Lisa Calhoun
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I’m Lisa Calhoun, Managing Partner at Valor Ventures and I am really excited about our guest today live from Atlanta, Michael Staton. When I met Michael, he was a partner at Learn Capital in San Mateo, California, where he sat on the IC, and helped lead investments in the companies you’ve heard of like Coursera, Minerva, Outschool, Andela and so many others. Glad you’re with us, Michael.
Michael Staton
Hey, yeah, it’s good to be here. It’s good to see you on your home turf, even though we’re meeting virtually, yeah, it
Lisa Calhoun
It is great that you came all the way from the west coast to Atlanta. And you know what, that’s a good place to start. People might actually think that you’re a VC investor that moved to Atlanta. But while you are, you’re sort of a retired VC, maybe begin with now and we’ll work back a little bit. But what brought you to Atlanta?
Michael Staton
Well, like any good story, love brought me to Atlanta. So, my partner was looking for a senior role in venture capital or private equity and was given an offer to join a private equity firm based out of Atlanta. I’ve been able to work remotely, slash been totally lonely, working from home, even before the pandemic, it kind of started about a year or two before the pandemic. And I was mobile so, I was like, let’s go. And I got here not that long ago. I feel like it was maybe two to three months ago, somewhere around there. And have really loved it. It turned out I had friends here. You, being one of them, and more people are moving to Atlanta all the time. So it’s a great place to be. It’s very active. They got the kind of what you call it kind of walkable communities down? Thank you in certain pockets. I grew up in Houston. So I’m familiar with the, you sprawl out. And then as a city, you’re like, wait, “now we’re really sprawled out, we need some, some density, some community and, most big cities”, I think, don’t really get it right. And I’ve been to a few places in Atlanta that felt, really nice like walkable communities.
Lisa Calhoun
Speaking of Houston, if I remember correctly, you actually started your education as a professional educator teaching social studies at High School in Houston?
Michael Staton
Yeah, I took the tried and true path from public high school teacher to venture capital. By way of taking zero business classes, finance classes, or marketing classes. I just kind of went by the seat of my pants and had fun along the way and went through the school of hard knocks.
Lisa Calhoun
I definitely want to go back and capture some of your top takeaways from your time leading in Venture Capital at Learn Capital and as an angel, but I don’t want to hesitate bringing the audience into your current company, CoLearn. Tell us what you’re working on.
Michael Staton
Sure. I’ll give you a straightforward answer. And then I’ll go to the more idealistic visionary answer. When I was a school teacher, like many school teachers, I had to reinvent the wheel. And then I guess, a little bit of, either radical self-belief or a little bit of, ego, I thought the way that I was doing things, was working extraordinarily well and was pretty cool and wanted to see that have a future one day, and I got the idea to maybe start my own school based on or start a school based on some of the things I was doing as a teacher. And so when the pandemic kicked in, I was like, Well, this is like a once in the 1000 year moment to start a school. So I left my cushy VC job and have been eating ramen noodles and working, 90-hour weeks since.
Lisa Calhoun
Well, school just started back up in Georgia just last week, and everyone believes that education is broken. It’s some way. The problem is when you ask 10 people, you get 10 different answers. As someone who’s been a professional educator, a founder of an educational company, a school, and an investor for a decade in leading education across the world, what do you think is broken?
