Alex Bean. From $2.5B Exit to Fulfillment and Impact.

0:00Welcome to the Exit Paradox Podcast, where we discuss how to build a fulfilling and meaningful life after selling a business. I'm Anastasia Koroleva, an exited founder who spent the last 13 years researching and collecting stories about life after a successful business sale. Hello, Alex. Very happy to have you here today. Thank you for joining me. Looking forward to it. Excellent. So let's jump right in. You built and sold a company called Divi. It took you five years to sell and you sold it three years ago. Can you tell me a little bit about it and then we'll focus on how you felt afterwards?

0:38Yeah. We started in around 2016, around when Apple Pay and Venmo were starting. And we created a credit card meant for businesses that was a smarter credit card that we built. And so it automated expense reports and didn't budgets. And we sold the small to medium-sized businesses. And it took us about two years to build and three years to scale. and sold it in our third to fourth year. And it was a fun run. That's quite fast. How did you feel right after you sold if you take yourself back to that moment? Like, so two elements. One, I was obviously really proud, really excited. I think we sold to, you know, someone who bought what was really good to our employees as well.

1:25So overall, really proud. But the funny thing about it as I was trying, I told this to someone the other day, you think in your moment when you sell there's going to be some sign the paper everything hits the bank account this euphoric moment and it was like the opposite there was all sorts of legal nuance and you know timing delays and by the time it actually like hit the so the the quote unquote bank account it was like kind of weeks after the celebration it just felt very anti-climatic through the whole process so yes really excited about the problem also kind of like wait a minute like you know when is the moment where you join us and i never really can so it never happened what happened what happened afterwards tell me about the next few months how did they play out yeah so we sold in june which uh for me was a good timing because it was kind of my kids were out of school and I left immediately after selling.

2:25And so I said to myself, to my family and to other people, I said, no one even talked to me about work for the summer. Like I'm going to take the summer off. And, uh, you know, we're going to trip with my wife and my kids and just, just was able to like detox after so many, not, not just did it, but also years prior to the so many sprinting years in the startup world that it was awesome. So for the first three months, I'll call it the honeymean phase. Like it was really, really great. Once my kids went back to school in September, it changed. And it started to get, I think we'll cover a lot today where I was like, oh, wow, I'm pretty bored.

3:01Oh, wow. I don't feel fulfilled. Oh, wow. Like, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. So really great for a couple of months. And then after that, it started to shift. Okay. And then what happened? Yeah. I mean, so I used the phrase. I had a friend telling this to me a long time ago, and it's this phrase of like earning your sleep. And what happened with me is I remember being in bed. It's probably like October. And I sent this to my wife, and I said, Megan, I'm going to tell you something that I can't say publicly because people would not get it or they would just like crucify me for it.

3:39But I said, I'm kind of jealous of my friends that are still in the rat race. And she's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, I played golf today. I hung out with my kids, but like, I don't feel fulfilled. Like I went to bed just not earning my sleep. Like I just didn't achieve anything. I didn't build anything. I didn't contribute to anything. It was just all like consuming, like, you know, eating and relaxing and playing golf or whatever. And for me, it was this very unfulfilling, you know, feeling, feeling. And I just said, like, I miss being on the hunt. I miss having a purpose every day of like, all right, I'm going to work today.

4:18So when I get home, it's like I can relax and I go to bed thinking like I accomplished something today. And that feeling was gone. The feeling of accomplishing something was gone on a daily basis. And that was really weird. And so that led me on a whole little journey. But that was the feeling that led me to feel like very unsettled, unfulfilled. And it would hit me at night when I didn't earn my sleep. That's kind of what I would always trigger. Yeah. Were you tired at the time? after the marathon of the business well i was i was tired so when i sold we sold i was tired and then i took those couple months off and after the couple months i felt pretty good um and so it's like i felt like i detoxed so going into that october you know time frame and beyond i i wouldn't no i wasn't tired anymore right i was 37 yeah so still young and I was like okay I'm now I have to do something it was kind of like my body was like wanting to go yeah and I had nothing to go for so I was just kind of like stuck in this idle situation so I wouldn't say I was tired come October and I felt pretty refreshed so you were full of energy and nowhere to go what did you try to do that is uh yeah so I did all sorts of weird stuff.

