Investing In Innovation: Opportunities In Dual-Use Tech With Sherman Williams, Part 1

 

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Welcome to another episode of The 7 in 7 Show with Zack Ellison, which features full-length interviews with the world’s leading investors in innovation.

The show this week features Sherman Williams, the co-founder and Managing Partner of AIN Ventures. Sherman has an extensive history investing in dual-use technology subsegments, such as space technology and healthcare technology. Sherman has been the VC-in-Residence to several Techstars programs and is also a Kauffman Fellow (’26).

Prior to becoming an early-stage investor, Sherman gathered six years of financial transaction experience as a Healthcare Technology M&A Investment Banker. Sherman started his career as a Naval Intelligence Officer and holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Naval Academy.

In this episode, Zack Ellison and Sherman Williams discuss:

1. Big Investment Opportunities in Dual-Use Technologies
2. Reasons that Military Veterans Make Great Founders
3. In-the-Box Experience for Out-of-the-Box Thinking
4. Venture Debt as a Founder-Friendly Complement to Equity Financing
5. The Importance of Founder Leadership, Resourcefulness, and Grit
6. Why Adaptability Is Imperative for Success
7. The Significance of Technical Expertise in Founding Teams

Investing In Innovation: Opportunities In Dual-Use Tech With Sherman Williams, Part 1

Veteran Founders

In this episode, I have with me my former classmate at the University of Chicago with the School of Business and good friend, Sherman Williams. Sherman is the Managing Partner of Academy Investor Network, which goes by AIN Ventures. Sherman, it’s great to have you. Thanks for joining.

Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

You’ve made some time for us. It’s New York Tech Week. You’ve got meetings galore. Thank you for making a little time. Tell everybody how you got here. What’s your story?

My story is I’m originally from Chicago. I grew up in Chicago in a massive family. It’s an extended family and a decent-sized nuclear family. I was an intellectually curious kid. I played sports growing up and did well enough to go into the Naval Academy in Annapolis. I had a pretty crazy time there. That was a very interesting place.

My upbringing didn’t necessarily prepare me for the rigors of the Naval Academy but I was able to not take things too seriously. That works if you let things roll off your shoulder a little bit. I was able to come out of the Naval Academy. I was a Naval officer for many years and at a unique time because it was during the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. I was able to deploy quite a bit. That helped me mature dramatically and got me on a certain track.

 

 

The Naval Academy helped me with that but it was majorly reinforced during my time in the military. While in the military, the Naval Academy was heavy in STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. That’s the curriculum. You can major in other things, but even if you are an English major, you get a Bachelor’s in Science because you do all your physics and calculus.

I had a decent technology background with a Bachelor’s degree coming out to the Naval Academy but I was always interested in business. I didn’t come from money. I wanted to understand how money worked. You’re not in that environment at the Naval Academy. People are not doing summer internships or anything like that. People are focused on going into the military. People focus on engineering and science.

I started doing my reading. As an early naval officer, I was fortunate enough to have a great roommate who comes from a family that’s a little bit more wealthy than mine. He connected with his financial advisors like Mark Stanley. He took me on because I was a young naval officer who was friendly with the son of one of the families he oversaw. He would have great talks with me and directed me on the right path. It started down a path of starting to understand finance.

What happened as I got older as an officer, I started to realize that you start to think about what interests you the most. For me, I was interested in technology very much. I developed that love more so at the academy or school. I didn’t realize that I was very interested in innovation and started to slowly realize that. I wanted to learn a lot about finance.

When I looked at my life, I said, “How can I do something I’m passionate about? How can I be in my sweet spot doing what I want to do?” I manifest whatever my destiny is. That was working at the intersection of finance, technology, and innovation. That’s what I focused on. I started researching and I found that the intersection is best served in venture capital.

I stayed past my required time at the Naval Academy. In the Navy, you have to do 5 years and I did about 8. I was not inclined to get out. Things were going well in the Navy. I was doing great deployments. It was a secret sauce. A lot of guys want to do stuff. It’s terrible. There are wars and everything but we want to do stuff. Put me in the game, coach.

