Key Strategies For Venture Capital And Emerging Tech With Ken Hall, Part 2

 

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Welcome to another insightful episode of The 7 in 7 Show with Zack Ellison, where we explore the cutting edge of venture capital and innovation with the world’s leading investors.

Episode #14B of Season 2 features Ken Hall, a Partner at Orlando-based DeepWork Capital, where he supports the firm in sourcing and executing investments, fund operations, portfolio management, and more.

Prior to DeepWork, Ken worked for IBM in New York City, where he held numerous roles for IBM in Corporate Development and Corporate Venture Capital and supported some of the company’s most innovative brands, including IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, Watson Health, Hybrid Cloud, and IBM Automation. He gained additional venture capital investment experience as a former advisor to 1843 Capital and various family offices, where he supported over a dozen early-stage investments ranging from industrial products to autonomous vehicles and cryptocurrency banks.

Ken is currently the Chairman of Startups for the Orlando Tech Community, where he leads initiatives to help early-stage companies throughout Central Florida. He is a frequent guest speaker at Rollins College, Stetson University, and University of Central Florida and is an advisor and mentor to numerous startup accelerator programs and organizations, including Endeavor Miami, Techstars Miami, leAD Lake Nona, and Plug & Play.

Ken completed his undergraduate studies summa cum laude and the top of his class at the College of Business of the University of New Haven. He received his MBA with top honors from Boston University. In his free time, Ken enjoys finding new restaurants, trying to be “less awful” at golf, and exploring all that Florida has to offer while still being a die-hard Boston sports fan.

In this episode, Zack and Ken discuss:

1. Investment Strategies in Emerging Technologies: Exploring sectors like biotech, life sciences, and enterprise software, and their impact on venture capital.
2. Founder Quality and Resilience in Startups: Why a founder’s obsession and persistence are critical at the earliest stages of a startup.
3. Capital Efficiency & Scalable Business Models: Insights into building scalable startups and leveraging capital efficiency for sustainable growth.
4. Valuation Sensitivity and Market Dynamics: How market conditions affect valuation and the importance of strategic entry and exit points in venture capital.
5. The Role of Humility and Confidence in Founders: Balancing confidence and humility to build strong, trustworthy relationships with investors and teams.
6. Current Venture Market Trends and the Future: Analyzing the current state of the venture capital market and what the future holds for early-stage funding.
7. Venture Debt and Diversified Investment Strategies: Understanding the role of venture debt in providing safer access to innovation and its benefits for investors.

Key Strategies For Venture Capital And Emerging Tech With Ken Hall, Part 2

Venture Debt

What you hit on is that innovation is the asset class, so then question is, how do you want to access that? There are a lot of different ways to do it. There are the public markets with the larger tech companies that have performed quite well. There’s very early stage all the way up to angel investing, where you could be writing $25,000 checks, and everything in between.

That brings up the idea of venture debt as well, which you know I run a venture debt fund. The way I think about it is what we’re doing is providing access to innovation in a safer way. I wanted to get your thoughts as an equity investor in terms of how you think about venture debt, helping portfolio companies, and then also maybe what the benefits are for some of the LPs in the space.

Venture debt can be a very useful mechanism for companies that have hit the right level of maturity, where the revenue and growth is a little more predictable. It’s less or non-dilutive effectively ways to bring in capital. Often, the time to close it is a lot quicker than equity investors. I think it can be a useful tool. I’ve seen it go a lot more times than I’ve seen it go wrong for early-stage companies.

From an LP perspective, if people are looking at your fund, it’s probably a higher floor, lower ceiling way to get exposure into the asset class as we were saying like the innovation economy. I view the same thing as when we’re raising funds. I think the highest ceiling, the lowest floor like the most variance you’re going to get is investing directly into companies.

I’ve seen that way too many times where a lot of high-net-worth individuals especially have had some level of success, and then they want to dip their toes into technology and have exposure into this asset class and think the best way to do it is by writing checks into four companies. When you do that, when you don’t have the diversification spread out across a portfolio or through a fund manager or a venture debt in a portfolio.

