The Creative Capital Revolution: Eric Frost’s Blueprint for Startup Success | Venture Capital Series

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Eric Frost, managing partner at Demos and partner at Zeus Jones. They are a creative consultancy focused on strategy and design with a mission to keep creativity at the heart of problem solving while envisioning future possibilities. They have worked with some of the world’s most iconic companies, including Nike, Apple, Chipotle, Meta, 3M, General Mills, Nestle, and Fidelity. They are recognized as a B-Corp, underscoring their commitment to ethical and sustainable business practices. And while that’s an impressive roster of clients, what makes Eric’s approach truly unique is his creative capital model at Demos, where he doesn’t just invest money but provides world-class creative services that help startups gain a competitive advantage. By helping these companies develop the best brand, story, and positioning, he’s essentially de-risking their growth and helping them stand out in emerging markets. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company, and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, founder, managing partner at Demos, Eric Frost. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Eric Frost : Yeah, thanks very much for having me on. I appreciate it.

Anthony Codispoti : All right, Eric. So you got your start in the earliest days of the commercial internet. After earning a graduate degree in creative writing in San Francisco, you joined an interactive agency building the very first websites for brands like Patagonia and Land Rover. Eventually led you to Sapient and then Fallon, big agencies, big name agencies, you know, top agencies at the time. Eric, I would love to kind of zoom in on this early chapter in your life for a moment before we talk about that creative capital model at Demos. So from your perspective, what was it like being on the digital side of brand building at a time when people still didn’t really understand what the internet was?

Eric Frost : For me, it was a dream job at the time, you know, getting to, I’m someone who’s always been an early adopter in my personal life, a lover of technology. So these brands and this technology and information becoming more accessible at the early days of the internet was a super exciting time.

At the same time, totally new, very wild, wild west. We were working through browser compatibility issues on these websites all the time. The website wouldn’t look the same as it was the tools were very archaic at the time.

It was very, it was a challenge. It was always like a creative problem solving challenge to take what the designers would come up with and translate that into the website at that time, because it was just the technology was so much earlier, it was harder to express the brand in the way that you wanted and deliver the type of even though that experience was breakthrough, the idea that you could say shop for Patagonia clothing on a website as opposed to a catalog was breakthrough. But you know, these are the best brands in the world, they’re very high standards for how their brands show up in the experience they’re delivering to consumers. And that that was very challenging. But you know, just like any new technology, it rapidly improved. And you know, by the time I was at Fallon working on say a website for BMW, you could do so much more than you could even just a few years prior.

Anthony Codispoti : So I had a business involved in the early days of internet design as well. I exited in 2000, 2001. And we were still dealing with a lot of browser like interoperability issues. Have those largely been resolved or is that something you still wrestle with?

Eric Frost : No, that’s largely been resolved. And a lot of the sort of archaic tools that we use to create layouts, you can do just about anything. I mean, you can do pro programmatic animation at this point, you can do do all sorts of stuff.

It’s pretty amazing. And now with the advent of AI and AI, being able to just custom code websites and applications for people, I feel like we’re to take another massive leap forward in the technology. And I stepped away from actually coding probably in about 2000 and three 2004. Oh, it’s been a while. So it’s been a while.

I haven’t been up to speed recently. And you know, whenever I encounter any of that, I’m so amazed at where things have gone to and what you can do pretty much anything is possible at this point.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. So can you remember a moment where it really hits you, Eric, that the way that brands interact with customers was completely changing, just unfolding in front of your eyes?

