Ep. 46: Trey Bowles | Co-Founder of 1845 Ventures & Serial Entrepreneur

Trey: Apple came and asked me to be a director of something new that they were building called iTunes. I went and met with the guys in Apple and Steve Jobs and gave them my advice on what they should do. But I thought, man, I was just CEO of this fastest-growing company in the Internet. Why would I go be a director somewhere? Well, I didn't realize that director at Apple was a way bigger deal than CEO of a small startup company. So I looked at that. I'd been given the opportunity to be the early partner at a company called Skype. And I just said, I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to go build another company. So I spent the next 8 or 10 years building companies in different cities. We built Morpheus in Franklin, Tennessee, which is 30 miles south of Florida.

Evan: It's amazing.

Trey: My thought was, if you can build a company like this in Franklin, Tennessee, then I could build a company from wherever I wanted.

Intro: Welcome to Y'all Street. Today I meet with Trey Bowles, managing partner of 1845 Ventures. 100% legit. So Chris, do you want a cup of coffee?

Evan: Trey, do you want a cup of coffee?

Trey: Absolutely.

Evan: I got you this awesome Texas coffee mug because, I'm not going to lie, you might be the most Texan man in business that I have interviewed yet, which I am very excited about.

Trey: I appreciate that, and hopefully I'll prove that through our conversation today.

Evan: Texan down to the core, even to the name of your company, which is 1845 Ventures. Tell me what 1845 Ventures is, and where did you get the name 1845?

Trey: First of all, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I love talking about Texas, so excited to get into that. 1845 is a venture firm. We have several different products. Our first product is a venture studio, which is a little bit different than traditional venture that you might hear about from other people. We actually co-found companies with the founders. That means we come in as 50-50 partners, and then our job is to help do all the things that a first-time entrepreneur doesn't know how to do. Oftentimes, I believe entrepreneurs don't fail because they're not solving a real problem or because they're not facing an issue that really exists. I believe they just don't know what they're doing in so many different areas. They're an expert in one particular area, but to build a company, you've got to know 25 different areas. What we do is come in and backfill that with shared services. We help them legally structure their business. We help them find a development partner and designers and help them build out strategy and go-to-market pieces and product-market fit. We do all that stuff for them so they can really focus on the product that they're trying to solve and attacking that. Because businesses fail because they run out of time and they run out of money. If we can help expedite the time to market, we can really help them win and put them in a place where they can really be successful.

Evan: Get them to a place where they're having revenue earlier so that they're not just burning cash. Where did 1845 come from?

Trey: 1845 is the year that Texas became a state. We believe that all roads are leading to Texas. Over the next decade, we're going to continue to see this. We feel like there's no better place in the country to build a business, to launch a business, and to sell a business. Because of the makeup of our corporate environment here, specifically in North Texas, there's a lot of exits that are happening. A part of our thesis is there's not a lot of billion-dollar tech exits in North Texas, but there's a lot of $100 to $300 million exits every week. That happens because these corporations are coming in and buying up companies that are solving problems for them. The reason we don't see more of that publicly in the media is because those companies are buying these businesses for $100 to $300 million. In most cases, that's not a large enough acquisition for them to even write a press release about. We have these entrepreneurs who are building, solving problems, exiting, but they're not really allowed to talk about it. We believe instead of fighting that historical statistical makeup, let's embrace it. Let's build and find companies that are solving problems that companies will purchase and build a pretty nice model for us at 1845.

Evan: There's an incredible amount there that I want to get into, but I'm not going to get ahead of myself. Let's go back to your background and your career. What led you here? Where did you go to college? Did you work in big banks? Were you an investment banker? Were you always an entrepreneur? Tell me about your early career.

Trey: It's a very untraditional background. I grew up in Dallas, went to play football at a small school in Alabama called Sanford University. Got hurt, decided I would absolutely never live in the South, so I came back to Texas and finished at Baylor. While at Baylor, I had a buddy who had started a company. This was during the dot-com boom. He built a company, asked me to help be a part of the team, so we helped build that out. He sold the company really quickly to a business in Tennessee, so I moved back to the South. Thankfully, I had a bunch of friends that had graduated from Sanford, so I had a bunch of friends in Nashville. But I started helping build that company out and getting more and more involved in starting new divisions and helping run parts of the business. I was maybe 20, 21 years old. I just decided at that point I really enjoyed it, so I launched a second company and then I launched a third company. I think by the time I launched my third company, I thought, I may be an entrepreneur, and that's what got me into that space and continued to help me build.

Evan: So when the larger company acquired your first company, you stayed on for a period of how long?

Trey: We moved to Nashville. We stayed on. It was a company called Gaylord Entertainment. They bought our company specifically with the vision of having us create an internet presence for their 26 disparate business units. They owned the Grand Ole Opry. They owned radio stations. They owned Opryland. They owned all these different properties that they had. They believed this young group would be able to build a web presence for them, which sounds weird now, but back then most people didn't have websites. We came on to do that for as long as they were going to be able to keep us there. What happened was the dot-com busted. At that point, the parent company said, uh-oh, the internet was a fad. We've got to get out of this. They unwound everything and shut down the business. I was in Nashville helping them unwind the company, helping sell off the assets of the business and figure out what we were going to help them do to make some money on the stuff that they had done. We did not believe that the internet was a fad, but at that time it was still early. From there, I moved to my next venture and then ended up building a company that was right time, right place, and happened to be the fastest growing company in the history of the internet. We had about 110 million customers in the first 11 months.

Evan: This is your third company?

Trey: The third company.

Evan: Tell me about that one.

Trey: It's called Morpheus. Some people are familiar with a company called Napster. Napster built and grew and then was shut down by the government. Again, I said right time, right place. We launched a week after Napster shut down. Napster built the awareness for this thing called peer-to-peer file sharing. When Napster went away, a bunch of people didn't have any place to go and share content, so they came to Morpheus. We were there to receive them, embrace them, and build out a platform to help them be able to share content. Unlike Napster, we were not creating copyright infringement. Even though we got sued by all the record labels, movie studios, and everybody else that could throw a tin can at us, we ended up winning that lawsuit and building up this massive organization. I tell people I'll never work at a company that size again. I remember in the same week, I was in London and popped into a black cab. The cabbie asked me, have you ever heard of Morpheus? Later that week, I was in a Walmart in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. The couple in front of me were talking about Morpheus. I'll never work for a company like that again. It was an amazing opportunity. I learned a ton. It's where I cut my teeth on business. I had to build a sales department. I'd never done that before, so I bought a book and built a sales department. I had to build an international business development strategy. I'd never done that before, so I bought a book, read that, and built out an international business development strategy. A lot of my career from that point on, and even before that, was me jumping into the deep end of the pool and figuring out how to swim.