It was a little bit of a lull there in that timeframe. I come back from Afghanistan. At that point, I was deployed. I was in Southeast Asia. I applied to business schools. I ended up at Booth. I was in NEX or Navy Exchange somewhere. There was some magazine and I didn’t know much. It said that the number one ranking of business schools at the time was Chicago Booth. I’m from Chicago originally. I was like, “This makes sense.”

I did go through a pre-program. It wasn’t like I applied raw, but I went through some program that I mainly did virtually. I got into Chicago Booth. I had to think about it and I was like, “This makes sense to depart.” I was about 30 years old. I came and went in the uniform at seventeen. At that point, it was about half my life. That got me to Booth in a VC internship. I ended up going to invest in banking. That eventually led me to AIN Ventures. I started a venture fund with my co-founder.

We’ve got a lot in common. I grew up without a lot of money and didn’t have access to anybody that was in the finance space. My internships are almost too menial to mention, including college. One of the things I’ve learned is that learning is a lifelong process. You’ve learned. You don’t necessarily need to have done something previously to figure out how to do it in the future. That’s why we’re both good in the innovation space because innovation doesn’t come with a track record.

To be a good VC, you’ve got to be forward-thinking and do things that people have not done before. If you’re doing things the way they were done years ago, you’re doing them wrong. We both think like that. There are a couple of things I wanted to note. You served seven-plus years in the Navy and did multiple tours overseas. You and I both have a lot of friends that are veterans. You have more because you’ve served. I’ve always felt that veterans make good founders for a lot of reasons. I want to get your thoughts on that in terms of what characteristics veterans have that make them better founders in many cases.

One of the key things is that I believe you can classify three attributes that veterans have. It’s leadership, determination, and grit. They’ve led people. I was an investment banker for years. You lead people but you do have a managing director that’s over you. It’s a little bit different. You don’t have that kind of leeway. It’s a kind of different leadership within the context of Corporate America.

You are for sure going to fail at times. It’s your responsibility to train those around you, and if they fail, it’s your fault. Share on X

In the Navy, once you leave that waterline, it’s a situation where we all we got. You’re given a task. You’ve been over-trained to be able to accomplish that task. You got to go out and do it. That extreme ownership, which Jaco talks about, is tough for people to understand in the civilian world. It’s one thing to have money on the line, which is a lot. I’m an entrepreneur with this new fund, AIN Ventures. It’s a lot to not know where the next paycheck is coming in. It’s a different thing in your life. They both suck but one sucks more to have those issues.

I believe that it is that level of extreme ownership that you were forced to take at an early age that makes you a better leader. You say determination. From the day you enter a boot camp setting, no matter your service, you’re put in situations where you’re going to have to give all that you have. It’s not going to be easy to get by. They find people who things are easy for and selectively make things harder for them, almost like a computer adaptive test. Remember taking the GMAT? The better you do, the harder it should be. You have that issue with respect to determination. You’re putting those environments early on so it becomes ingrained in you.

Lastly, it’s grit. You are also put in situations where it’s not only hard for you but you are for sure going to fail. It is not likely going to work out. It may not even be a fault of your own. It may be the fault of the person right to the left or right of you but you have to train them. If they fail, it’s your fault. Take extreme ownership as a leader. You have to deal with that and you’re going to take the blame as the leader. You have to have the grit to be able to train a person next to you.

If you were the reason that folks fail, you have to overcome your past miscalculations or whatever have you. Being put in those kinds of environments at such a young age is a leadership laboratory. They talk about the Naval Academy, and West Point Air Force Academy as academies, different ROTC programs, and also Canada schools. Those are leadership laboratories affected. You don’t get that kind of experiential learning. It’s tough to get that in a civilian world, particularly where the stakes can be so high. Those are the three attributes that make founders much better and different. The stats show that founders with a military background do better than their civilian account per capita basis.