Eric Frost : Yeah, so when we when we were at Fallon, I think seeing how customers were starting to participate and actually starting to create and shape how brands were sort of operating online. So taking some of the brand elements and sort of recasting or reshaping them for themselves, be that in social posts in sort of as web 2.0 started to emerge or on blogs or remixing them on t shirts or clothing or things like that. We started to see even back then the early days of what we call like participatory brands where, as opposed to this idea from mass communications, where a brand is something that the brand besides they’re going to stand for this one thing and you you deliver that message over and over again through mass communications and you beat it into people’s heads. It really started to be more of a conversation between consumers and brands about what the brand stood for, the products and services that the consumers wanted from the brand and helping shape the future of those things. So we saw brands like Starbucks and Google and all of these brands emerging that weren’t shaped by advertising and mass media. They’re really shaped by the internet and internet culture, which was much more participatory, much faster moving and much much more of a sort of community feel like the community really felt like they owned part of that relationship with the brand as opposed to this top down mass communication model.

Anthony Codispoti : Was there one or maybe a small handful of brands that seemed to really pioneer this approach?

Eric Frost : At the time, you know, when we were at Fallon and thinking about sort of pioneering this new approach that eventually led to us leaving and starting Zeus Jones, we were looking at brands more specifically some of the kind of tech native or tech oriented brands like the Google’s and Facebook at the time, but even traditional brands like Nordstrom that were built on a much more service model like the legendary service was the thing that everyone talked about. So what we wanted to do was work with companies and brands and figure out what is that sort of most viral part of the interaction?

What is the most valuable part of the interaction that everyone else is going to talk about or pass on? So in the early days of Google, that might have been how much better Gmail was or how much better Google was as a search engine than anything else. The early Starbucks experience of like for the first time coming to this third space in the United States where it had these amazing products and amazing food and you really felt like you could hang out there and interact and really gather. Those were entirely new ways of building brands at the time as opposed to mass communications, deals, you know, banner ads, all those kind of things that felt very transactional, felt very one way and they felt very interruptive, didn’t feel like it was delivering a lot of value to consumers.

So we were really asking ourselves like, what is marketing or what is the way of building a brand that delivers and builds value that feels participatory and that invites consumers in to a deeper relationship, not a transactional relationship.

Anthony Codispoti : So I’m kind of going back through my memory banks and it seems to me that maybe all of this kind of got started or kicked off or was possible because of Facebook specifically. Was, am I right? Was that the only platform where there are earlier ones that I’m not kind of thinking of that sort of allowed this brand and consumer participation to come together?

Eric Frost : Yeah, I think at the same time Facebook was coming up, it was sort of like, you know, we sort of moved from web one, you know, we always refer to as that was the read era. I’m a passive consumer. I’m consuming this. Web two was right, which is like, I’ve been invited to now create. So from platforms like Blogger and Tumblr and early social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, that was where you really started to see this brand evangelism, people really kind of early days of what we would now would call influencing with brands, taking assets, giving feedback, new recipe ideas, new content, like that sort of interaction just became much more possible in those early days.

But yeah, you’re absolutely right. Facebook was one of the big cultural forces at the time. We spent a lot of time building up, you know, brand communities on Facebook at that time.

Anthony Codispoti : So how would you characterize where we are now with sort of, you know, the graph of this trend? And where do you see it going that may not be super obvious to the average lay person?

Eric Frost : Yeah, one of the things that I’ve been interested in, it’s funny because this movement has been maybe a little bit hijacked by the AI narrative, but I think might actually end up blending in the end with the AI narrative is so once again, I’ll revisit web one was read, I’m a passive participant, web two was was right, I’ve been invited into this thing. However, the sort of means of production, the all of the search engines, all of the data is still controlled by a few large parties.

It’s the Google that’s the Meta’s it’s the Microsoft’s of the world. Web 3.0, which a lot of people would refer to as crypto or blockchain, I like refer to it as web 3.0, because it does feel like this next iteration of the internet is what we’re calling the own era of the internet, where these communities, or people are invited into the actual infrastructure and to participate much more fully in the economy that’s forming around this next era of the internet. So the idea that communities are going to own and participate in value creation and value extraction is much different than a lot of the value accruing up to say a few very large companies, which honestly those same companies are dominating AI. So that’s why I think it’s going to be interesting to see how AI versus web three starts to play out, especially as we deal with things like data rights and data sovereignty, the blockchain in some ways, the very elegant tool to to deal with a lot of those problems.