Evan: Help people understand the specifics of Napster, of the peer-to-peer file sharing. MP4 files, this is so normal to us. We're sending things all over the place, all the time. Why did they get shut down? You said copyright infringement. What did you do differently?

Trey: Now everybody, we use Apple, we use Spotify, we use Pandora. We have all these different ways to access content. Back then, the future of content was unclear. There wasn't the ability readily available to download content online. There were these sites out there, Napster being the first, that would create the ability for you to upload content online and share it with other people. I'll do this without trying to get too technical, but essentially, on Napster, you would ask Napster to find you a certain file. Let's assume that file was a song. Then Napster would talk to me and say, do you have that song? If you do, will you share it? What Napster was doing that was illegal, was Napster was helping to facilitate the illegal transaction of content.

Evan: Without payment.

Trey: What Morpheus did was we took this piece out of the middle. What Morpheus did was create a massive node environment where all these different computers were talking to each other. You would search the network, and the network would determine what content you were looking for and help facilitate it back to you. Morpheus didn't know what content you were sharing. Technically, we were not contributing to copyright infringement. Again, we got sued by everybody. The court case actually went all the way up to the Supreme Court and fortunately was upheld. But I was no longer with the company at that point. But it was just an amazing time to see the future of media, the future of content being decided. It was really at that point where I realized, policy has its place and is important, and content laws are important. But the reality is, as technology advances, we have to adapt to it. Because you were not going to put the genie back in the bottle. And we had situations where, in some cases, artists were embracing it and they were putting their content on these platforms to get it out to their fans. So they could create relationships with the fans. But it did, some would say, kill the music industry. We would say, transform the music industry and put it to where we are today.

Evan: How old were you when you left Morpheus?

Trey: 22 or 23.

Evan: So you're 23 years old. You've built now three companies.

Trey: You've divested or sold off a company, been involved in that.

Evan: And you've been involved in multiple lawsuits, learning that. Going all the way up to the Supreme Court. The wealth of knowledge at a young age is almost unheard of today, especially in large corporations. You're a professor at SMU. You teach a class. Do you push kids to go away from their traditional investment banking, MBB consulting, and actually go get experience?

Trey: That's a great question, because a lot of the students at SMU, that's kind of the path they take in finance. What I tell people is, and I'm probably one of the biggest advocates for entrepreneurship of anybody I've ever met, but I tell people if there's one word of advice I would give an aspiring entrepreneur, it would be unequivocally, without exception, every single time, don't do this. Don't do it. It is not for most people, and it is super difficult, and it is the hardest thing that you will ever do, and it's because it requires all of you. It's because there is never a moment when you're building a startup company that you are not responsible for every single aspect of it. Most people, if they knew what it took to start a business before they started it, they wouldn't do it. I also follow up with saying, if that makes you not want to start a business, then you're probably not an entrepreneur. Because a real entrepreneur just goes, yeah, whatever, I'm doing it. What I do with my students is I spend a lot of time talking to them and listening to them and understanding what it is I think I hear they want to do, and then I encourage them to make their own choice and follow their own path. In some cases, that's entrepreneurship. In other cases, it's not the benefit of starting companies when you're young, because it doesn't cost a lot of money to live. You can be extremely mobile and flexible and have the ability to move and go anywhere you want, do whatever you want, you just have no knowledge or experience. That's why we see the average age of entrepreneurship being closer to 40. Because most people go out, get a bunch of experience, begin to understand and see problems that exist and how they think they'd solve them. A lot of times I encourage students, you'll never ever regret going and working for Goldman Sachs or doing iBanking or something like that. Having some of those names on your resume will only help you and you'll only increase your ability to learn. Then at that point, in two or three or five or ten years, you can always come back and restart it. One of the things you don't have at 20 is perspective. You don't realize how long your career actually is. You have tons of time to go gain some experience, learn from people, understand if you really like this and you want to do this thing. On the other side, if somebody said, I'm going to start a business, I would help them.

Evan: I completely agree. When you're young, you do not realize how long your career is. I'm 23 and I always feel myself feeling like I'm 50 and I have to do everything in the next five years or else I'm going to retire. Putting yourself in the right mindset of how young you are and how amazing the opportunities are that you have is really difficult. Especially for my generation today, when everything comes fast, fast, fast.

Trey: Exactly. There were decisions that I made at Morpheus, at some of those early companies, because I didn't have experience, that really hurt me. When Morpheus offered to give me stock in the business as a part of my compensation, they told me how many shares they'd give me. I did not ask how many shares were outstanding. I didn't know that. I just said, wow, that sounds like a lot of shares, that I'm going to be rich. Not, oh my gosh, how many shares are outstanding, so how much of the company do I actually own? It turns out that if we would have sold Morpheus, I would have made a good amount of money. But I should have asked for more stock and I should have asked for different things than I would have that now I know and back then I didn't.

Evan: You didn't found Morpheus though, right?

Trey: I did not.

Evan: How early were you?

Trey: I was there right after it launched and then I took over as CEO a few months in.

Evan: You were 22, 23?

Trey: Yes, 23. Again, when I joined, they didn't expect me to end up running it. When I was asked to first start, a friend of mine's dad was CEO and he came to me and said, I need you to build me an online advertising strategy. I said, no problem, give me two weeks. I spent the first week researching how online advertising worked and the second week building the plan. Then I went in there and again, we spent zero dollars on marketing. When I say right time, right place, there has never been a more right time, right place scenario. I was trying to lasso a wave, not build momentum. But what we saw was a situation where the market was just growing. We got a couple million people the first month and a few more million people the second month. Then it was 10 million, then it was 15, then it was 25, then it was 50. It was just exploding. My job was to monetize what was already existing. The hardest part that we had to deal with was because of the dot-com busting, the online advertising rates were really, really low. Right now I'd say an average ad, nothing special, is probably what we call $5 CPM. Back then it was about five cents a CPM. Then there was a cost to serve. It was a different time and a different place. But because we had so many ad impressions, billions and billions of ad impressions a month, we were making a bunch of money. We were spending $15 million a month in legal fees and still making money on top of it. But I had no point of reference. I'd go out and do a $10 million deal and I didn't know, was that good or bad? Should it have been a $7 million deal and I knocked it out of the park? Or should it have been a $15 million deal and I did a horrible job? I was just learning. But because I was willing to learn and willing to make mistakes and willing to just be coachable and malleable, built out a good board team and things like that, I ended up learning a lot that really benefited me. In every position in my career, every business I've started, I learned a little bit more. All that does for you is it helps you make fewer mistakes as you go along, because you've made most of the mistakes that you could have made already. Yeah, I always say with my job that I just work off instinct all the time.

