yesterday, that 9 percent of the market in housing caused that destruction in the housing market, and in our economy. And we’re headed toward a 1.5 trillion and growing unsecured debt, which could trigger another recession.

ABERMAN: You’ve got the 1.5 trillion dollars in consumer debt. You’ve got trillions and trillions of dollars of government debt that’s trading below inflation interest. People are actually paying governments to take their money right now. Corporate debts probably, in many cases, below real interest rates as well. Seems like there’s debt everywhere. Richard, clearly we’ve got some consumer things to talk about today, but is this a global issue, a bigger issue?

LEVICK:Well, I think it’s both. You’re right. First of all, debt is a fairly new instrument. You know, you think post-World War 2, the G.I. Bills, student loans. The whole concept of mortgages. This is fairly new, for just a couple of generations. And we’ve gone from it being a rather new tool, one in which initially shame was involved, if you were to have this debt, to where everyone, almost everyone expects to have debt. We’ve seen the movies, OPM, other people’s money. And yet there’s always been this sense of sort of an in loco parentis, a parent there that will somehow come in and reach in and save us. And we see the federal government doing that.

We see consumers doing that, that we think that if we get the 5th credit card, the sixth credit card, that somehow this will all salvage itself at some point. There are two last points that I want to make. One, that George Will column last year in which he talked about the fact that the federal government never engaged in debt unless it was to do something for the future. Roads, bridges, national defense. The federal government no longer feels that way. And then, on a personal level, Rebecca, you raised the issue of predatory lending, and that has an ominous sound to it. What do you mean by that?

STEELE: That really means that there are people out there, and companies out there, let’s take fintech, for example. Fintech is a really popular growth area for companies out there, lending money. It’s easy to lend money today at high interest rates, at high feed costs. You really have to know how to shop, and how to understand those particular programs. So, predatory is where somebody is being charged more than they should, if they were able to really shop and understand their options. And, higher fee charges for lower credit. So really understanding how to get the right credit, in order to access money, and loans, and personal loans and other things. It’s a very, very complex ecosystem out there to consumers.

ABERMAN: It is very complex. And I want to help our listeners out for a moment, and just take a step back. Well, we’re talking about two different issues here. One is debt from a standpoint of, you borrow a sum of money, which you repay sometime in the future. That amount is fixed. The variable part is the interest, the rentals that you pay for the money. And that should be associated with your risk, the riskiness of the borrower. You know, hypothetically, the more risk that somebody won’t repay, the more interest can be charged, 18, 20, 25 percent, 6 percent, whatever. It sounds to me that what we have right now is, we’ve got the systemic issue, Richard, which is: there’s borrowing going on everywhere to finance current demand with future borrowing. We’re no longer borrowing to build bridges. We’re now borrowing to make payroll.

Which is a systemic thing, but bringing it down to consumers. Rebecca, the predatory point. Money in a free market economy has a cost. Are you saying that what’s happening now is, people are paying more than they should be fairly, because they’re being preyed upon? Is that what’s going on?

STEELE: I would say generally not. I would say that interest rates today, you know, on a typical credit card, are going to run anywhere from 20 percent to 30 percent. That’s an average.

ABERMAN: Which means that you’re effectively paying a third a year on the money. So if I borrow a thousand dollars, I’m paying back three hundred dollars just to stay even.

STEELE: Right. And if you can’t pay off the full balance, understanding the impact of that interest payment on your budget is really where people aren’t thinking right now, and they’re not planning for that. And that’s why they’re paying minimums. So, you pay a minimum amount, you will never pay off your credit card. So, really understanding the math behind that, and having someone maybe help you understand what that payment is, is really important. But predatory more generally, I think, is: I liken it to a zip code. So if you know a zip code of a consumer in the United States today, you know a lot about them. You know where they live.

Number one, easy. But you also know their FICO score, you know their medical situation. You most probably know their education. This is called segregation. And in today’s economy, it’s very much segregated by zip codes. So, what does that mean? That means that it’s easy to prey upon people in certain areas that have lower credit, that may be stressed with any kind of financial crisis, or life events. And that really enables predatory lending, and predatory moves like payday lending.

ABERMAN: It’s almost like reverse blue lining.

STEELE: It absolutely is.

ABERMAN: Bruce, you’re all in the middle of this, at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. So, let’s take it from a consumer standpoint. What do we need to do to arm consumers, so they can better handle themselves in this kind of situation?

MCCLARY: Well, I think I think one of the things it’s important to do, in terms of getting the right information in front of consumers, is to protect them from some of the more dangerous choices in getting out of debt, and offer safe and responsible alternatives to those. We talk about the landscape of debt relief opportunities for people, and we see the ads on TV. We listen to the ads on the radio, constantly promising things like settlement of debt for pennies on the dollar, for more than 50 percent. You know, turn to these companies to get out of debt and just walk away from it. Let us handle it. Those, a lot of those offers, are dangerous. There are warnings out there from the FTC, from the CFP. The BBB has miles of complaints about these debt relief companies that are out there, and essentially what they’re doing can be described as being just as predatory as what some of these lenders that we were just talking about earlier were doing.

So, I think one of the things that needs to be done is to protect consumers, and let them know, this is the danger area over here. There are safer alternatives. Here’s what you should be doing to responsibly manage your debt. Here are some alternatives to help you get out of debt that are not as dangerous. A lot of the debt relief companies, the for-profit debt relief companies, what they’re doing is, they’re telling people that they’ll settle the debt. But what they don’t tell people about is what that involves. A lot of times, that involves forced delinquency, putting people who are not seriously delinquent into a state of serious delinquency in order to negotiate. And that’s like dropping a nuclear bomb on somebody’s credit health. It just makes it so much worse.

And in the event that they’re not able to successfully negotiate, what is that person to do? Because now they’ve destroyed their credit in order for the chance to have a negotiated settlement, and then a lot of these settlement companies with low success rates are coming back and saying, well, you know, gee, we’re sorry we couldn’t negotiate this settlement for you. You’re left on your own now. And by that time, your creditor’s probably suing them for the balance that they owe. So, really dangerous avenues that people can go down to try to resolve their debt out there.

ABERMAN: Let’s help our listeners. Let’s give them some guidance for how to cut through the noise, and actually get the help, or get a plan, so they can deal with this challenge.

STEELE: I think one of the first things you really want to talk about is taking that first step. It’s really important not to be afraid to take the first step, and understand where to go for that. So maybe, Richard, I’ll ask you around the psyche of the consumer, and what they need to do to get past the fear of taking that first step. What do you think?

LEVICK: Well, you know, first of all, we talk about shame, and then we move past it as if simply mentioning the word is enough to understand its power. It’s sort of like describing to a Martian what love is by simply giving them the dictionary definition. It’s great power. You talked earlier in the episode today about what happens during the holidays, people taking on about thirteen hundred dollars on average in additional debt. Why? Because everywhere you turn is buy, buy, buy. The kids come home and they want something and you want to show your love.

