Tag: life

Advice For Someone Starting a Business or Non-Profit

December 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 106 of The Edge of Innovation, Jacob Young is sharing some advice for someone starting a business or nonprofit organization.

Sections

Maintaining Healthy Rhythms
AI Technology & Mimicking A Person’s Voice
Should We Trust What We Consume or What We See Now?
Is Authentication in Information a Major Issue?
Is Foregoing the Digital World Even An Option?
Will Machines & AI Take Over For The Minds & Hearts of Entrepreneurs?
The Playing Field Is Even For Everyone To Be Able To Innovate
Innovation Is Still A Human Process
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

Advice For Someone Starting a Business or Non-Profit

Paul: So, one final question. What would be the one piece of advice that you would give to somebody starting something? I know what you’re doing isn’t a business, but I’m sure there’s a lot of angst that you’ve had, a lot of joy you’ve had, a lot of good, a lot of bad, a lot of hard, a lot of easy. And what would be that one piece of advice that you would give out to somebody?

Jacob: For beginning something new, either an entrepreneur?

Paul: Yeah.

Maintaining Healthy Rhythms

Jacob: Interesting. A friend of mine here in the city is – he’s about my age. Maybe a little bit younger than me. He’s an entrepreneur, and he’s not a Christian. We’re very good friends, and he has started up two restaurants here in Manchester. And I think the similarity for what our experiences is, is that if you are starting something new, you are dreaming something into existence, and that’s a very scary dynamic, and it can be a very all-consuming dynamic. Whether it’s a church, or a restaurant, or a tech enterprise, a software, an app – whatever it is – you’re dreaming something into existence, and you’re banking your livelihood on that happening. And so, it can be very all-consuming.

And what my friend and I are regularly kind of checking in on each other with is, do you have healthy rhythms so that you are a whole human being regardless of what happens with whatever you’re starting up?

Paul: Your enterprise.

Jacob: Yeah, whatever your enterprise is. A church, an app, whatever. I think that tends to be where I would aim at for, men and women, young men and women, whoever, who are starting up something new is, not only do you have the ability…

Are you honest with assessing what do healthy rhythms look like for me, and human health look like for me? Do you have people around you – whether it’s a spouse, or close friends, or family – that are able to hold you through that?

Because I think we all have, like, “Oh, I’m fine. You know, I can work eighty hours a week.” Well, you’re going to do eighty hours a week for forty weeks straight, and you’re going to be checked into a psych ward. It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. And having people who can legitimately say to you, “Hey, you need to re-evaluate,” or, “Let’s re-evaluate your healthy rhythms so that you’re whole.” And some of that includes talking to people who had no relationship to what you’re doing. I have no idea what it’s like to start a restaurant, but I really enjoy hanging out with my friend, and he helps me keep my head above water. Just like it’s good to talk to somebody that has no relationship to the church.

But, a part of maintaining healthy rhythms is maintaining healthy rhythms with people who are just not doing the same thing that you’re doing. You know, and the reason that’s important is because, if you’re actually killing it doing whatever your enterprise is, you’re going to networking out your eyeballs with people that are in the same, or close to the same, sphere of life that you’re trying to build within. Right? I mean, if you’re trying to do an app, you’re trying to get investors who invest in the tech world, so you’re still talking to the same people that are within your sphere. You need to get out and go to a cooking class and learn how to make some killer baked salmon or whatever it is you’re going to make.

It’s a part of being a whole person, and everything about your life is not going to be consumed by what you’re trying to build. So that’s, kind of, where I would go with if you’re trying to start something, a church or not, that’s where my mind goes.

Paul: Ah, I think wise advice.

Jacob: Yeah.

AI Technology & Mimicking A Person’s Voice

Jacob: Can I ask you a question?

Paul: Of course.

Jacob: In the tech world, in The Edge of Innovation, I am increasingly concerned about AI technology as it relates to mimicking and emulating other people, to put it in a broad way. So, I would be curious what your advice is. So, this last week, you have this whole deepfake that’s been on the Internet for a few years now, and now this is being used in very inventive ways.

And so, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with who Jordan Peterson is, but he writes this article this last week saying somebody had made a website using his voice, and you could type in whatever you wanted, and it would emulate his voice from recordings. It used machine learning and AI technology to take his voice and then say whatever you’re typing. So you can type in Mein Kampf, and he’s going to recite it with his voice. And so now it becomes a question of, “Did Jordan Peterson actually say that or not?”

And the concerning thing that was in that article, regardless of the person involved, was that technology is now… basically, they only need about six hours of audio recording to be able to produce that type of technology for anybody.

Paul: Right.

Jacob: That hit my radar immediately, because I’m like, “As a pastor, I put out forty minutes or whatever of audio recording on the Internet every week.” And, as a podcaster, you do similarly.

Paul: Right.

Jacob: And it’s just — It’s deeply concerning as to, “Okay, how do I understand that? But then, what are the ramifications and anticipations and liabilities I need to be aware of moving forward?” Does that question, or does that dynamic make sense at all?

Paul: Absolutely. I mean, you, you mentioned two different things. You know, you were worried about AI and its applications, and then you went into a very specific example of a technology, mechanism, or methodology to do something. They’re very different questions. The whole concept of AI, or artificial intelligence — There’s a point at which something becomes intelligent or not intelligent, and I don’t think we’re really anywhere near that. We have really expert systems that can infer things from larger sets of data than we can. We infer things. You know, somebody’s, is rude to you. You can infer they have a bad day or whatever that is, or we can infer enormous amounts of information with the tone of voice, body language, all that kind of stuff.

And so, systems — computer systems — will be able to be taught, in some ways, to do some of that, but it’s not true artificial intelligence and machine learning. I mean, it is, but it’s not necessarily what science fiction talks about as AI.

Should We Trust What We Consume or What We See Now?

Now, having said that, your concern is not unfounded. It’s not fake. It’s true. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that I can emulate a voice, or I can send an email that looks like it came from you, or I can do all these different things. So, the bottom line is, I think, that we are in a situation where you won’t be able to trust what you consume or see. That’s the only thing we can do. It’s that, how do you know?

I have a friend who has a Wikipedia page that is quite controversial, but he has a high-resolution scan of his signature there. And it’s like, “Why would you put your signature up there?” I think he even has his Social Security number on there. And it’s a very interesting question. So, now, the point becomes that if you see something with his signature on it, did he sign it, or did somebody put it there from using his high-res sample? And you can’t necessarily know that. So then, it becomes, “Oh, I attest to that, indeed did sign it.”

