Gabe Galvez:
Thanks A.J. I’m happy to be here. It’s a rarity to find people in my day to day who want to talk about this kind of stuff. So I’m always excited to nerd out with a fellow experiencer.

A.J. Lawrence:
Given everything that’s going on, where do you see yourself as an entrepreneur? Where are you on your own entrepreneurial journey?

Gabe Galvez:
That’s kind of the age old question. I think for a lot of folks in our positions, and for me, fairly recently in the last couple of years, right? Which we’re a blur, right? What is a couple of years anymore? I don’t know. But the last big sort of series events for me was challenging myself to turn the corner on trading time for money, right? Which we all do in different respects. I mean, I’ve been, if not a founder or a chief executive or a CXO of a number of companies, exited some businesses and we’ve built some that are, I think built to last. But at some level we’re still kind of trading time for money, right? You show up at the office, you have your team meeting, you try to progress your agenda day by day and we all do that. Thing. But don’t get me wrong, you can, can build yourself into a position where you can trade time for pretty generous sums of money, right, for what we do, which is a wonderful gift in and of itself and a great reward for that level of work and introspection and leadership, all that stuff that has to happen just to like, take a thing from, you know, nothing to something. I view that, that whole trading Time for money concept as the first, you know, 15, 18 years of my entrepreneurial journey. And somewhere in there I decided this, let’s just start playing a different game. I need to sort of opt out of this game, the Trading Time for money game, and play the, what I consider sort of the value creation game from a little bit above my own clouds. So for me, that’s really turned this corner into, you know, co running the family office that I’m a partner of, but more importantly, treating my own balance sheet, whether it’s professionalized or my literal personal balance sheet, as its own amalgamation of conventional and alternative assets and really trying to grow those by way of strategy and a little less by way of coming up with new ideas and inspiring people, which I love to do. And I’ve done okay doing some of that work. But I like to say I have enough resources to be dangerous now. And I’d like to think that I’m doing myself a disservice not trying to be dangerous with it, you know, And I’ve worked in the, in, in our broader private equity and investment banking space for long enough to go out there in the world and see some really brilliant folks making huge sums of money and impacting businesses really positively. Frankly, I’ve seen some folks that are, I mean, they gotta be, you know, as dumb as I am, doing some really big things too. And somewhere in there the two kind of clicked. And I said, look, if there are people doing this with other people’s money, and there’s some sort of precedent set for what that track record looks like, what that process looks like, can I do it with my own capital and can I sort of become the proto manager of my own balance sheet? So, long answer to your short question. Really moving away from trading time for money and really getting into deploying capital through a professional lens with an entrepreneurial spirit behind it, but through a professional lens to really create some much more significant gains in wealth than building and selling, you know, middle market companies, which is fun, but there’s a new game I’m trying to play and I’m really challenging myself to be disciplined, to play that game every day.

A.J. Lawrence:
That is really interesting because at the most basic, I think so many of us entrepreneurs have difficulty even living beyond our own business. So much the value I get is from growing X and selling X or, you know, some future event. So we sacrifice and we say one day. And the reality is there’s no guarantees and if you have it, you should be investing. So, you know, just from that core concept right there. But I think many of us who are later in our journeys should kind of be thinking of that, just listening because looking at my own portfolio and saying, oh yeah, it’s nice, maybe I should put some more thought into all these things.

Gabe Galvez:
You should, yeah.

A.J. Lawrence:
I mean, without a doubt. That is so important. I think what’s even more interesting, even going further into this, because you do have a family. You’ve set up the family firm, you have the structure. You are looking that transition from wealth generation to really, to kind of permanence. You’re looking at this concept of where it goes further multigenerational. What was that transition for you where you really decided long term? And I’m going to just say long term capital. Yeah, multigenerational. You were successful. You could have just really nice beaches with really nice cocktails. Instead. Yeah, you’re looking and you’re actively spending your intellectual capital to go even further.

Gabe Galvez:
Well, number one, I mean, I’m calling in from San Diego, so it may not be southern Spain, but we have pretty nice beaches. Maybe I’ve seen better, but these are my beaches. I’ve grown up in the water here and on these beaches my whole life. So I’m pretty connected to these beaches. But beyond that, when we talk about the private equity component of my entrepreneurial story, which we can get into, I mean, so many folks on this podcast and similar conversations are sort of truly entrepreneurs, idea people, people, people. And I have that experience. But I went into the private capital market side of entrepreneurship at some point and never really looked back. So I view the options as whether you’re a sponsor or a, you know, somebody who’s getting into that space by way of entrepreneurial acquisition, or you’re a, you work for a fund or whatever, their job is capital deployment.