Michael Staton
To answer the previous question, what am I doing now? I’ve started an online school that breaks a lot of boundaries or makes some kind of false dichotomies, like irrelevant. So, are you online or are you offline? We’re an online school that has a lot of community components, leverages a lot of service providers and resources and locations within communities, and does field trips almost every week. And kids and parents really do get to know each other. And that’s just one. But if I could make an analogy that is a little too, in almost too ambitious, I think education needs like a kind of SpaceX, or Tesla innovator who has to rethink everything along, the value chain. Basically, rethink every part and rethink how everything fits together. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And right now, we serve families that would otherwise be totally homeschooling or have wanted to homeschool, but maybe felt like they didn’t really know where to start, or they wouldn’t want to do it without extra support. And, the kind of more idealistic view of what we’re doing is that, for most parents, if they’re dissatisfied with school options, they have two options, they find and choose another school, which they’re kind of, they have to choose and then totally delegate to that school, or like kind of 4% of school-aged kids. They can do what we call take the leap and go to homeschool where they totally own, and they’re totally responsible for and they have, no support infrastructure. And we actually think there’s a huge amount of parent demand that’s in the middle of those two extremes, which is that parents want agency influence involvement in academic planning. And they want more engagement and involvement in kind of the day-to-day progress and learning activities.
Lisa Calhoun
But they are in your program. Now. I mean, it’s less than a year old.
Michael Staton
Well, at this point that we’re going into our third year in Arizona. In Arizona, we have a little over 200 students. And we’ve been kind of iterating on what we do there, iterating on the technology iterating on the instruction. And most families really, really love it. We have an 84 Net Promoter Score, which means that parents love us more than Disney or Target, or Costco, which I love Costco.
Lisa Calhoun
How about Georgia?
Michael Staton
We don’t have any students in Georgia. So, we started as a virtual charter school. And we’ve only started to we only got accreditation permission to be a moderately costed private school. But we don’t have any students in Georgia now. But we are in an application process with the state authorizer in Georgia to launch in Georgia next school year. And speaking of which, if any listeners here are interested in a totally new kind of school, please show support, you can go to colearn.com/georgia. And if you fill out the form there, you’re basically just signing a petition that we’ll share with the authorizers that we have public support.
Lisa Calhoun
Well, that’s good to hear! How many students do you need to have to start school in Georgia?
Michael Staton
In our application, we said we would start our first year with around 300. It’s good to start, kind of small because schools like many other organizations are operationally complex. And there’s a lot of muscle memory that needs to develop before you deal with other headaches, like 1000s of students, right?
Lisa Calhoun
Is that K – 12? Or is that a subsection?
Michael Staton
Yeah, it’s K- 12.
Lisa Calhoun
All right. Awesome! Well, I graduated in a in a class of 43, in a K – 12. School of 250 or so, it was heavier weighted toward High School. So I’ve been in High school like that, so I mean, it can be quite a community. What’s the difference that you’re trying to give through CoLearn? I mean, I hear what you’re saying about the spectrum of it’s all on the parent, it’s homeschool, or it’s all on the school. It’s completely outsourced? What are some of the places where you’ve chosen to kind of create a middle setting?
Michael Staton
Sure. The first thing is given my background as an investor and EdTech, one of the things that we do is we curate and recommend, and support different interactive learning curriculums. And we help parents like, make the right choice as to like, what to plug their kids into and let them know why. And then we help them monitor their progress and troubleshoot along the way. We have a formative assessment rhythm. And if you’re not into education, that just means like, kind of like a check in every few weeks to see, it’s like a third party you check in to see, are they learning the material? Are they just working their way through it? We have a study skills portfolio, that we asked students at the high school level to start developing, which essentially gets them ready for the rigors of college where they’re going to have to learn more or less independently without a lot of anybody telling them exactly what to do. We have a principle we call authentic work. So even though students are working through their first conceptual understanding, from an interactive curriculum. After that, we asked them to do the kinds of you might call them projects. But, in the work world, sometimes they’re called deliverables, but that, people actually do like, lab reports, and, persuasive blog essays and, video reviews.
Lisa Calhoun
I don’t know, Michael. I don’t think people do persuasive blog essays anymore. I think they edit them after ChatGPT wrote it.
Michael Staton
Yeah, right. We’ve thought about it, maybe we should just teach the kids that ChatGPT. They probably already know it.