 

 

That’s a sure-fired way to lose money in the venture then for you to never look at the asset class again. In general, venture debt, putting money into funds, and putting money into professionally managed groups is probably a better way to do it than writing checks into 3 to 5 companies, seeing them go belly up, and then never going into tech investing again.

I couldn’t agree more. That’s a message I tell a lot of people. I work with a lot of family offices and many of them want to do direct deals. Oftentimes they’re very smart, and sophisticated. They built businesses that generated hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars but oftentimes, that doesn’t necessarily make them experts in individual tech deals outside of their core competency. If you built a company selling widgets and did it better than anybody. You made a ton of money, but now you’re going to go pick the early-stage SaaS deals or fintech deals, or AI deals.

They don’t have anything in common. To your point, the smarter investors better fund managers that will then let them co-invest potentially in certain deals where they have a real affinity or expertise. That, to me, is the model. That’s the model we use here at ARI where we basically want our LPs to have access to co-invest in certain deals that we’re doing, but then they’re getting the diversification of the portfolio.

It’s funny too because I work with a lot of pro athletes. For whatever reason, a lot of pro athletes got a lot of money and they see a lot of opportunities because people are calling them all the time because they know they’ve got money and got access. One of the saddest things I’ve seen is how many pro athletes do direct deals and wind up with a bunch of zeros. I’ve been working hard with them to try to get them into funds that are professionally managed that offer them diversification, like we just talked about, the ability to level up and do bigger deals if they have like a real inclination or something they can bring to the table in that particular deal.

For context, we’re both talking about our own book but I do like fundamentally believe it. I’m not saying like, “Just do this.” I think you’re saying it the right way. It’s not either or. You can do and. You can do both because, to me, they might be seeing a lot of deals. You might be seeing a lot of deals as an exited entrepreneur, but you’re not seeing that. You don’t have time to diligence a couple of hundred deals a year as somebody who’s a professional athlete or an exited entrepreneur. You have other things that are going on.

That’s the benefit of probably both of us where I don’t have any other distractions. I don’t invest in real estate and restaurants. I don’t own a law firm. I get up and the only thing I do is venture. One of the dynamics that I always talk about is one of the things that early stage or for venture investing, or even just like investor founder dynamics is like there’s so much information asymmetry where it’s like the founders have so much information about such a little thing.

They are the expert. They live and breathe one thing. They get up and the only thing they care about is their business. For me, I get to see a little of a lot. I get to see thousands of deals a year. I get to sit on different boards. I get to see how different dynamics play out and collect that knowledge year after year and apply it in conversations and in mentorship with the founders that I work with. That’s an advantage that you build over time as a professional investor that you cannot build as a hobbyist.

You’re getting a lot more reps in than other folks. That enables you to see what works and what doesn’t and generates more effective pattern recognition. You can say, “I’ve looked at a thousand companies and we’ve invested in X percentage of those companies. Here’s what works and here’s what doesn’t.”

As you said earlier, even founders have had an exit or two and are on their second or third venture, they’re much more effective and efficient in so many ways that first-time founders wouldn’t even realize. They’ve just gotten more reps in. Once you’ve built a company and gone through a lot of these middle office, and back-office pains, you realize there’s a lot there that you can improve upon.

The other similar pattern recognition that I’ve realized, it’s having a prepared mind. We get up on a Saturday or Sunday and we’re reading something about the market or whatever or some company they got bought and then we’re looking at a deal a year later and we’re tying it together. It’s having a prepared mind of being educated and well informed to different industries. Again, it’s hard to do if you’re not doing it every single day.

Investing Principles

Related to this conversation, what are some other investment principles that you live by that are not processes per se but big-picture items that you think about when you’re investing?

There are a lot of ways to make money. Look for the ones that actually matter and will impact people in improving their quality of life. Share on X

I would say invest in things that matter. One of the things that I often think about is, if this company is successful, so what? It’s like, “People are going to have more fun gambling or this is going to help businesses sell more cigarettes.” I do think that there are so many places that you can invest and there are so many investment opportunities that we all see on a given day.