“Is that your signature?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Is that your Signature?”

“Well, I believe it is.”

They are very different answers.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: It will be the fact that I could very easily post something with anybody’s name that I want to. I mean, well — You know, just yesterday one of the senators had a fake — or an alias Twitter account that was actually him, and then, it’s like, “Well, why would you do that?” I mean, regardless of what your political persuasion is, well, what was your point in doing that? And you look at the story that the person has been trying to tell over that. So, it’s very interesting. We have to reconsider the way we validate the sources of information we have.

Is Authentication in Information a Major Issue?

Jacob: Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. Like, it seems like authentication is a major issue at that point.

Paul: It is, but I don’t believe there will be a technical solution to it. It’s extremely difficult. In the world that we’ve created, there are just too many cracks in the foundation. And I’m very frustrated with the Equifax breach, and what has happened to that company is virtually nothing. I mean, even if they get a quarter or a half-a-billion-dollar fine, it’s not a big deal, you know. Nobody goes without pay, and they make that money back in a couple of years, and everything’s fine. But yet, now, my personal information is out and available for other people, and so, what did you expect, I guess.

The bottom line is that with the genies out of the bottle, there’s nothing we can do to put that information back in the bottle, and our systems are built in such a way that they’re built by humans, and there’s a lot of mistakes that humans make, and most of the issues that we see with technology are because humans made a mistake. So, I look forward to finding out what I’m going to say in the future.

But, it’ll be a lot about relationships and saying, “No, that doesn’t sound like Paul. That doesn’t sound like Jacob. That doesn’t sound like Bob. That doesn’t sound like Julie, you know.”

And we’re going to have to get to it and it’s going to be interesting. I mean, there’s been a lot of science fiction written about things like that. Photoshop was the first thing. It’s fairly easy now to Photoshop something and make a person that wasn’t there, there.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: And this is just the next level. It was difficult at one time to put somebody into a photo. Now, it’s virtually trivial.

The same thing will happen with our voices. The same thing will happen with our presence, our GPS locations, and all that kind of stuff. It’s an interesting, interesting new world.

Is Foregoing the Digital World Even An Option?

Jacob: Do you feel like that would be an argument, then, for foregoing the digital world?

Paul: I don’t think it’s an option. I mean, you’ll have your outliers of people who say, “Oh, I forego that,” but your sheer absence will almost point to where you are and who you are. I don’t believe there is a digital world. It’s just the world. I’m not negative or positive about it. It’s just the way it is. You lived on a street when you grew up, and you had neighbors, and that was the fact. It was that fact. And they had right assumptions about your family and wrong ones and whatever. They heard snippets of conversations, and they formed opinions, and they heard complete conversations and formed different opinions. It’s all the same thing, except there is a great ability to mess with people now.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: So how was that?

Will Machines & AI Take Over For The Minds & Hearts of Entrepreneurs?

Jacob: Well, I’m curious – Again, maybe this is a silly question. I wonder, you were saying with the AI and is working with a larger data set in terms of machine learning, or kind of, that realm of things, do you foresee that the future of — even talking about the nature of your podcast of innovation — that the innovations and entrepreneurial work that comes out in the future, could that basically be pumped out from a machine rather than from the minds and hearts of entrepreneurs? That is, if the nature of entrepreneurial is engaging with problems and finding a solution, are computers the front edge of determining what those problems are and finding solutions rather than humans? Does that make sense?

Paul: Yeah, it does. I don’t know that. It’s interesting. In teaching innovation, you’re teaching people to think differently, and in developing AI or machine learning, we’re trying to teach a computer to think — or to emulate thinking by sheer volume of processing power. And it’s usually the subtleties that make an innovation innovative. There is an “aha” moment that’s like, “Oh, that’s what it was.”

I was just rewatching the introduction of the iPhone, and as Steve was dancing about with the thing, we’re talking about an iPod, an Internet device, a phone. Are you getting it? An iPod, an Internet, and a phone. An iPod, an int— You know, so it’s just one device.

And very, very interesting, in reading and watching some of the videos about the gestation period of the iPhone and what happened during that time, and how some of it was innovative. One of the most innovative things was the ability for when you scrolled with your finger, that it had a rubber band effect at the bottom.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: That made the human interface better. Now, could a machine figure that out? I guess I’d like to think that someday it could, but before that was… I mean, when I say it now, it’s an obvious thing, that you can sympathize with and say, “Oh yeah, I see that.” You can’t necessarily remember how bad other devices that didn’t have that rubber banding effect were to use. I do, because I’m a nerd techie, and I remember that kind of stuff, and I saw phones and devices that didn’t have that rubber banding effect.

So, there’s this thing, in data science, called fuzzy, fuzz… Well, it’s fuzzy math or fuzzy data, and the thing is that where you take the data you have, and you make it a little bit more, and a little bit less, and you change different parameters of it to see what happens, and it has to do with chaos and things like that. And so, as, as we start to apply those things to data sets, I think they’ll be tremendously beneficial to help us realize things that we wouldn’t have realized otherwise.

Now, having said that, I don’t know that we’re — You know, the synthesis of something — That rubber banding effect is a human realization that we needed to have a way to experience something in a different way. if you were to go to a native on an island, and say, “Here’s two phones,” and they’ve never seen a phone before. “Do you like the one with the rubber banding effect or the one with out?” I don’t know that they’d have a context to make a decision. So that’s difficult, I think, for machines to do that without a lot more data about that.

Now, I think you could probably build an expert system or an AI that worked on just interface things, and then, as the people started to feed into it different options, it could probably meld those together into the better option that we couldn’t do.

The Playing Field Is Even For Everyone To Be Able To Innovate

Jacob: Yeah. But, then, it seems like the controlling factor in terms of what qualifies as innovation is the human factor, not merely the parts and pieces that actually end up being put together.

Paul: Right. Well, that’s true. Yeah. I have a good friend that says – he was giving a lecture in Washington, D.C. just a few blocks from the Library of Congress – and it’s all the answers are there. And now, all the answers are in your pocket. You just need to know what question to ask.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: And so, none of us are uneven. The field is completely even for us to be able to innovate. It’s really a thought process. There’s nothing I intrinsically have that’s better than you or than the person across the street. We are all able to innovate similarly. Now, we might have differences in the way we can execute that innovation, but a lot of that comes with persistence.