Evan: Because you're 23, you have no experience, and everything is instinct. There's people who that instinct works out really well for them. There's people who it doesn't. But the people even who it does work out really well, that experience, instinct is not going to be right 100% of the time. I find it incredibly, incredibly helpful of our executive team, who is very, very involved in my work all the time, that kind of helps supplement some of that experience of let me go, let me go. I'm like, hey, come back, come back, come back. I'm sure that experience at a young age has affected how you've decided to run 1845. But before we get there, why did you leave Morpheus?

Trey: Morpheus was, again, being sued. What had happened was, and this is a much longer story I won't get into, but basically we had partnered with a company called Kazaa, which was another big player at the time, to build our network and manage the technology. They had come to us and said, you owe us a certain amount of money for the licensing fees. We disagreed. That's part of the reason I became CEO. We decided not to pay them for that technology. One of the interesting things about Morpheus as well was, because there was no centralized server, technically Morpheus couldn't be shut off. Even if we had gotten sued out of business, the world that it existed in peer-to-peer file sharing would keep going. But Kazaa did this really, really fascinating strategic thing where they sent out a mandatory upgrade of the technology to all of the people that were using it, but didn't give it to Morpheus. We went from 60 or 70 million users in one day to zero. It was brilliant. It was one of the most incredible moves I'd ever seen. I later got to meet the CEO of Kazaa and talk with him through that. At that point I realized, through a bunch of other things, that I didn't think there was going to be a huge allegiance long-term to any specific peer-to-peer network. We saw that as it went from Napster to Morpheus to Kazaa to LimeWire. I could go on BitTorrent to a bunch of other ones. What I did was I went to the board and said, I think we have to realize a couple things. One, we're going to be able to rebuild the technology and get back out there. We're going to be able to scale back up our user base. But over the long haul, this is not going to be a place where peer-to-peer file sharing companies win. I think you should sell the business. Nobody knows that we took a hit. Now is the time to sell. They said, what do you know? You're 23 years old. Then I started to watch the numbers go down over time. I came back to them. I said, again, please trust me in this. I really think this is what we need to do. They said, you're an idiot. There was some other stuff that was going on that I felt like they were trying to make me the scapegoat if the lawsuit did go down. Kind of say, he's the one in charge. Blame him. It just was a bunch of different pieces. I quit the day that we won the initial lawsuit and decided to go on and do other things.

Evan: You leave the company. You now see yourself in an identity standpoint as an entrepreneur. What do you do next?

Trey: This is another thing about youth. I think I was probably in a different place than I thought I was. My first initial thought was, there was a television network back then called MTV. It was really big back then. I thought, I'll just go run the internet arm of MTV. I didn't realize that MTV didn't think that I was the right person to do that. I went to MTV and said, I built this thing and I want to be the head of your internet division. They said, that job's not available. Then Apple came and asked me to be a director of something new that they were building called iTunes. I went and met with the guys in Apple and Steve Jobs and gave them my advice on what they should do. But I thought, I was just CEO of this fastest growing company in the internet. Why would I go be a director somewhere? I didn't realize that director at Apple was a way bigger deal than CEO of a small startup company. I looked at that. I'd been given the opportunity to be the early partner at a company called Skype. A bunch of different things. I just said, I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to go build another company. I spent the next eight or 10 years building companies in different cities. We built Morpheus in Franklin, Tennessee, which is 30 miles south of Florida. It's amazing. My thought was, if you can build a company like this in Franklin, Tennessee, then I could build a company from wherever I wanted. I basically picked cities I wanted to live in and spent the next 10 years going from DC to New York to LA to San Francisco to Oklahoma. I lived in a bunch of different places and just built companies there. I built out a music company with some friends, did some stuff in film and television, did some stuff in counterterrorism technology, ran an investment bank, media and technology for an investment bank in LA, did a bunch of different things, and then ended up moving back to Texas in 2008.

Evan: Were you married through that?

Trey: I did not get married until I came back to Texas in 2008.

Evan: What brought you back to Texas?

Trey: Partially my girlfriend, now wife, and partially because I just didn't like LA. What we were doing out there was we were working with celebrities. We would get celebrities to invest their money and then we would use them as brand ambassadors to help build out the brand. The celebrities I had no problem with. They were great people. It was the people around them that I didn't like and I just felt like it just wasn't a good environment. I didn't really want to be there. Texas was kind of where I had been. My family was here, my wife's family was here, and so I came back.

Evan: I just didn't like LA might be the most Texan statement I've heard in my life.

Trey: It was so horrible because when I came back, what I saw, and this speaks to Texas' development, what I saw was that we wanted, in Dallas specifically, we wanted to be more LA than LA and we wanted to be more New York than New York, but most of the people that were doing that hadn't really spent a bunch of time in either place. We didn't have our own identity. It wasn't, we're Dallas, we're Texas, let's be who that is. That's part of what changed. Part of why I moved back here, having lived in all those other cities, was I saw no city, no region with more opportunity for growth than Dallas-Fort Worth.

Evan: Even at that time?

Trey: I was in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C. Nashville, unbelievable city, but it was small. It's grown a lot since I was there, but it's never going to be a massive, international, global city. Dallas had that opportunity. It was a place of wildcatters and entrepreneurs. It was a place where you can do something. It was a place where if somebody says to you, I got an idea, the response was, you should do that. The second response is, how can I help? That was not how the other cities had been. Some of them were global cities and they didn't have that opportunity to grow anymore. They had achieved what they needed to achieve. Texas, specifically Dallas-Fort Worth, was where I saw that happening.

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Evan: Why Dallas-Fort Worth even more than in Austin? Just resources and size and the multiple different industries that it dominates? What specifically did you see of DFW compared to other Texas cities?

Trey: I'm always careful when I say this. I think Austin is great. We love everybody. But what I say about Austin versus Dallas is, I think Austin is a great town. It's not a city. It's not Dallas-Fort Worth. When you're in Austin and you want to do business, you come to Dallas. This is where the businesses are. This is where international flights come in. It is a hub and that takes nothing away from Austin. Austin's done some amazing things. I still love going down there and I think the people down there are incredible. And they are Texans, so we're all on the same team. We are a corporate hub, one of the largest in the country. We have more tech workers than Austin and Houston combined. There's so many things about Dallas-Fort Worth, including the opportunity for growth that continues to happen, that I felt like this was the right place to be. That's why I thought Dallas-Fort Worth was a better place for me than those other opportunities. Where I really saw an opportunity was, how do we build out this startup community? How do we build a place that is better for entrepreneurs to start building growth businesses? That's what I spent the second 10 years of my career. After I came back to Dallas, I exited a couple of my companies and spent the next decade on, how do I help build the ecosystem that we have here?