Lisa Calhoun
Tell me about your better education system. I mean, you’re so passionate about education. We talk about it every time we’ve talked in the last, I don’t know, five years. And so I believe you have a very different vision, I’d love for you to share a little bit more of how you see education should be different.
Michael Staton
Yeah. So, there are a couple of principles. Let’s see if I remember all of them. I mean, the first one is, I think that one of the reasons, students on average, are not really making a lot of achievement gains, despite spending more and more is that we are actually dumbing it down.
Lisa Calhoun
“We” mean, the Department of Education
Michael Staton
I mean, there are so many people involved. I mean, clearly, it’s not like, you or your listeners. But yeah, the standardized test regime, and I actually am pro standardized tests, but the side effect of it, is that people end up teaching to the test. And they think the only way to make test scores go up is to drill and kill and focus more and more on a relatively, limited amount of information. And it’s probably not presented in the most compelling way to boot. And because these Scantron tests or things like the Scantron test, are easily gradable and measurable. For a lot of students, that’s the only kind of work that they ever have known right now and they know that’s not real work. Why should they be motivated for it? And there’s a lot of an attitude of like, well, this is all, this is all just some game that I don’t want to play. So I think that actually if we figure out how to not dumb it down and introduce real challenges for students that feel like real-world work, I think they’d be a lot more interesting.
Lisa Calhoun
And so, could you give me an example from the students you have live today on the platform? What’s a real-world challenge that you feel like presented an appropriate challenge yet still created that might better sink and sink my teeth into this?
Michael Staton
Sure, at the end of the term last semester, we asked the high school students to create a deep reflection on their term. And they could either make it as a video and make it as a presentation, they would do live or write long form. And a number of people chose to do the video reflection. So, I think that for some of the students, it actually felt like a pretty, as good if not maybe even better than your average, YouTube talking head. So that’s an example. I was pretty drill and kill last term on how to take notes efficiently and how to make flashcards, not that you really have to teach people how to make flashcards. But, there’s also a way to use flashcards called the lightener system, I worked with them on a lightener doesn’t sound very cool. So I called it a study box.
Lisa Calhoun
Yes, you’re not wrong. And I have to come in here, we have a very robust intern program at Valor. And we work with some of the brightest young minds, especially out of Atlanta area schools, and also Yale and Northwestern. But I will say the young people with a quality degree who are just graduates are about to graduate in a year, they lacked systems of learning, they really do. And my team and I are sitting down all the time with these absolute sponges, lovely human beings, who don’t have a framework to apply to solving a problem, holds them back because they are some of the best educated socially people we’ve ever had in kind high values, but framework free.
Michael Staton
There are a lot of frameworks that we are applying more and more so the one that we’re going to try to apply this year, we did it halfway last year, but this year, I call it the attack framework. Ah, yeah. And, in education, you have to make everything a catchy acronym. So stands for approach thought, authenticity, craft, and content. And the theory is that when you’re only grading content understanding, which is do they remember the material?
Lisa Calhoun
Reading comprehension?
Michael Staton
Yeah, well, it’s like, for most students, and most classes, it’s like, Hey, you go into the test, and they’re testing. Do you remember and understand the content, right? But for a lot of students where that doesn’t come easy, they might feel a sense of struggle. They feel like an unfair rigged system where some set of kids are just doing well, and then lots of other kids are not. And the idea of grading according to the attack system is that content understanding is actually an outcome of a series of steps that some to quite a lot of students don’t actually know. And it’s about how you approach it, how you think about it. The authenticity of your motivation and interest and engagement. The craft, like your willingness and ability to do the work at better and better levels. And if you do those four, you’ll know the material.
Lisa Calhoun
Awesome. No, I like the authenticity and craft part too, because those things do matter. They do matter in a final product. And a lot of times more and more with our reliance on technology, the content details are almost variable in real time. But authenticity isn’t that’s still very human. Let me, let me take that as a bridge into a subject I think everyone is hearing seeing learning a lot about, and that’s the growing divide between male and female performance in our school system. Yes, I know. I’m completely blindsiding you with this. So listeners, please understand, didn’t get any questions in advance. But does your format or system help address this? How do you see it? What is your perspective on what’s going on in that situation? And how to fix it?