So this shame cycle is inculcated in everything that we do. But then, when it happens to you personally, you don’t see yourself as someone in debt. I can work my way out of this! It takes a long time to understand that you need help. And the fear is, when you’re there, it’s sleeplessness, because it’s not just, well, how am I going to pay this credit card? When the dishwasher breaks, or you get a flat tire? It is a life altering experience. And someone who has never carried debt, never been in that downward cycle, has no idea the kind of emotional pressure that that puts on. So when you have that, you’re inundated with these commercials with predatory lenders, and you think, oh, here’s the easy 1-800 solution. And that’s the exact opposite direction you need to go.

MCCLARY: Well, I think in terms also, you talked about the shame of debt. One of the things that drives people into the hands of these predatory lenders is the fact that they don’t want to go to a lender that’s going to give them a rejection. Or, they don’t want the possibility of rejection. So, they go where there’s the easy yes. And they see that in these predatory lenders. Don’t worry about your credit score. Don’t worry about your income. Come to us. We’ll give you the loan, and we’ll make it fit your budget.

ABERMAN: So it sounds to me, first of all, we should acknowledge that the best way not to get yourself over your skis, with respect to debt, is to treat debt as any spending. And the hard fact is, if you don’t have enough money. You may not have enough money. And that stinks. But borrowing doesn’t mean you have more money. Borrowing just means that you hope to have more money in the future. So, there’s an educational aspect to this week as well.

But once the horse has left the barn, and you’re in the situation, you’ve got to get over the shame. It sounds almost like an alcoholic. I’m an alcoholic. I have an addiction. But I’ve acknowledged the problem gone. But more to the point, when I’ve reached that moment, how do I not fall into this trap? Do I go to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling website or their approved providers? I mean, how do I make sure that I’ve got somebody to help me work this problem, so that I can make my situation better, not worse?

MCCLARY: I think visiting the NFCC website is a great start. People that go to nfcc.org, they can find a counselor who can talk to them, who can work through the situation in a way that’s not judgmental. They’re not going to be further shamed about their debt. They’re going to learn more about their present situation. And they’re gonna realize that there might be options that they hadn’t considered. It’s like being in the fog of war. There’s the shame, but there’s also all the stress, and the fear that comes with carrying certain debt loads.

ABERMAN: So what’s the idea of a provider that I can trust? What am I looking for? Somebody who I can trust to help me. What are they going to do for me that’s going to signal that they’re not taking advantage of me?

MCCLARY: Well, they’re going to give you financial advice before dipping into your pocket, is one thing. They’re going to sit down with you. They’re going to conduct a thorough review of your budget. They’re going to ask you questions. They’re going to give you advice for things that you can do on your own.

STEELE: And there are red flags, too, let’s not forget those. Those red flags would include asking for money upfront. That should not happen. Asking for them to stop making payments altogether. That should not happen. Also, making sure that that’s not a high pressure sales piece. You want to be able to think about what the options are. You want to be able to talk to someone who’s willing to take the time with you. You want to have some options around how to put a budget together. Those things take time and patience. So, don’t rush.

ABERMAN: The key underpinning this is, there are people, there are groups that are not for profits, that exist in this country, where people will take the time to help individuals without reaching into their pocket or trying to sell them something. And that’s what we’re really getting at. If you don’t have an accountant or an uncle or somebody who is financially adept, you can find an objective person if you use the Internet properly, and are careful about these red flags.

MCCLARY: Yeah, that’s what nonprofit credit counseling is all about. And just as Rebecca mentioned, you definitely want to stay away from the ones that are going to be asking you for fees up front, too, and promising things they can’t successfully do for you on your behalf, that leave you in a worse situation. But the main thing is just to be getting advice from a nonprofit credit counseling agency. It just means that you’re getting an action plan that fits your unique situation, that you’ve spent time with a financial professional who’s not looking out for their own interests, but they’re advocating on your behalf. And it gives you a safe space to talk about your debt without the cloud of shame. It gives you a safe space to identify solutions. And it gives you a pathway out of debt that is realistic, based on your capability and your capacity to complete a particular option.

STEELE: And by the way, in addition to that, I think it’s really important that credit counselors are free. So, somebody is already in a bad shape with their debt. They need to talk to someone that will be patient, and then will not charge them for that upfront, and really set them on a pathway to success. And the other thing to keep in mind is, success is sort of like a New Year’s resolution. You have to stick to it. You can’t take it, you know, just for January. This takes months and months to get out of debt. And you have to be patient, and have someone there along beside you to help you with that stress.

MCCLARY: And in a lot of these programs that are offered by the debt settlement companies, they’re only things that are short term solutions, if they even work. And the difference there is that you find a person who goes to a debt settlement company, they may end up back in the exact same circumstances after they go through that, because what was missing from that was the financial education piece, was the counseling piece, was the advocacy, to help ensure that the person is better prepared to avoid falling into circumstances like that again.

ABERMAN: The key here is that taking on larger and larger amounts of consumer debt is not a story that ends well, because the bankruptcy laws are not structured to allow you to walk away. The financial system and credit reporting is not designed to allow you to walk away. So if you take on this debt, at some point you have to manage it down. Otherwise, you’re penalized. Richard, you’ve been edging toward the microphone for a little while now.

LEVICK: A couple of thoughts. One, Rebecca said something so critically important, which is: when you need help, you shouldn’t be charged for it. And the NFCC is there, and its chapters all over the country, locally, to help you. And there really are a godsend, if you’ll forgive it, it’s the Church of the Financial Redeemer, because they’re available to help. And you should be able to find someone, whether it’s the NFCC or someone else who’s not making money off of your situation. The question I have for the folks from the NFCC is: what should the banks be doing to help, or what can they do? You know, the banks want to give credit cards. They want people to pay over time. They don’t want the predatory counselors involved, because it doesn’t end well for their customers, and it costs them more. So what can the banks be doing to help you, and help their customers?

STEELE: Well, that’s a great question, and something that we think about every single day. Because the banks need to be partners with the NFCC. We have, since 1951, worked closely with the banks. But there’s an important point here. We’re not working for the banks. We are working for consumers, helping them get out of debt, being advocates for them. But the banks have a critical position here where we need their cooperation, we need their insight, their intellect, their help. And they’re pushing toward producing ways that consumers can get out of debt when there are life events, or when they’re struggling with those payments. And I will tell you, lots of banks are working with us. So if you’re a consumer and you’re in debt, you should not be afraid to call the NFCC, or go online and email us. We’ll get right back to you immediately, because we are going to work with your bank to make sure that you get taken care of. Bruce, anything else on that?