5:38Well, not all weird, but some of it was I wanted to publish bucket list items. My best friend and I wanted to do a Guinness Book of World Records, so we played pickleball for 24 hours to break a pickleball or Guinness Book of World Record. We climbed Mount Rainier. I started taking piano lessons with my two daughters who were 12 and 10 at the time or whatever the ages were at the time. I started playing piano. I started taking magic card lessons because I always thought that was interesting. Oh, my God. You were really bored. Yeah, I was really bored. And I, you know, it was like I liked piano and the card thing was interesting and all these little stuff.

6:22But it wasn't fulfilling. It was like I did it. It kept me busy. I ended up not just not doing anything, but it wasn't fulfilling. I wasn't building or creating anything with a purpose. And so that's what I did from probably September to call it like April, main time frame. Like I stayed very busy and not productive. And so that kind of was my life for about six months. Okay. And something happened in April that helped you become more productive? Yeah. So I would say probably like October, I started going into an office every day. uh you know not eight hours a day but like going into an office to create some structure to just get out of the house and go do something i started writing a book um not the one i actually will talk about another one that i had always wanted to write so i started writing a book to stay busy and i started meeting with entrepreneurs and so entrepreneurs have reached out and said hey i want you get your opinion i want to hear what you did at divvy and how we can do it But so that naturally started getting all these entrepreneurship conversations.

7:31And from that, I basically said, OK, like I enjoy this. I enjoy helping out the next generation. And I had a friend reach out and say, look, I'm leaving my venture capital firm and I want to start another VC fund. And I said, let's do it. So I started I jumped into the venture capital world two years ago in May. Okay, so from your personal perspective, like very subjectively, can you compare your experience as a founder versus post-exit VC? Yeah, you know, yes, I would still like consider myself an operator and a founder more than a VC. So I'm pretending to be a VC, I'm learning how to be a VC.

8:12I will say, you know, there's a skill on both sides, right? To be a VC, you have to see certain things. You have to find it in founders. You have to enable founders. There's things that it requires. But I also sometimes have to laugh because VCs, most of them haven't done it, and they do not know at any level what it actually takes from a stress level, from an energy level, from just the mental grind. And VC, by nature, is you're very diversified. You're betting on lots of different people and hoping that they do it. Whereas when you're a founder, you have all your eggs in one basket. This thing has to work.

8:53And it lives 24-7 all the time. So you're just constantly like the stress, the risk. So my heart goes out to founders. That's why as a VC, I do my best to basically be there for them and not try to tell them how to do it, but to try to listen because it's so much harder to be a founder and operator than it is a VC. Yeah. Okay. Did it give you that fulfillment you were missing after your exit? Yeah. Yeah. Much more so, you know, and we've been doing it now for two years and I really enjoy it. Right. For me, it's the right pace. It gives me purpose. I feel like I can get in with founders and interact with them and work with the teams and try to recruit and do all this stuff.

9:37but I'm not having to work the hours and the stress and the time we were when we were doing Divi. But yes, I find a lot of fulfillment in helping out these other founders and investing in them. And so it's also a little different than just kind of doing personal investments. I know a lot of other people in similar situations and they kind of make personal investments. I find that that's not as intensive as what we're doing, which we're like, you know, we're meeting with five companies a day, maybe not five a day, but, you know, a fair amount of day and that it's enough work and fulfillment yeah i really like it it's good it's been a good transition for them how many hours a day you work i would say i'm in the office from nine to four on average um and then i do a little bit of work at home so you don't call it seven to eight i don't really take a lunch break so to speak so they send me so do you think you have a healthy balance now between work and life comparing to before yeah i really like where i'm at right now there's days where i am busier than i anticipated and i'm like oh shoot like i'd love to turn it down back a little bit but other days i'm like oh no this is perfect i i can do the things i want to do when i want to do them but i'm busy and engaged in building a lot of things both with tandem and beyond you know some personal projects and stuff so um to me it feels like a really good rhythm so hopefully we can keep with it So you think that's what you're going to do for the foreseeable future?