If we have an immutable ledger that very transparently says this is where this thing came from, this is who owns this data, this is who created this art, etc. etc. So it’ll be interesting to see how those things evolve, co-evolve and how they continue to interact.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you maybe give a specific example of what it is that you’re envisioning or thinking about? You know, you’re talking about individuals being able to participate from an economic standpoint more. Is this sort of like the idea of like, I would truly own my data on Facebook and kind of lease it back to them kind of a thing?

Eric Frost : That’s a very good example. So if you think of medical data is very high value at this point. But consumers, it’s these patients data, they have no ownership over it, and they’re not compensated in any way. However, a lot of that data is shared or resold currently on the market by other companies that say might use that in clinical trials, or to set up research or to set up now AI models to do like sort of AI driven research for new drugs or different therapies or things like that. So if you’re thinking about someone owning through the blockchain, all of the medical data, especially it’s interesting because the most valuable data comes from the people who generally have the highest healthcare expenses. So people who have rare diseases or conditions or multiple conditions, that data is extremely valuable. And if we could help offset some of their personal costs, but also the cost of the system by valuing this data and sharing that value back with people, you start to create a whole different sort of economy and ecosystem around healthcare and health data and how that data is used and how the sort of value of it accrues to different parties.

Anthony Codispoti : What’s the likelihood of something like this materializing? Because it seems like it flies in the face of the incentives for the people who are basically in control of our data now.

Eric Frost : Yeah, it does indeed. Very much so. That’s why I think, and that’s one of the things that’s bad when you have a few companies that basically control the sort of modern infrastructure of the internet because it de-incentivizes innovation. So if you look at, there are parts of the internet that are open protocols, like for example, TCIP and email, and you still see lots of innovation and third-party tools and things being built on that. But what is the innovation to build tools and apps and things at this point on, say, Facebook? So there’s no real incentive for innovation there because Facebook controls the entire market.

They control what apps are or aren’t allowed in the ecosystem and they control all the monetization of that. So one of the things I think is bad about the current Web 2.0 system and the way it’s controlled is we’ve stifled innovation. In the Web 3.0 world, I think a lot of this is going to be consumer demand or people sort of moving towards better models. If, say, a company, a ride-sharing company spun up and you knew that the drivers through tokens or the blockchain were part owners of this whole system, I think a lot of consumers would preferentially move to a service like that because it would have more social capital because you’d know that these people were earning a living wage, it would be transparent, you’d know that they were owners partially in the system. So it’s a little bit like the traditional co-op model of, say, grocery stores where you can go, there’s a community ownership, the community has a voice, they’re able to vote on certain initiatives and help determine the future of the service or the business. So I think a lot of people would naturally gravitate, the nature of it would give you a competitive edge over some certain services that are in the market today.

Anthony Codispoti : Do you see anything either from a technological or a social perspective being a hurdle to still overcome to get to some of these ideas?

Eric Frost : Yeah, I think the reason why Web 3.0 hasn’t caught on and has a more mass adoption is we don’t have the killer app yet. I think in the same way that most people, like when I reference TCIP and internet protocols and stuff, are like, what is that? I don’t even know what that is because it’s entirely seamless and transparent to them, the internet just works.

I open up my browser, I open up my computer, that’s what’s great about AI too, I just chat with something and it delivers me this value. I think Web 3.0 is on the verge of getting to that point and all the apps and services that are being built that will seamlessly deliver where I don’t have to go exchange dollars for tokens and I don’t have to go open up a separate blockchain wallet in order to navigate these services. All of that will be done away with and you’ll have a more seamless interaction like you do with the current internet.