Michael Staton
Well, I have no data to support this, either in terms of do we address it, or what is the real problem. But, my armchair expert analysis would be somewhat similar to the attack framework, which is that through the kind of increasingly standardized curriculum and standardized assessment, the kinds of behavior and kind of cognitive functioning that’s rewarded. Probably comes more easily to girls at a certain age than boys at a certain age. Boys mature at a somewhat slower rate. And there are a lot of boys that before they really fully mature and can engage cognitively and with their attention span and with their energy levels, et cetera. So that they can sit still focus and be willing to kind of play the game. They check out before they get to that level, of cognitive maturity. And part of it is I think that there’s been a creeping divestment in things that engage kids, like activities and subjects, things like band and shop and other kinds of what could be considered, I don’t know, elective or extracurricular activities, because it’s like, well, we don’t have money for that. We got to double down on the core, we got to double down on the core, you gotta, and I think that young men are probably not finding things that they’re interested in at school.
Lisa Calhoun
Do you think that’ll be different with color? And I mean, I know it’s very young. But imagine that we’re starting color. And in Georgia, it’s a year from now? October 1, 2024. And there are a few bright young students showing up, how would you go? Tell us the future.
Michael Staton
Yeah, so I think our design supports that. I don’t have it again, I don’t have we haven’t done a data analysis on that. But I mean, one of the things that we’re trying to figure out how to do systematically, and we did kind of extemporaneously last term, was actually being able to, like accept anything for credit. And, kids get really, really interested in stuff and go after it and become quite good at it. without anybody giving them credit for it. As a matter of fact, sometimes there’s an inverse relationship between their authentic motivation, and whether or not
Lisa Calhoun
I know a kid absolutely knows every leaf in Georgia. It’s this is a young child, like eight years old. There’s another one that’s just crazy about bugs and knows so much about the real world. And that’s not in school. But it’s an amazing, vast pool of knowledge, which is really fun. And I don’t mean it’s an app. I mean, those kids themselves really know their natural world, which is impressive.
Michael Staton
Yeah. So we are trying to come up with a more systematic way other than proposing it to Michael and showing what you did to Michael and checking in with him, which is how it went last year. But it’s basically like if you tell us what you’re interested in and what you’re learning about, and it is, academically relevant, and you essentially propose a scope of work, commit to certain keeping a certain set of documents. So there’s something called a pacing guide, a planner, those who are interconnected, they sit together, you have to keep a notebook, you have to take notes, you have to keep a journal. And if you do these sorts of things, plus do exemplary work, will have like, essentially, like a review process at the end of the term, where we will give you like, academic credit, if you do all those things. Yeah, if that makes sense. So that way, our design could I think, accommodate young men who get really, really excited about certain things that don’t relate to school at all.
Lisa Calhoun
I probably would have tried to apply it to the horse trade. Absolutely!
Michael Staton
So, I don’t know if we’re gonna do it for a fortnight, but we may have something around, game mechanics, game design…
Lisa Calhoun
On craft, whatever you tell me. What’s the process that you’re in the middle of? What is it like starting a net new school in Georgia?
Michael Staton
It’s like a 400-page document. I mean, the authorizing regulators in any state take their job very, very seriously. And they want to super-analyze your plan. As you imagine.
Lisa Calhoun
That makes a lot of sense to me.