11:07Yeah, foreseeable future for sure. I mean, I'm writing this book, as you know, called Factory for Good, which is kind of my experience along with my family history's experience and how to navigate this post-exit life. So there's a lot of things I do that kind of connect to the VC side of things, but are really its own little project as well. so you know meeting with people and doing events along those lines is also something i'm gonna do but um yeah i i love helping out the next generation and if we can invest and make money together then let's do it so it's been three years since your exit what would you say are the biggest lessons you've learned so far what are you trying to achieve like what do you mean by that right like who am i talking to someone on like how to just navigate post-exit life or would you just say you know what are the lessons i learned on you know yeah basically if imagine someone who just sold their company and they're like okay what's ahead of me what what do these people who are a few years ahead of me know also somebody who's maybe selling the company or contemplating it what it is they you feel they could benefit from if you tell them maybe you know problems traps to avoid yes okay those are two different people but the same so Let me answer a little bit of both.

12:29If someone just sold their business, they know they're selling it. It's not a discussion of whether they're selling it. It's like it's sold or they're selling it. But first thing I would say is like enjoy it, but know that the enjoyment or the honeymoon is not going to last forever and that's okay. But enjoy the honeymoon while it lasts. Kind of have that experience of detoxing, but just know that that's not going to be the way you live life for the rest of your life. You're going to need to find purpose. yeah so for me like you know the book content is like purpose relationships and legacy um and then i have one other thing i want to add after that but purpose is you know eventually you're going to need to find what's next right and as we talked about before the podcast started you know when you're not money motivated anymore right money's still a productive thing and a good thing and whatnot i'm not saying it's it's miserable but when you're not working just for money you're working for purpose and for creation and for, you know, things of that nature, you could be really fulfilled on what you choose to do, but try to go find something that you really want to do.

13:34So you're going to need to find purpose and it could be nonprofit. It could be a business. It doesn't really matter, but you need to have something that like in the shower, in the car. And actually someone told me this quote, they, um, they gave me this advice when I just left. They said, my kids need to know what I do for work. I said, why? Because if dad, if they think dad just does nothing, that's their reality. And that's what they're going to expect to do with their life. And that's not going to be fair to them. So I've always thought that that was really good advice to just dad, you know, in my regard, dad or mom.

14:05Yeah, they have to know what you do. So one purpose, two relationships. It's amazing how many people I've met, especially interviewing for the book, that are missing happiness. They sold their company. they bought the cars the houses the planes yeah and they're just they like made some choices that like separated them from their their closest relationships and their chase for all this fun stuff and um i think when you talk to them they you realize that like actually the things that matter are their closest relationships like your husband wife or spouse or bond or your kids and your closest friends like i would say do whatever you can to make sure that those stay in a really healthy strong spot because if you don't have those or it doesn't matter what plane you're flying on you're not going to be happy and um on that same token the thing i wanted to throw in to to someone if i had to talk to someone who sold their business today i would say take a breath on buying all the stuff right now you're gonna have the money in the future don't go don't go out first week and just buy everything you've ever thought about buying yeah just slow roll it enjoy the process you know you don't need to go buy something tomorrow and i think that that would that would be probably some cute best of you brilliant so in terms of the relationships how did exit the exit and what you've learned affected your relationships with your wife for example yeah this is this is i got one for you so my wife grew up poor uh single mom with six kids she did not grow up as much I grew up was called middle class you know we had what we wanted but not not like crazy wealthy so when the money came I was like oh let's go do this let's do this for this these people let's buy a cabin and let's you know let's do this and my wife was like no let's not change anything like I don't want to move I don't want to buy a new car I don't I I just want to keep the life I have.