Those are great points that you mentioned. I’d add to that. Veterans, in general, have higher levels of integrity. They’re very adaptable. It’s something that Kelly Perdew brought up in a previous episode. People often think that when you’re in the military, you’re told what to do and you’re very robotic and mechanical but the reality is things change clearly and there’s massive risk on the line. You have to be very adaptable. That mirrors what we see in the business context, where almost every startup, no matter how good they are, is going to have to pivot multiple times. To be a founder who’s used to pivoting with their life on the line gives them a background that other people don’t have.

That’s a massive misnomer in the military that people are not adaptable. That’s wrong. As a matter of fact, the US military is the opposite of that. One of the secret sauces of the US military is the non-commissioned officer corps. Those E6s to E9s, enlisted level 6 and enlisted level 9. If you think about levels, google it or some Corporate America reference. It’s giving those people ownership over a process or task, and then them doing their share of the task and not necessarily being told what to do.

We have a concept in the Navy called Command By Negation. It’s like, “Here are your left and right limits. You figure out how to get there.” A lot of people outside the US military don’t realize that that’s how the US military works. There was a joke that I overheard when I was in the military. During the Cold War, when the USSR folks were trying to assess American tactics, they couldn’t figure it out. These Americans are like, “How was he doing this crazy stuff?” They didn’t even have a tax. They’re like, “Our taxes were all over the place.”

You have the ability to adapt and find a way to win. That is a core competency of folks in the US military wildly adapt, at least the best of us. You’re right about integrity. Not through our fund or this one but I’ve invested in the past in the veteran-led startup that failed. What I will say is that they came with a tremendous amount of integrity, even though they failed. That’s pretty solid. You’re not going to get that across. You’re right on a per capita basis. Those veteran-led startups will come with a higher degree.

Veterans’ ability under pressure is also incredibly important. Founders have so much pressure on them. I don’t think people realize that unless you’ve been a founder. Both you and I invest in founders but we’re also founders ourselves. We understand how hard it is to wear a risk 24/7. Part of being a veteran is that there’s a new kind of risk that they would experience as a founder. It’s clearly a lot of risk and responsibility but it’s nothing that they haven’t done before in terms of the level of intensity.

I think a lot about that. What I always look for is people who have a footprint of success and overcoming adversity. To me, that’s the most important factor. That ties in with a very high correlation between grit and persistence. The only way you overcome adversity is if you’ve got grit, resourcefulness, and the ability to stick with it.

I remember I was reading a Malcolm Gladwell book years ago. He’s written a couple of good books but I’m pretty sure it was an Outliers. If I recall, it was an event that brought together a bunch of hedge fund managers with military commanders and leaders. He said, “Two peas in a pod.” They’re both taking immense amounts of risk with valuable assets, people, and money.

 

These leaders weren’t necessarily on the battlefield because they were so senior that they were calling the shots. All that responsibility ultimately lay with them and he thought it was incredible how similar they were. You wouldn’t have known who was in the military and who was the hedge fund manager based on how they approached risk because they both dealt with risk on a daily basis.

I’m a true believer that your experiences will shape you. I’m going to use two clichés. One is don’t pray for an easy life, pray for the ability to endure hard life. The ability to suffer is part of the human experience. Suffer is too big of a word. The ability to go through hard things and put yourself in very difficult situations that come out on top is essential to the human experience. Running toward easiness and simpleness is not necessarily a good thing. It’s me, Sherman, talking. I don’t think that’s a life fully lived.

There are 200,000 people at JP Morgan. That’s the size of the US Marine Corps. People aren’t going to die but he is feeding 200,000 families. With the lending, it’s a large bank in the Western world. There’s a lot of people that rely on it. The commander of SOCOM or CENTCOM, or with Israel and Hamas with that going on, that’s a tremendous amount of responsibility. There’s effectively a full armada.