Evan: Tell me about that puzzle piece that you fit in there of yourself coming in and creating that, or being a part of that growing venture community.

Trey: I'd sold a couple of companies. One that was a video sharing site that I turned around and sold. One was one of our media companies, which was a music management company. Sold that to my partners. And then sitting around going, what do I want to do when I grow up? One of the interesting things about being an entrepreneur is, I've asked myself many times over 20 years, what do I want to be when I grow up? I still don't know, but I sure have fun trying to figure it out. At that time, there was a gentleman who had started a company called AOL, named Steve Case. Steve had built this national nonprofit with the Kauffman Foundation and the Obama White House called the Startup America Partnership. It was to help high-growth entrepreneurs be successful primarily outside of the coast. He had asked me to help run the Texas version of this. I'd started doing that, and then through a very weird circumstance, I was asked to help build an entrepreneurship department at SMU in the Meadows School of Arts. I was kind of stuck at a place where I was like, well, I can't really launch a for-profit business because these two other things I'm working on will fail. What if I just launched nonprofits for a while? When you don't have a career path and you can do whatever you want, taking the middle of your career, which you usually would make the most money, and choosing to spend that on building nonprofits, nobody can tell you not to do that. A lot of people told me I shouldn't do it, but they couldn't tell me I couldn't. What I did was I started to build nonprofits specifically focused on how do we help support building a community of innovation and entrepreneurship in DFW. We launched this thing called the DEC, the Dallas Entrepreneur Center. We launched something called the Dallas Innovation Alliance, which was a smart cities infrastructure play. We launched something called the Mayor's Star Council, which was a leadership development organization to help find culturally diverse and civically minded young professionals. We took the nonprofit that Steve Case had built, and it had been Sunset. We relaunched it as a national network of ecosystem builders called the Startup Champions Network, and a couple other things that we were doing at the time. I had gotten real involved in the city, real involved as a board member of the Dallas Regional Chamber, which is an incredible organization of business leaders that really help make DFW great.

Evan: What do they do specifically?

Trey: It's a chamber of commerce that supports North Texas. It is not focused specifically on the city, it's focused on the region. Their job is to do economic development and bring groups here, which they've done an incredible job of. They were recently named the number one chamber in the country. People have different opinions on chambers depending on where you come from and what your involvement is, but they are absolutely second to none. They are top-notch, and I really enjoyed getting to serve there on their board. I spent 2012 to 2020 doing primarily my own version of economic development for startups. We built the deck, we had a bunch of different locations there. I probably helped 10,000 startups in that time. Small businesses, startups, minority-led, women-led. It was really, if you were an entrepreneur, we would help you. That became a fundamental piece of my work in that decade, along with some of those other nonprofits that we built as well.

Evan: How many total, between the start of your career in 2020, how many businesses or not-for-profits did you have active roles in?

Trey: Active roles is tough. I would say I met and helped more than 10,000 startups. I've launched, at this point, over 30 of my own companies. I've gotten to play a role in a bunch of others. I call myself more of a serial starter than I am a serial entrepreneur. As soon as it starts to work, I'm like, let's bring somebody in who wants to run something. I really like building it. Still have been really blessed to have several exits and get to work with some great people who've made awesome things happen. For 10 years, my job was to meet with any company that ever wanted to meet at any time. I was very available. I was connecting people to mentors. I was helping people raise money. That was just what I had committed to do for that period of my career.

Evan: I'm sure the money wasn't quite as good as your previous ventures. You truly believed in it, though. Did you feel the fulfillment and purpose in that, even though the money wasn't quite there?

Trey: Going back to when I was young, when I was 23, if you asked me what success was, I would have said, if I have a million dollars by the time I'm 30, I'll be success. Then I'll retire and I'll go live on a boat. I didn't know that a million dollars didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, a million dollars is a lot of money, but it's not enough money to live that way. When I began to realize, wait a second, a million dollars isn't going to do that, and then we had this opportunity at Morpheus, which I believe should have been a billion dollar exit, and it didn't happen. I really realized something about entrepreneurship, which is you can't always control the outcome of your business, but you can control your contribution to the process. My focus was, whatever it is, I'm going to contribute 100% of myself to that venture every day. If it exits, great, we make money, awesome. If it doesn't exit, I can still accomplish my vision and goal. Doing that in a nonprofit space was how I did that. I had a vision, I wanted to build something that supported entrepreneurship and innovation in Dallas, and so that's what I did. My success was never tied to the monetary component of it, or how successful it would be. It was really about, did I feel like I was doing what I set out to do? Then when I did that, I felt fulfilled. I wasn't driven by money at that point, never been driven by money really, other than when I thought I was going to have a million dollars by the time I was 30. It just had a different perspective for me. Again, with a nontraditional background, me building nonprofits in the middle of my career wasn't something that I considered to be a failure or a bad business decision. It was my decision, mine and my wife's.

Evan: Do you get bored easily? What's the psychology behind you wanting to be a serial starter and not just an entrepreneur?

Trey: I think I really like building things. I think my gifting is around mobilizing and galvanizing people around a concept. Then I really enjoy working with and managing people. I pride myself on being able to help people exceed the expectation they see in themselves. That's probably why I like teaching. I also believe that when you put this much time and effort into something, you have an opportunity to bring other people in. Two of my favorite parts of building a business is the first time you hear somebody say, we, rather than I. Somebody comes in and says, we need to do this, or wouldn't it be great if this happened? This would be awesome for us. That's where you know somebody has grabbed hold of ownership of your vision and that it's not just yours. The second piece, which I love, is when somebody comes up with an idea that I haven't thought of. You go, that's a great idea. Not every idea has to be mine. I always tell people, I don't care about being right. I care about figuring out what is right. If your idea is right, great. The other thing is, you don't have pride of ownership and credit, so you really have the ability to amass the best team you possibly can. I tell people all the time, imagine that you own the Dallas Mavericks and you are one of the starting five. Then you get a chance to bring in LeBron James. You have to give up your position so that he can be a part of your team. Who wouldn't do that? Your job as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, is to surround yourself by the best team you possibly can. I tell founders all the time, if you're the best at more than two things in your company, you've hired poorly. If you're the best at nothing in your company, you've hired brilliantly. Why wouldn't you go find the best team you possibly can in the entire world to come work for the company that you own? Because it's just going to get better. Why not have it be worth more and more and more by bringing in the right team? That's what I like. I love building companies. I love helping them grow. I love seeing them succeed. I don't know that I get bored as much as I know where my value is. There's a lot of people that can run a company really well and grow a company marginally year over year over year. It's hard to find somebody who's willing to go out and start a company from scratch often. Whether that's an addiction or a curse or a skill, that's kind of what I do and that's what we do at 1845. That's what my partner loves. It just creates a great opportunity for us to add value to companies and really help them in a different way.

