#135 - Interview with Henry Kaestner, Founder of Sovereign's Capital

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." - Thomas Aquinas

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Circle of Competence Podcast #16 - Henry Kaestner, Founder of Sovereign's Capital

This week, I'm sharing my conversation with Henry Kaestner, founder of Sovereign's Capital and host of the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. Sovereign's Capital "invests in two market segments: profitable, lower middle market companies (with $10 million to $100 million in revenue, and $2.5 million to $10 million in owner earnings) and promising, early-stage technology companies (with $500,000 to $5 million in annual recurring revenue)." In our conversation, we covered:

- The Bandwidth.com story and Henry's years as CEO and Chairman

- The culture at Bandwidth ($BAND) and how it was defined from the start

- The incentives behind venture capital investment

- Buying customers (and burning cash) vs. delighting customers (and keeping them)

- Debt vs. equity for founders

- Convertible debt and SAFE's

- Henry's work and drive behind the Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor organizations

- The launch of the Faith Driven Investor marketplace

- The power of surrounding yourself with friends who will speak wisdom into your life

- Henry's business idea to reinvent the collectibles industry using cloud labor and computer vision to grade collectibles and sell them over a marketplace platform

Podcast Update - Sponsorships and Partner(s)

I've had a couple conversations around sponsorships for the podcast that I hope to reveal soon if we can finalize details and also have conversations lined up next week to discuss potential partnerships with the people who reached out to my last post around growing the podcast. More soon!

LINKS

Investing

The Barry Diller Playbook (The Generalist)

How to jam a buyer (Matthew Hinson)

Calculating net working capital in a business acquisition (Matthew Hinson)

COMPASS Pathways (CMPS) - The Platform Mental Health Company 50 Years in the Making (Citron Research)

Real Estate

The Grave Dancer (Sam Zell)

Technology

Marketplaces year in review 2020 (Marketplace Pulse)

Microsoft's breakdown of the recent Russia Hack (Microsoft)

The pandora's box of central bank digital currencies (Doubleline)