MCCLARY: Yeah, I think you said it exactly the way the way it is. I mean, I think the banks are already taking a leadership position, in many ways, to support NFCC. There’s much more work to be done. And I think there’s a lot of room for the banks to come along on that journey and help protect consumers to find safer solutions for them to get out of debt.

ABERMAN: The important point for all of us listening and here in the studio today is that debt is something that can be a great tool. It can also be a great challenge. It could also be your undoing. It’s a tool that should be used carefully. The good news is, there are rules for helping you manage if you have gotten over your head, and take advantage of the resources like the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, to solve these problems.

Most technologically literate people practice safety and security when it comes to their laptops and personal computers, but for some, your mobile phone can be a wide blind spot. To understand the inherent vulnerabilities in cell phones and other mobile devices, and what can be done to secure them, we spoke with Bob Stevens, vice president for the Americas at Lookout.

ABERMAN: Well, let’s start with the basics. In general, how have mobile phones become such a security challenge and liability for all of us?

STEVENS: You know, I call it the underbelly of the hacker world, because it’s a lot easier to breach than traditional devices. If you look at your PC, your laptop, you know, there’s a lot of tools that have likely been installed on those to help protect them. Mobile devices, not so much. You know, I think most people think, hey, my phone’s inherently secure, which really isn’t the case. You know, there’s a lot of ways for hackers to be able to get on the device. You know, they can do it via text messages. They can do it via messaging apps. They can do it in an application itself with malicious content. There’s vulnerabilities that exist on the devices. So, there’s just a lot of surface area for hackers to be able to pursue.

ABERMAN: Yeah, I don’t think that people tend to really focus that these days, the phone that they’re carrying around in their pockets really is the technological equivalent of what would have been sitting on their desk as recently as five years ago.

STEVENS: It’s bigger than that. It’s actually a supercomputer. So, you know, it has more processing power than the supercomputers of 20 years ago. So, it is a powerful device, and it literally carries your entire life with you wherever you go.

ABERMAN: We could spend the next 10 minutes talking about the social ramifications that we’re using supercomputers to promulgate cat photos. But let’s take it from the trivial to the important, which is: we now have these devices which provide an enormously attractive attack surface for cyber security hackers, and people who want to steal data and manipulate. I know you’re an expert in this. What’s caused you to want to really raise the alarm around why this is relevant, with respect to politics?

STEVENS: Well, as we know, there are other countries that have attempted or have interfered with our elections. And one of the things that I would like to see is, you know, as many people are allowed to vote as possible, and as many people as possible are informed about the vote that they’re about to place. One of the ways you do that is through your mobile device. And politicians are definitely aware of that. You know, we’ve seen an unbelievable increase in the use of mobile advertisements, text messages, social media to get their message out. One of the ways to ensure that all voters get to participate is to make it easy for them, make it convenient. So, you know, the mobile device allows you to do that. But with that comes a lot of risk.

ABERMAN: Well, absolutely. It is interesting to me that I can bank on my phone. Right. There are many things I could do my phone, but I can’t vote. I’ve always found that very… there’s no reason why you couldn’t overcome the technical challenge to really encourage democracy through these mobile devices, if you chose.

STEVENS: And there are states that have allowed voting on mobile devices. So during the last election, West Virginia allowed absentee ballots to be placed with a mobile device. So it’s mostly for service people that are overseas, that wanted to be able to participate in the election. You know, in the past, you and I would say, well, but they’re absentee ballots, do they really matter? Today, they do. Every single one of them needs to be counted, because in the last election, we saw that they mattered. And you’re right. Having the ability to vote is just a matter of creating an application that allows you to do that, which has been done.

But I’m sure the app developers will tell you, hey, my app is safe, and it probably is. But is the device safe that you’re voting on? You know, is there somebody on that device that’s stealing your credentials, that’s now going to place votes on your behalf? Are they trying to, you know, manipulate the messages that you received from the from the candidates, to try and sway your opinion one way or the other? And, you know, because people are on mobile devices all the time, that’s where generally where they’re getting their data from. You know, it’s a huge concern.

ABERMAN: So in effect, there are multiple aspects to this. Sounds like the first one is: if your personal information, your biases, your behaviors, are reachable by unscrupulous people, they then can use that information to place misinformation, or try to manipulate us. Which is the same issue we have with our personal computers these days, with the social networks. The second one is: my personal information may be taken, and then used to represent or spoof me in the world, and represent that I have an opinion, but I don’t, or I vote in a way that I don’t.

STEVENS: Yes, all that’s true. I look at three areas as a concern, and things we need to think about protecting. One is the candidates themselves and their staffs. As we know, there were breaches that occurred back in 2016. If somebody that’s trying to get into a candidate’s network or to try and steal any data whatsoever, I’m likely to go after the mobile device, because I know there’s very little protection on it today. And most of the staffers are running around with their mobile devices, and using it to communicate, or accessing the databases of the candidate to understand: I’m in front of a house. How does this person traditionally vote? You know, should I go in and talk to them? Things like that. So the second area is the voters themselves. So, how do I ensure that the integrity of their vote is met? So, I’ve got an app. I place my vote on the app, as we just talked about. Did that register as the candidate that I wanted to select? Or did somebody hack into my into my device potentially change my vote?

ABERMAN: We have Apple out, basically marketing themselves as almost a hack proof ecosystem. They seem to do that on mobile and also on their desktops. I don’t see similar claims in the Windows world. But at the end of the day, is this a software problem? Is this a hardware problem? What technologies exist right now that are deployable into mobile, that can address these types of security issues?

STEVENS: It’s all of the above. Anytime you’re creating software, there’s going to be vulnerabilities. It’s the nature of the beast. So you’ve always got to worry about software and software development. And I wouldn’t say that it’s always malicious. You can download what they call an SDK, which is a kit that you use to help develop software to make things easier for you. And there may be some poorly written code in there that you’re not aware of. But the hackers are, and they can take advantage of it. And then, of course, there’s always hardware. Less likely, but always hardware issues as well. What you need to be able to do is, you need to protect the phone in several areas. One is what we call safe browsing, or safe Wi-Fi.

So, you know, mobile devices try and connect to every Wi-Fi network that they come in contact with. If I’m a bad guy, I’m sitting there waiting for you to try and connect. I’ll try and get in the middle of that connection, and then I’ll start to steal your credentials, or your data or whatever it is. And probably the most important is phishing. You’re trained on your desktop, or your laptop, to spot phishing attempts. You don’t always do that on a mobile device. And also, the phishing attempt can come in a text, via a messaging app. It could come in from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You know, e-mails. There’s a whole host of ways that you can be phished on a mobile device.