Michael Staton
Right? Yeah. But you’ve also met startup companies, and you’ve invested in some of them. And there’s a lot of things that happen that like, weren’t necessarily planned out ahead of time. And, some of the things that you plan out ahead of time don’t necessarily go the way that you think they will. And, I think that we, in our conversations, all, all the states that we have talked to and districts or universities, their different authorizers are like they want this kind of innovation and thinking. And they ask a lot of tough questions to make sure that, certain learners are not neglected, we’re not taking advantage of the system, we’re not misusing public funding. And they ask a lot of tough questions that are not often asked of, younger organizations that are figuring it out, right? And so what it’s meant is, first of all, we have to plan a lot more, and we have to, like write a lot more, what our plans are, and, and we’ve also had to think, grow up faster, in some ways. And, it’s been really interesting to go from, working with companies that are like two or three people, and a rough prototype. And then what they ended up doing is nothing like what they said they were doing, like at the beginning to really needing to articulate who you are in the world and how you’re going to be accountable to basically all stakeholders in a pretty highly scrutinized way.
Lisa Calhoun
Yeah. So are you proposing to take public funds at some level with CoLearn?
Michael Staton
No, well we do in Arizona, so when I say coming to Georgia, we can be here as a private school. Now, we haven’t done any marketing or outreach or anything, but as a former public school teacher, if I if we’re going to and if we are, we are creating a new model of school. I think that many parents would be interested in it. I want that to be accessible to all. And so we’re just doing the upfront work to, be a public charter school. So, it’ll be a nonprofit entity. In Georgia, it is a nonprofit entity in Georgia, with its own local board. And essentially, they’re replicating, quote, the model, the CoLearn way, if you want to call it that, and using a technology platform that makes it all possible.
Lisa Calhoun
Wow, that would be new, that would be very different. So, if this gets going in Georgia, do you have some school systems that you think are most likely candidates for a hybrid model?
Michael Staton
So we would be our own school system, technically.
Lisa Calhoun
So, it’s like Fulton, Atlanta public schools, and CoLearn.
Michael Staton
Yeah, exactly. I think that we are attractive to family families, where one of the parents or close relative, can be home a lot. So think of a new kind of flexible work, movement. I think at some point, there were more jobs being offered for white-collared work that were default remote than there were default in the office. So, the other thing would be being the type of parent that has thoughts about what they’d like their kids to be learning, and how, what a school experience should be like, and very active parents, very active parents.
Lisa Calhoun
My mom was like that she’s very active in our public school system, and very dissatisfied. It created a lot of interesting experiences.
Michael Staton
I think it’s 56% of parents are dissatisfied with public schools.
Lisa Calhoun
It’s tough.
Michael Staton
Over 40% of parents would like three or more days a week of attendance at school to be flexible. We do little things with flexibility that don’t really sound revolutionary unless you stop and think about it, which is we have a button where you can say skip today or skip, you can say skip these three days or skip this week. And you can automatically reschedule everything you’re doing into future dates. And I’m not aware of any other school that has a net worth taking today off Peace out, we’re going to Grandma’s like,
Lisa Calhoun
We’re going to be called snow days and ice days.
Michael Staton
You can declare your own snow day, right, which is pretty cool. But we have teachers that monitor whether or not you’re actually doing the makeup work, or you can work ahead and accumulate, quote, credits, or whatever that you can then take a vacation with. But, I think that if somebody came in without public school, existing, there’s a bit of Stockholm Syndrome here. If public school didn’t exist, and suddenly, all parents in the United States, were told, we’re going to take your kids from roughly August 15, fish through roughly, may 15 fish, and you won’t be able to go anywhere, or go on vacation and your entire life is going to be about getting them to where, where we are holding them captive, and getting them home and then making sure that they are doing the things that they don’t want to do that we told them to do. I don’t think people would go for that. Right?
Lisa Calhoun
That’s right. And then you add in that a lot of textbooks are 15 – 20 years anyway. No, I mean, there are some real challenges. So rather than take on an easy topic, like public school directly like that, because you’re trying to change it so you’re building a solution. You’re not just complaining, you’re not you actually have a living solution that students are in today. I’d like to ask you as a way of our listeners, just getting you some lightning round questions from different points in your life right up for that. Cool. So let’s go back to high school teachers in Houston, Texas. What are three things you learned about educating students from being a classroom teacher?