It’s two care groups in the Eastern Med. That’s a lot of life to depend on or he is focused on. Those experiences will naturally shape. You’re right. In my life, I try to go through things that are a little bit more difficult to remind myself that I have to do that. Suffering is not a bad thing. Put yourself through hard things. To me, that’s the sweeter part of life when you overcome it.

My saying is, “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” In everything I do, I’m always at the limit. We were talking before we started recording and you’re like, “How are things going?” I’m like, “It’s going great.” How do I have time for everything? I operate at 130% capacity at all times. You have to be able to do that. If you work for me or with me, you have to be able to do that, too. That’s the level of expectation here. Most people aren’t comfortable with being uncomfortable but once you get used to it, it’s all good. It’s a day in the life.

With AIN Ventures, starting a venture fund, particularly in this environment, I take so much risk. It’s not even risky. The financial risk stamp is crazy. You were in finance before. I was an investment banker. Those things pay well. It’s a good, steady life but that would not have fulfilled me and I knew. I took that risk and made that leap. Founders also make that leap.

A lot of your best founders can easily go work for someone else by definition of them being that competent. It’s a selection bias towards those founders who are successful. You want a life fully lived. Put yourself out there. Speaking about Malcolm Gladwell, I saw something about folks on their deathbed. The one thing that they said was, “Why did I not pull the trigger on X, Y, and Z?” Live a life with no regrets. Push.

AIN Ventures

Let’s dig into AIN Ventures. How did you decide to start it? How have you been building it? Where are you at with all the good things that are going on that you’ve told me about?

I left banking and was looking for a role in the venture. I was working as a venture partner at a few funds, helping them source deals. 1 or 2 of them gave me an official title, a VC in Training or whatever have you. I did my first venture internship in 2011 while working as an investment banker. After that first year and a half with those initial associates, I picked my head up and was constantly going to entrepreneurial events in whatever city I was in. I stayed ingrained in that community because I knew I wanted to tap back into the venture.

What happened was one of the folks I was working as a partner for brought me an idea for AI like bringing together academy grants. We were a venture fund and we also ran a syndicate separately. They brought me the idea of the syndicate. I did a whole PowerPoint about this and said, “I like the idea of a syndicate but I’m in a ton of syndicates.” At that point, I had invested in a ton of companies with my personal capital and had led syndicates.

I said, “Syndicates are terrible. It’s like herding cats.” Unless you already know wealthy people. Syndicates are very difficult to do long-term without a fund. I said, “You probably need to start a fund that will help ensure that that syndicate lasts a very long time.” The concept of dual-use has been around for a long time. Other than maybe Lux Capital and a few other folks, people put in their stamp on dual-use. That wasn’t a thing in 2019.

Define dual-use for everybody.

Your experiences shape you. Don't pray for an easy life. Pray for the endurance to handle a hard one. Share on X

Dual-use technologies are companies that have both government and commercial applications but I have a certain view of dual-use. If you’re relying on getting contracts in the federal government, no matter the department, it’s very difficult to do that but for a certain segment of dual-use for deep technology, the government wants to see certain technologies be in existence.

What the federal government will do is have nondilutive funding programs such as the SBIR program and SCTR program. They will give nondilutive funding, which is free. It effectively lowers the cost of capital. You think about the weighted average cost of capital. You’re lowering the cost of capital for that company to develop this technology and get to commercial markets.

Do they have to pay interest on that capital?

Negative. It’s completely nondiluted. It’s a grant.

It’s a grant that they provide to build out these technologies that have governmental applications.

What we do is find those technologies that have both government and commercial applications. We find those companies where we can dramatically solve the pain from a financial standpoint. We’re finding those technologies where the cost of capital for the development of the technology is dramatic. At the time we started the fund, there was a bill that had been in Congress for some time called the Endless Frontier Act. That act was modified and was eventually split up. It was passed in portions of the Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

That all happened after we started the fund but we felt like it was going to come. In those bills, something else happens that’s important outside of lowering the cost of capital to develop the technology. The government is effectively saying we’ll be the first customer of the technology if you think about inflation. Yes, it’s huge.