ABERMAN: If you and I talk about this in the corporate context, I think that you and I agree that that the corporate entity has the responsibility to create and enhance security, so that the data can’t be breached at the server level, and at the edge level. But yet, when you’re talking about mobile, who’s ultimately responsible for the end? Consumers are using the phones, you have the carriers who provide the carriage. You’ve got the companies that are providing the data. Is that really the problem here, that nobody is really responsible for the edge-to-edge security?

STEVENS: You know, I think it lends to the problem. Nobody has stepped up to take responsibility. I think the bigger problem is that most people turn a blind eye when it comes to security on mobile devices, because as you mentioned earlier, they think that they’re inherently secure, and they’re really not a target for the bad guys, which isn’t true. I’ll give an example. We had a customer that recently tested 1,000 devices for 30 days. They had 150 phishing attempts during that 30 day period. So, that’s a huge percentage, and a very small number of the actual employees in the company. So I think the organizations in the government need to step up and take responsibility. And they need to understand that mobile devices are outside of their traditional perimeter. They’re not protected by their firewalls. You know, it’s up to them to ensure that there’s something that’s protecting the device, on the device, and also that the consumer or the user of that device is aware of what’s occurring.

ABERMAN: So if I’m a consumer now, and I don’t want to wait for the government to mandate edge-to-edge security, what do I do?

STEVENS: So the company I work for, Lookout, we have a personal product that’s on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

ABERMAN: So we’ve now come to a situation where, if we want to do our part for democracy, we should actually download an application to protect our phones.

STEVENS: We should, yes. It’s not just you as an employee trying to protect your work phone, as you pointed out. It’s a consumer phone as well, your personal phone. Because if I’m going to go after you, and I know you carry two phones, one for work, one for home, personal use, I’m going to go after the personal one.

2019 was a turbulent year for investing and the economy at large, and many venture firms had to learn hard lessons on what makes a business profitable and sustainable. To learn more about what the new year could hold for the economy, we spoke with Andy Medici, senior staff reporter for the Washington Business Journal.

ABERMAN: Let’s get caught up on the big trends from 2019. What are the big stories you think really shaped the year, and how do you see them teeing up how our economy is going to look for next year?

MEDICI: 2019 was a big year for venture capital, because it was a year that showed us what didn’t work. We had a lot of angst around WeWork, a model that, for years, had been taken as a given in venture capitalism, which is that growth at the expense of everything else is always preferable. And in this case, we saw how quickly that collapsed. We looked at a 47 billion dollar valuation drop to below 10 billion, a bailout by Softbank, huge layoffs, divesting the business. And that was just one of these massive startups that have sprung up over the years that have been fueled by investor dollars. And we saw this year that it just didn’t work. So in 2020, you know, we’re going to hopefully see what does.

ABERMAN: Well, we’ll see that. Also, Amazon was a huge story throughout the year. You covered it a great deal. How much do you see Amazon as shaping things in 2020, in our region?

MEDICI: Well, it’s interesting, because as Amazon moves here physically in the region, it seems like they’re taking up more and more of the debate, too, which is: in what way should Amazon exist? You know, 2019 in many ways was sort of their debut in terms of national politicians talking about this company, in terms of the company taking stands on individual issues. Some of it good, raising their minimum wage to 15 dollars. But some of it bad. You know, whether they have anti-competitive practices or not. So 2020 really is going to be: what does Amazon look like in the future, and how are national politicians and Congress going to look at this company from an antitrust perspective, from a regulatory perspective, as they go into new markets, as they continue to acquire new businesses?

ABERMAN: So we have Amazon, we have the whole sort of venture capital bubble, which burst not just with WeWork, but with other high-profile companies that went public, and traded down since then. What was the other big thing that you saw last year that really sort of shapes things as you’re looking forward?

MEDICI: Well, I think what we saw was a focus on these companies going public, these companies finally trying to get an exit. Uber and Lyft. But what happened was that people didn’t clearly value them as much as the venture capitalist did. So you have Uber, which has traded down, Lyft, which has traded down, Blue Apron, which has traded down. All these companies that professionals had, for years, sort of groomed and molded to have these successful exits. And they didn’t do well. And I think that begs the question, which is: what should venture capital be going forward, and how should a venture capitalist invest in these companies going forward? Because we think about venture capital as having been around forever, but it’s still a very young, and very new industry. Maybe you could say it’s 30 or 40 years old. Which means that, there’s plenty of room for change. And it will be interesting to see how that does change in 2020.

ABERMAN: For me, one of the big things of 2019, heading to 2020, and you touched on it: the biggest funds, most of them were raised by institutions that really didn’t have any particular nexus in the D.C. early stage community. For example, NEA raising a huge fund. You know, Sands Capital, really successful money management firm based in Arlington, started a new venture effort with some of the guys from Valhalla. And it seems to me that what’s happening now is: there’s a tremendous fusion that’s going on where private equity, hedge funds and venture, it’s all sort of coming out of the same bucket. And it’s just a question of where it gets deployed.

MEDICI: I think that’s a great point, Jonathan. That’s true. A lot of companies that have traditionally not been in venture have branched out into venture. As you said, Sands Capital, The Motley Fool, which for years had sort of prided itself on public company statistics and information and news, also with its own venture fund. And I think what is happening is that you have these large players in public markets, these large investment players, and they increasingly realize that the best way to get access to deals, as they come up, is to have been an investor in them the whole time.

So you see them creating a pipeline. You know, Sands Capital has more than 40 billion dollars in assets under management. So, a small venture fund really isn’t a huge investment for them. They can target these companies, and they can invest in them at every stage of growth, so that when they do go public, they’re there already. And I think you’re going to see that in a lot of places. Private equity in general is reaching earlier and earlier into the liquidity stack to pick up. You know, in D.C., several companies were bought by private equity, but they were only raising B rounds, which before was unheard of. Usually private equity comes in a lot later. So, I think what you’re seeing is people looking at the risk profiles and realizing that they would rather reap better rewards than wait down the road to see what comes out of that pipeline.

ABERMAN: You know, for me, as I look at 2020, what I am most interested in and concerned about is that there is an enormous amount of liquidity around the world. You know, we have trillions upon trillions of dollars of government debt now that’s trading below below zero interest rates. And you see more and more behavior where investments are being made to try to get a higher risk-based return. It seems like we’re in the middle of a bubble, and it’s very concerning to me. As you look at 2020, what’s your view?

MEDICI: I think a lot of people are going to look at 2020 as a time to make your bets before any possible recession. I know we’ve been talking about a recession for a while now, generally in the media and across the country. But what we’re really looking at is the fact that, as you said, there’s this been availability of cheap money for a decade or more now, at 0 at 1 percent interest rates. They’re going down still, even as we speak. They’ll probably go down again before I finish the sentence. And that’s how fast that’s happening. And that creates this excess amount of capital.