A lot of them are qualified. I’m not even saying they’re bad investments, but like there are a lot of ways to make money, so why don’t you make money doing things that matter and things that are going to impact people and their quality of life and their well-being. We have a lot of bets around one way or another tied into aging and demographic shifts. It’s like, there’s going to be a lot of strains on the healthcare system, on the financial system, even on the workforce population.

If we can alleviate some of those stresses that are going on or help people live better lives as they’re living longer, that’s awesome. That’s a great outcome if those businesses are successful. Why don’t we do that? Another thing I would just try to live by is invest in people that you want to work with. Life is too short to work with people that you don’t get along with that are A-holes that you don’t want to deal with. Invest in people that you want to work and you truly enjoy spending time because life is too short to do otherwise.

I agree with both of those points. I love the idea of products that solve a real problem, as opposed to, “Let’s just figure out how to distract people more and gain more of their attention or dig into their wallets without providing them benefit.” To me, the problem isn’t that we don’t spend enough time on apps. Somebody says, “I’ve got this app and it’s going to it’s going to be addictive.” That’ll probably make money because a lot of the apps that we’re looking at now are pretty low-value, but they’re addictive.

To me, that’s a detriment to society. To your point, if you can find solutions to real problems, not just what people want, but what people fundamentally need to live a better life, that’s a surefire way to find some good opportunities. Also, as you said, working with good people. I was talking to somebody and I said, “I love working with fat people.” They’re like, “What do you mean?”

I’m like, “Fair, aligned, and transparent.” That’s what I want. Every person I work with, they have to be fat. That’s the truth because to your point, you can work with so many different types of companies. There’s almost a limitless amount of companies that need capital and many of them will be successful over time. The question is how do you want to spend your time and it’s not working with people that are painful.

I think about that too in terms of when I give founders advice. They say like, “How do I raise capital more efficiently?” Be somebody who’s easy to work with. It doesn’t mean you need to be the life of the party or the most charismatic person or super likable per se. You just have to be somebody who is easy to work with. Don’t make things difficult. To me, that’s more important than anything because time is my most valuable asset by far.

Safer Investing

At this stage of my life, time, it is far and away the thing that I value the most because you don’t get it back. There’s a lot of people that want to waste it essentially. If I’m going to work with somebody, I want to be sure they’re very efficient about how they utilize my time. I think those are great points. Also, to tie up this idea about common mistakes that investors make when investing in innovation.

This ties into some of the bubbles we’ve seen recently or historically. If you’re an investor and you want to get involved in innovation, because that’s what’s creating value. You want to do it in a safer way or in a way that just offers better risk-adjusted potential returns. What are some things that you would say to them?

We already hit on from individuals not having diversification. One of the more common mistakes that we make is not being risky enough. At the end of the day, we are asset managers that if you truly have alignment with your LPs, in reality, most VCs are hired by their LPs to give them exposure into very high-risk or high-reward portfolio return movers. That can move the needle on the returns of their portfolio.

 

Therefore, a lot of VCs need to seek more risk and the potential for more outlier returns that can drive those returns all the way back to their LPs that moves the needle for them, for their endowment, foundation, and pension fund. One of the ways that materializes is, a lot of VCs tend to invest almost where the puck is or where the conversation is rather than potentially where it’s going. You can look like a complete idiot if you do that poorly.

Going back again to the point of people don’t want to build in public, a lot of VCs’ track records and portfolios are public so a lot of their failures will be public. Maybe that’s why some VCs have strayed further away from risk and potentially seeking these crazy outlier returns. At least a lot of the ones I’ve interacted with. Not to go on a tangent, but one framework for this is people look at a lot of VCs will write something and talk about total addressable market.

More importantly, the best companies challenge that framework of looking at a TAM Sam song or whatever. Some new VC or someone who’s not having those outlier returns is rigidly looking and evaluating at investment opportunities through that framework. The best ones make you rethink what that is. The best examples of this are Uber and Airbnb, where if you did a TAM of Airbnb at the seed stage, you would have passed on it. You would have been like, “This is people renting couches in San Francisco. This market cannot get that big.”