Innovation Is Still A Human Process

Jacob: Yeah. So that’s the interesting. That’s a helpful dynamic. It’s that, at the end of the day, the innovation is still a human process. It’s not merely a — Maybe that was where my question was wrong-footed. It’s merely a problem–solution process. It’s a human process, at the end of the day.

Paul: I think so. I think so. But I do think machines can assist on that. They could probably predict better than a human could what you might like to have for dinner if you gave them the information. You know, “I had a hard day. I had this, this, and this,” and, “Okay, well, then. If it’s going to be comfort food, okay, let’s make pasta.” You know, so, however you’re wired, or if you have celiac disease, they’re not going to suggest that. So, it’s all data, and it’s an optimized fit.

Humans, we process enormous amounts of data, and don’t underestimate the amount of data that we process. We also filter out good and bad data, and machines don’t have necessarily that ability to weigh what’s important and what’s not important yet. So, I don’t know.

Jacob: Actually, well, that’s helpful, yeah.

Paul: I don’t know if that’s, you know —

Jacob: No, I appreciate you letting me get into the interviewer chair and ask you a few questions on that.

Paul: Oh, absolutely.

Closing

Paul: All right, well, we’ve been talking with Jacob Young. Do you have an official title?

Jacob: I’m the Great and Mighty Jacob Young.

Paul: No, no. Wasn’t it — What were we saying? It was just yesterday that we were talking about — Oh, Mister Awesome, that’s right.

Jacob: Yes, yeah.

Paul: Is that on your business card?

Jacob: That is, yeah.

Paul: All right. Well, we’ve been talking with Jacob Young, a church-planting pastor in Manchester, New Hampshire, and we’ll have links to his website and some of his blogs.

I think it’d be good for people who are listening who might be interested to follow him and see what he has to say, as he’s sort of on one of the cutting edge of our society right now. New England is really in a post-church time, and you’ve chosen to go and really plant a church, start a church in a hard area.

Jacob: Yeah. Exciting times, and I’m enjoying it. It’s a fun time, you know.

Paul: Cool. Thank you, sir.

Jacob: Yeah, Paul, thanks for your time.

More Episodes:

This is Part 3 of 3 of our conversation with Jacob Young!
If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it here!
If you missed Part 2, you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

A Church on Capitol Hill With Pastor Mark Dever

August 6, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 97 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Mark Dever, the senior pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C.

Sections

Introduction
A Church on Capitol Hill
About Mark Dever
What is a Church?
Are All Churches Equal?
Why Do People Go To Church?
Who Is God?
More Episodes
Show Notes

A Church on Capitol Hill With Pastor Mark Dever

Introduction

Paul: So, welcome to the Edge of Innovation. Today were talking with Mark Dever from Washington D.C. Mark, I usually put in there the owner of ABC company, but I’m struck. What do you do?

Mark: For a quarter of a century now I’ve been the pastor of a church on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.

Paul: Okay, so you’re a pastor. What kind of church? I mean is it Buddhist church? Help me out.

Mark. It’s a Christian church. It’s a Baptist church. It’s been around since right after the Civil War.

A Church on Capitol Hill

Paul: So, you’re in Capitol Hill. That sounds like a very interesting place to be. I know a bunch of different people that live in the Washington D.C area and do you suffer from the same myopic view of the world that other people in D.C. suffer from? Because I’m in Boston and people are listening to us from all over the world and I imagine that D.C. has a sort of realty distortion feel. Is that a part of your life?

Mark: People seem to think that is the case. That, you know, if you live, as we put it, inside the beltway, that your absorbed with things that go on here. I think the nature of my work takes me outside the beltway more than most. So, I might be a little less absorbed than the guy who works five blocks away in the Capitol Building.

Paul: Okay.

Mark: Behind the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Five blocks just east of the Capitol Building.

Paul: Very cool. So that must be neat. Now you have a church and it’s been there since, you said the 1800s. that’s quite a long time. Do a lot of people go to it? Is it a thriving church? Is it a healthy organization?

Mark: We have about a thousand people on Sunday mornings. And yeah, about a four million dollar, not quite, 3.5 million dollar annual budget. The congregation’s average age is probably about thirty. Yeah, it’s a delightful congregation to be a part of. It has a lot of transiency because were in the middle of the city. A lot of young people come here to work after college and then they meet a spouse, start having kids, find D.C. in the middle is too expensive to live in so they either move out to the suburbs or back up to Boston or someplace.

About Mark Dever

Paul: I see. And so now, you’ve been there 25 years?

Mark: 25 years.

Paul: Wow! Is this what you, when you were young, is this what you envisioned you’d be doing?

Mark: Interestingly, you assume I’m not young but no, in fact, it’s not. I thought I would be a professor.

Paul: A professor of what?

Mark: A professor of historical theology, which means what people in the past have believed.

Paul: Okay, well that’s a whole interesting thing we should talk about. But let’s continue down our path. So, you were going to be a professor.

What is a Church?

Paul: A thousand people at a church. Is that a lot? Is that a little? Is that how you measure the success of a church? You know, I have a small business. We have eleven employees. And that’s a small business. A very small business. But then you’re talking, you know, Boeing. It has thousands of employees, tens of thousands. So, how do you rank that or how do we even discuss that kind of thing?

Mark: I think the average church in America is fifty to a hundred people. So, I think this would be a large church but it’s not what they call in the press, a mega church which is like two thousand or five thousand or ten thousand. This is just like a thousand. It’s a big church.

Paul: I imagine church has something to do with faith and there are many different faiths. How is a church different from like the YMCA or a club or a fraternal club or things like that? Is there a difference?

Mark: Yeah, I think a sociologist or an anthropologist could look at them and see some similarities of them being voluntary social organizations but certainly, from inside a church, it’s very very different because a lot of our members of our church will be members of other organizations. Like, for example, the ones you just named. Or maybe they’re an engineer and they’re part of an association of certain kinds of engineers or they’re a doctor or a they’re teacher and they’re part of a teacher’s union or part of the faculty of the local high school.