And I think we need to get to that point for it to be something that allows for that mass adoption and shift where we truly go from a Web 2.0 world to a Web 3.0 world.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, let’s come back to now Eric’s path. Back to Fallon, you’re getting a lot of great experience there. What was going on that gave you the inspiration, the idea to go off and start your own thing with Seuss Jones?

Eric Frost : Yeah, so I was working in a small group there that was Fallon Interactive, so it was really the people who had come from that sort of Web world who had spent a lot of their professional careers adopting that new technology.

Sorry, one second, I’m just gonna put out of a chat here. Adopting new technology, pushing the way that brands were being built, we were already sort of practicing these new much more dynamic ways of building brands, building services, doing all that stuff. So we were already kind of thinking that way, the larger agency was still stuck in sort of that more mass media mindset. So we were pushing the boundaries and really experimenting with how brands were built. We were doing things like branded entertainment where Amazon films, shoppable experiences, shoppable music videos for Nordstrom, obviously pushing the boundaries on digital and websites and how shopping was happening there.

Anthony Codispoti : But we were looking for entirely new product placement kinds of things. Yeah, inside these movies.

Eric Frost : Yeah, so it was everything from Fallon was an agency that created what I think many people credit as the first branded entertainment films they created a film series online called BMW Films with Clive Owen where there were these action films. The insight was where’s the car the star and the answer is action films. So BMW partnered with all these, you know, from Guy Ritchie to Eng Lee to all these amazing directors to create short films that really featured BMW vehicles and then gave them away for free on the internet. So it was we just hit this point where it was possible to start streaming high quality short films on the internet. So it was a sort of perfect intersection of this insight of while we can deliver content directly to consumers, we can do this in a high quality way. It’s basically more exciting than watching an ad it’s content but it’s showing the ultimate driving machine which was BMW’s tagline at the time in the perfect scenarios of these action films. And you have this guy the driver Clive Owen who is on these missions where the car is really the tool that he’s using to accomplish these missions. Gotcha.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. So you guys were at Ballon you were kind of pushing the boundaries on all this and you wanted to do more of it. That was kind of the reason to go off and do your own thing.

Eric Frost : Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And there it’s interesting because there are different periods of sort of internet adoption like we saw. And you probably experienced this from the early times. There was this massive boom and then there was a crash in about 2001. Everyone started getting laid off. People were saying stuff like the internet was over.

Well, that was fun. But now the internet’s over. And then really everyone just quietly kind of kept building building building and then added this other layer of functionality that web to then created this boom, true e-commerce, social media, all that kind of stuff that happened. And web three has gone through similar sort of bust boom kind of cycles where everyone’s like, well, blockchain’s dead.

It’s like, well, everyone just keep building AI has seen similar narratives. So one of the things I’ve learned through my time as a business person is like, truly what the adoption curve actually looks like and the different stages of adoption of new technology. And to never really believe something is dead or over because really it’s just quietly building in the background and it’s going to hit mainstream inflection again in a couple of years and in a much bigger way. So that’s one of the things I’ve sort of learned, which is help me as an investor as well, understand those sort of bust and boom cycles and what signals to pay attention to and what signals to ignore.

Anthony Codispoti : I mean, that’s, I think you hit on something key there, right? Because the hype cycle, we’ve seen it over and over and over again, right? The early days of the internet, right?

Come 2000, 2001, when we had the bubble pop, people were saying, oh, yep, the internet was a fad. There’s no use. Like this is going to fade away. People who were actually using it and building on it knew that that wasn’t true. It was just the hype had kind of leveled out. We saw it with blockchain. We’re seeing it to some degree with AI now and it’s hard. When you’re in the midst of that hype cycle, it’s hard to separate the hype from the true value, right?

Eric Frost : That’s absolutely right. And I think the thing that’s getting interesting is the cycles are getting shorter as well. And it will be interesting to see what effect AI has on those cycles as AI makes culture and business and innovation move even faster. Like do those cycles get even shorter? Are we talking about instead of years, we’re talking about three to six months between these different cycles? Now it’ll be fascinating to see what happens.