You don’t necessarily have product market fit but you can say, “I’ve got money to develop the technology. I approved this technology in the wild with a customer. That customer might be the government but I still approved it.” I can go to the commercial sector and say, “The government used me. How about you use me? I was good enough for them.” It helps out your pitch.

What we saw underpinning our thesis of dual-use was the great power competition that was arising in 2019. It was a great power competition between us, Russia, and China. In 2019, there’s no way what I was guessing then would have happened to the degree. With the state that we’re living in on February 24th, 2022, with Russia invading Ukraine, I could not have guessed that. It’s a continuously tense relationship between the US and the CCP on a bipartisan basis with respect to the United States.

That’s one of the few things. If, bipartisan-wise, there’s agreement in the United States, I could not have guessed that. I was betting it would happen but not that fast. There’s an interesting thing, where that great power competition is fueling the government to give ever more nondiluted funding and be the first customer of these newer technologies. I was betting that that great competition was for sure going to happen and it is playing itself out. I believe it’s going to last for many years.

From a game theory standpoint, no one’s incentivized to fight a new group. You will see something less than that. That’s in the form of proxy wars. I don’t believe history rhymes but it echoes. There are lessons to learn from the Cold War and World War II. During that time, World War I and World War II, we had a twenty-year interwar period or something like that. You roll right into the Cold War. You saw the greatest technological advancements in human history during that time. Now, it’s starting to pick back up. Some of the stuff they did then was still radical.

 

If you look at the Apollo program and him going to the moon in the 1960s, it was insane with the level of technology that they had. They did it. They’re wicked smart engineers. They made it happen. You’re going to see something similar between the United States and the CCP. We’re engaged in total competition with the CCP. It’s not just militaristic. It’s also economic, technology, societal, and consumerism. It affects so many different areas.

My thesis is directly aligned with yours. It centers on the fact that there’s an arms race going on that’s heating up exponentially. When I say an arms race, instead of weapons, it’s technology because that’s what’s been weaponized. Data and technology have been weaponized. There’s going to be tons of money going into deep tech, cyber security, and AI. There’s an infinite amount of money coming out of the government on both sides and that’s going to keep driving innovation and provide commercial opportunities as well.

There’s an arbitrage opportunity that exists here that I’m not sure everyone knows about. It’s not that there’s an infinite amount of money. It’s the fact that as early-stage investors, one of our companies gets on contract with the federal government. Let’s say the federal government gives our companies $15 million of R&D money. On top of that, the federal government is the first customer of that technology. Let’s say it’s a $10 million contract or something along those lines. That’s $30 million. That’s massive.

That $10 million of customer revenue is not a big deal when you have a $148 billion budget, plus the other contingency operation budget, plus the portion of the black budget. It puts you to North of a trillion to spend a year. That’s a very big deal for an early-stage startup and an early-stage investor that invests in X low valuation but with that $10 million contract and technological development, that company all of a sudden jumps up to Y and Z valuation.

It’s a peculiarity that’s very unique to early-stage ventures, which is at the intersection of dual-use and deep technology that I don’t think a lot of people understand. Per our UChicago backgrounds, we’re finance nerds. We understand what is happening in the context of black. We fully get that. A lot of people can’t break that down.

You think about beta and risking this relative market. Not that we focus on that too much with government contracts but if you do get a government contract, that revenue can be pretty sticky. The government is going to pay its bills because they’re using our money. We have to pay our bills. Otherwise, you go to jail. There’s a whole underwriting corpus in a work that needs to be done that’s unique to that early-stage dual-use deep tech segment.

You have a competitive advantage and AIN does as well. We’ve got an understanding of how that segment of the economy works. You do have to know the ins and outs. You have to know who’s got the money and who makes the decisions. Ultimately, it’s not like you can read a book and it’s going to tell you how to do this. You have to be in the weeds to know where the opportunities are. There’s a big entry for folks that aren’t in the game.