But no. A church is distinctive in that it’s specifically a grouping of Christians and it would be people who understand themselves to be taking on special responsibilities for each other and having others take on special responsibilities for them. So, for an example, when we had an older woman in our church a number of years ago, who had never been married and had no children and she grew older and became more infirm. She had worked in our church back in the 1950s and 60s on staff. In retrospect, we felt we had not taken good enough care of her back then, so we simply absorbed all of her costs of her last years as she moved into a home and needed medical attention. We simply as a church, paid for all of that.

Paul: Interesting. And so, does that happen from the leadership….? So, you mentioned you have members of the church. I’m thinking I’ve been a member of a photography club for years and we certainly don’t help people with their needs. We tell them their photo doesn’t look good or you need to do this, or the lens goes away from you when you take the picture and push the button. But this sounds very different.

Mark: Yeah. It’s probably more comprehensive. We would understand that a good local church should be at the center of each Christian’s life and it will help them think through everything from their marriage, to their own relationship with God, to their children, to their job, their education, their neighborhood. Yeah.

Paul: Okay, that’s interesting. So a church is a – I’m just going to repeat back to you what I heard – an organization much more holistic than a photography club, to use that example, that really is concerned with the wellbeing of the people within it? Is that fair?

Mark: That’s certainly fair. We’re also concerned that the basic understanding of God and the relationship we come to have with him through Jesus Christ, is something that he wants everyone to have so we understand that we are under obligation to make this known to others outside our church and even around the world and faraway places like Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Are All Churches Equal?

Paul: The church has so – I’m stopping myself here because there are lots of different types of churches. You mentioned that you’re a Baptist church. I’ve heard of the Catholic church. I’ve heard of Lutheran, Methodist, you know, Scientology as a church. I don’t even know much about that but what are the differentiators between these? Are they all churches equal or are they different?

Mark: Well usually if there’s a different name attached to a church, there’s some difference behind it that gives rise to that different name. So, Christian churches would be those churches that are Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, those churches that maintain that God became a man in Jesus Christ. That would be different that something you mentioned like Scientology which would not be that. Or even “The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints” – the Mormons – who would teach that every person is an incarnate potential deity. So, Scientology, Mormonism, would be very different.

Our church would be in the strain of Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, which would believe very much in Jesus Christ at the center. We would be different than the old strains of Greek Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. We’d be with the Protestants in that we believe the way we’re basically made right with God is by trusting in Christ. It’s not by anything we do to cooperate with the church. It’s just our faith in Christ. But that leads us to be a part of local churches which is what all Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists have historically believed.

Paul: So, it sounds like you have a bent towards understanding the history of the church?

Mark: I did my PHD in Cambridge on history.

Why Do People Go To Church?

Paul: So, I’m struck by… there’s lots of different labels that we’re talking about and they mean different things. Like if you were talking to me about computers or a certain type of technology, I would understand those labels and I guess you’re saying that the belief… Why do people come to your church, Capitol Hill, as a oppose to a church down the street? Is it because you’re a good CEO or what is that?

Mark: I’m sure there are as many different reasons as there are people. Maybe because they like the preaching. They like the singing. They have a friend that comes here. It may be because they’ve found their life changed by this specific teaching that they hear here, or someone at another church that they had been prospering in spiritually, recommended they come here when they moved to D.C.

Paul: Now do you have a sign – not in reality – the idea of a sign that says “Here’s why you’d come to Capitol Hill Baptist church?” What are you advertising? What are you selling?

Mark: Yeah. We wouldn’t actually be in competition with other churches that have the same gospel as we do. So, there would be many churches in Washington D.C. and we would understand that there is no great difference between you going to them or you going to us. We would say the important thing is you going to a church where the Bible is understood and taught.

Paul: Okay, and now you’re The Bible, the Christian Bible which I guess is the Old Testament, New Testament, as opposed to some of the other religious books that have been out there?

Mark: Right. The Hebrew scriptures plus the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

Paul: Okay, so you’re a place where that is believed, championed, it’s a good idea?

Mark: All of those things. Like if you read Justin Martyr writing in the middle of the second century. He will talk about how on the first day of each week all the Christians gather, and they hear the Gospels read and then they have someone explain it to them. That’s exactly what we do. We read the Bible and we talk about it. We sing and we pray. So, we do what Christians have always done and that’s what so many Christians around the world do every Sunday.

Paul: So, is that different from let’s say, reading the newspaper every Sunday?

Mark: Yeah, because we don’t understand that the newspaper comes from God, whereas we understand that the Bible comes from God.

Who Is God?

Paul: So, you’re saying that the Bible comes from God and who is God in this? I mean, there’s a lot of different definitions and I imagine if you lined up twelve people on the street and asked “Who is God?” you’d get different answers.

Mark: Yeah.

Paul: In your world, in Capitol Hill Baptist Church, in Mark Dever’s world, who is God? Is he…?

Mark: If God exists, He exists regardless of how you or I perceive him. So, regardless of whether we’re in Mark Dever’s world, we’re in God’s world. We can close our eyes but He’s still there. He’s a sentient being who made everything that is and He has made people especially to be like Him in His image and He’s given us His will and His word and His law and He calls us to follow Him. And by nature, we tend to follow Him some but also we break His law. We do what is wrong. We do what the Bible calls sin.

And that’s where Christianity comes in. We understand that God sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to live a life of complete trust in Him and then died as a substitute sacrifice on the cross. You’ve probably seen the cross and associated that with Christianity. That’s how it is at the center. That’s the sacrifice that we understand that Jesus made to assuage or satisfy God’s wrath against us for all we’ve done that’s wrong. Jesus took that punishment. He died in the place of all of us who trust in Him. That’s the good news that we as Christians share with people in our church and really all truly Christian churches.

Paul: Okay, but couldn’t God just overlook that? I have children that do things that are wrong and sometimes I discipline them for that but many times I overlook it

Mark: Well, you say “couldn’t” like that is an ability and to not do that is something like a disability. But when you’re talking about overlooking that which is good and overlooking that which is evil, that would not be good on God’s part. It would be an evil thing for Him to ignore injustices that were done. So, it’s really, it’s a problem with our language that we speak of God as being able to overlook that which is evil. That would really be a disability of God’s.

Paul: Okay. So, you’re not talking whether He’s able or not, but whether He would.

Mark: Yeah. He will not because He is good.

Paul: Interesting.

So, we’ve been speaking with Mark Dever, the senior pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C.

Thanks for listening and we’d love your feedback!