Anthony Codispoti : And so as you guys started Zeus Jones and you were really aggressively excited about this new participation model, kind of getting the consumers and the brands to sort of have that conversation together. How was this received by the marketplace? How were your how were clients kind of opening up to it?

Eric Frost : Yeah, it was a really interesting time because a lot of people knew in the early days of social media and digital now having a very firm foothold e-commerce being being a force knew that our brands were being built and how advertising and how marketing was being done was changing.

So there was a lot of doom in the gloom. You’d open up advertising sites like ad week. And every week there’d be an article about the sky is falling, the sky is falling.

But the interesting thing was no one had any answers for what’s next. And one of the things that we’ve always been excited about is like being part of the voice and the thought leadership that helps people determine what’s next and helps take these big, especially traditional brands, usher them into that next position of leadership by bringing what’s next to them. So what we were excited to do was come out and really rewrite the rules of marketing and how brands were being built based on a lot of these examples that I mentioned earlier, the Starbucks, the Googles, even the Nordstroms, but you know, the Nikes of the world, how they were adopting this much more innovative model. And then we went and had those conversations with these big Fortune 100 companies.

And what was interesting is they were kind of, you could see them sort of relaxed in the room. We had this side by side chart that we used to say like, that’s the million dollar chart because we would, it would unlock projects instantly. So it took us a while to arrive at this. But when we got to the side by side, we literally said, this is the way you’ve been practicing marketing on the left. These are the new rules of what modern, how modern brands are being built.

And when we got to that slide, you could literally see people physically relaxed in the room. We’d be like, finally, someone is bringing me a new methodology and a new way to build my brand and to move forward. And I recognize all these things and I’ve been feeling them, but I don’t know how to get there. And so really what made Zeus Jones very successful in the early days and catch on was that fundamental philosophy and that side by side chart and that recognition of like, we know, and we can help transform you to this new way.

Anthony Codispoti : And what was that new way? What specifically were you outlining on that magical million dollar slide?

Eric Frost : It’s a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about. It’s like building a community around your brand, recognizing that brands are now participatory elements that your consumers want to have a say and they want to have a voice. They want to interact with you. They just don’t want to hear from you and be marketed to you. They want to tell their friends about services and value you’re delivering to them, not just the messaging. It’s, we had a very early mantra that was in all of our decks was like, actions speak louder than words. A brand should be built on the value deliver and what you do is much more important than what you say.

What you say can catch someone’s attention, but if you’re not delivering value, if it’s not a compelling product experience, if everything underneath the veneer of the marketing isn’t best in class, isn’t solid, isn’t amazing, they’re going to move on to the next thing because there’s now with the internet, they know all the options that are out there. There’s more options than ever. And you really need to stand out and deliver an amazing experience.

Anthony Codispoti : So for people listening, maybe they own a small brand or a big brand or they’re working at one, what’s a piece of low hanging fruit that you can give them? Like here’s something we see a lot of brands miss, you put it in place, it doesn’t fix everything, it doesn’t convert you into a unicorn overnight, but this is a big lever to pull.

Eric Frost : Yeah, a lot of what we do with our clients, big or small, no matter what size, is really look out. We pride ourselves on being very in tune with what’s happening in culture. And I think that cultural resonance is the thing most companies big and small miss. It’s funny because even startup companies, I think you have a founder who’s very passionate, they understand what’s missing or how to unlock or create a better experience in a certain market, they understand the culture in that moment. But as they build their company, as they start to scale it, they don’t continue to keep pace with how culture is evolving. So a lot of companies, sometimes they’re small, sometimes they’re big, very established companies, we generally sense they’ve lost sense and this happens more and more because culture is evolving faster and faster. They’ve lost sense of the cultural resonance of their brand, their product and what they need, how they need to be connecting to communities. So really what we do is the first part of any fundamental brand strategy we do is we’re looking at deep consumer insights, we’re looking at culture, how culture is evolving, and we’re bringing those cultural and consumer insights to those brands and generally reshaping what those brands stand for and how they’re delivering those products.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, now here’s the part of the conversation I’m really excited to get to is to finally transition into how did Zeus Jones sort of spawn this idea of what you’re doing at Demos? How did this door open up?

