Jeffery: Welcome to supporters fund ask an investor I’m your host Jeffery Potvin let’s please welcome Carey Ransom managing director at bank Tech Ventures founder at operate as our investor for today welcome Carrie it’s a real pleasure having you join us.

Carey: Thanks for having me it’s great to be here

Jeffery: Brilliant I’m super excited to chat with care we’ve chatted a few times over the better part of the last year and there’s been so much amazing stuff that I’ve got to learn from you and the things that you’ve shared and so I’m excited to kind of dive into this and break this all apart and I’ve got some really specific questions because you’re doing something that not a lot of investors do which is this whole Venture Studio world so I’m really excited to kind of dive in and learn about that and help the audience learn more about where all these pieces fit in this early stage ecosystem I’d like to start the way we like to kick our show off is that we want to allow you to share your background and you can go back to the school side the family business all these great things share a little bit about yourself and and what you guys have been up to and then one thing about you that nobody would know.

Carey: Well Jeffrey thank you and you know you mentioned the Venture Studio I think going back in time is probably what led me to why I’m doing what I’m doing and how I’m doing it today and so you know for me it goes back to growing up in a 100 year old family business and I started working when I was really young partly because I was curious about you know what did my dad do what did my grandpa do every day and what we had this local retail business that had been multi-generationally in my family and it was really what brought our whole family together so in a in a world that is probably becoming and continues to become increasingly less tribal that was kind of the the clan that that I grew up in and it was where I would say a lot of my early learning came from about how to treat other people how to think about the interplay and and dynamics of the community and we were in this little self-contained town that at that point in time it weirdly was was starting to to change in that it probably wasn’t quite big enough for the world that was growing around it and the expectations that people had from what a community or or the world could give them but it was this really interesting almost laboratory as I look back at it that I got to experience and also try a lot of things I I got to work with a lot of different people I get to see the value of Education because a lot of them were not as well read or well educated as I quickly became even as I got through high school and I’m so grateful to my parents because they exposed me we traveled quite a bit when I was a kid and they exposed me to this larger world and just between that and I was a voracious reader it just unlocked me and I I was this really curious kid always asking people questions and ultimately that led me to say I have to go get to a bigger Pond somewhere I went to a big school and part of that was just to challenge myself and say you know can I compete in a in a bigger place and I was pretty successful there and then I found myself in a big city and wanted to see you know could I survive in the in the big city and I ended up in Chicago and very shortly after that because I started in an industry I started in the consumer products industry which was somewhat comfortable because I’d kind of grown up in a in a world where we were moving consumer products through our retail family business but I was just always intrigued by technology and I’d had a computer in my house as a young kid and I tinkered a little bit with programming and basic which will date me but I I finally said you know what I need to go make this really a part of what I do and so in the mid 90s I talked my way into a software company and got a job in a software company and realized okay this is where I need to be and so if you look now across the last you know almost 30 years my life has been primarily in and around technology companies and you know I’ve done eight startups that I have joined from either founding or really early team or coming in as as a really early executive and you know I’ve had that entrepreneur and founder mindset and I know we’ll talk more about that and I kind of look at it as you can have that whether you were there at the drawing board when the idea was conceived or not but I have a lot of of life learnings now in in the rearview mirror that really inform where I go as we look ahead and you know it’s things like company building as a team sport and I want to be you know a part of teams that are going to have high conflict High interaction to try to find the opportunities and the best ideas and do that quickly and that informs a lot of how I look at investing today and so it’s been just an incredible journey I’ve had some amazing successes I’ve had some miserable failures and it’s just been a a really fun journey to be on and primarily what drives me is this continued curiosity to understand how things work today how they might work better and how to incorporate new and emerging ideas that are coming from Humanity on how to do things better that just continues to propel our world forward and so I feel such a privilege to be able to be out on closer to the front edge of that with how you apply a lot of these new technologies and new ideas to problems that can be better solved because of them and so about three years ago I walked out of my last operating role in a startup I was CEO of a Neo bank which many of your audience are probably familiar with these non-bank uh startups and we scaled it really fast and you know became a unicorn and I put a lot of new team in place and said you know this I think is my last full-time operating role and from here on out I feel like serial entrepreneur serial startup involvement is probably the best way for me to apply all these experiences and and skills and so that led to starting what ultimately became operate which is our version of Adventure studio and it’s different from every other Venture Studio out there and I think what I learned in the process was you meet one Venture Studio you meet one Venture studio and there are a lot of things that are like that and there really isn’t a singular way that those work and we said look we’re operators my partner and I both have built a lot of companies and learned a lot we said we’d love to work with early Founders and if we