Gabe Galvez:
Because you don’t make any money without deployment. I don’t care if you have a management fee, you’ve got a 2 in 20 split, you’re a young MBA or scrappy guy or gal who wants to run a company, you still got to deploy that capital to create the mechanism in which to generate a return. Right. And. And that’s Fine, that’s how it works. That’s cool. But a fundamental focus on capital deployment as a business model I think comes with some challenges. Right. Because our incentives tend to skew towards deployment. I can’t make money unless I deploy this capital. And that’s just a reality. There are some use cases for that being a disastrous reality because we got to spend money to make money, especially if it’s not your money. So the other side of that coin I just call capital preservation. Right. It’s moving beyond the need to deploy capital and into a conversation about how do I make sure this capital, or some appreciated version of this capital exists a hundred years from now. I actually was inspired to adopt that mindset by way of a conversation I had with some bankers who ran a niche a bank in the Midwest. And we were having some beers here one day and they were really excited to show me their new strategic plan. Okay. I don’t know, it’s interesting. And they really amped up this little management team about their strategic plan. Little bank, but longevity. And they showed it to me. It was pretty standard fare and I felt like I was missing something. And I asked one of the guys, I was like, dude, what? So why is this? Why, why are we so excited about this? You bank every three years, five years, I don’t know, you roll out a new plan. Seems pretty standard fare. And he said, well no, this is our second plan. And I go, haven’t you been a bank for like a hundred and some odd years? He goes, yeah, we do hundred year planning cycles. Think about that. Think about the gravity of that. It’s heavy duty, it doesn’t work for everybody. But think about that. 100 year planning cycles. The freedom that is permitted to make mistakes for 99 years or to move a stone very slowly or a big ship or whatever the metaphor is, very slowly. So much so that the passengers on the ship cannot detect a change in course only to end up in some beautiful paradise. Is really pretty prolific. And I can’t say who does or doesn’t plan like that, but I had not been exposed to a professionalized team that had a charter to plan in 100 year chunks before. And we don’t have a hundred year charter by any means. But it was a great example of what happens when we move beyond the immediate need to deploy capital to generate management fee. Short term ROI, hit a 5 year IRR number, whatever the metric is, and instead move into what do we have to do to make sure this is all here and better X terminal date when I die, which you know, could be tomorrow, hopefully it’s not for another, you know, 50, 60 years. My life insurance people think I’m going to live to be 120 or something crazy. So who knows anymore. So the capital preservation business is what I consider my business these days. And there’s a lot of moving parts to that. And that portfolio is super diverse. It includes operating businesses that I have a role in, like CAPTARGET here, where I’m still the CEO by title. And I mean I have a very active role, not a day to day, but an active role to being a fund to fund participant or being a third party LP in some larger real estate plays, or having a zany crypto conversation or principally doing control acquisitions locally for a platform that we’re conducting a roll up for with a internalized management team. So the challenge now is to be very diverse and to table the conversation about deploying capital and move into a conversation about preserving capital.

A.J. Lawrence:
What is very interesting though, as you talk about preserving capital, so many people think of it as like, okay, get to your bonds, you know, da da da. You’re talking about actually having it be active. Your thought process around capital preservation is actually value generation. Obviously you probably have a portfolio approach to this, but it does seem that value creation is kind of a core part of that. Are you looking at sort of where your family is going to be? A hundred years is generally three to four generations. As you look at that capital preservation and utilizing value generation, is it somewhat around what future generations of your family are? Or is that not as much of a concern as the value generation?