And people need to invest it, and they need to invest in their return. And you put it into huge rounds, like Softbank’s Vision fund, which hasn’t done as well as people would have hoped it would be. You put into these large companies, you put it anywhere you can. And does that create problematic issues? It definitely does. And it also means that capital, which is cheap, people borrow against, and it creates all sorts of risks, so that if there is a downturn of any kind in the economy, you have a lot of dominos that are ready to fall.

ABERMAN: So we’re here in D.C., I have to ask: as you look at the election, you talk with other folks in the financial industry. Do people really think that the election is going to make a particular difference?

MEDICI: I mean, a lot of these economic issues are macro, and they’re baked in. So it might not matter who you elect. You know, it doesn’t seem that long ago when Barack Obama got elected in the face of a recession that seemed to be happening, whether or not he was elected. He did a lot of things to try and mitigate the issues there. But all of these issues: high corporate debt, high student loan debt, credit risks, you know, all these little bubbles that are springing up, those are the results of years of the current situation and monetary practice. Will any president be better than any other at solving those problems? I think that remains to be seen, but that’s definitely something that I think will be on the top of people’s minds as people continue to campaign in 2020.

ABERMAN: Oh, absolutely. I know that though they’ll campaign on the difference, and they’ll say, the sky is falling, and you’ve got to vote for me, or the world’s going to end. As I look at it, and I think you’re right from the standpoint of there being certain macro issues, the largest one being the large amount of liquidity around the world, that’s not going to matter whoever the president is. But to my mind, the other thing that’s very likely, whether the Democrats or Republicans hold the White House: I think this will mean more regulation of tech. That seems to be, particularly antitrust, seems almost inevitable right now. Are people talking about that?

MEDICI: I think a strong dislike of social media companies now might be one of the few areas where both parties seem to agree, at least on some level, whether the specifics really pan out. But, you know, large companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, they are such key factors in all of our lives. And, you know, I shop on Amazon, and I use Google, and I’m on Facebook. And I think people are realizing now that what they signed up for, maybe, is not what they really wanted. And Congress is trying to struggle with these issues, and see what they can do about it. And in a lot of cases, that means regulation. There has been general chatter about, how do you break up tech companies? Should Facebook and Instagram be separate companies? Should Amazon be able to be both a marketplace and a seller? And these are debates and issues that are playing across the world stage. But I think in 2020, you’re going to see a lot more of those take front and center.

ABERMAN: As you talk with entrepreneurs, or you look at the community, it’s pretty clear that large amounts of capital are pooling in professional hands. Are you seeing, or do you think that we’ll see, an emergence of more angel funds, or smaller funds, or should entrepreneurs really understand that getting money is now a big company game?

MEDICI: I think what you’re going to see is small funds being raised. They’re not going to really hold a candle to the huge players that have very deep pockets. I think in 2020, you’ll see a few funds, you’ll see a couple of successor funds to small groups. But I think what you’re really going to see is more corporate capital, more corporations, more large scale asset managers get into the space. It’s too attractive to ignore for them. So, sure, there’ll still be small funds, and there will be some new funds, especially in this area. But these large players, they’re going to continue getting into the space. And I think we’ll see a lot more of that.

ABERMAN: So if you were looking at the conditions for being an entrepreneur in town, do you think 2020 is better than 2019, the same, worse? How are you feeling about it?

MEDICI: I think 2020 might be a good time to raise money, if you can get it in before any possible recession. I would say that entrepreneurs are always optimistic, and that’s probably why they’re entrepreneurs. But I think there is going to be a big side issue of realism, which is, how much time do we have before there is a downturn? And what should companies and entrepreneurs do to make sure that they are secure?

ABERMAN: Conclusive proof that entrepreneurs are not economists.

MEDICI: That’s exactly right.

ABERMAN: Well, Andy, as you look at 2020, what are some of the stories you think are going to be most interesting for people to pay attention to?

MEDICI: We have to take a look at venture capital, and what that’s going to turn into. There’s already talk about what big investors are valuing, and it might be a return to more realistic measures like revenue, possibilities for profit. For years, it was growth at almost all costs. And those models haven’t exactly borne a lot of fruit for a certain stage of investor. So, you know, you have companies, and D.C., I think, might reap some of the benefits of that. Because a lot of the companies in D.C. are focused more on revenue, they’re focused more on software and growth.

They have very few of those companies that are about growing without a product, or growing without a real customer base. You’ll still see some of that. But I think more and more, you’re going to see a shift towards: what can we do to make sure the company can thrive financially, even if that means sacrificing maybe a little bit of that growth on the top end? And there’s going to be all sorts of new models that, I think, will come up. You know, the traditional committed fund within a company getting equity, I think people are going to do a lot more experimentation to see what works better for them.

While women now make up more than half of all college students, and are reaching similar levels in the workplace, this hasn’t changed the fact that in the C suite, women are still woefully underrepresented. To learn more about the challenges women face with reaching the top of the ladder, and what organizations can do to bring the bevy of qualified women to the table, we spoke with Dr. Carly Speranza, professor of management and marketing at Marymount University, and Cheryl Williford, president and COO at Modus Create.

ABERMAN: Why is this issue of getting leadership mentorship properly trained into women so important to you personally?

WILLIFORD: Personally, as a female that has come up through the ranks of management and consulting and leadership, especially here locally in D.C., I think it’s very important to me to be able to portray an example for the women and the young women in the area. I think there is an especially interesting aspect to it here in the D.C. area, where there’s a lot of federally based organizations, as well as commercial organizations. And in that world, it’s much more even traditionally male, in the government sector, in the public sector than in the private sector.

So being able to be out in the community and, you know, speak to women, speak to young women, live by example of how to navigate those waters, and come up through those ranks, I think is really helpful here locally, for women coming up through the federal space, as well as the women coming up through the commercial space. And I think it’ll help tie those two ecosystems together really well going forward into the future. And I think women have a strong place in that tie of, you know, not just promoting more women up through the leadership ranks, or leading by example through the ranks, but also tying some of these more esoteric economic worlds together.

ABERMAN: Carly, how about you?

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SPERANZA: Today, women make up roughly 56 percent of college students nationwide. However, they’re still having issues breaking into that C suite, or even reaching mid-management levels. And we’ve found that in every space that women have reached that executive level, they add growth, opportunity, diversity, innovation and the bottom dollar to an organization. And women today are still struggling with, how do I get to that placement? How do I get to that space that I can reach my full potential within a company? And sitting at Marymount, I’ve had many students ask me, how does this work as a young female? What does my space look like when I graduate? And so we decided to look into this, and just start talking to them, and saying, hey, let’s let’s figure out: how do you find mentors? How do you grow confidence? How do you make your own space when you get out there?