Evan: Let's get into 1845. You started this in 2025. Tell me a little bit about the structure of it, how you structure deals with these founders of companies. Then I'm really curious of how you find founders in that early of a stage. I feel like it's a lot easier to find companies that are a few years old and they're reaching out for capital or for mentorship. How are you finding them so early?

Trey: That's a great question. The thing I did right before we started 1845 was I worked for a global investment firm called Techstars. They do accelerators, probably 30 to 50 accelerators around the world. They were really one of the pioneers of the accelerator space alongside Y Combinator, which many people have heard of. I had done that and I was sourcing. I ran three different programs. I ran a healthcare program in Fort Worth. I ran a short time program out of Stockholm. Then I ran our Anywhere accelerator, which was virtual. I was looking at 3,000 to 5,000 companies per program that I was going out, pulling in, sourcing, reading through, and inviting in some way, shape, or form. It was usually 3,000 to 5,000 that I would look at. Then I would pick 1,500 to 2,000 to invite to apply and be a part of the program. At that point, I learned how to look at a lot of businesses at one time and how do you find them and where do you find them. One of the things I realized in my role there, because we had about 25 or 30 people that had my role, managing director, that ran these different programs. I looked at them and learned a lot from them. They were incredible investors. When I started to talk to entrepreneurs, we had multiple programs they could participate in. They'd say, why don't we join your program versus their program, even in the same company? My answer was, I don't think you can go wrong. I think their program's great. But what I realized my value add was for entrepreneurs is not that I would pick better companies than anybody else, not that I could tell you how to raise capital better than anybody else, or my network was better than anybody else's. It was that I had built 30 companies. There wasn't something that you were going to go through that I hadn't experienced. That's where my value was. When I left Techstars, a lot of managing directors launched funds. I looked at that opportunity and I looked at the market. I just didn't feel like we had gone from 200 or 300 venture capital firms 10 years ago, 15 years ago, to 14,000 now. I just think it's a really saturated market. I think it's harder and harder to get capital. I was going to raise a fund and compete against the best in the business at trying to get you, an entrepreneur, to take my capital versus theirs. That didn't seem like it made a lot of sense. But what made sense was when my business partner, Ryan Brown, came to me and pitched the idea. It was his idea. He said, what if we go find companies that are early that we can build to a model that Texas is perfect for? One of the things that we noticed about Texas is that Texas doesn't have a lot of billion dollar tech exits. But they have a lot of 100 to 300 million dollar exits. We said, if that's a data point that's really important, then how do we build companies to get them to a point where they can meet this 100 to 300 million exit point? He said, well, the other thing we can't do if you're going to do this, you can't go raise 50 to 100 million dollars for the company, because that's going to create a problem to exit at what a lot of people would say an early exit. What if we created a model where our thesis was, let's find companies that we can raise 2 to 3 million dollars total, and then get them to a point where they fit inside of that exit range. What we realized was the corporations that are buying these companies, they're here, they're in Texas, these exits are happening every week. What we started to do as we looked for companies, as we started that sourcing process, is we also started talking to corporations at the same time to say, we're looking at a company that's solving this problem, do you feel that problem? If that problem were solved, would this be the type of company that you would acquire? What are the elements that you would need to see in that company? How big does it need to be? That's a part of our sourcing process. For us, and then also having been in this space, finding companies that are out there or having people contact you for deals is not the hard part. I'm getting contacted with 20 to 40 deals a week. I'm the co-chair of the North Texas Angel Network. I run the Park City's Angel Network. I run a funded SME. In terms of early stage stuff, there's a lot of that that comes our way. But our model is unique in that we partner 50-50 with these companies. In most cases, these are super early companies. It's not going to be somebody who's out there raising a Series A that's going to want to fit with our 50-50 model. It's not going to be somebody who's built several companies because they're going to say, I've learned the things that you would want to teach me. It's somebody who says, I realize I don't know what I'm doing, but I have a problem I think I can really solve. I realize I could use help from somebody who's been there before. I realize it would be nice to have somebody help me raise money and do that whole side. I want to have a partner to help me grow so that you can help remove the obstacles that stand in the way that help you get to a point where you can actually launch the business.

Evan: When you're vetting those opportunities, how much of you are looking at the problem that they're trying to solve and trying to say, do I agree that this is a problem, that there's a market for this problem, and that this solution is a true solution? Then alongside that, how much are you looking at the entrepreneur themselves and saying, is this the right person? Do they have the grit? Do they have the intelligence? Do they have the entrepreneurial spirit? Do they have the intangibles that they need? How important are those two things? What do you say those are the two main things that you have to decide through when deciding on a specific company or person?

Trey: I'll steal a little bit from the Techstars model because I think it does a good job of representing. We have six categories at Techstars that we look at. Very similar to what we do at 1845 and probably any early stage person. Number one, number two, and number three categories are team. Founders are exceptionally important. The team is exceptionally important. If the team doesn't have the perseverance, if we don't feel like the team is convicted, strongly convicted by the model that they're going to do, the problem they're trying to solve, that's extremely concerning. Because as I said to you before, if most people knew what it took to start a business, they'd never do it. So we need to make sure that he or she is not going to stop when this gets hard. The conviction piece is super important. We need to make sure they believe in this. That they're not in love with the solution that they're creating, but they're in love with the problem and how do they solve that problem. And then secondarily, we look at the market. We say, is there a market for this? Is it big enough? Do we think they have the ability to go capture a portion of that market? Obviously with our model, they don't have to capture nearly as much. But in most cases, companies don't sell for a billion dollars anyway, and they go out and raise $30, $50, $100 million. They still only exit for a few hundred million dollars. And so for us, it also has to fit our model. Do we believe two to three million dollars is enough to create a distribution and marketing channel strategy that they can partner with people to build and grow to that? And then next would be, how much traction have they had? So you asked the question, do we help them go figure out, do customer discovery, is there a problem, is there a solution? We expect every single founder that we work with to have done three things. It doesn't cost any money to do these three things. One, go find your customer and make sure that they are feeling the problem. A lot of times we may think the customer is somebody different than it actually is, or it may not be a problem that the customer feels. But first you've got to make sure they find the customer who has experienced the problem. Second, they have to make sure that the solution they're proposing doesn't have to be created. Also, we live in a world now where creating an app is like 45 minutes. So they can create some sort of image of what that solution is. Does the solution solve your problem? And C, if the solution existed, to solve the problem you agree you had, would you pay for it and how much? That didn't cost any money. We expect our companies to have done that before we meet with them, or before we agree to move forward with them. Part of it is we're evaluating the founder. Part of it is we're evaluating the problem. Part of it is we're evaluating, does this solution solve that problem? And finally, in our case, do we think there's somebody out there that will buy that company if they solve that problem? That's the method that we take. There's a lot more that goes through our due diligence, but that's how we think about it.