Gabe Galvez:
I think the multi generational component is a thought exercise. I mean, I don’t have children. I’m not going to make any big promises here, but that’s not an immediate focus as far as specific individuals are being brought into a, you know, some sort of structure. It’s really more of a disciplined thought exercise. But to the question about value creation, this might make me kind of old school. I’m kind of just hitting this hump where people are saying like, dude, that’s not how we do things anymore. And I used to think I was cool and like pretty dialed in. And now I’ve, I don’t know. The other day we had a phone call with one of our designers and we did it as a three way. I just, I called my partner, I called her and she’s, you know, young woman and she said three way phone call, guys. Like, what is this 10 years ago? Like we can’t have a zoom call and we didn’t even think about it. And she’s like, guys, this is, this is ridiculous. So I may be admittedly a little out of touch already, but this value creation edict we use as a fundamental decision making tool when you’re in the, just call it the alt asset broad universe. It’s venture, it’s private equity, it’s down market angel stuff, it’s some debt instrument stuff. It can be crypto, it can be anything that’s not public equity, whatever. The alt universe is really big and getting way bigger. It’s impossible or I don’t think it’s realistic for me and my time and capacity and interest to become expert in all these altar opportunities. Right. It’s just, it’s a really big ask. And if I don’t understand it, we tend to not invest in it. If I don’t have a connection to the value creation component of the investment, we don’t invest in it. That doesn’t mean it’s not a bad deal or not a good deal or it doesn’t mean anything. It just means we understand that there needs to be a framework in which we make decisions that we’re all totally aligned around. Like any operating business, we at CAPTARGET, we have one of those frameworks both in a personal level and at a company, you know, culture and trajectory level. But it allows us very quickly to look at this whole alt universe and just say, I don’t care about that, number one, or I’m not an expert. I tend to say I don’t care. As a funny thing internally, I’ll just be like, I don’t, I don’t care about whatever. Or if there’s not an apparent connection to real value creation as a matter of principle, we don’t do it. If there is an opportunity to arbitrage price inefficiencies of crypto between here and South Korean markets, whatever, which there was, by the way, about five years ago, we don’t do it because who cares? Again, yeah, you can make some money there, but I can argue you can make some money doing everything. You and I could go start a business selling popsicles, whatever, we could go Gary Vee style and go to garage, whatever. We can make money doing something. So we need to have a better framework for decision making beyond IRR targets. And is this a possibility, right? Or probability of success or failure, whatever. And so for us it’s do we care? Meaning do we have some expert connection or can we develop an expert connection to the end product, service opportunity? And two is the value creation component truly apparent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making some like altruistic claim. We’re not an impact investor. We’re not only investing green and we honestly, we don’t have any of those kind of investments. Value doesn’t need to be a pop culture phenomenon. It can, it can be really literal stuff. Hey, this deal is going to put X more roofs over people’s heads. This deal lowers the cost of doing this thing that all businesses do and in turn creates an EBITDA opportunity for a whole sector. It can be as simple as that. And this may sound, you know, silly to some of your listeners, hopefully it resonates with some. But there are a lot of opportunities that that simple connection between what are you doing and where’s the impact doesn’t really exist. And I would argue now more than ever because the alt investing world has become so diverse and so dynamic by way of digital everything that more often than I could have ever imagined even 10 years ago, you’ll see a pitch deck and you’ll read it and go, cool, this is probably going to make a bunch of money, but so what?

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, it’s the puppy that can poop gold. Yeah, the gold poop. And yeah, it’s like, that’s great. Well, now you can’t even use it as fertilizer because it’s gold. But, you know, that’s great. But what’s going on? I mean, it’s funny because I know I’m having difficulty. I played around a little bit getting early into crypto and I kind of ignored it until a couple of years ago and was like, oh, something has happened. And recently, just by having assets in decentralized finance stuff and seeing how advanced some people are getting in here, there is that fear of missing out. There’s all this stuff that trying to focus. And I’m hearing it from other. It’s like, oh, well, you know what? I’m not going to go do X, I’m just going to go. And it’s not spinning in a wheel because there’s more to it than crypto than just saying it’s a giant roulette. But it’s in my head. I had a 20 year like, okay, this is cool. And this is, there’s a good use case. You know, my thoughts in 2012. Yeah, was this is a 32. This is something that, okay, if a bunch of things happen to now, I’m worried. And using that focus that, you know, that intention that you utilize, I think is something a lot of us can. And it’s not just crypto. I mean, I’m using it because that’s today’s bright shiny object, but I’m definitely someone who has the squirrel condition. Using that framework is an interesting.