Eric Frost : Yeah, so I would say we’ve been doing Demos for about four years, so we’re about 15 years in, we were working with some of the best brands in the world looking at the sort of long-term strategies of how their categories are evolving. So we did a project with Nike about the future of sport, we did a project with Nestle about the future of food, with Mayo Clinic about the future of healthcare, you know, we’re looking at these big sort of category and societal shifts, sort of the ultimate version of that cultural fluency that I was talking about earlier, like how is the world going to evolve in this area in the next five, 10, 15 years? And because we’re doing this deep strategy that went all the way up to the C-suite, one of the things we saw is these big companies, you know, they have lots of resources, but one of the things that they’re not great at is moving quickly and taking advantage of opportunities and innovation. So a lot of times the way they’re realizing these opportunities is through acquisition, through M &A activity, buying companies that help them deliver or take advantage of these new value streams or shifts in the market. So we realized M &A was going to be a massive part of these people’s strategy, and I think that was the original impetus to say our best way to participate in that is to go out and help startups sort of build their services and build their companies in a way that connects to the way that we know these categories are evolving and the way that we know that these big strategic players are thinking about the future of these different categories and say food, transformation of agriculture in the food system, transformation of health, and transformation of say financial services and financial equity and things like that.

Anthony Codispoti : And so you start doing this, you start going and you know doing some work for these startups and you know kind of giving them this this big picture vision and all the skill sets that you guys have access to. And how rewarding was that?

Eric Frost : It was immensely rewarding. I think we we knew that we could add value. We didn’t understand what an unlock and an unfair advantage honestly, bringing world-class branding to these early stage startups who otherwise couldn’t afford this level of branding and talent and brand strategy experience would be to catapult some of these early stage companies to category leaders within some of these emerging categories. So and what we saw was that not only did that allow these companies to become leaders but it allowed us as a someone who was a sort of fledgling fund in this category to really get into deals we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to get into with some of the much more established bigger players in the venture capital space.

Anthony Codispoti : Are there other folks doing this kind of model? Because I mean the way you’re describing it Eric, it sounds like you know your work at Demos is almost like a cheat code for these these startup companies. It’s like you’ve got the vision, you’ve got the talents, you’ve got the skills, you’ve done this for brands that are just you know just starting to come about, you’ve done this for big established brands like you’ve got the playbook and you put that on top of you know a great product or great service that is in its early days and it’s like gas on the fire.

Eric Frost : Yeah I mean we certainly like to think of it as a cheat code and I think our VC and investment partners and the startups we partner with certainly think of it that way.

You know it took us a while to sort of refine and arrive at the way the model is now. There are a couple other firms that are doing it. There’s some friends of ours on the east coast called Bullish that are doing it but they’re laser focused on sort of consumer brands and consumer products. That’s where their expertise is. They’re delivering services outside of the companies that they invest in and we’re actually going to start to do that at Demos as well. Whether or not we’re investing with you we feel like we have a model that now works for early stage companies and that honestly was always a struggle at Zeus Jones. We struggled to make the same sort of financial structures that we were working with Nike work for these small companies which is why honestly investing made sense. It was the first time we were able to actually work with these companies because we had skin in the game.

Over investing suddenly made sense because there was long term value. It was a long term partnership but ultimately the next evolution of Demos now will be we’re actually going to build a small creative studio inside of the fund who will be directly delivering those services as opposed to using Zeus Jones resources. We’re going to take everything all the expertise, everything I’ve learned in my career and my founding partners have learned in their careers. We’re going to bring that into Demos but build a nimble team that works at the pace and the financial structures that work for these early stage companies.