Michael Staton
Yes, I feel like I should be listening to my own advice I’m about to give a mic. Which is don’t assume that everyone heard the instructions or got the instruction book or the schedule of what is to come, I pretty much assume that a very good portion either didn’t get it, lost it, didn’t understand it, etc. And so, you have to be willing to front load a lot of communication that would feel redundant, right, in order to get everybody on the same page. And then the second is to be arbitrarily consistent. And actually, those are both related, which is, I think, a lot of the challenges in education, and a lot of companies and organizations, startups, maybe even Avalor, right, could be anywhere, is everybody’s not on the same page. Right. And even when you think everybody’s on the same page, they’re not, right? And there’s this impossibility, as an educator or potentially as any kind of leader to move forward with everyone. If a bunch of people are not on the same page. And keeping people on the same page is easier. If you make some choices like framework thinking or whatever, where you can be arbitrarily consistent, just like its own, it almost is like swimming laps or something gets in the pool, front stroke backstroke,
Lisa Calhoun
When you do it today, but do 10,000 steps today, like that, exactly.
Michael Staton
Be consistent to the point where you almost like, laugh at yourself as to how consistent you are. Another one would be chapter will challenge people to do great work. And let them choose what great work they want to do. So this is another thing that I did as a teacher, which is I had read an article somewhere that students are more motivated when they feel like they have a choice, even if that choice is not as significant as it could be. But I would create a menu of options. So, this week, there are these 20 things, you could do to choose one. But whatever you’re going to choose, you got to do it at a really high level, and then kids would choose and they would really, really try it. They would that people are motivated to try to do great work if they think the skill or the work itself is valuable. And they would rather be challenged than not challenged. And then the other thing is great on a sum rather than an average. And I could probably apply that also to professional life as well, which is, there are people that don’t do that well every day, right? They’re not at the top of their game every day. Some of the work they do isn’t as great as it could be, stay right. Yeah, they may have challenges with the kind of executive functioning that we hope everyone should have. And I definitely don’t. You probably do, though, Lisa. But pretty much everybody if they can find their kind of zone of genius can can show their best selves frequently enough that if you’re grading on a song rather than an average, most people will get there.
Lisa Calhoun
Awesome and to be super clear, what’s an example of grading on a cell?
Michael Staton
Sure, so I noticed this when I started doing more challenging assignments with my students, which is when especially young boys or young men if they turn something in late early or don’t understand the instructions, or don’t care once they get a grade that when averaged into future grades will bring everything and down to the point where they’re already going to get a C, they’re already going to get a D, they’re already going to fail, their parents are already going to be mad at them. Their reaction is a very human reaction, which is, “I’m done, I’m done, peace out”, not even going to try. And so if you’re trying to challenge people, and you’re trying to take everyone with you, and you’re not acting like with the Jack Welch, like, we’re gonna call, the bottom before. If you’re trying to take everybody with you if you’re grading by an average, the people that have some kind of struggle early for any reason, a lot of them will give up. And if what you say is cool, so instead of having an average where every assignment averages down, and the average was 100, I said, by the end of the six weeks period, you have to accumulate 100 points. And there are all these things that you can do to accumulate 100 points. So if you did not get, eight out of eight possible points on that thing, you just did, you only got two, that’s not an average, you can still do a whole lot more right
Lisa Calhoun
at it. Okay. Yeah, that already feels more motivational. Now, to kind of last thing, I’ll go into, from your time as a VC specializing in ed tech. I’m wondering, what are three things you learned about educating people? Because you were working with some of the coolest latest technologies? And even if you didn’t invest in it, chances are you’ve saw it on the Investment Committee.