Evan: The reason that people typically raise funds rather than raising deal by deal is it's just easier to say, I'm Trey Bowles, I've run 30 companies, I've exited multiple, I'm raising $15 million, and then going and taking those $15 million and being able to put it into five to seven companies. You're doing it a little differently. You're raising deal by deal. What went into that decision?

Trey: We saw this at the deck, I've seen this at Techstars, at all the companies that I've built and organizations I've been a part of that help startups is one of the key elements of helping make a business successful. One of the top is mentorship, coaching. Surrounding yourself with people who have been there and done it before, people who are subject matter experts, people who have made mistakes, people who have relationships in that space. We believed that for our particular model, that was important. What we did was we raised some money into our parent company, into 1845 Ventures LLC, and those investors, which we have about 30, have equity in every single business that we build. It's a great diversification strategy for an angel because with one check you're getting 15 or 20 companies, however many we choose to participate in. Second of all, we picked very intentional investors, people we thought added strategic value. People who didn't just want to write a check, they wanted to get involved in helping those companies succeed. One of my theses as a personal investor, as an angel accredited investor, is that I don't want to write a check to any company that I can't add value to. If I can't make them worth more personally, then why would I write them a check? That's how we feel about our investors at 1845. That was part of it. Then the individual approach to, why are we going to raise individually for a company, was that we felt like it gave us an opportunity to bring in additional strategic investors or advisors and mentors, people who wanted to participate. At some point we may build a fund after these companies start to succeed, and then we use that fund to fill in, because our investors get right at first refusal of any deal that we do. We're raising money for four deals right now, and we go to them first before we go to anybody else. They have the opportunity to double down and put more money in, and invest in those companies to help see those companies be successful. Then we go outside of that, but we go very strategic with the investors we're trying to find. When you're only raising two to three million total dollars, you can do that. We don't expect to see a lot of institutional capital VC funds put money in a model like that. I think we'll find some that will, but most of them are trying to put a little bit of money in now, so they can put more money in later and continue to be a part of that cap table and take up more of that equity as it grows. Ours is just a different model.

Evan: I think that there's also a lot of downsides that people don't talk enough about funds. If I go raise a $10 million fund, and everybody put $10 million in, they're expecting me to do something with it. You look at a Berkshire Hathaway before Warren Buffett retired at the end of 2025. They had $380 billion in treasuries or something like that. He's saying, I'm going to sit on my hands because I don't see a good value play for VC funds. That's kind of not a choice. It's like, I have no good options. I just have to pick something. You minimize your need or the pressure on you in order to do that by doing that as well.

Trey: As I mentioned before, I think the VC marketplace, if we're being really candid, a good-sized fund in Dallas for venture is $100 million, which would take a couple years to raise, if you could even raise it. I'm not saying that I could. That's a small fund when you go to the Bay Area, New York, or Boston. You're not as well-equipped. Then three years later, you've got to raise fund two with no exits from fund one. Then three to five years later after that, you have to raise fund three. At that point, you better have an exit from fund one. You're not really making any money until you get to fund three anyway. On $100 million, it's hard to compete with the Andreessen Horowitz and the Sequoias and the great VC firms. They're also on fund 38 and I'm on fund one. Emerging managers was really hot five or 10 years ago in this space. People were investing in emerging managers as opposed to the more established ones. That's just not the case right now. For us, this was a model that fit what we wanted to do, how we'd want to do it again. We've never been the kind of person that would be told what to do. It's my career, it's my partner Brian's career. We're going to build what we want to build. Talk about being scrappy. My business partner is scrappy. That guy knows how to build businesses from the ground up and he's great at it. He also knows how to scale them. He's built businesses that he came alongside of and grew. He's built businesses from scratch. I couldn't think of a better partner to go out and do this with. We both love Texas. We do invest in companies outside of Texas. We'll invest in companies anywhere in the world, but we believe the value that we offer them starts in Texas and then moves out across the rest of the country.

Evan: Why do you think that is?

Trey: A, it's the best place to build a business. We have that can-do spirit I talked about before. It's a business-friendly environment community. We can get into all the things that Taxi has helped make happen from a policy perspective. That's going to make it more attractive for companies to move here. There's the ability to start, grow, and exit. I used to travel through Europe quite a bit. This was back when George W. Bush was president. People would criticize me as to my political choices. They'd make fun of Americans. Americans don't know anything about the rest of the world. I said, I live in a state where you can be born, grow up, become a billionaire, and die and never have to leave the state.

Evan: It's incredible.

Trey: We have the eighth largest economy in the world. There is not a better place to be in the world than Texas. I don't think there's a better place to be than North Texas. That being said, I think all the signs are pointing here. Look at the corporations moving here. Look at what Goldman's bringing here. Look at what JP Morgan brought here. Look at the banks that are moving. The Texas Stock Exchange, which launched, was enough of a deal that the top exchanges in the world moved here to compete. Competition is awesome. That spurs innovation, it spurs opportunity, it spurs all sorts of different things. We're just going to continue to see these corporations. I'll go back to the Dallas Regional Chamber. That's the reason it's great to have a chamber like that. Dallas just launched a new economic development corporation that's going to be super valuable. Fort Worth has an economic development partnership. Frisco's crushing it. McKinney's doing awesome things. Plano's doing things that are incredible. That's just a few of the cities in our region. It is going to just continue to grow here. I think because of all of the standard economic development reasons you should move here, along with the quality of life and the school systems that exist across our region, and the ability for somebody to come in and own property and land and be here and grow, it's an incredible place. It has always been an incredible place to have a business. I believe that it's becoming an incredible place to build a business and grow a business. Although we are not a startup hub like a Bay Area or like a Boston or even New York or even an Austin at this point, we're going to draft off the benefit that we get from corporates. My job is to make sure that the business leaders of this region are constantly thinking of how does what the decisions we're making affect people who are launching businesses. Because 95% of our businesses are small business in the country. Another interesting fact is that job growth, which is such an important economic development thing that people talk about all the time, does not happen in corporations. It does not happen in small businesses. It happens at the startup level. We have to have startups. That's where jobs come from and they grow. We need to continue to highlight and focus on and encourage and fund these businesses. Then we have to teach these businesses as they grow, scale, and exit that they need to stay here. They need to teach their employees to launch new businesses. They need to teach their employees to fund other businesses. That's really where you saw a lot of the growth in the Bay Area. It was because people were exiting businesses, starting new ones, and funding their friends' new businesses. That's where I really think we can see something that's unique and special. But it's building upon what's been here and what's been done here. What's being done here by our Texas legislation and the governor and all the other people that are participating in making this possible.