Anthony Codispoti : That makes a lot of sense. When you’re working with somebody like Nike, they’ve got a budget that can support the types of talent that you guys need to bring in for these projects. When you’re working with a startup they could certainly benefit from your skills but they don’t have the same kind of budget.

Now you guys can get creative, the creative capital model that we’ve been referencing here. I’m curious how do most of these deals come about? Is this you kind of going around like knocking on doors or are they finding you?

Eric Frost : It was sort of us either through existing Zeus Joe’s relationships or looking at trends, investment trends, and then going on to finding startups that met that. I would say that was the early days. Now we’ve really established through the case studies and the work that we’ve done and the value ad we’ve shown with some of our companies in our very first fund. We now have a track record that basically is attracting people.

We have lots of people coming to us. So we’ll look at, I think we’ve looked at 1700 deals in the last six months to get to probably four investments. So we’re going through an enormous amount of these companies and we’re only picking the very best opportunities that have undeniable momentum. Where it feels like our strategic fit and the strategic advantage we bring to the table can truly be that unlock. And where we have connections to potential partners or big strategic companies that can also be a value add in those relationships as well. So in the ag space that might be a partner like Land O’Lakes in the medical space, it’s Medtronic and Mayo Clinic and people like that, that we can hopefully bring a partnership or at least the possibility of partnership to these investment opportunities.

Anthony Codispoti : When you say bring partnership to the investment opportunity, like additional funds in or like some kind of like a, I don’t know, like you mentioned Land O’Lakes, like they’re going to be like a co-packaging partner or what do you mean by this?

Eric Frost : Yeah, so Land O’Lakes has a massive co-op of farmers. I think in some form or fashion they have about 40, over 40% of the acres under management in the United States is part of a Land O’Lakes co-op in one form or another. So if you have say a new nano agronomy play that replaces insecticides in row crops, you know, if Land O’Lakes isn’t interested in what you’re doing, you’re probably not going to be able to scale that company because they’re such a massive player. So one of times what we’ll do is we’ll go to a partner like that and we’ll even vet the idea before we invest. That’s one of the ways we can uniquely do due diligence is we bring in those key strategic players through our relationships. And then we ask them, you know, are you interested in trying this?

Like, is this something you’d be interested in, you know, bringing to your co-op network and trying out? Same thing with a Mayo Clinic. And sometimes we look for deals who are already in conversation or working with Mayo Clinic and we know that we can even maybe further advance those or we know we can help, you know, make sure that relationship stays strong. But what we look for those true partnership opportunities where it’s about either co-product development, development of a new service or that, you know, that Land O’Lakes or Medtronic might be the end customer or even the end acquirer of the startup company.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s really interesting because it occurred to me that the big thing that you guys would be looking for is, oh, can they benefit from sort of, you know, being able to build that participation between the community and the brand. And I’m sure that that’s part of it too. But the big thing that you’re talking about here is the ability to connect them with other folks that you’ve got great relationships with.

Eric Frost : That’s absolutely right. And if they can do that, they’re much more likely to make it to that next stage down the venture capital chain. So the whole game is about how do we get you to the next stage of funding the next stage of development. And when those partnerships are enormously important as a part of that, that’s a signal to the rest of the market that these people are going to be a leader. They’re being taken seriously by the most important players in the market. And that creates, you know, a very advantageous situation for them. So we really see the branding as, yes, it helps establish you as a category leader, but with that comes an unlock of more investment, an unlock of more partners, whether it’s partners we’re bringing to the table or partner conversations they’re in, a tighter brand, a better story makes people want to partner with you. It attracts the best talent. So we see it as an unlock on numerous fronts.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you talk about any of the companies that you are currently doing work with, or maybe you’ve sort of completed your work cycle with them at Demos that would be a great case study? You’re super excited about what they’re doing.