Gabe Galvez:
There’s this idea of, you know, really getting real about answering the question what’s the point? And you can take that as broadly as you want to. Whether that’s pondering why we’re here, if here’s even a place, or if we are we or whatever, none of that really matters because ultimately all that means is physics works or it doesn’t work. And whether this is digital or analog, it’s just definitions. Don’t worry about that part. But really more the tangible why am I here today, tomorrow, yesterday? And this doesn’t need to be a big philosophical debate, but it can really help focus the effort output and help mitigate some of that FOMO stuff, which, you know, I try to keep my own ego in check, but I’ll brag about one thing and that’s I got no fomo. I don’t care what you’re doing. I got a sweet life. I don’t, I don’t need more sweet life. I got a sweet life. And you know what? Before I had a sweet life, I still had a sweet life. I was broke, but I still was in love and had a car that started and lived in a beautiful place and, you know, had a family that was alive. Still is, you know, so I’m not worried about missing out on Bitcoin at 500k because whatever, I don’t know, I don’t see the value today. I don’t have an expert connection to it. But that’s seeded again in this idea of what’s the point? What are we trying to do here at the firm level, what are we trying to do individually in a fairly tangible way? And answering that what’s the point Question allows us to move pretty quickly beyond fomo, beyond second guessing investments, beyond kicking around zany startup ideas. One of my business partners shout out Paul Sadowitz, I attribute all of our good ideas to. I’m not an idea guy. Probably 98 of his ideas were totally terrible. Actually out of a hundred, let’s say 95. But five were really good. Right. And having a real anchored perspective on what am I trying to do personally, what are we as a team trying to do allows us really quickly to say, could we start a XYZ company and make money? Yeah, not the point, right. That’s not why we agreed to be here. That’s not why fate, our interests, circumstances put us here together because we’ve agreed our point is something else and it allows us to shed a lot of the nonsense really quickly. And have we lost a huge amount of money or at least opportunity cost along the way? Totally. But we got three lives, what else can we hope for, you know?

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, I like that concept. And you know, I jokingly was like, as I was listening there were so much really cool things, but I just kept thinking San Diego fish tacos, of course you have a sweet life. There is nothing finer in life but that process, that using the framework and moving forward. I think we all kind of need to.

Gabe Galvez:
If I could just share one more thought just to tie this rambling together. You know, when we talk about this perspective or my one guy’s perspective in the context of entrepreneurship rather than investing, you know, we come back to some real harsh truths that you and I have talked about. One being, look, a lot of us tie up a lot of our net worth, potential, upside, future plans in the liquidity event, right? When I sell this business and we run the business today like we’re selling it tomorrow, which is prudent and I, I think is great. But the statistical probability of you selling tomorrow is basically none. Right. Most businesses are total crap by the numbers. You know, I mean we look at businesses all day long to acquire. Yeah. 99 fail. We run a whole professionalized organization around sourcing opportunities at CAPTARGET for private equity funds, big corporate buyers and we generate thousands, maybe tens of thousands of leads per year and you know, one in a hundred closes. So just the high level data, pretty quickly we can get to a place as entrepreneurs where we should be saying look, if this thing sells, cool, awesome, let’s not plan on it selling. Unless you’re hell bent on engineering a sale. And you and I have talked about, we both live through selling our agencies and certain businesses, including agencies you can kind of engineer either on the way up or on the way down because it’s, it’s horse trading, it’s people and contracts. There’s not a lot of IP whatever, but we got to do better than just assuming we’re going to get a bunch of money at some point in the future and then waiting for that day to come by just running a good business, whatever that looks like for every individual entrepreneur. So when I think about this idea of capital preservation, it’s actually seeded in the uncertainty of entrepreneurship, right? It’s not some investor guy strategy. I don’t claim to be any sort of sophisticated Investor. It’s pretty basic, pretty ghetto what we do, but it’s based in the entrepreneurial cycle that I’ve lived through. Starting dozen businesses, selling three of them, trying to sell one three or four times and we could never sell it. And really trying to embody this spirit that I can’t count on tomorrow Dollars really or future to be valued asset that has either no value or made up value today. As an aside, I always tell entrepreneurs on their balance sheet to put their businesses enterprise value at zero because it’s worth nothing until somebody pays you for it. Let’s not pretend our balance sheet has this thing that’s worth $30 million on it, but it’s not worth $30 million because you don’t have $30 million and nobody wants to pay you $30 million for it. If we understand some of these basic dynamics of business acquisition and failure rates and integration failure rates and all that pretty quickly, I think it forces us to adopt the perspective of capital preservation. Right. What can I do today with the assets, the team, the ip, the liquidity, the penetration into a market, the customer list, whatever, to ensure that there’s value here, not just tomorrow for our fictitious sale, but next year, five years from now, whatever. How do we build businesses that don’t really ever die or have the mechanics to survive almost anything and still create value to the market and to stake and shareholders. So there’s a connection here to entrepreneurship and some of the fallacies that pop culture entrepreneurship really preaches hard to us about tomorrow being our big win. Right, let’s forget about that and let’s get into, let’s get real and let’s build a strategy that protects all the hard work people, blood, sweat and tears we put into these things.