Michael Staton
Yeah, wow. Some guys I know, actually wrote a book called get lucky. And it was about how to do the groundwork, so that serendipity seems to just start happening more and more and more, right. And as somebody who was already privileged, and then seems to have stumbled into more privilege, like, I know that, luck isn’t evenly distributed. But there are things that you can do to put yourself in the way of luck. And it for a lot of people that are founders, I see them wanting to get funding or find the right customer, or, some, they like want the luck to happen, super super, they’re like starving for the luck. But they’re not necessarily doing all the things that they could do to make sure that that luck is more and more probable. So that would be one another is don’t assume any problems will be solved by hiring anyone. Especially when you’re kind of in an under-resourced phase of the company. A lot of things that need to be done are not rocket science. And you’ll probably need to do it yourself. Or at least learn how to do it yourself and struggle to do it yourself before you realize you need to hire someone. And, it’s worth diving headfirst and with a maniacal focus into things that you think you would want to hire other people for.
Lisa Calhoun
Got it! And so last question, when you look at the world of education and tech and the future, what is something you’re most excited about? What is something good that you’re expecting that you’re really excited about?
Michael Staton
Right now, I’ve been thinking a lot about for lack of a better term visual leadership. Just like how to relay the ideas and concepts and frameworks and beliefs that need to be in the DNA and need to be replicated as any organization scales. And this is quite beyond like brand identity and, mission statement and schwag this is like a bow Really having having your own elegant visual representation of things like, , marketing personas and funnels and like decision trees, and org charts and OKRs. And yeah, all that kind of stuff. And so I’ve been we’re at a moment now where some of the ideas that we’ve talked about really need to be very trainable to new teachers that are coming on board. And it’s really kind of forced me to codify a lot of things into easy-to-understand visuals. And now that I’m learning that skill, I’m like, creating my own cones and creating my own animations and, like, getting airtable to talk to Figma. Wow, this is like, a total skill set that so many people need that they’re not even aware of. I mean, I didn’t even do not aware of it. And I used to tell entrepreneurs, that the two things, the two skills that will come up over and over and over and over are design thinking and visual communication. And what I meant by visual communication is basically this visual leadership. But even I didn’t know how deep you could get into it. So yeah, I would say just systems for visual leadership is something I’m geeking out on right now.
Lisa Calhoun
Oh, my gosh, you should go to the Tableau User Conference. Yeah, you will love it. Okay. Thank you so much for your time. This has been awesome. Did we? Is there anything I’ve missed that I should have asked you about that you’re dying to tell our audience or share with them? Upcoming events? Anything at all?
Michael Staton
Sure, yeah. Well, having moved to Atlanta from Silicon Valley. , the thing that makes Silicon Valley tick, I like to summarize is like an open trust network, where everyone feels a responsibility to pay it forward. And to stay open, almost no matter how kind of successful and closed doors they get. And I’m not saying that everybody follows that. But generally speaking, it is way easier than it should be as nobody gets a meeting with somebody in Silicon Valley. And as a founder to end up with a string of meetings with people that are helpful. And it becomes this kind of like, the journey of increasingly appropriate advice and potential investors. And, the thing that most emerging ecosystems struggled to replicate. Is that open trust network is that Pay It Forward mentality? And I definitely feel like Atlanta has that vibe. I haven’t been here long enough to understand if it exists outside of the Valar ecosystem. But, for anybody who’s listening who’s been a successful entrepreneur, or who wants to engage in the entrepreneurial community, like being present, taking meetings, giving encouraging words like those things go so far when a whole ecosystem aligns on it.
Lisa Calhoun
Absolutely do. I think that that is very core to the culture at Valor, and organizations like it led to starting a podcast and sort of runway, but we didn’t invent it here. It’s a really kind of fundamental part of the idea of Southern hospitality. I think the version of it that comes out of the South at a greater scale is going to be mind blown. Absolutely. And I’m glad you’re here for it, Michael. Thanks again.
Michael Staton
Thank you for your time, everybody.
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