Evan: We know multiple people, mutual people at the Texas Stock Exchange. We think very highly of them. I know you think very highly of them. You spent the vast majority or almost all of your career in private business. Do you believe in that public business that Texy is attempting to bring to the state as well? NASDAQ launched, changed their Chicago exchange, I believe, down here. NYSE brought NYSE Texas down here. It's all of them, but obviously I think Texy is their main and only exchange is down here. Do you believe in that as well, that IPO for those public companies coming to Texas on top of everything that you've said about the startups and the private companies?

Trey: 100%. I've never taken a company public. It's not something that's super interesting to me today. But I work at them so early that there's a long road between starting a company and creating a C-Corp to taking it public. But I have a lot of friends who are running companies that could go public and will go public. I think it's an unbelievable opportunity that you can start, build, and exit a company to an IPO.

Evan: Different type of exit, but still an exit.

Trey: You can exit it or you can take it on an IPO. I think that's an unbelievable opportunity. I think it's great that the people at the Texas Stock Exchange have created that opportunity. They're not focusing simply on Texas. They're focusing primarily across the southeast to go find deals. I think we'll see companies move here because of all the policy changes that have occurred since Texy started. We're seeing it's becoming an even better place for corporations to move. Even if they don't move, launch, or transition to the Texas Stock Exchange. We're also seeing companies launch on NYSE Texas and NASDAQ, which is in Texas, which are great solutions as well. I'm going to advocate for all of the exchanges because I think that's an unbelievable thing. But I think Texy was the initiation of it. It really was what got things started. What I've liked about them, we had Nicole Chambers come and speak in our startup community. The fact that Texas Stock Exchange is recognizing that it is valuable to have startups because they can be a conduit to what makes those companies eventually go public. The fact that they're thinking like that is really innovative and I think really positive. I think having those things are essential to help build out an entire ecosystem. Just like I think it's essential that we build more tools and entrepreneurial support organizations to support companies at an early stage. We need more funding to go into early stage companies to help them grow so that they can stay in Texas. One of the great things that has happened over the last decade, and some of it was because of COVID, was when we first started getting into this space, if you want to get funded by a VC in New York or in San Francisco, you had to move your business there. Now you don't have to move your business there. People are working remote, you can stay in Texas. A lot of people are recognizing the value of staying in Texas. I used to say to people all the time, if they're so smart in California and they're so brilliant, why in the world would they ever start a company there? It's a horrible business decision. Same with New York. Texas is a place to build a business. You're seeing the Delaware exits coming here now. Delaware was the place where we launched all of our LLCs and all of our C-corps. Now people are doing it here. Every company that we've launched through 1845 is a Texas-based corporation. We just believe it's getting better and better and better to be here and will continue to be better to be here. I think as we see more of these exits happen, which will happen in the next months to years, as we see some of these companies going public on Texie and the other exchanges, we're going to see more people coming here. It's just the beginning of this domino effect that is happening in Texas and will continue to happen here, which is why we're so glad to be 1845.

Evan: I love it. I think that the Texas Stock Exchange, NASDAQ Texas, NYSE Texas, the startup culture that is here, that is in Austin, the continuing growth. I think for someone young in their career, being born and raised in Texas, living in Dallas now, it is absolutely incredible to look out on the horizon and say, look at all the opportunity that awaits me. I always try to ask people about Gen Z because obviously it helps me personally. I have a lot of friends that watch and a lot of young people. You are a professor at SMU so you really get an in with my generation. What are you seeing from us? What is the temperature? Is there a lot of fear? What do you see from my generation? What's your perspective on it?

Trey: I think every generation is different. Every generation before looks at the generation after and says, you don't understand how we had it. I guarantee you the baby boomers that were before my generation said, you don't understand how we had it. Everybody thinks it was harder on them and everybody's got it easy and that young people don't work hard and they want instant gratification. I think to some degree that's true. What I'm seeing with the involvement I have at SMU is a couple of things. One, I think the students are exceptionally bright. SMU gets great students and they're coming from all over the country. Lots of California students, lots of kids from New York, East Coast. They're coming from all over. I think they look at SMU more like a Vanderbilt or USC, which I think it's a great school. I'm seeing lots of interest, enthusiasm, excitement. I see students that want to go do great things. They want to work, they want to contribute. They're scared about what decision, do they make the right decision? I don't think that's any different than any other different generation. I would say that my generation before was a little bit more, you take one or two jobs and stay with those jobs. Now that's not the way it's going to be. Which is good and bad. You're learning a lot, but then your employer's not counting on you being there. I used to, in the companies I'd build, assumed somebody would be there two years. I would plan on replacing them in two years. That was my process of thinking about how often I needed to do changeover. At SMU we also have a fund that I run called the SMU Impact Lab. It's an impact-driven fund. One of the things I'm seeing is students are much more interested in building business that make a difference in the world, not just make profit. That's what's so great about impact-driven companies, is they're for-profit companies that are making an impact. A part of our program, we have an element where we actually teach the students how to source, do diligence, run the investment memo process, and actually pitch the companies to an investment committee at the end. There is no internship that I've seen anywhere in the world that gives that kind of access, that comprehensive access to going through the entire deal flow process and getting to experience that. Which I think for an environment like ours that doesn't have a ton of venture capital firms, it gives them a leg up when they want to go somewhere else and get a job in venture capital. Now if they want to do private equity, this is the place to be. I also think SMU is doing some really interesting thing around entrepreneurships with the Spears Institute that they built. Dr. Spears funded and was the largest investment in SMU from a non-graduate ever. They are doing incredible things. Josh Taylor runs that. It's a really incredible program. Bob Nikumar runs their Spears Accelerator program. They have an accelerator program they're going through right now. This is just SMU. UT Dallas is doing amazing things. There's a lot of great things going on up here. But I think what I'm seeing more than anything from young people is trying to figure out, because most of you guys had to deal with COVID during school to some degree. I think they're trying to figure out how do they make their brand on the world. Like all of us thought, at a young age you think, I'm going to change the world. How am I going to do that? At a young age you think, I'm going to make a bunch of money. How do I do that? I see a genuine interest in students to try to figure out how do they do that and what can they do that brings fulfillment as well as financial satisfaction. The students are exceptionally bright. I also helped build out an entrepreneurship program at Highland Park High School where my kids are not in high school, but they're in that program. The students there are some of the most impressive students I've met anywhere in the world. The students there are incredible. There's just so much opportunity. I think the biggest thing that worries me is the willingness and capability that a student has to connect in real life. So much of what you guys have done is online. Relationships are built online. Someone's my friend if I follow them on Instagram or if I see them on TikTok. I think that is part of what I see the biggest benefit of college being, is creating that social interaction piece. I felt that way when I went to college. You can learn finance and accounting and statistics and English at any place, but being able to build out that social element is going to be important. That's an element that I think your generation has been robbed of. I see them really desiring that and wanting that. My hope for them is that they are able to find and build those relationships, that my kids are able to build those relationships. Not as much online, but in person. That's my hope for the generation. Other than that, I think y'all will figure it out. All generations do. When I was getting started, it was the tech boom and everybody thought, oh my gosh, web-enabled. If you could just have a website, that was amazing. Now, in the next two to three years, every business will be AI-enabled and it won't even be a thing anymore. It'll just be your business has got AI built into it. I think there are challenges around AI. I think there's challenges around what kind of jobs do you guys go find now? What's hireable? Because those junior-level jobs, in many cases, aren't going to be there anymore. I think we'll adapt. Community colleges do a great job of that because they move so quickly and they can create new things. But I know SMU's got an AI graduate program now and a lot of different things. We'll adapt, we'll learn, we'll grow. Because one of the most exciting things I've had in my career, and we talk about some of the things that I've done, is I believe the transition of leadership is so important. That mentorship and coaching process of finding young people that are 23 years old, like your executive team you mentioned, who's willing to come alongside you, spend time and effort giving and teaching and coaching you, will give you the tools to be able to accelerate your learning process, to accelerate your experience process. If you go and do that to somebody younger when you're older, that's how we transition that leadership and help create the whole person so that they're ready to be a part of and grow and take on the leadership roles. I completely agree.