ABERMAN: So, first of all, the issue these days is not women having access to higher education. Right. In fact, I’ve heard where there’s almost at some point an affirmative action program to have more young men in college. These days, it appears the issue is not bringing intelligent women into a university or an academic setting. With respect to the workforce, are women also a majority of the workforce now, the professional workforce, or are they a minority there right now?

SPERANZA: Women are actually a majority of the workforce, probably about 50 to 51 percent roughly. They’re also 51 percent of small business owners. So, women are making a difference. Where we’re seeing the biggest gaps, first, the biggest gap is political representation. It’s roughly between 20 and 25 percent nationally and locally across the U.S. But then, in the C suite, only one out of every five C suites have a woman member in those cabinets right now, at the top businesses.

ABERMAN: So it sounds to me, and Cheryl, it’ll be interesting to get your perspective on it, because you’ve pushed through this issue: it sounds to me like the pyramid of life. You know, you start out, everything is a force function. You get educated. If you get educated, you get to an interesting job, but the funnel follows, and narrows and narrows to leadership. CEO, political leadership, division leadership. What is it about the ways the workforce works right now that runs against the ability for women to compete equally for those types of opportunities?

WILLIFORD: It’s a very interesting question, Jonathan. Obviously, one of the most important ones. And it’s very true. So I’ve spent my career in the commercial side. I’m in the technology sector, and largely in consulting. And while Carly points out those statistics and the numbers that, you know, that do hold true, and I see this in the workforce, where the percentage is roughly 50/50 of male to female just in the general workforce within the organizations. But absolutely throughout my years, I’ve seen, as you go up the ladder, so to speak, the proverbial ladder, that disparity is as larger and larger and larger, to the point when you get to the C suite, there are still very few women. And it is typically one female at the table with, you know, about a half a dozen or so males. So it is a problem that does still need to be addressed and conquered.

I think the easy answer to address your question of, what are the preventative factors that hold women back: I don’t necessarily think that’s the right way to even pose it. I mean, the facts are there. And the truth is there. But the holdback, I don’t think is a specific thing. It’s not as if there is a group of men sitting in the conference room saying, hey, what are we going to do to keep women out? I honestly have never experienced that sense or that feeling. All people, men and women, all genders, they just want strong people with great leadership capabilities to run the companies, to run the teams, to manage the people. So I think what we need to look at is: where does that disparity happen, that those skills stop being accreted by women, or women stop pushing themselves forward, or they’re not recognized for some reason, just because of the way men and women think differently, that potentially they’re not actually seen, even if they’re there.

I think that’s the way we need to start addressing the difference here, what’s causing that disparity within the ranks, and solving at that level. As opposed to coming at it in terms of, you know, what’s holding women back. You know, what needs to change within this sector to change the outcome? Carly and I have spoken about this a lot. One of the determining factors, I think, is just the confidence level as well. And I think that’ll get into some of your future questions here, is that women carry with them that confidence that they actually can get to the next step. You know, so that their own fears aren’t holding themselves back.

ABERMAN: We’re past the point of overt exclusionary behavior, but now we’re into something. like, we’re not describing leadership in a way that actually is holistic? You know, it tends to be very patterned towards male types of behavior? Carly, what do you think?

SPERANZA: Well, you’ve got adjunctic and communal traits that are somewhat different. So the bottom line is, yes, male and female leadership tends to be different. And what’s happening right now is that, the research is showing that women are typically not as aggressive there. They typically undervalue themselves, almost 20 percent less valuable than men believe they are. One of the statistics I love to throw out there is that women will typically apply for a job when they are 100 percent qualified, whereas men do when 60 percent qualified.

So women don’t tend to put themselves out there as often as men do for those for those opportunities. And one of the things that I’ve told, since my national security career, my promotions were made through men. Men were my mentors, and men helped me, and they were they were phenomenal champions for me. I actually didn’t work for my first woman role model until I was in national security about 10 years. It’s also a lack of role models out there, a lack of seeing what’s possible. When you see that there are women in the C suite, when you see the route that a woman has taken, it makes you more likely to think, yes, I can get there, why not me?

ABERMAN: Where are women the strongest? What unique skills do they have? Carly, I’ll turn to you first.

SPERANZA: So some of the things that we found is that women are stronger in transformational leadership, meaning they tend to be more inspirational. They tend to have a higher degree of emotional intelligence. Generally, they’re better at listening skills and team building, especially when an organization is going through a large change, or there’s periods of conflict. Women tend to rally the troops, tend to get more buy in, and tend to listen a bit more closely than men, too. They tend to be more likely, probably about 5 percent more likely, to make ethical decisions in the workplace than men do.

ABERMAN: Cheryl, what about you, from the perspective of an entrepreneur?

WILLIFORD: Pretty much along the same lines as Carly is talking about, from the perspective of entrepreneurs, and transformational organizations in general, and companies that help other organizations go through a transformation. Women do bring a trust level, I think, that does help rally the troops. So I think in general, people open up more and talk to women and they’ll talk about, what some of the struggles are. Men and women, both, I think, open up to women more than they’ll open up to men. So, as they’re going through some really tough decision making processes in the organization, especially in the face of transformation at the business level, or at the technical level, or at the financial level, or even at the political level.

Men and women both will seek out a female leader to soundboard with, and to bounce ideas off of, or to talk about their vulnerabilities, or what their concerns are. And that’s a great asset for women to actually internalize and know, that’s sort of one of those soft, inherited skills that I think women excel at, or have, because of the fact that they are women in general. That if they’re aware of that, they can really help organizations, help their own career, help other people’s careers, by understanding they’re going to get a lot more personal information from their coworkers, from their leaders above them, and from people that they’re leading as well. And they can use that information to help mentor. And so, that’s a great aspect of providing mentorship to help within the organizational ranks also.

ABERMAN: Well, that’s a key issue. And I think I want to turn next to the idea of mentorship, you know, helping people develop. But I suspect that one of the reasons why women are so well suited to succeed in today’s workforce is that they expect servant leadership. The idea that you don’t dictate to people, you bring people along by delegating authority and giving them encouragement to execute. As we start to think about these inherent advantages, the combination of empathy, a willingness to learn, delegation, servant leadership, that women seem to be at least indexed towards, how can women position themselves within an organization for promotion in advance?

SPERANZA: Jonathan, you bring up an excellent question. And one of the things that women can do more is, there have to be opportunities. They have to, when they’re thinking about wanting something, or a new opportunity comes up, they need to trust themselves. They need to trust their expertise, their intelligence, their education, and put their names forward. Their mentors, if they are a woman or man, if you see someone that is suited for a certain position or promotion, with women, you are more likely to have to go and have that conversation with them, and give a little bit more of a push. Women are not typically going to barge into a room and say, hey, this is for me. This is perfect for me. That’s just not happening in the workplace as much as it could. So, women really have to have that confidence, and the innate drive to say, yes, I’m ready for this. I can tackle this. Put me in.