16:09And the answer, by the way, was in the middle. It wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't what she wanted. But what happened is for us is, you know, I used to joke that if my wife could have pressed a button for the first year after after the exit, pressed it like, you know, the easy button. We could go back to like not exiting. She would have pressed the button. She wouldn't have told me because she knew like how much it meant to me. But she wanted to go back to a simpler time. and um it just took a lot of communication frankly it took us a long time to get on the same page of what are our responsibilities uh what does giving look like how do we not spoil our kids like the biggest thing for my wife was how do we make this that kids are entitled spoiled little brats and they can be contributors in society because that's all that she cares about so it was uh more complicated than i thought i didn't expect the first year uh post exit to be essentially our hardest year of marriage and we we worked through it we're in a great relationship but that it wasn't easy it was it was definitely more complicated than i anticipated so so now you think you're you're out of that crisis and it affected the relationship in a positive way looking back is would that be true yeah i mean it wasn't because like all experience is good and bad if done properly with your spouse can be productive and healthy and strong and great and tighter bond right so we went through things we didn't go through before so in theory yes i would say we were the stronger place but you know like two things on this one you know we live in an apartment for our first eight years of our marriage and you know now we have a nice home and it's like if you ask us if we're happier now in our nice home versus the first eight years in our marriage i i don't think the answer is yes at all i think it's actually like there we're together as a family And as long as we're together and have a healthy relationship, it doesn't really matter where we live or what we're doing.

18:07But, yeah, crisis averted, so to speak, we're in a much better spot. We've kind of found our rhythm and footing for, you know, the things that we want to spend on and what that looks like and how to manage the kids, but also our relationships with our siblings. You know, another thing I've found fascinating in this world is if you have if you're lucky enough to have success. You can't go online and talk about it, right? You can't go on Instagram or Twitter and talk about it because a lot of people don't want to hear it. It's totally fine. You don't have your siblings and your family haven't really gone through it.

18:43So it's new for them. So you can't go to them for emotional support or questions. And then, you know, for your friends, a lot of your friends are in this situation. And so you kind of find yourselves in a little bit of a lonely space where you're trying to figure it out. But there can be jealousies. There can be you do things incorrectly or other people perceive things incorrectly. And so trying to navigate all those relationships to keep your friendships and all that stuff intact took a little time. But I think we're in a really good spot. Did people ask you for money? I mean like friends and family?

19:18Yes. What did you do? Yeah, I'm not going to use names, obviously. So we actually really enjoyed giving certain people, certain organizations, and things like that. So it's been really fun and really rewarding. But there also have been other scenarios where it's not as rewarding, and there's an expectation and entitlement. And it can be really like, oh, wow, this isn't fun. Like they just expect me to give them this money and, you know, it's not as enjoyable as you were hoping to give. So someone came to this recently. I think this is the best way I would advise someone. So if someone comes in with a business idea and they want me to invest in it, that's great.

20:09And sometimes I do. For me, I throw it to my team and I have, you know, team advisors and I say, hey, send me everything you got. I love it. let me have my advisors go through it and if my advisors go through it they think it looks bad then like they can be the bad guy and they can say hey you're i'm not gonna let you do this right so i don't have to personally say no yeah that's hopeful um dream but to like family and friends like someone in need um the advice that was giving to me was do you have an is it an asset problem or behavior problem as an example a single mom who's raising kids and working hard with her car race down.

20:48She needs a car to let you work. That's an asset problem. She's doing everything she can in her power, but it's an asset problem. So you can fix that asset with an asset, money and a car, right? But if it's a behavior problem, and this is complicated and this is where a lot of people get in trouble, if it's a behavior problem, you can't fix a behavior problem with an asset. So whether it's your parents or a kid or a sibling or a cousin or a neighbor, whoever's in trouble, if they're in trouble because Because of the behavior, whatever that might be, you can't solve those behavior problems just by throwing money at it or giving it to them.

21:25And if you give them$10 ,000 this month, they're in$10 ,000 the next month, and$10 ,000 the next month, and$10 ,000 the next month, because they're not fixing behaviors. And I think we've had some scenarios there that hasn't been super fun. And we've gotten – it's fine, but it hasn't been great. Yeah, that's a hard one. But that's such a great framework, behavior versus asset. Brilliant. It doesn't make it easy to say no because there's definitely times where, you know, like you wish it was that easy to say, great, let me give you this money you're asking for. The sad reality, not just for my life, but also these people I interviewed for the book was it's just not the case.