Evan: I think I have given the advice to dozens of kids now and have said the most important thing early in your career is that someone knows your name and cares about you as a person. I went through COVID, end of my junior year of high school it started, and then throughout my senior year of high school. I do think that to a certain extent I agree that we were robbed of that social interaction, especially at that time. But I think that it created a desire for us to have it so much that when I got into college, everything was desiring in person. I think remote work is a big example of this. I have a lot of friends who work remote. You don't have to go in the office, it might be easier, there's less friction, but you don't really get that in-person mentorship that you get from seeing people every single day. I think for any young student who's looking somewhere, don't go somewhere where you're going to be a number. Go somewhere where someone knows your name and actually cares about your development. I think, just like you said, outside of that we will adapt. Who is the entrepreneur today, the archetype that you believe should be reaching out to 1845 and how do they reach you?

Trey: They can reach us through our website. There's a way to contact us there and then obviously on LinkedIn we have a page there. The type of entrepreneur we're looking for is the three characteristics that I love most about entrepreneurs. First, they're courageous. It takes a lot of guts to go put yourself out there and put yourself completely and wholly into an idea that you put out in front of the world that they can choose to accept or not accept. One of the things I tell founders all the time, in fact I just wrote an article about it, it's coming out this week, is on this idea that they're so afraid to take their business out and show it to customers because they're afraid that somebody's going to tell them that their baby is ugly. I say, that's easy, don't worry about that at all. You should never worry about if somebody's going to think your baby's ugly because lots of people are going to think your baby's ugly. Your job is to find the people that think your baby's cute. The courage it takes to go stand on the edge of a cliff and jump off is incredible. The courageousness of a founder we love. Perseverance is super important. Building a company is like this, it's like a roller coaster. It's just up and down and it is super hard. Someone who can persevere through that, somebody who has the conviction and the passion to stay with a business, that's what we're looking for at 1845. Third, and this is by far not the least important, but one of the things that I found about the best entrepreneurs is they're a little bit crazy.

Evan: I totally agree.

Trey: Because you have to be crazy to think that you can go out there and build a company where you know 90% of them fail before you even start. You got to be crazy to think that you can change the way that somebody does something. You can change a market, you can change the world. We're looking for people who are wanting to change the world, people who are willing to persevere and work hard, people who are coachable. One of the things that I would tell you at any point is, if a founder is not coachable, then I can't add value. If I can't add value, then it doesn't help you. Then we don't have anywhere to start. If you're not coachable, we're not interested. I will be coached by anybody at any time. I built 30 plus companies because sometimes somebody's going to tell me something that I didn't know or that I should do different or that I could do better. That leads to the next piece, which is there is a very fine line between confidence and arrogance. You cannot not be confident. Arrogance will kill you because arrogance prevents you from asking help. It prevents you from bringing on people who are smarter than you. It prevents you from doing some of the stuff we talked about earlier. That piece is super important. Then we want people who are building businesses that have done those three things that I talked about. Have you found your customer? Do they admit there's a problem? Does your solution solve that problem? Will they pay for it? If they do that, then they've shown that there's actually demand for that. Then can you fit in our model? If you say, I want to come in and raise $50 million and I want to buy ads to purchase my customer base, that's a great business model. If you have absolutely no intention at all of co-founding and partnering with 1845, you're just trying to raise $10 million for your next round, we're not the right fit. Part of it is understanding who our customer and who our startup is, and who they aren't. You would not be surprised how many people reach out for us and ask us to invest in their round. They don't really pay attention to the 73 times that we say, this is our model. But that's okay. Attention to detail is important as well. Those are the types of people we're looking for. You go to our website, you fill out a form. We are pretty full right now with the four companies we have. We'll probably go back out proactively sourcing in the fall. Once we get these companies up running and generating revenue. Our goal is to invest to three to five a year. It doesn't mean we'll turn away a great company if we find one. It just means right now we're really focused on those companies and giving them all of who we are. It really is like launching four companies from scratch at one time. It's truly amazing.

Evan: Thank you for coming on. As a parting gift, we got you a one ounce Y'all Street coin. It's pure silver. It's yours to keep.

Trey: Thank you so much.

Evan: The impact on it, everything that you are doing in DFW, just the desire to help, is really impactful. From the public markets to the private markets, even the startup niche within the private markets, there's so much in Texas, there's so much in DFW. You have resources everywhere. It's incredibly encouraging as a young man to get to see all of this happening and genuinely look at the horizon and see how much opportunity there is. Thank you for everything you do. I'm sure that we'll reach out.

Trey: Thank you.

Evan: Thank you.