ABERMAN: Cheryl, how does this relate to your life passion around mentorship?

WILLIFORD: From both aspects. I think to Carly’s point, women are less likely to barge in to the superior’s office and say, I want this position, give it to me. In terms of mentorship, I think that’s a very important thing, for women to help mentor other women that are coming up, or trying to create more skills, and grow their career path, to let them know to be more assertive. So when we talk about, you know, how can women position themselves better to rise up the ranks, while they’re even using these intrinsic skills that come along with being a woman that add, you know, value in diversity, in leadership? Also, speaking to men that are great mentors as well, and just asking them: what are some of the things that I could be doing different to help me get up the ranks? And it’s usually not about, take this class, or you’re missing this piece of education.

The one thing I learned, and I learned this from every male mentor that I had, and that is: seek out mentors, male or female, that are giving you great information at a personal level, that you feel is valuable, as opposed to having somebody say, I’m going to be your mentor or, you know, don’t wait for a mentor to be assigned to you. If there’s somebody that you’re really impassioned about what they do, and you want to follow their career path, go talk to them. And that’s mentorship in itself. It doesn’t have to be this assigned programmatic type of thing. It’s, you know, building alliances and networking within an organization, and building your own mentorship path of making sure that you’re open to receiving information that you know is going to be valuable to you yourself, personally, to your future. Often mentors don’t know they’re mentors. They don’t know that they’re providing information to other people that are really taking it to heart, and taking it home, and spending a lot of time over the next few years following that path.

ABERMAN: What kind of advice could you give specifically to our women listeners about how to develop mentoring relationships with peers? How do you find a mentor, and get somebody to want to mentor you?

SPERANZA: One thing I’ve noticed is that women will tend to try to go, especially if they’re entry level, they try to go right to the top. You need to find somebody that is in that mid level, maybe somebody that you don’t even work directly with or for, maybe across an organization. Find someone that you would maybe want to be, or a position that you would like to be in, in the next five to 10 years. Just have a conversation with them, ask those questions, say, hey, can we have a coffee one day and talk? Can we sit down and just talk about this? But they’re not going to give you a pathway. You have to have an understanding of maybe where you would like to go, or what are those opportunities? The other thing I’ll tell you with everybody is: work is not enough. Your work product can be absolutely superior. But if you don’t get along well with others, if you can’t build, if people don’t trust you, it won’t work.

ABERMAN: So much of what we discussed today is relevant and applicable to my own career. I’m very fortunate. I have great mentors, people in town here that have taken real interest in my career, both younger and older than me. Someone doesn’t have to be older than you to be a mentor. A mentor is somebody who takes an interest in you. And I’ve found that you have to execute, you know, on a regular consistent basis. It’s not just, hey, let’s have coffee. You have to walk the walk, and mentorship develops organically over a long period of time. It doesn’t happen through a coffee, right?

WILLIFORD: Yeah, absolutely. You have to execute and you have to follow through, and you have to show results. And, you know, you have to be able to present results in a way that can be consumed as well. So even if we’re not talking about work product, and we’re just talking about the outcomes of mentorship, whether you’re receiving it or providing it, if you’re going through your career path and you’re meeting regularly with somebody that you consider as a mentor, or somebody that has a career that you want to follow in, even if it is just a quarterly, hey, let’s have coffee. Let me chat with you, provide information back to that person as well.

You know, again, they may not know that the information they’re giving you, or these coffees, or these conversations, are helping to craft their career. And even if they do know, they may not realize themselves, what is the most impactful conversation, and what is not? Again, back to not everything being a hard skill or an academic skill set. One of the best pieces of mentorship I ever received, that I received from a couple of male mentors, was: learn to negotiate better. You know, you’re out negotiating contracts and large deals. Negotiate for yourself and your career and your tactics, too. Apply some of your hard skills to your own self. So, give the feedback, just as you would give data feedback, such as reporting on dashboards out at work, on your output.

Give that feedback to mentors as well and say, hey, that that piece of information you gave me, Jonathan, has helped me over the last five years, and I am at this level now because I relied on that. And that gives the person that’s providing you mentorship a lot of feedback to know, hey, this is a really important thing for women in general to now. So, as I’m talking to other women, you know, Cheryl told me this really helped her. I should give that same piece of information out to other women trying to get up this path also. So, it is bidirectional, and there’s a responsibility for somebody that’s being mentored to actually help the people that are helping them. You know, it’s the circle, the virtuous circle of giving back.

ABERMAN: It is a virtuous circle of giving back. And it’s also, I think, as we wind up this really illuminating conversation: the best-run organizations, in fact, have cycles to give information, get information, and are organic in how they grow. They grow by empowering people, whether they’re introverts, women, men, to succeed, and then giving them feedback. And in other words, as we conclude this, it seems to me, we’ve talked about women, but ultimately, organizations need to tolerate and encourage diversity so that everybody has an opportunity to grow. Carly, I’ll give you the final word on that.

SPERANZA: I don’t know if it’s just the diversity, but it’s also that recognition that leaders need to understand followers have more power than they’ve ever had before. It’s got to be a team effort, and you’ve got to get the buy in from everyone. And the buy in from everyone means bringing those creative ideas, bringing those ideas you haven’t thought of. Bringing people that have different experiences, that, yes, they look different than you. They have different education than you. But surrounding yourself with others that are exactly like you is not going to get you to the innovation and the creativity and the market space that you crave.

You may not think too often about the roadside assistance services you’d need to call if you get into an accident, but when you need it, it can become a lifeline. To learn more about the industry of roadside assistance, and how one company is working to provide it to even more people, we spoke with Chris Spanos, CEO and co-founder of Urgent.ly.

Well, we’re happy to have in the studio the CEO of one of the fastest growing companies, United States. Chris Spanos is the CEO and co-founder of Urgently Roadside Assistance, a very exciting startup that’s a grow up here in the region. Talk with him a bit about how the company got started, why it’s succeeding, and how it relates to a broader question about whether or not D.C. is a great place to grow a technology company. Chris, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, Jonathan.

ABERMAN: Well, let’s start with Urgent.ly. Great name, but what does Urgent.ly Roadside Assistance do?

SPANOS: Urgent.ly is what we call a mobility assistance platform. We have a very simple premise. If it moves, it will break and it will need assistance. And our entry point into this marketplace was reinventing and reimagining traditional roadside assistance, which was a completely broken customer experience. But we built a platform that is capable of taking signals from any distress vehicle. And we all know about the future, mobility is being transformed right now. The future of assistance will also be transformed. And we’ve built a platform that’s capable of doing it on a global basis.

ABERMAN: What’s interesting is, to me, you described building a platform, which means, you know, technology enablement. But fundamentally, you and I have been in technology for a long time, just having a technology platform doesn’t get you customers. So are you direct to consumer, direct to business? How do you find the customer for a great technology platform?