If you said they were not going into homes and vacation homes and they were going to start going into experiences. They were going to start taking share from the entire hospitality and hotel market. That challenges the framework of what the TAM is. They also introduced a whole new class of travellers. More people are traveling now because of Airbnb. Not only did they take the TAM from what you thought it was and move it here, they then took it here and expanded. It grew the tame of the market.

The same thing with Uber. Remember back years ago, ordering a taxi? That was the worst experience. If they capture this share of the taxi market, you would have passed on it probably, but they increased the share of that market or the entire size of the ride-hailing market because that experience was so poor. Now it is so good.

They’ve brought more people into that market. Those are opportunities to where we have these frameworks for how people look at investment opportunities. Some investors approach it very rigid and are evaluating opportunities through these frameworks that the best companies challenge and throw in a trashcan and completely change what the market is. It can build $50,000 billion outcomes when they create markets.

I love your point about the risk and missing opportunities, especially with technology and innovation. That’s the real risk. The risk is not that you put some money to work and it doesn’t materialize. That’s par for the course. That’s the median outcome. It’s no returns on a lot of these investments, but if you’re sitting there afraid of that, then you’re going to miss these huge upside opportunities, which to your point, creates more opportunities as they scale.

That TAM is not static. That’s what people miss. First of all, it’s like nonsense economics anyway. It’s like, “We’re going to estimate what this market is.” If you look at some of the consulting numbers in terms of how big the internet was going to be, how big cell phones were going to be, how big X, Y, or Z was going to be. They all were not even within orders of magnitude of being close. These are coming from the McKinsey’s and BCG’s of the world. Let’s be realistic here. The idea of TAM doesn’t like mean that much.

You just want to make sure that the scale is in the ballpark. You’re not going to make a big investment in a company where there’s no scalability. You don’t know if the TAM is $10 billion or $100 billion or $2 trillion. We have no idea how big some of these markets can be because they aren’t there yet. You’re literally investing in companies that are creating and shaping the very markets that they’re in. For somebody to estimate the size of a market that doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean anything.

Those are non-obvious things to think about 5-10 years out. If you’re betting on Uber, at that point, you’re betting on the proliferation of the iPhone. If you were having supercomputers within your pockets that have a much better improved GPS tracking and everything like that. If I pulled a McKinsey report or I was some VC back in 2011 looking at Uber, iPhone sales are going to top that $5 million a year, then I would go, “This is the past.” Even going back to the point earlier, you do need some of that ego and confidence to make these high conviction bets into companies that are going to run counter to some of the consensus and some of the reporting that you’re going to see.

Artificial Intelligence

Speaking of big markets that are hard to estimate the size of, we talked briefly about AI, but let’s dig in a little bit more on your thoughts on AI and what the opportunities are, but also what the risks are.

The best companies challenge and throw in cash to completely change what the market is and what it can build. Share on X

It’s going to be hard to invest in directly into AI. Illuded that there are 5 or 6 companies that have raised over $20 billion combined. We’re seeing tens of billions of capEx spent from 5 or 6 publicly traded companies. It’s this arms race that you’re seeing within AI. We’re a seed series A stage investor and an emerging manager, so it’s hard to compete with a $5 million seed round to go land the best talent to win enterprise customers away from some of the AI companies if you’re trying to directly invest and directly compete with them.

I don’t think I’m the first to have this thought, but it’s like the winners of most of the prior platform shifts were large, well-established, and well-capitalized incumbents. They weren’t disruptive startups. It’s who won the PC revolution or the cloud revolution or the mobile revolution? It wasn’t some completely no-name company. It’s Apple or it’s Google. Google after it had built a search business. They launched GCP. After it launched, Amazon launched AWS. These were well-capitalized and well-funded incumbent companies and Microsoft.