22:08If they ask for a 20 and you give them 20, they actually didn't solve the issue so often and you find the same situation two months later. So you're saying in your book, you divided the post-exit problem into three sections, purpose, relationships, and legacy. So let's go back to the purpose a little bit more. I want to dig deeper into that. So how do you think someone who sold the business should go about looking for their new purpose? Yeah. So there's a chapter, basically the four stages is post-exit. We phrase it as honeymoon, right? Enjoy the honeymoon. Just know it's not going to last. Stage two is loss.

22:54And loss is really funny. I was known as the divvy guy. and you know for like i'll tell cook sure i was walking my dog uh over or no my dog got loose and i couldn't find him so i was in the neighborhood trying to find my dog and i i'm driving in the neighborhood i rolled out my window i see this guy i know from the neighborhood and uh old gentleman i rolled out my window and i said hey um have you seen a little black dog and he goes he kind of looks at me he can't really see me and he he's like oh you're the divvy guy i've been gone for divvy for two years and it's like i felt in but then when he said it i was like wow that's what he knows about me he doesn't know my name he doesn't know my personality he doesn't know my family he knew me as the divvy guy and you will feel a sense of loss in stage two and as long as you understand that it's coming just you're gonna have to absorb that sense of loss you're no longer the ceo you're no longer whatever you're gonna be kind of you know separate So you got to internalize the loss.

23:59And then stage three is experiment. And really, I don't know the easy equation for purpose, but you have to find another mountain to climb. You have to find another purpose that is hard to achieve and start marching towards that purpose. And if it's to eradicate the world of poverty, great. if it's to build a real estate empire a second time over but there's you know there's charitable giving things attached to it fine but you've got to find something that causes you to to look up and say i'm going to climb that mountain and let's fair down and um and then you know see you experiment and hopefully from the experimentation you find it and then uh if you get to stage four then you're in a good spot and and then you feel you deserve your sleep at that point yeah but deserve your sleep means like you feel happy you're right you feel good because you go to bed at night like oh i did something with my day and for me it means like i can leave my wife in the eye my kids in the eye or my maker in the eye and say i did something today and i i think that's what you're trying to figure out.

25:11Yeah. No, I think it's fascinating. You want to feel your day is not wasted, which means your life is not wasted, which means your life actually has a meaning because it's not wasted. Right? Yeah. And I just want to say one thing is that people, if they hear me say these things, I think they're thinking never buy nice things or never relax or vacation that's not how i feel i actually you know like i still play a lot of golf and travel or whatever but if that's all you do i feel like the that path has been paved by a lot of people a vast majority of them don't make it and that's a lot of what i talk about because i saw my grandpa do that and you know he kind of stayed focused on just making money i call it money mountain like he just kept focusing on making money without really trying to find another purpose in life yeah and because he never got off money mountain he just made money that was his pride and joy so to speak and you know that will let you down in the end that's not the same as a relationship it's not with you like you're gonna die and you know he died alone and unhappy because that's where he put his pride and joy okay so so that is purpose and then you said relationships we touched upon it with your wife uh what else you found regarding relationships is important to think about post-exit yeah i mean look uh who said it um i actually heard a jim carrey quote yesterday that really liked it was basically i'm sure you've heard it that i wish everyone could get rich and famous because then they'd realize that's not the answer okay yeah yeah and He kind of explains on it and is like, you know, that's not what matters, like not at all, but like at all.

27:02Like, you know, he didn't enjoy it. He's actually been very open about how much he hates being both rich and famous. And, you know, for me, how I outlined, how I structured the thinking is there's a circle A group, a circle B and a circle C. A circle A is like for spouse to your kids and closest friends. These are the people that matter more than anything in the world. And whether you're poor or rich or anywhere in between, this is why when you go to Africa and you find people that are super poor but they're really happy, it's like why? It's like because they have a poor group of people that love them and they love back.