More Episodes:

This is Part 1 of 3 our interview with Mark Dever. Stay tuned for parts 2 & 3, coming soon!

Show Notes:

Creating the New MBA Finance Program at Gordon College

December 25, 2018 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 81 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Alexander Lowry about creating and directing the new MBA finance program at Gordon College.

Sections

A Crisis of Confidence
An Ah-Ha Moment in the Job Search
Working For PA Consulting Group
Moving To London With PG Consulting Group
Moving Back To New York City After Seven Years in London
Scratching The Finance Itch
Working For JPMorgan
Why Gordon College?
Master of Science and Financial Analysis
Building a Finance Program From Scratch
Moving to New England
The Entrepreneurial Side of Things
Building the Vision, the Strategy, the Execution, & the Marketing
Building Connections For Gordon’s Finance Program
Marketing to the Business Professionals
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Creating the New MBA Finance Program at Gordon College

A Crisis of Confidence

Paul: Well, welcome to the Edge of Innovation. We’re here today with Alexander Lowry.

But now, that must have been a huge crisis because you lost a job. And the economy… Well, when did you lose the job?

Alexander: So we’re talking the year 2000.

Paul: Oh, okay. 2000.

Alexander: So definitely a crisis of confidence at the very least. As men, I think the general stereotype — and I believe it — is that our identities, if not fully, at least partially, are wrapped up in our job and who we are and how well we do it. So for me, this was a gut-check time of “Am I doing the right thing? Am I headed in the right direction?”

Paul: So what came back?

Alexander: What came back was a little bit of help realizing I was not the only one let go. There were a lot of people losing their jobs at that point because the internet bubble was bursting. And there was probably also an assessment of this is a chance that, to step back and take stock. And that was probably when I first came up with the idea that I could use some help and let’s talk to some other people. Some of my dad’s friends were in business, and were very useful for me to sit down and talk with and learn from and sort of realized that I don’t have to do all this life stuff on my own.

An Ah-Ha Moment in the Job Search

Paul: So can you recall like an ah-ha moment during any of those talks?

Alexander: Well, yeah. I can remember one. So, I want to say about two weeks after I was laid off, I was at a Haverford College mixer/networking event. And one of the alumni, his wife, they were an older couple, was there. And she was a recruiter at Goldman Sachs. So I went up and talked to her. We had a really good conversation. She goes, “You would be a great fit for our position.”

I thought, “Yes, I would.”

And then she started asking me about my career history, and I explained. “I was at my first company for a year, and I left to join this internet consulting company, and then they’ve just laid off all their young analysts.”

She said, “Oh, I can’t hire you.”

I thought, “Why?”

She said, “Well, you’re a job hopper.”

And I said, “I don’t think I am. I’ve got a very good story.”

She goes, “It doesn’t matter. That’s the perception is reality, and that’s what you look like on paper.”

So from my point of view, that was a gut-check in my career thinking I don’t ever want that again. And I was determined that my next job to find a great place where I could grow and develop. I thought, I need to be there at least three years. We’ll talk more about it. Fast forward. It was 12 years, the next job. So it’s never an issue again. Right? But, yeah.

Working For PA Consulting Group

Paul: So, where did you go?

Alexander: So I actually ended up realizing that I loved the consulting, and I wanted to stay in that. But I wanted to be in more of an established company. I loved the startup vibe; I loved the opportunity behind it, the sense that you could grow faster in your career because you’re not in a typical pyramid structure of… Accenture is a good example where they have this very clear pyramid. They bring in tons of young people every year, and you move up. And not that you can’t have a fast-career trajectory, but it’s established. It’s set. And I thought I would like to join a company that somehow mixes the established firm company that is very secure with a startup.

Paul: Okay. That sounds great, yeah.

Alexander: It does. And I actually found one. So PA Consulting Group headquartered out of the UK. It started during World War II. It was Personnel Administration Consulting. The men went off to fight in the war. The women came to work in the factories. They integrated the women in the factories. The men came back after the war. They integrated the men back to the factories. Personnel Administration. And it abbreviated down to PA, so they basically expanded to do every other type of consulting. At one point, they were the second biggest in the world. They had been shrunk a lot, but they were very big in Europe. The Financial Times called them the McKinsey of Europe. Huge name, well recognized. But they were just starting to get a footprint in the US.

So for me, this was the perfect situation. They had, I think, 10, 20 people in the US. I was able to join the New York office at a very critical moment where it was like a startup mode for an established company.

Paul: Cool. Alright. Okay. So did you move? You were in New York still?

Alexander: Still in New York.

Paul: So then what happened next?

Moving To London With PG Consulting Group

Alexander: I worked for them in New York for about three years. And at that point, there was an opportunity they presented me with. They said, “Would you like to go over the headquarters in London?” Now I will also be very clear, one of the reasons I chose this company was also Machiavellian. I did not study abroad in college. I had a great time. I was sitting with professors in their homes junior and senior year, ten people in their living room with very smart people. Really enjoyed that. I didn’t want to go abroad. But I did now. I did. I thought the idea of living somewhere else… Again, I said New York, in my mind, was a normal city. Abnormal, absolutely. But for me, what are the other standards like that? London, in my mind, maybe Paris, maybe Hong Kong. A couple of cities. Can I get to one of those?

So joining this company headquartered in London was always in the back of my mind that that will be of benefit. My assumption was you can always get a transfer to headquarters. Take JPMorgan, for example. If you join them in the London office or the Hong Kong office, New York is the show. If you’re really good, you will eventually get an opportunity to move.

And I became the first American that got the opportunity to go to the London headquarters for this firm.

Paul: Wow. Really.

Alexander: So I was excited about that.

Paul: That is very cool. And so you moved to London.

Alexander: I moved to London. The intent was for what they call secondment. So two years with a third year option. That was the deal. And I got over there and got established, and it was a personal and professional success. So I was enjoying traveling every other weekend, though. It’s a cheap flight capital in Europe, right out of London. Every other weekend you spend a couple of hours, and you’re in a different country, a different culture, a different language — everything else. Just wonder experiences for me.

And I decided I wanted to stay even longer. So after three years, they put me on the local citizenship track. They kept the papers there. I was able to stay long enough to get my passport and the citizenship. So I’ve got that dual standard now. I stayed seven years.

Paul: Wow. Okay. Well, did you leave there?