You can’t just run in and do defense tech investing. It’s very difficult. There are some excellent defense tech firms out there, like Scout Ventures, Squadra, Moonshots, Harpoon, and Decisive Point. Lux is probably one of the most profound. Founders Fund has a massive arm. They’re also profound. Those guys have done excellent. 8DC does a lot of defense tech deals. Those guys are fine and they don’t miss out. They understand what they do.

What people need to appreciate is that at the end of the day, whether you sell them pizzas or missile systems, you have to be able to sell them. You’ve got to be an entrepreneur. We walk a fine line. Also, we’re looking at those technologies that can scale commercial. That is a core competency of AIN Ventures. That’s unique to us. We may pass on a defense tech deal that those other outstanding defense tech investors do.

Some of them are not pure defense. Some of them are more dual-use or science-forward, like Prime Movers Lab or ABC. We’re looking for those things that can scale commercially. I’m not saying that those other folks aren’t because a lot of them are. We’re walking a fine line. I’m trying to assess the entrepreneur and the eventual reality of penetrating commercial markets on a wide scale, achieving $100 million over the 7 years on a current basis.

Mandate And Scope

Sherman, here’s a question for you in terms of AIN. Do you only invest in veterans and dual-use? What’s the mandate? How broad can it be?

No. We do not only invest in veterans. We invest in companies at the intersection of dual-use and deep technology. That can be anyone globally. We will look and then potentially invest. We’ve already done that. Separately from that, we do invest in veterans. With the unique attributes of veterans, that leadership, determination, and grit, we will invest in non-DTEK. If we do anything outside of that intersection of duties and DTEK, we will invest in veterans and we’re industry agnostic there.

History doesn’t rhyme, but it echoes. Share on X

We have an overwhelmingly strong software bias due to who’s on our team at this time. We don’t necessarily have the network to vet things outside of the software space. Not to say we won’t do a deal in the consumer space, that’s veteran-led, but those are going to be very few and far between for us. To understand and reiterate, we invest in a section of duties and DTEK. Those founders do not need to be veterans. They can be anywhere in the world. We’ll look globally. Separately, if we do anything outside of that space, we invest in veterans because of those three attributes, leadership, determination, and grit. We’re industry agnostic there with a strong software bias.

In terms of the stage of company development, what stage are you investing in predominantly?

Pre-seed.

What’s that check size that you’re targeting?

Ideally, we’d be able to write $250,000 and $750,000 checks. I tell people, “You tell me the size of your fund and I’ll tell you the stage of investment.” It’s the number you back into.

Identifying Good Founders

We talked a lot about the dual-use angle. How do you identify good founders, especially good veteran founders?

Let me focus on good founders first from the deep tech standpoint, not veterans. I’m looking for technical talent on board the team immediately. I’m looking for someone who has worked in that industry space in some way, shape, or form that they’re trying to disrupt. We classify deep tech as companies building advanced technologies, meaning scientific or engineering risk is being overcome. Also, companies building advanced technologies that are out of the R&D phase with those technologies that do not yet have wide-scale commercial adoption.

Those same technologies can either disrupt existing markets or create brand-new markets. Advanced scientific engineering, overcoming that risk, I need a technical person on the team. The ability to disrupt an existing market or create a brand-new market, I need you to have work in that market or you work in an adjacent market. Also, you come to me with some jaw-dropping astounding way that’s sensible to me and my network of how you’re going to go and attack a certain market.

I need those things to be in existence from a team. I didn’t want to have seen you overcome something. A PhD demonstrates a lot of grit. Starting a company before and failing demonstrates a lot of grit. Also, taking a risk of starting a company. Even if they failed to succeed, the fact that you started coming before it demonstrates a lot of grit. The fact that you overcame something is important. We invest in first-time founders. We have no problem with that. We do have a lot of second-time founders. We have people who are able to tell a narrative and articulate a story to us, showing that they’ve overcome something. That’s also huge.