I don’t know how you compete directly with Microsoft and OpenAI with a few million bucks and a PhD if you’re playing their game. To me, we want to invest in companies that are leveraging those very capital-intensive innovations and building on top of those leading companies. We want to understand their AI strategy. We want to understand how they are gaining efficiencies within sales and marketing. How they’re gaining efficiencies within product development? How they are leveraging those innovations to make everyone’s dollars go further when we invest in those companies?

That’s my thesis as well. I’ve been saying that I think it’s going to be the incumbents that win the AI race in a sense, but the real winners are going to be the smaller companies that are utilizing AI within their niche to outperform all their competitors because they’re basically harnessing something built by Apple or Google or ChatGPT, and OpenAI. They’re then using those tools to operate more efficiently and operate at a scale that would have otherwise been impossible if they weren’t using those tools.

It’s hard to identify. You got to dig in and see how are they utilized in these tools because the tools are emerging so quickly and changing so rapidly. It’s not like it’s easy to see like company A is doing it great but company B has no idea what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s obvious, but generally speaking, to me, that’s going to be where AI is very transformative. It’s going to be taking a small and medium-sized business and giving them the power to compete with multi-billion-dollar businesses.

Almost from day one because it’s changing so quickly. You can produce more in-house spending like $30 a month on an AI tool than you could have with a team of marketers that costs you $3 million a year 3 or 5 years ago. That’s just one little example, but what you can do with digital marketing now, too. That’s transformed. I agree with your thesis. It’ll be interesting to see how investor sentiment shifts because we’re seeing it already. You can see it in some of the numbers like the number of deals that are AI-focused are declining. It’s like outside of the big world.

It’s hard to tell, though. I always joke about how it’s impossible to tell. I write some of our market analyses to our own investors and things like that. It’s like, the main driver of the AI funding is the number of companies that say they’re AI. It’s like the advanced statistics companies from the ‘90s turned into the business intelligence and analytics in 2000s. It turned into like the big data and cloud computing companies in the 2010s. Now they’re all AI. I’d love to find a company that’s just changed the categorization of the company over the last 40 years and had very little change in their underlying technology.

Funding For Founders

When people lead with AI in their pitch decks, for instance, and this will lead into the next thing I want to talk about, which is tips for getting funded for founders. We’re using AI to do X, Y, and Z, but the X, Y, Z is the afterthought. It’s about we’re using AI. That goes right in the delete file. Maybe save for later, but probably never read it.

The reality is, going back to your point you made earlier, it’s about are you solving a fundamental problem and do you have a business model that works without AI? You put AI into that and integrate that. That’s fuel for the fire, so to speak. In a way, it’s nice because it’s easy for me to just say no, because like you, I get hundreds of pitch decks and it’s like, “AI for this, delete. AI for that, delete. Here’s a good business. Now, let me talk to them.”

When I’m talking to them, I figure out how they’re utilizing AI potentially along with other efficiency tools. It’s like a negative screen, which leads into the next question, which is, for founders, what are some fundraising tips you have? We see stuff all over the internet, LinkedIn, and other social platforms about how to build a pitch deck, and contact investors. Some of it’s helpful but most of it is regurgitated garbage. Coming from a VC, what would you say are some of the things that you would recommend founders do to get your attention?

If you say GenAI three times in a closet, I’ll show up with a blank check.

 

You say Web 3.0, that’s the other thing that just goes, “Delete.”

I think I said it earlier. We get a bunch of these cold emails and most of them go into the trash. I’ll be honest, we have done investments through cold emails and cold outreach. It’s extremely rare. These are long-term relationships that are usually 5 to 10 years. It’s always better to have somebody refer you in. The pure or the tactical way to approach this, I always recommend for founders to build their dream investor list.

Once we’ve invested in seed stages, it’s the same thing I tell them, build your dream investor list or go find companies that are similar to yours who did they raise from. Build a wish list for investors, share those with everybody in your network, have people assign themselves of who’s going to introduce you to who, and hold them accountable. To me, if we’re investing at the seed stage, I should be able to make 10 to 20 at least warm introductions into VCs that I know at the series A or series B, stage that will look at the company.