A.J. Lawrence:
It is interesting and I’ll try to not get us into too of a geeky digression, but I’ve been fascinated with some of the concepts coming up around Daos that kind of extension of sort of the employee owned and then like some of the German permanent companies that are basically steward by non owners with a combination of the stakeholders. And looking at what is possible with some of the Daos, yes, there are ways to make money, but there’s also this concept that you are trying to create something much longer. So I think there’s some fascinating things happening. What are you finding fascinating right now? I mean, you’re touching on so much. You’re looking, you’re involved, you’re basically in the position where you’re doing what you want to be doing. You have no FOMO Living your best life. My teenage daughter would give me the thing. It’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, living my best life. But like, what are you finding interesting right now as an entrepreneur?

Gabe Galvez:
For me, and this is probably kind of a boring answer because it’s sort of inside our walls answer, but it took me a really long time and I think we had a lot of accidental success not prioritizing the value of people really simply. You know, maybe it’s like my third read of Good to Great in the last 15 years or whatever, or the luxury of being able to pay more for talent or wait till the right people are on the bus, whatever the metaphor is. But the thing I’ve become almost obsessed with in fairly recent history, particularly living through Covid, running all of our business remotely, we acquired a platform company over summer. We’ve made three or four other significant investments this year or during that period rather. And after being interested in new spaces and new strategies and new options that are presented to me as my net worth grows a little bit bit or my experience, it gets a little rounder. And at the end of the day it keeps coming down to we need to be really, really interested in understanding, cultivating and sourcing great people. And with these great people, we can do anything, right? We can buy a company and turn it around, we can launch a new product, we can increase the LTV of our customer without having to change the business model beyond the business model, changing to prioritize the right butts in the right seats and really finding great people. And I think a lot of times when we hear about great people, I think there’s this subtext that great people are industry leaders. They’re super senior as an entrepreneur. I think there’s this sort of wink, wink, they’re expensive, right? Great people. Yeah. You’re going to have to poach the other guy from the billion dollar competitor and you have to pay him or her a bunch of money. And that’s not what great people is about. I thought that’s what great people was about for the last. Most of my hiring has been in the last 10 years. It’s not about that at all. It’s about shared experience, shared values and like day one alignment. That’s what a great person to me is. Somebody who on day one says, yep, I think the same way about these goals, but I might think a different way about how we solve them or how we achieve them. And from that diversity of thought, with aligned culture comes the opportunity to do anything. I’ve got some people on my team now, unfortunately, I’m probably the weak link in a lot of ways, but my family office partner, this guy’s a Swiss army knife. We can look at a deal. He’s new to private equity, but he’s very seasoned deal guy. He comes from commercial real estate investing background. And I can be tied up and say, go to this pitch meeting, figure out what this company’s worth, get all the docs in order, and then call me when you’re done. Okay. It’s the people. So I am now very, very interested. Probably a little late to my own personal story arc, but very, very interested in just what’s the right person? What’s the next person look like here? And how do those people augment the possible future that we’re looking to end up in someday?

A.J. Lawrence:
Without a doubt. With everything that’s going on in the world, the great resignations, this kind of the seeking of value in employment, how do you work on that? Now that this is important. I know for myself, I found I’m very lucky. There’s a certain type of nerdy curiosity seeker that I just gel mind meld with. But then normal people, yeah, real functioning people in society, I have difficulty with. So it’s like, okay, I can’t just create nerd companies. You need a mix of people. How do you go about, what is it that you use to help you become a better people person, if that’s the term.