27:38Circle B is a broader influencer of friends. Maybe you're not closest friends but good people and people you interact with and your neighbor and your communities. and um these have to be you have to almost think of them as like how how rich are those relationships how how how strong are they not just how many but how strong are they so yeah and your circle a and then you have a circle b and then circle c is kind of the you know the extended influence and so for me it was starting with circle a and making sure that those were in a really good spot and setting up the rhythms and cadence for those and then b and then you know try to move on to c which is ultimately a legacy but um yeah and what do you think would help you care more about people in that circle c because now we are talking about kind of growing out of yourself right yeah that's a good question i i say this like i think i'm a nice guy but i also realize that i'm innately selfish and what i mean by that personally is i think about myself and my wife and kids and kind of my little circle and that's the world i live in and um hopefully i treat those people really well but i don't innately wake up and think like okay how do i how do i help circle c um i want to do it and so for me what i've uh i've put time and energy into is like i've actually surrounded of myself with people that do really care and their purpose in life is to help you know yeah see and so working with them and creating relationships with them to be exposed to different things through them has helped me go like oh i didn't even know that that was an option or that that was possible so through those relationships i've my eyes have been open to different experiences that i wouldn't have connected yeah and frankly then when you actually get to meet people either running those organizations or the people that are affected by it, you start to realize how valuable those relationships are.

29:39How much they can expose... By the way, it can be locally, it can be internationally, it can be domestically. But for me, it's surrounding myself with people that really care about Circle C situations and having empathy through them and learning through them and being exposed to them. I love this. I'm a big fan of being very conscious about people you spend time with because we get so much from other people. We copy so much from other people without often realizing it. So the only way to deal with that copying is to pick the way people to copy. Okay, that's brilliant. Great. So that brings us to legacy.

30:23What is legacy for you? I mean, so legacy to me is like having an impact, just having an impact on the world around you and making it a better place. And so, you know, we talk it. I've thought about it a lot. Like I have a great grandfather that was successful in his own right. It's been 70 years since he was, you know, a productive person of society. And we still talk about it, right? Like we still talk about this man 60, 70 years later. And it's because of the community, like the impact he had on the community in terms of, you know, he built a building here and he set up organizations over here and they still exist.

31:13And that's so to my family, we still talk about and or make decisions in our lives today because of the person that he was then. And, you know, so for me, I think about it with that lens of, can I make the world better today? And can I do something by establishing my values to my children so they know that mom and dad didn't just care about having a swimming pool, but that we cared about these other things that really, really mattered. And we think shaped who we were as people, both our faith and both, you know, impacting, you know, the community and everything at large. so to me it's about passing on values to people beyond your historical light and circle d and and uh creating an impact so i think it's just different for all people so how are you doing it or how do you plan to do that at this point this point in your life uh the book's called factory for good by the way and the reason it's called factory for good is for this this purpose so we've thought about it this way most people you you know when you start you know the responsibility becoming an adult is like you work you have this factory and you work really hard so at the end of the factory money is outputted so you can provide shelter and food and all the you know basic needs what we're talking about today is like well when you provide it for your basic needs the factory needs to be retooled and reshifted so instead of this factory that we spend all of our time and energy on outputting money we now take money and input into the factory and the output needs to be good or impact on whatever you phrase but we all good right so for me i've set up budgets um with people that hold me accountable and help expose the money to other people and again doesn't need to be melinda gates big you know just whatever your amount is and we've created a mission statement behind it uh we and then we meet you know once a month and say okay some things we do we have of these things we call$5 ,000 miracles.

33:14And it's like single mom here, guy here, where we'll send out little things. It's not going to change their life forever, but we're just trying to help some people. But fundamentally, we try to say, okay, here's our overall budget and here's our mission statement. And we are constantly trying to find things that allow us to invest in these like a business where do we get the most impact where is the roi where's what's sustainable and that we're trying to increase the budget uh therefore the impact and we just we report on it like a business and we try to really sit there and so my wife and i and uh we have a third person that works with us to like keep us you know honest on it and pacing on our anyways and so for us that's our factory for good is trying to actually be stewards of that budget and money and purpose and then give to their organizations and people that will execute.