Moving Back To New York City After Seven Years in London

Alexander: They brought me back to New York. I was missing my friends and family. I felt like I was living a good life over there but wasn’t really established in the sense of… I love the Brits, but they are a careful, closed community, and to be—

Paul: Sort of like New England, but we’ll talk about that later.

Alexander: Okay, that’s good. I need advice. And to break into the circles, you almost had to be dating someone local too. So you need someone to get you in. Right? You needed a reference to get a bank account opened. It’s just the way the society works there.

And from my point of view, I was sort of one foot on this side of the pond one foot on that side, coming back regularly seeing friends and family. And I got to thinking, “Am I going to live here forever, or am I going to go home?” Because if I’m going home to meet someone and settle down and start my life, I’m kind of way behind here. If I’m going to do it here, I better just go all in. So I decided I needed to go back home.

Scratching The Finance Itch

So they brought me back to New York. And at that point, I was thinking, “You know, this is really fun, but I wonder… I’ve never scratched that finance itch. We’d been talking about Wall Street since back in the Haverford days. I think I’d like to do that.”

And the traditional way that someone makes a massive career change like that is business school. That’s the way most people tend to do it. For some reason, it’s so common now to get a two-year traditional MBA — you do a summer internship in between, and you switch — that employers never question it. If you switch most jobs, they say you need a story. You need to be able to explain to someone why. It doesn’t need to be long. It just needs to be clear and believable. You just say business school, and everyone is like “Oh, yeah. Okay.”

So I thought, “Why don’t I use the MBA to switch?” And I ended up going to Wharton to get the MBA, and I also wanted that school, partly, specifically because it is a finance name and it resonates. Everyone hears Wharton, and they’re like “Oh, yeah, finance, Wall Street — makes total sense.” And that was how I switched over to JPMorgan.

Working For JPMorgan

Paul: Wow. Okay. So you went to JPMorgan. What did you do there? What was going to be your job?

Alexander: I joined at a fascinating time. They hired me — which makes total sense — partly because of my consulting background and skill set. And there was what they call the London Whale Scandal. Jamie Dimon famously called it a “tempest in a teapot,” which actually ended up being a really big deal. And what they realized was that they called one of the companies “It’s too big to fail.” It’s just too big to manage is what it is. Even Jamie Dimon, the best banker in, probably, the history of banking, must struggle with it because you have five Fortune 500 companies in one. Absolutely massive. They’re all best at what they do.

And what the company realized with that London Whale Scandal was they actually did not have a true handle on what was going on in the business. When you think about it, Jamie Dimon sitting 50 stories up in the sky does not know anything about what’s going on down below. Information was not getting fed up. They built a brand new unit called oversight and control, which was supposed to sit on top of audit, finance, legal, compliance — everything — to get one source of truth and also to be a single point of contact with the regulators. And the regulators were, say, either coming into the London office and then later coming to the New York office finding the same problems or coming into the investment bank and finding the same problem as the commercial bank. And the business was going, how do we get our own house in order? How do we get this under control?

So they needed that unit established. And I came in, and I helped asset management get it under way, and that’s how I started out.

Paul: Okay. Was that your last job before this?

Alexander: It was not. So after I’d been in that role a year, a year and a half, the business was getting sorted out. Things were under control. We had unearthed a lot of problems, which we expected to, and now we had this long list to solve.

So then in a US private bank — you can think about it as very wealthy clients, affluent individuals — they needed to solve a lot of their problems. So the COO over there said, “Hey, I need a deputy. Come over here. All that stuff you figured out, come over here and solve.” So I was working in the US private bank, deputy COO, which a role I absolutely loved and enjoyed. And another real interesting thing helped. JPMorgan always has fascinating stuff going on. They decided to accelerate the recovery for Detroit. Remember this was when Detroit was going through bankruptcy — big problems. JPMorgan committed $100 million over five years to help accelerate that, which was a huge opportunity.

Now, at that point, our private foundation was already one of the, say, 25th biggest in the country, giving away about 240 million a year. But that system had been set up a long time ago, sort of being held together with Band-Aids. You’re going to add another 100 million on top of that, it would have fallen apart. So I was brought over to be deputy COO there and help solidify that and get it under way. And unbeknownst to me, I did not actually know at the time exactly why that was happening, but there was a clear plan. That role helped set the foundation for where I am now. And, I don’t want to jump ahead too much, but that got me one foot in the nonprofit world already, which led to the academic rollout.

Paul: Interesting. Okay. And is there another job?

Alexander: No, no. So that was four and a half years at JPMorgan.

Paul: Okay so four and a half years at JPMorgan and that brings us to what?

Alexander: Then we came here to Gordon College.

Why Gordon College?

Paul: Why in the world did you…? So you said you were never interesting in academia. And you were never interested in this. Let’s go down this road a little bit. If Gordon hadn’t happened, where would you be?

Alexander: I think we would have ended up in Colorado. So the other thing going on at this time — which we’ve talked a lot about professional — there was the personal life. And my personal life was changing. We talked about being in London. It felt like I hadn’t fully settled down into the roots. As I got back, that was what took up a lot more importance in my life. And I’m fortunate now, just over two years married to the amazing Rebecca, and she is a blessing in my life. And as Rebecca and I were courting and getting ready to get married and were engaged, she said to me one day, she said, “I don’t think you working a hundred hours a week at a bank is really going to be good for us.”

Paul: Yeah, good. Good for her.

Paul: Yeah, she’s great at challenging me in very healthy ways. And I said, “Good point, darling.” So we began thinking about what that could look like and feel like. And we thought, well, you know, we want to settle down. We want to have a family. We’d like to have a house, maybe a picket fence, the dog — whatever it is.

And her brother’s out in Colorado. And we know that it is just an amazing and beautiful place, high quality of life. It’s so popular, all the companies are either relocating or building offices there. And we thought that’s where we would be going as well. So I began looking for opportunities out there and found some really good ones. But about that same time, this opportunity at Gordon College came up.

Now I’ll be very clear, I had never heard of Gordon before. It is a fantastic liberal arts school, but it wasn’t on my radar. You know, I’m a New York fan. It wasn’t really coming to the Boston area.

Paul: Right. Exactly. Well, exactly. It’s an outlier, at best for you, especially. But it wasn’t just an outlier of a school. In other words, this small school in north of Boston. So you’re sort of like oh, my gosh. I’m in finance. That’s like going from being a doctor to something completely different. And so how did that even get broached? Because it’s sort of like maybe you can’t even teach.