Gabe Galvez:
I mean, I don’t know if there’s a silver bullet. And I don’t make any claims to be a really good people person at all. I mean, I truly think it’s my big deficiency. Right. Like a week ago, I think I ran my first productive meeting. I kid you not. Straight up, it was shocking to me. I walked away. I was like, wow, that was different. That really works. What? What did I do? So I don’t necessarily know if I have a real concise answer for you there, but I do think, just putting a pin in something I said earlier, this idea that, and to your point, we don’t want to build companies in our own image as individuals. That’s a really dangerous thing, right? You get this cult of personality thing that has worked for some high visibility companies, but generally doesn’t work. And of course, I tell anybody who says something similar, like, look, bro, there was one Steve Jobs. I know he’s inspirational to you, like, you want to be the next Elon Musk, like, cool, go. I hope you do it. We need more like that in the world. But like, there’s one in, like 8 billion. And so if we’re playing with those lads, go play the lotto and we can do some other stuff that have 1 in 150 million and similar upside. Right, so what are we actually talking about? So we want to be wary about building that culture personality. But I think this convergence of diversity of thought, diversity of perspective, which comes from being from different cultures, being from different places and its overlap with shared values. And I’m not talking about company values, which we’re sort of, all our companies are moving away from a little bit and into more of what we call a personal archetype. More of the stuff in here, not we buy into. We like to treat customers well and we’ll razzle dazzle people or we want to be the biggest whatever by Q4, whenever we’re trying to find people that have some core seated beliefs internally, regardless of their backgrounds, that align with all of us and we talk a lot about our peer, the CAPTARGET archetype, or with the company we just bought the Juniper archetype and they’re all different. But we think that personal archetype is the thing that really drives that gelling process. So I think that’s important. But as far as how as an individual, I work on that, I think I’ve just assumed it’s going to be a forever struggle. I think in this great resignation, shout out, Reddit, anti work, which I love, subreddit, which is just people telling their bosses to go, you know, pound sand. It’s awesome. It’s just, you know, like text messages like, can you come in tomorrow? No, I have tomorrow off. It’s awesome. It’s just people quitting. I love it. Knock on wood. We haven’t had any of that happen and I don’t believe it’s because we pay people a bunch of money. I think we’re a pretty average employer by way of benefits, whatever. You know, with all these people wanting what they view as fair, I view as fair. I think one of the things we don’t talk enough about is this pursuit of personal autonomy. At least in America, in Europe now, I know it’s a very different world, but if this last little bit of time has taught us anything, which is pretty wacky, it’s that Americans like their autonomy, right? But table political autonomy, Covid stuff, whatever. Because we don’t need to get into it. But just as individuals, particularly at work where we spend a lot of time of our life producing something, we need to come up with systems that create environments that support autonomous workforce and culture, that really Encourages autonomous thinking, autonomous action. And we’ve tried to adopt strategies at all of our companies that really focus on it’s okay to make mistakes. This is part of our culture. We want you to make mistakes. We don’t want you to make the same mistake twice. That’s our only expectation. Nobody will punish you for making mistakes because we value your autonomous, call it entre, entrepreneurial journey in our organization much more highly than a certainty of positive outcome. And as long as that becomes an iterative process where we say you’re an autonomous person, you’re here because we know your brain makes good decisions. We also recognize that it won’t always make good decisions, and that’s okay, and we’re going to learn from it together. That seems to have a little something to do with our high retention rate and our, I think, generally, you know, pretty happy team. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I’m kind of a rogue, unemployable guy. Like many entrepreneurs you talk to, I value my autonomy to come and go in the investment bank. I left to start the company whose offices I’m sitting in now. I basically quit because they wanted me to check in and out. When I left for meetings and went to the field, it’s just like, bro, like, do you trust that I can do this deal or not? Like, if you don’t, not a negative reflection of you or me. I just know I’m not a good fit and I’ll leave. But if you do, why are we spending admin hours on me logging when I go to lunch with a client? That seems silly, you know, so I’m just not going to do the silly stuff. And I went back to school and did some other stuff with my time while starting capture, but that carried with me a lot. I have an innate desire for the ability to be autonomous, and I think every American in our workforce at some level does too. And if you don’t, that’s okay. There are some jobs that work well for that. Go join the military. Go do something where somebody tells you what to do all the time. But I think we’re inching towards a world where you have to let these people be the people they are and teach them as they go. We have to move beyond management. Right. Of people and into true leadership and true learning. Right. Training and leadership, not management. That’s sort of where I think we’re headed.

A.J. Lawrence:
I like that because I would say it’s not just Americans. I hire people around the globe. And yeah, that wanting to have that better Workplace to have the ability to improve and to grow is something, you know, that autonomy is something I’m seeing everywhere. And I’m surprised sometimes when I’m working with someone from Bulgaria and I’m like, wow, you get kind of now this is last but a couple of years ago, everyone’s like oh yeah, it’s so cookie. You get X this country X. You hire from this and you get X, Y or Z. And now it’s like wait, country western and this. And oh, you’re building this. You’re trying to. That is one culture is becoming global even as globalization from business and stuff has been happening. But culture and just that mindset. So you know, seeing that American autonomy expanding, that is cool. And I like that approach. Looking at sort of does it improve their ability to have a journey, Your collection of companies taining value from their own growth from their journey. But that’s trade off versus you’re going to do this. So we pay. I think too often companies look at it as not a mutual exchange of value.