The other big thing we’re looking for is someone inspiring. You have the ability to recruit talent. That’s something that not enough people talk about. Instead of immediately going out to pitch a VC, how about you pitch someone to quit their job or take time out of their day with their busy life and time with their family to help you on the side at the minimum on your startup? That’s the first people need to win over before you can win a VC. A partnership with a potential customer, where they say, “I’m going to put money into to see this get developed.” Before you go talk to VC, those are the things to do.

I’m looking for founders that have the ability to be scrappy. They’re not going to quit because you’re right. They’re likely going to pivot. It’s a long journey. This is a 7 to 15-year journey if it’s successful. I need to see that. That’s wildly important. It’s technical talent, working at an existing market or an adjacent market, the ability to recruit folks, and showing that you’ve overcome something in life.

Those are great points. I’ve talked with others about this idea of being a charismatic leader who’s a good marketer. To your point, what you have to do as a founder is attract resources of all types. It’s not just money. It’s talent and many other partnerships along the way. That never ends. The entire journey is going to require somebody who’s magnetic and able to attract resources through the force of their personality and the sheer force of their will in many respects, in my view.

 

Another thing you hit on, which I fully agree with and that a lot of people miss, is this idea of having worked in that market and been successful in that market. I see this in fintech a lot, where there are a lot of new-fangled lenders who want to be like neo-banks. Most of them are blowing up and most of them will certainly blow up over the next couple of years.

The reality is, if you look at those founding teams, the majority don’t have people who have real experience with that product. When somebody comes to me and says that they’ve got a lending solution and they have nobody on their team who’s been a good lender, has underwriting experience, and knows how the pieces work, it’s going to fail. It’s a matter of time. I don’t even know why people invest in a lot of these companies. Honestly, it makes me question like B2Cs quite frankly. Why would you invest in somebody who doesn’t even know the product?

When we graduated from Chicago Booth, I can’t remember who the professor was or who our keynote speaker was. It was a younger guy. He wasn’t that old. I can’t remember his name. It was Kevin something.

I’ll look it up. I can’t remember either. It’s long ago. We’re older than we look. That’s the thing.

I feel young.

Me too.

The one thing he said was to be an out-of-box speaker, you need to know what’s in the box first. You need to have someone around you who has been in the box first. I’ve done a lot of work in life sciences. When I talk to tech people in Silicon Valley, I’m like, “We’re going to move fast and break things.” You’re not going to do that in healthcare or the defense department. You’re going to kill people. It’s never going to happen. That’s not going to fly.

You see a different approach. I’m not saying that you could be an entrepreneur who wants to disrupt the market but at least find someone who has worked in the market. Talk to them. Take the good that they tell you and throw out the bag. Have them advise you at a minimum. I do think to be a true out-of-the-box thinker, either you or someone very close to you has to happen first.

Let’s pause this. We’re going to do part two. Everybody who’s reading, thank you. I have Sherman Williams. We’ll be back. We’ll see you soon.

Thank you.

Thanks for coming.

 

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About Sherman Williams

Mission Driven: I seek to invest in innovators that are changing the world. I am currently doing this through AIN Ventures, where I am the cofounder and Managing Partner. AIN Ventures invests in dual-use technology (companies that make our country safer, operate more efficiently and have a strong commercial use case), and veteran-led startups (industry agnostic). (https://www.ainventures.com/)

I consider myself quite lucky because I also get to invest in entrepreneurs through Techstars LA, including the Techstars SpaceTech program (https://www.techstars.com/accelerators/los-angeles)

Always Seeking to Improve: Kauffman Fellows Class 26 (https://www.kauffmanfellows.org/the-kauffman-fellows-program)

Personality: I am ESTP. I operate with a purpose and there is passion and drive behind the purpose. I am trying to maximize my eulogy virtues along with my resume virtues, and this thought process permeates throughout all the work that I do.

Experience: Growing up in Chicago and serving as a Naval Officer molded me. I have had a few other experiences along the way, primarily as an M&A Investment Banker.

U.S. Naval Academy (B.S) and Chicago Booth (MBA) Graduate.