Alexander: Well, I think I can, and we’ll find out soon. And that’s a good point. So it’s not as big of a leap, when I explain it, as you’ll think it will be. So I’ve actually done a lot of teaching in my past, and that’s only a part of my job. Leading, it is more. But, so I’ve done a T8 at Wharton and at Haverford and did a lot of running of presentations is part of consulting and a lot of training.

So I’ve got all of the teaching aspect in my background, but it was less about me being brought over to teach. It was more of there is this unique program that was an exact fit. But let me sort of finish off the story from where we were just a moment ago.

So Gordon came and actually found me. I didn’t find them. It was through some friends, again, people on my board who said, “Hey, I know you’re looking in Colorado for these sorts of finance opportunities. This is not what you’re thinking about, but you would be a great fit for this role.” And in my mind, one of the fascinating tests in doesn’t have to hold is, do you find the job, or does the job find you? Which I always find a little more fascinating.

And my wife and I looked at it and, again, wrong geographic direction, wrong sports teams, our family is other parts of the country, so it wasn’t what we were looking for. But when we started digging into it, I realized, in many ways, this is a perfect fit for me. So I probably need to describe the program for just a minute to help you understand what that is.

Paul: Okay. Yeah. Let’s go ahead.

Master of Science and Financial Analysis

Alexander: So the Master of Science and Financial Analysis, again, let’s just call it Masters in Finance — rolls off the tongue a little more easily. This is designed to be a one-year program for people to get a fast track to a great career in finance. And I will contextualize it against a traditional MBA, just because that’s the easiest thing to wrap our head around.

When you go to an MBA, like I go to Wharton, I went to Wharton to study finance, but every MBA program is generally set up the first year you do a little bit of everything. They want to make sure you’re a generalist with some knowledge about strategy, operations, marketing, finance, accounting — everything under the sun. You do your summer internship where you’re testing out do you really want to specialize in the field you think you do. And you come back, and you go, “Yeah, that’s great,” and you spend your second year doing deep dive — marketing, finance, whatever it is.

So I went to Wharton knowing I wanted to be in finance. I’ve already done all the general stuff in consulting, but it was still a great brand for me to have. Compare that to the program that we offer. The assumption for us is you know you want to be in finance. Right? So therefore, you don’t need that first year of general knowledge. You’re just going to specialize. So therefore, it’s half of the opportunity cost in terms of time — and that’s expensive because it’s lost salary. Obviously, there’s a program component cost to it. Average MBA is $140,000. And the top school like Wharton, getting closer to 200.

We charge 30 because we don’t want big debt loads for our students.

Building a Finance Program From Scratch

Alexander: So for me, it was exciting to realize, okay, we were going to build a program from scratch in finance, my field of enjoyment and expertise, all of my project management background, which we might talk through, is great for setting that up. I love being out there and engaging with students and coaching and developing them. Teaching in some of the classes will be exciting. So there were just a lot of reasons we felt like there was a unique opportunity.

Another part of it is you’re talking a small school. We’re not talking Ohio State. We’re not talking big, established brands. You’re building something which is entrepreneurial — I know we’ll get to that. Another part of it is at a smaller institution, you don’t have the same — I’m going to call it — rules, rigmarole, structure. You have some of that at Gordon, but it’s not like at a place like Ohio State where you have to be locked down. Otherwise, it’d be chaos. Therefore realizing there’s probably so much value I can add in other ways to the school. So that was the professional part.

The personal part — my wife and I got up here and visited. This is a beautiful part of the country. I also know I’m going to love three seasons. We really got here and experienced winter. I don’t know about that one as much, but I think it’s justified by the other three. You’ll tell me. But, we’re excited about that. We’re just had our first child, and we just bought a house, and we get to settle down and enjoy this wonderful lifestyle with a better work-life balance in academia.

So all of that is, to us, a big package, which was what made it very attractive.

Paul: Alright, I guess it’s almost like a 180-degree turned.

Alexander: Dramatic.

Paul: Yeah, a dramatic turn.

Alexander: A lot of people actually challenge and say, “Usually people go the other way.”

Moving to New England

Paul: Yeah, exactly, yeah. So now you have a new job, and you’re here in New England in a new world, in many more ways than one. And for those of you who aren’t in New England, New England is an interesting place. You’re not considered somebody who — how would you put it? You’re a newcomer if you’ve been in town for 25 years, okay? And after 25 years, they sort of accept that you’re going to be there, and then you just automatically become a regular, a “towny” if you will, depending on the town you live in.

But it’s really amazing. My wife was born in and raised here, so she’s a New Englander, but for me, it was, against, get some of that by association, but now that I’ve been here over 30 years, it’s inconsequential. Resistance is futile I guess I should say.

So, you’re here. And you’ve been here since January.

Alexander: Well, I started in September, moved up in October.

Paul: Okay. Alright. So, not long at all.

Alexander: Less than a year.

Paul: And so you need to go out and you’re going to sell vacuum cleaners door to door. And you’ve got to sell 30 vacuum cleaners this year for $30,000 apiece. Is that right?

Alexander: Something like that.

The Entrepreneurial Side of Things

Paul: Yeah, you’ve started a new business, effectively. So let’s get into a sense. This sounds like Gordon is being very entrepreneurial with the department that is there. So this finance department or this role is saying, okay, let’s make a go of it, and you’ve got support from Gordon to do that, but you ultimately have to put the people in the seats.

So you’re on a process of that as you’ve been sort of peeling this onion, I guess. What are your hopes, dreams, concerns, plans? How are you going to…? You have a magic wand?

Alexander: Well, that’s interesting because at the moment people ask me, “How are you doing it all? How are you doing, physically getting all of this done?”

I said, “Well, at the moment, it’s just me, myself, and my dog, and I don’t have my dog yet.” So a lot of it’s just the chutzpah and the manpower. My wife would tell you I don’t sleep enough working many days a week. But all of this is great and exciting.

Building the Vision, the Strategy, the Execution, & the Marketing

A big part of it is building the vision, the strategy, the execution, the marketing that get people excited. So a big part of the program for us is just sharing, raising that awareness that if you are going to a great school, and you’re in Podunk, Wherever, no one will know, because the big employers cannot come to you at a small school because you don’t have enough people to justify their time.

Paul: Sure. Okay.