Gabe Galvez:
I think a lot of us are afraid of our employees. We got to go beyond I’m afraid he’s going to leave if he figures out he’s worth more money or I’m afraid she’s going to leave because she’s bored at her debt. Like we got to do better than I’m afraid these people are going to leave and not come at this from a place of retroactive protect the company. And really into a conversation again, a capital preservation and asset preservation conversation about how do we create an environment that will function today, tomorrow, 10 years from now, 20 years from now and what can we do to get there sooner than later. And no company is perfect. But I think if we can push the conversation really deliberately down that avenue, it’ll benefit all of us. We’ve got to stop being afraid of these people they’re trying to help. We’re all here trying to do the same thing right? Company fails, we all fail. Our clients fail, we all fail. And as long as we hire people who understand that and most people understand that, I think we’re good and in there somewhere. We’ve been talking about that a lot in all of our companies very recently. Correction of the thinking of management of a lot of particularly mid sized companies that have grown out of being small. But often the managers are just the most senior people. The guy who thought of the idea, the woman who developed the product, the first hire who’s been there for 15 years because she’s friends with the boss and is Pretty good at her job. That middle market management deficit doesn’t really benefit anybody, I don’t think. And because of that, I think we need to start as managers, as leaders and people acknowledging that. I don’t care if you’re a greeter at Walmart, if you’re a lawnmower pusher at one of our landscaping companies, if you’re a data entry person who never talks to a customer and just gets a ticket and fills out a spreadsheet regardless of your job. Us as managers, us as leaders, we need to acknowledge that there is a reality where that person pushing the lawnmower wants to be the best lawnmower pusher around, period. Or wants to be some future iteration of a guy who used to push a lawnmower but was proud of the work he or she did. Right. Those people exist at every level of the workforce and we need to move beyond. Well, the warehouse guys, they don’t really speak English. So we don’t, we don’t bug them with these meetings and into this idea that everybody has the capacity to desire and achieve excellence at some contextualized level of their experience. And if management believes that, all of a sudden everything changes.

A.J. Lawrence:
Because you have to make then the role of pushing the lawnmower valuable. Because too often it’s like you do X, I hope you are happy. But like literally, you know, that mindset, you’re changing the concept. It’s like if I’m asking to do something, yes, it may be busy or maybe blah, blah. Yeah. But if, you know, I’m putting the effort into making it valuable for you, then yeah, it doesn’t matter if it’s. I still think some of my original jobs as a kid pushing a lawnmower was one of them. Yeah, the value, just how much that has impacted on me, I like that. I always love. Because I’m too busy asking you questions and listening to you here, but re listening to these and pulling out a lot of the different value and stringing them together I think is going to be really, really impactful given, you know, everything and what we’ve been talking about and your focus on long term and value creation stuff. Do you go about defining success for yourself now? Do you use a formal process or is this more of a cloud of concepts? How are you defining your own success?

Gabe Galvez:
You know, maybe a little bit of both. I mean, I’m pretty tactical with my planning. I mean there’s a lot of lists. I set goals for myself every quarter. Personally, professionally, they’re usually measurable goals, often financial Whether it’s hitting a net worth number or a liquidity ratio number or a diversification number. I mean, I do that habitually. So much so that I think a lot of the people in my life might think it’s a little extreme. Then I’ve eased up on it over the years because it’s a little less critical these days if I hit it today or hit it tomorrow. But I still want to hit those goals.

Gabe Galvez:
Those are more professional and financial goals. The personal quandary of what is success is, I think, an absolute fallacy. Being here is the success. It’s totally a miracle that I’m talking to a dude on the Internet across the world. Like, what is success? We’re successful. I have a computer, I’ve got this thing has the sum total of human knowledge. I keep it, it sits on my butt every day. That’s success.

A.J. Lawrence:
Your butt sits on the sum total?