SPANOS: Yeah, we are a B-to-B customer. So, we power assistance programs in the U.S for companies like Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, Uber, across a wide range of automotive, transportation and logistics verticals. So, our customers bring their customers. Our job is to deliver a great service, both through technology and management of the service experience. So in some respects, a platform and a tech-enabled service. We’re not a direct to consumer company, although we started off that way, in the first two years of our six year journey so far.

ABERMAN: People will often say, well, if they aren’t particularly informed, that D.C. is not a place where you can start and grow a consumer- or business-focused technology company. that we’re the kings and queens of consultancy because we don’t have enough talent to grow these type of companies. How do you react to that?

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SPANOS: I mean, I would react violently in disagreement. D.C. is a tremendous place to do this. I mean, there is a ton of talent here. So, you know, my background. I came out of MCI, the telecom revolution. I was at AOL. I was at NEW, you know, which merged with Asurion. A number of our co-founders came from AOL, Verisign. There is a ton of talent here. There is a ton of capital here. It is a great platform in which to have an idea, build a team, get that early money, even get that big money. You know, we’re in a building right now that has the largest VC firm in the world, which is NEA, right around the corner from here. So you can do it here. It is a great place.

ABERMAN: I’m going to try a theory out with you, which I’ve been rolling around for the last couple months. My theory is that what D.C. excels in is what I call intrapreneurship, where a lot of us, me included, cut our teeth doing startups, this is instead being entrepreneurial in a large organization, where we learn the lessons of finding a customer and learning execution with somebody bankrolling us. We didn’t necessarily get all the upside, but we learned an enormous amount which then set us up to be entrepreneurial. And maybe that’s the secret sauce for why we now have some really, really good startups. EverFi was a huge success, and many others. I wonder if that’s what is really setting us apart.

SPANOS: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a good theory. I mean, that certainly aligns with my experience. MCI was a very entrepreneurial company inside, very Type A, aggressive, finding new markets, go after it. Same thing with AOL. NEW also, right? So, really good. I was very fortunate to have really, really good training. And in fact, my first job out of school was in a publishing company in Old Town Alexandria, and they were building a new newsletter off their existing financial newsletters, but they treated it like a startup. So we were in the other half of the building. We had the folding tables and chairs. The other half of the building was quite nice. And, you know, we built up this publication into this most successful financial newsletter in history, but it was a startup inside an organization. And that just continues.

ABERMAN: A lot of people have focused on Amazon in different ways. My gut is that, what Amazon ultimately will do for us is, it’ll validate that the region has great technologies.

SPANOS: Yeah, I mean, I’m a big fan of Amazon coming here. It’s going to cost us money. It’s going to cost us talent in the initial phases. But, you know, the way I look at it is, rebuilding the Crystal City area, and then having UVA, George Mason, Virginia Tech, putting education campuses there, and then even the University of Maryland coming across the river into Virginia to establish a foothold, now we’re going to start to have what I think Silicon Valley has, which is this great entrepreneur spirit, great universities, a ton of money, a ton of history. And it becomes this machine. Now, if we can create a similar machine, where the university component is a key function in that, I think it’s a great springboard to a wonderful future.

ABERMAN: I do too. With my Dean’s hat on over at UMD, I see the same thing for my school. You’re absolutely spot on, I believe. Speaking of spot on, I think it would be fun for me to reveal that, as an investor, I was approached very early on by Urgent.ly, and I didn’t invest. And there are some interesting lessons. Lesson number one is: sometimes investors are wrong. Sometimes you look back in sadness. But, you know, at the time, it was a very different business. And I think there’s some interesting lessons there for entrepreneurs as well. Could you give some insight into how the business evolved, and what other entrepreneurs could to learn from how you went through the process of modifying your business to be able to scale it?

SPANOS: Yeah, absolutely. The original vision for Urgent.ly was that any urgent need connected to servicer who could provide it. And that’s a very broad approach, and we needed to benefit from focus. And very well entrenched competitors who grew up in the Internet, Service Magic, which became Homeadvisor, there’s a reason why they’re the king of the hill, and why there isn’t, you know, a new local services startup that starts every week and then doesn’t make it. Because, they’re super smart and they know what they’re doing. So, we had the opportunity to take the team, take an early version of the platform. We were able to get a roadside assistance network, a preexisting one with 17 years of performance history. And in 2013, we looked and said, look, it’s Uber for X, everything’s being Uber-fied. Uber was changing the culture. On-demand economy was going to destroy all subscription businesses. So, we thought, let’s focus on roadside assistance. No one is focusing on this whitespace. It needs to be Uber-fied fine. Transparency, speed, convenience. VCs love a clean story, on a big market, with entrenched legacy analog monopolists. That’s roadside assistance. So, that’s what we did. As it turned out, climbing the direct to consumer market was just too much of a mountain for us. And we pivoted to B-to-B. Because if you’re a car company, insurance company, rental, you’re offering roadside assistance to your customers. And if that service goes poorly, your brand is exposed. You may never choose to buy a car because of its roadside assistance program, but you may never buy that car again if you have a terrible experience. So, we made a pivot to B-to-B. And the story I like to tell is, we were on the phone with a car company in 2015. They said, hey, we’ve been tracking you. We would like to work with you. We would like the speed and transparency for us. Can you do that? And I said, let me put you on mute. I turned to our CTO and I said, all this stuff that we’re using to run and monitor the business, can we just pull it forward and put their logo on it, and give them a view of just their customers? And he said yes. And the reason why I had that thought is. I knew the guys who had created the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. And they had gone into Domino’s and they saw all this data behind the scenes and they said, let’s just pull it forward and give it to consumers. And that was that split second decision. I went off mute and I said, we can do this for you in 48 hours. We gave them the first version of it. And that was the turning point for the company.

ABERMAN: Is the moral of the story that, before I let you go, the financial markets are relatively unforgiving, but relatively perfect in that, if you can really find that mix between customer consumer adoption, and rapid growth, there’s money to be had.

SPANOS: Absolutely. And once we started along that journey, and then we were able to show that we could deliver service, our customers were super happy. We could win more customers. We could see a path through scale to get to a really good unit economics. Then the investors started getting behind us, and our first set of investors really were strategics. Because they understood the pain point they had on the operational side. And so, they had an incentive to support us to get stronger. And now we’re at the point where the financial VCs have said, OK. You’ve got all the characteristics we’re looking for. And we have had a number of investors who passed, who then came back around, paid a higher price to get in, because they can see this. This is massive, just roadside assistance. It’s a 32 billion dollar global market.

ABERMAN: Yeah, I suppose you’d be happy if you could just command two thirds of that! Well, Chris, it’s been great having you on.