Alexander: So part of the outreach is we have this great school. It’s a program custom-built for you, and it’s right outside the financial hub of Boston. When we talk finance jobs, Wall Street is, of course, what everyone thinks about. That is number one. Number two is a close between San Francisco and Boston. Lots of big companies either headquartered or large presence in Boston. It’s on our doorstep where we have all the connections. And we feel like, for some students, it’s saying, “You come to our program. You get this great credential that makes you stand out.”

So when I got an analyst role at JPMorgan, I was feeling I would have a stack of resumes the size of my hand. I don’t know how many hundreds I would get. How do I take that to a small pile that I might actually look at? Part of that would be if I see someone who has a differentiator like some Master of Education. That shows me they actually care about it, and they’re dedicated to it. You combine that to try to stand out in the market against access to the companies in your local backdoor with strong connections. We feel like that’s a very viable opportunity for a lot of people when you think about this is probably the first time in the last eight years that the businesses expect to hire one to two percent less college grads than they need the previous year.

Paul: So, I can imagine. Let me put this to you. You have people who, if you could get to them at that inflection point where they’re thinking “What do I do next?” or they’ve said, “Gee, I’ve got to do something with finance.” If you could be at the Starbucks when they just spit that out of their mouth and said, “Boy, I’ve got to find a good finance program,” you’d like to be able to sit down next to them and say, “What about considering this?”

So how are you doing that? Because it sounds like you’ve built this in your own life, this mentor system, the personal board. They may or may not have that. But it seems like you’re taking a much more holistic approach that, I think that maybe five years from now, you want to look back, and you have gotten a bunch of people that have personal boards that are advising them to go into this, and they could choose this smaller school to do this and be well on their way to a good career. So how are you thinking about that sort of instantiation or the realization of that, I guess, is what I want to say?

Alexander: So, in terms of how you would take that and execute it for a program like this, to me it’s stages. Take it as project management terms. Like, you cannot do it all at once. You’ve got time, cost, and qualities you’re trying to all balance and how do you want to balance that? Do you want to be average on all of them or good on whom of them? And what I would rather do is make sure we’re building a very strong, quality program and building it with a small cohort initially.

Building Connections For Gordon’s Finance Program

Alexander: So it’s how do you build school connections — a couple of key schools — and leverage it out from there while you’re perfect your messaging. And, we’re thinking about different cohorts of how do you appeal to the locals for the part-time program, build connections with businesses that not only will bring in students as interns or hire them but also will want to send it to their employees and say, “Hey, you should be aware of this program. Take it as a benefit.”

At the same time while going out to undergrads and connecting with them or looking at people that are maybe thinking about an MBA, and you could go to them and make the pitch of, well, instead of a two years and much higher cost, it will fit your needs because you can do it this way. So part of it just the bandwidth of building all of that marketing capacity and taking it to market.

Paul: So I think there’s some things that bear sort of digging into a little bit. So one of your market segments, if you will, is for the undergrads, to talk to them — “Hey, what are you doing next? This is an option. We’d love to talk to you and educate you through that and help you make the best decision for yourself.” And is that the nature of it? Because you go to a website, and it’s so impersonal. And you see a brochure, and it’s so impersonal. Are you trying to break that personal barrier? Are you saying, “Hey, call me. Email me. Let’s talk about your career.”

Alexander: Great question. So I think about it as how do I get change agents. How do I get advocates for the program? And undergrads are a great way to think about it because they are all at an inflection point when they graduate. Whether they go to grad school or get a job, they’re going to do something or take a time and go study abroad. They have to make a decision about something. And you want to, just as you said, if you could find the right people at the right time with the right information, it’s magic.

So senior year, for example, is the right time for people to be saying “Oh, you know what? Maybe instead of grad school, I’ll go work for a little while first,” or “I will consider my other options.” People are wrestling with those decisions. And they’re often wrestling with their advisors. You asked me back at Haverford, “Well, what were your advisors saying? Or your faculty members saying?” If you can make connections with people at the right schools — and it’s no different from any other business. Right? Who are going to be the people that influence for you? There’s only so much of your own time that you can go out and bang on door to door to sell the vacuum cleaners. But, you think about in social media today, if you could have someone on, who is a LinkedIn Influencer or who has got a huge Twitter network, someone like that… Imagine, on your podcast, if you got someone who is incredibly famous — Richard Branson sat down today — like he would sell your podcast to everyone else just by his name just being associated with it.

In some ways, if you can do that for us, if you could get some of the right schools around here, some of the influential faculty members, hopefully will help sell the program.

Marketing to the Business Professionals

Paul: Okay, so now, that’s definitely applicable to the undergrads, but then there’s also this other market opportunity which are professionals. And how do you think you can reach out to them? Like you’ve said, sort of going to local companies, I think that’s a brilliant idea, is to go where they are. But, is there any magic grand plan there?

Alexander: Part of it is, we think about it in different ways. So you could use maybe the geofencing term as a way to think about it. If you were tracking the people who are local to that area, either live or work there. So for example, I had one person who said, “Oh, two years ago, I had to fight traffic to go to BC to get their one-year master’s program. I would have much rather not have fought the traffic and just done it locally.”

So sharing that message and getting that out there is a very smart thing to do. But, of course, you’ve got to figure out the right channels, like for any business. How do you communicate what you need to communicate? Do you go on podcasts? Do you focus on buying ads on Facebook? Are you going to conferences and getting speaking slots? So I’ve gone to some of the North Shore Chambers breakfasts, having connect with the influencers and make that happen.

Paul: Sure. You could wear sandwich boards and just walk up and down streets.

Alexander: That could be the most… Maybe in the summer at the beach.

Paul: There you go. There you go. Definitely a challenge, and I think that’s why I sort of leapt to the “You’re an entrepreneur” because you have an idea; you have some wind at your back with the institution; but you really have an idea and some process, converting that into a business or a success is really a huge step to make that happen.

So, we’ve been talking with Alexander Lowry of Gordon College.

Alexander: It was a pleasure, thank you for your time today Paul. I enjoyed it.

Paul: Well thank you for coming in.

More Episodes:

This is Part 2 of our interview with Alexander Lowry. If you missed Part 1 “Masters of Science & Financial Analysis,” you can listen to it here!

Listen to the next episode, Part 3, here! We’ll be talking with Alexander Lowry about Ethics in the Finance World and more!

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