Gabe Galvez:
Yeah. That’s crazy. Totally crazy. And that’s not to minimize the challenges that human existence produces. And certainly we’re in very great positions by way of resource access, security of freedom. I mean, some of the fundamental things that make it enjoyable to live. Right. We have those and I want to recognize those. But I don’t think you need to have all of that to be a success. And I think there’s a lot of use case and anecdotal data and stories and experiences around the guy who lives in the Sahara, who has a stick and a family and all he does is smile. And they don’t have words for depression. Right. In their language, that seems like a success. So I think being here, being engaged with your community, working towards something, anything, as long as it’s not harmful and productive, I think that’s a success. And I would argue that almost all of us globally, you know, we need to really start rallying around our successes and our ability to succeed. Because so much of the conversation as capitalism has dominated our perspective of westernized culture for quite a while now, has become attached to the stuff. And like, I’m a stuff guy. Like, I got cars that you don’t want to know about. Like, I got stuff, believe me. But the stuff doesn’t define me. Honestly, if there wasn’t a huge tax incentive to have a lot of stuff, I probably would have no stuff. But I. I don’t want to pay 55% taxes or whatever, so. But I think we need to move beyond this stuff and into, you’ve got a family you connect with, you’ve got a life where you’re in charge of Your decisions. I’ve got the opportunity to do all this stuff, you know, I mean, my father immigrated from Mexico as a young adult and he’s a great success in my eyes. So personally, let’s own that. We’re almost, you know, a lot of us are successful just being us and that’s enough. And everything else is icing on the cake. And when you measure it by any other means, you’re going to get down a FOMO spiral or some other negative spiral that doesn’t benefit any of us. And much like employers needing to be less afraid of their employees, I think we need to really argue for a redefinition of success and not be afraid of the impact of saying, what if we’re all successful? What if being here is enough and this is a success? Some systems collapse. If that happens globally and that wouldn’t be beneficial. But I think the future of there being 8 billion of us or whatever, or 10 billion of us, we need to hone our collective success and start reframing some of the problems and some of the goals we have in a way that are productive.

A.J. Lawrence:
What I find interesting about that is, yeah, I actually do think we are looking. Someone might have said, once upon a time, the best of times, the worst of times. We are looking at abundance in so many things. Yet the transition period is going to be quite difficult because energy, which is this huge, you have such a drain, carbon and all that, all of a sudden, with the progression of solar, wind and geothermal, et cetera, it’s like all of a sudden it’s like, oh, in five to 10 years, potentially, we’re going to be in an overabundance of power, all these things. If everyone just now said, no, I’m fine where I am, yeah, that could be an issue. But I do think we’re going to be looking at a world where abundance is the general structure.

Gabe Galvez:
Well, at least we can hope that we en masse can believe that that’s a possible outcome and really work towards it. I think a lot of the, whether it’s social, political, whatever, that negative conversation just happens here. I mean, it’s amplified here because I’m here. I’m sure it’s a similar but different conversation for you where you are. I view that as the trapped animal in the corner. The people that are winning, the ideas that are winning. The trajectory that is best doesn’t need to run around screaming at the top of its lungs, we’re here and we’re winning because it’s the inevitability. So I think a lot of the stuff that we hear, whether it’s Covid related, politics related, you know, macro, economic related, there’s certainly some big concerns. And that transition is going to be, I think really painful that you’re talking about. I think we’re living through it now and it’s painful and scary in a lot of ways for a lot of people. I think all that noise only exists because it’s the screams of dying ideals. Hopefully we can transcend that into something that’s better. And if we can’t, we will have made the collective choice not to and that’ll be that and nobody will ever hear this again. And that’s okay. We had a good run.

A.J. Lawrence:
Let’s hope it’s a longer run. I really appreciate you coming here on the show. I mean I’ve gained a lot of from CAPTARGET, you know, newsletter and just your general conversations in some of the communities. I think, like I said, I found it in search funder. Besides going to look at CAPTARGET, where can people engage with you?

Gabe Galvez:
I’m not going to suggest they don’t engage with me, but I will say that I am a staunch anti social media person. I don’t have any social footprint of any real substance because I don’t care what anybody’s doing out there. If you know me, call me, stop by the house, knock on the door, whatever. But certainly you can find me by name at LinkedIn, which I do check periodically. I’m happy to connect with folks in a professional capacity. Otherwise, you know, our companies are not super associated with each other. But I do spend time at a leadership role here at CAPTARGET, a board position at Merger Labs and my day to day at Faraday, our holding company which doesn’t have a lot of public exposure but hit me up on LinkedIn. You can find my email by googling my name, which is a mixed blessing. But feel free to shoot me an email. I love to connect with like minded folks whether they’re in the space, starting their journey, same place, whatever. We need each other to figure this all out and I certainly haven’t figured out what little I have in a vacuum. So we should all keep that conversation going.

A.J. Lawrence:
You’ve been so kind with what you’ve shared today. I mean this has been a lot and like I mentioned earlier, there’s so much to unpack and so much to learn from this. So Gabe, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on.

Gabe Galvez:
Thank you A.J. Awesome time.