34:10Do you engage your kids in that? Yes and no. So they don't know the money elements yet. I don't know when we would expose them to that, but they don't yet. We do expose them. So for example, there's a, I live in Salt Lake. There's a guy who's running a place called Other Side Academy. Basically, they take homeless people off the street and drug addicts off the street. And instead of just kind of putting them in a room and giving them therapy, they've created these businesses for these drug addicts to come to and to work in the business. And they kind of rebuild their life through the work. Amazing organization.

34:53Super cool to watch. So we've donated money to this. Sorry, sorry. organization. But our kids are like, we've had our kids come to the Christmas wrapping one. We've had our kids come, you know, just meet, you know, come to the facility and meet people. And, you know, so they're engaged to know what the causes are and try to interact with us on those. They haven't read like our mission statement yet, but I think as they get a little older, probably 15 16 range will start to really innovate them more and you don't want them involved or know about your wealth just because you're afraid they'll be spoiled breads as you mentioned before uh yes it's probably a good summarization of it so i don't know if that's totally fair like you know my 14 year old smart enough to know that we're doing okay and things like that but I'm not sure I don't want to shy away from hey we've had some success because I actually think like if done properly they should be inspired by you know the risk we took and the things we did and the amount of effort it took so I'm not ashamed of it and I don't think it's like I won't ever tell them but I also don't think they need to know the numbers and and everything quite yet so we'll integrate that with them as they get older and our 14 year old we have more conversations with and we talk about stuff with but yes we try to tone down a lot of elements of what wealth might look like just so that they don't have a skewed reality because it's probably not going to be their reality because i'm not giving them no absolutely so okay um you're doing all these different things in terms of your impact but how would you connect your sense of purpose with legacy so for me i'm not a philanthropist at heart like amazing at it i guess it's also i i don't know how to do it it's not my it's not my gate so what i the my factory for good is i want to build businesses that create opportunity so i can employ people that are around me and in my circle of influence and end up and grow.

37:15And second, that creates cashflow and additional funds so that I can pour that into the, into the budget of giving away to the people that we think are actually really good at philanthropy. So for me doing the venture capital, doing the investments, that's my purpose. I like it that every day I enjoy that treadmill. But the motivation is, okay, can we make more money? Can we help these founders build their own kind of Facebook? Can we make more money? And we can put that into the budgets and we can start deploying more and more money into these various organizations, charities, people, et cetera.

37:54And I work with someone who's really good at helping me deploy that. So that's how I connect purpose and creating of additional wealth into Impact or Legacy. so how do you teach your children values and the definitions of things like success and wealth yeah um there's never one right answer for kids like you can't just say well if you have one meeting you'll do it um so you know my kids will say stuff uh like you know my kid will ask are we rich right they've asked that because their friends will call will make fun of them or call them rich or whatever. We live in a nice area. I say, what does that mean?

38:41We have a good conversation about what does rich mean? What does success mean? Also, rich does not imply you're the only one that is rich. People can consider themselves rich in a lot of different amounts or circumstances. We try to define what success is because I think to me, and Megan and I, what success means is are you building? Are you creating are you are you pushing something forward that has positive positive impact on the world you have this relationships you know and you go to bed and i and say like you got all the same things we've discussed and so we try to just have those conversations so when they ask a question like are we rich or whatever the question might be don't just say no and get out of the corner and don't say that again but try to flush those conversations out with your kids and let them you I'll let them be curious.

39:32Let them ask. Because I'm super proud of the work we put in and the opportunity we took advantage of and what we did. And so I want them to know that. I don't want them to think it's like a bad thing to have success. But I want them to know that they have to do it on their own, right? That they're going to have to go build their own world. There's a responsibility that you have if you're lucky enough to be found in this position to help others. and so we try to have those conversations especially so you mentioned that you felt quite lonely um after an exit did you join any organizations besides just reconnecting with your friends or anything like that that helped you through that stage yeah yeah i mean you know we talked i mean you're part of the same organization i am there's a tiger one there's a local one here and I saw LinkedIn join us that I've been in Brown for a few years.