I hope that those VCs, since if it’s coming for me, know that like, “I can vouch for this company. This is a founder I trust and would speak highly of.” To me, if you can get it from a VC, that’s fine. If you can get it from a founder, that’s even better. If you can get it from a founder that’s in the VC’s portfolio that we’ll refer you in, that’s going to go very far to get you at least a first meeting and then from there it’s about fit.

We’ve hit on enough about building public stuff, being public, visible, reachable, and pleasant to work with. All those things matter. The only thing I don’t think we have talked about that I genuinely do believe in is to invest in public speaking. I do see so many times that founders aren’t able to tell their own story with conviction in a compelling way.

It does matter from a VC’s perspective because we see a bunch of pitches. It’s helpful to have somebody that’s compelling to listen to. It also matters for your ability to win over the first customers for you to convince an employee to take a pay cut to come work for you because their equity is going to be worth more. It is hard to do that if you cannot tell a story and investing in public speaking, storytelling, or taking improv classes help shape a founder and their ability to build a company and scale it.

That goes with my thought about the charismatic founders that I was making earlier in the sense that it’s not about raising capital. It’s about attracting resources in general, and convincing great employees to join you for less money. Selling people on your vision, which is all about storytelling. Also, most important is then being fair, aligned, transparent, and pleasant to work with.

Information Access

Sometimes, it’s hard because there are so many people looking for money and so many startups. There’s such access to information now. A lot of life has become very homogenous. We’re all looking at the same stuff on the news and social media, reading the same types of stuff. It’s all global now and real-time. It’s very hard to have differentiated access. We wind up having a lot of the same idea.

I don’t know. I could take the complete counterpoint of that.

Let’s talk about it. I think it’s interesting.

Go on Twitter for five minutes, I bet you can find completely opposite sides of the world. A lot of businesses now send you stuff that you already think like you’re subscribing to newsletters, so they’ll give you more of the exact same thing. You follow people on Twitter, so they tell you to follow similar people on Twitter. It’s like a feedback.

Founders must invest in public speaking. Many of them could not tell their stories with conviction or in a compelling way. Share on X

A lot of people are getting the same information within the same echo chambers, but there’s this bifurcation of data. I bet you, if you had this show with somebody who was investing in Silicon Valley, they might have a completely different view of everything that I said. They would be absolutely shocked to hear opinions from somebody like me who’s an emerging manager in Florida. There are almost these information silos or echo chambers that we’ve created, maybe not as much from the business world, but certainly in politics and geopolitical issues for sure.

I agree with you and 100%. What I was getting at is in terms of fundraising. There’s a lot of the same information that’s shared on social media. If you go on social media, the algos know what I’m looking for and the types of stuff I read, I see probably 50 posts a day that are like, “Here’s what Sequoia says about how to build a pitch deck.” It’s people that’s regurgitating that crap over and over again claiming some of it as their own along the way, which is another one of my pet peeves.

I’ve read a book. I won’t disparage the person, but it was extremely West Coast. It’s completely like, “The best way to raise money is to be raising on a safe note. You should only raise on safe notes.” You need to give them a shot clock and say, “We’re closing in two weeks. If they don’t want to meet you, screw them.” It’s completely in conflict of what I believe, but I don’t know. It’s always good to throw in those because we’re all in our own little echo chambers in my opinion.

You’re right. I think there’s a big difference within the VC ecosystem how founders in Silicon Valley act and the type of information they’re getting versus those in the Southeast United States, For instance. They’re very different. Also, you need to be a different type of actor in each environment to do well. The ego of Silicon Valley doesn’t resonate in Florida. It’s just not going to get anywhere. People are going to be like, “Beat it.”

In certain areas, that is what they’re looking for. I’ve lived in New York, Chicago, LA, and Boston. I’ve never lived in Silicon Valley, but I spent a lot of time there. Each of those cities has a very different feel, but also, what they expect out of founders is very different too just because of the nature of the ecosystem.

Over time, though, I do think that things are getting more equalized across regions mainly because of the internet and digital age. It’s so much easier to get information. I think about basketball because I used to play basketball. I played in college. When I was growing up, you’d have to go and see people in person. You hear about this legendary ball handler like Shammgod Wells became Shammgod, and the end one mixtapes.

That was the first time that stuff from local environments was shared with the world. Before then, you would have to go and travel to Chicago, or LA, or New York. Each place is very different in terms of their style of basketball. Now that everybody watches the same highlights in real-time and they get access to the same type of coaching advice, the play has become much more homogenous across the board.

It’s not just that, but there’s a formula for how to play basketball now. The statistical analysis has told us that this is the exact way that you should be playing. It’s created a lot of similar styles of play.

Remember in baseball, you had Billy Bean and then you had Daryl Morey with the Houston Rockets and other folks that were data ones.

Theo Epstein.

You have the data ones but then you also had in combination with that, the people that weren’t necessarily using data, but they were then accessing all these different types of players, moves, and styles of play across the board in real-time. Those two factors converging like the data science with the transparency. NBA is a formula now. It’s like, “We’re either going to a rim or we’re shooting a three.” Nobody shoots mid-range jumpers. Nobody has any true style to their game that differentiates them in the same way back in the ‘80s like they had done.

I’m glad that the conversation brought us into the state of the NBA. You can look at a box square and be like, “How many threes did they shoot? How many threes did they make? Got it. They probably won. They won.” That’s how 90% of games are decided now.

 

American dynamism

In the interest of time, we’ve only got a few more minutes. The last question of the day is, over the next 3 to 5 years, what are the key themes that investors and founders should be thinking about? Big innovation themes that are on your mind.

I do believe like Andre, since calling it the American dynamism thesis. In general, the world is getting smaller. There’s a lot of on-shoring of manufacturing, near-shoring of supply chains, and critical technologies and what’s going on in the Middle East, China, Russia, and Taiwan. The world is getting extremely complicated.

There was a lot of incredible benefits to global trading and globalism. With a lot of key technologies, especially with the acceleration of AI, it is scary for continuing to have a lot of the same benefits of global trade. When we’re looking back to investing in things that matter and investing in irrefutable trends, we are looking toward a lot of the industries that are going to be influenced by the world getting smaller.

We have looked into more defense tech and dual-use technology. We’ve been open to more space tech and aerospace. We’ve been open to more climate tech, advanced manufacturing, warehouse robotics, and things like that because we do believe that the world is going to get smaller. There’s going to be a myriad of investment opportunities that surface from that.

Episode Wrap-up

Ken, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

You got it. Thanks for having me.

For those that want to reach out to you, is LinkedIn the best way or are there other ways to reach you?

LinkedIn’s great.

Thanks, Ken. Thanks, everybody, for reading this episode of the show.

 

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About Ken Hall

Ken Hall is Partner at DeepWork Capital and supports the firm in sourcing and executing investments, fund operations, portfolio management, and more.

Prior to DeepWork, Ken worked for IBM in New York City, where he held numerous roles for IBM in Corporate Development and Corporate Venture Capital and supported some of the company’s most innovative brands, including IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, Watson Health, Hybrid Cloud, and IBM Automation. He gained additional venture capital investment experience as a former advisor to 1843 Capital and various family offices where he supported over a dozen early stage investments ranging from industrial products to autonomous vehicles and cryptocurrency banks.

Since moving to Florida, Ken quickly became an impactful member of the venture community with his unique passion for helping startup companies. Ken is currently the Chairman of Startups for the Orlando Tech Community where he leads initiatives to help early-stage companies throughout Central Florida. He is a frequent guest speaker at Rollins College, Stetson University, and University of Central Florida and is an advisor/mentor to numerous startup accelerator programs and organizations, including Endeavor Miami, Techstars Miami, leAD Lake Nona, and Plug & Play.

Ken completed his undergraduate studies summa cum laude and the top of his class at the College of Business of the University of New Haven. He received his MBA with top honors from Boston University. In his free time, Ken enjoys finding new restaurants, trying to be “less awful” at golf, and exploring all that Florida has to offer while still being a die-hard Boston sports fan.