Eric Frost : Yeah, there’s a great example of a brand and this one could maybe speak to some of the kind of connections and things we’re able to form as well. There’s a brand called Shield AI. What they do is they create what they call a physical AI agent. So it’s a device that goes in the corner of a hospital room. It has a camera and it has AI built in and it tracks every surface in a hospital room or an operating room that’s touched. And then as soon as someone steps out of that room within 12 to 20 seconds, it can use UV light to disinfect every space that’s been touched in the room. And it does it much more accurately than someone who’s manually cleaning or bringing in like just a UV tower.

So they’ve proven through studies with Stanford Hospital and with Loma Linda that they can 96% more effectively eliminate bacteria and bio burden. And that’s just the start of what they do. They also can monitor bedrails and patient falls and hand washing and ORs and tools and compliance and all sorts of stuff. They’re continually adding services to help these hospitals be safer, more efficient and just automating kind of the future of healthcare and healthcare intelligence.

So that’s a complicated story. So helping them tell that story in an effective way because it’s not just about disinfection. It’s really about the future of intelligence and healthcare intelligence and automation. So helping them paint that vision, connecting them to some of the players like the eco labs in the world who currently are involved in disinfection and cleaning in a lot of those hospitals. So eco lab is a client of ours. They already had some relationships there, but you know, we can help them on that front. But yeah, just rebrand and making sure they don’t look like they’re all brilliant engineers.

They don’t know anything about design and marketing. But if we can make them look like someone that would be partnered with Mayo Clinic or when Mayo Clinic looks at them, it’s like we’re proud to share their materials. We’re proud to have them associate with our brand. That goes a long way to making sure those introductions are successful. And honestly, they’re like a poster child right now for every time we talk to them, they’ve signed up 10 new hospitals. They’re like off to the races. They’re absolutely amazing. So that’s one of those examples of undeniable momentum when I say we’re looking for it’s like.

Anthony Codispoti : So it’s obviously more than just cameras and data, although that’s huge because you’re talking about being able to like direct UV light to disinfecting. And this is all sort of within the same unit. Or it’s a camera unit communicates to the UV unit.

Eric Frost : No, yeah, the camera in the UV is all in the same sort of small little box that sits up in the corner of the room and can disinfect everything in it.

Like I said, in an OR hospital room. And what’s amazing about them is as the smart what you know, we would call the smart hospital the future as you know, more patient sensors, all these things. There’s lots of disparate devices that don’t have a brain to sort of take all that data and input it and actually proactively act on it.

So I think what we were our vision for them and what we want them to do and I think they see this as well is to really be the brain that can pull some of these smaller more functional devices that can pull that data in process it make it meaningful and digestible to the hotel staff because I think one of the reasons that the shield AI device is catching on right now is because of post COVID hospital staffing is really difficult. The healthcare system is overburdened they’re really short staffed. So if we can bring in something that actually reduces their costs and makes it safer and reduces that burden on the human staff but also makes them feel like they’re safer as well at the same time they’re not going to get an infection from these improperly cleaned rooms or you know, dealing with patients. That’s why I think they’re catching on so fast and it’s like a sort of viral product at the moment because they’re just had that perfect market fit for the cultural moment we’re in where are you know we’re seeing, you know, a greater burden on the hospital system through all the what be it COVID or the other norovirus or different things that are going around. We have staff that’s burned out so people are exiting the healthcare space, but we can bring in the smart device and actually reduce costs and reduce that sort of staff burden at the same time.

Anthony Codispoti : So they probably had and tell us the name of the business again it’s it’s shield spelled SHYLD shield AI.

Eric Frost : Great.

Anthony Codispoti : We’ll make sure we include a link to that in the show notes. So I’m sure that SHYLD has their hands full just sort of tackling the hospital market which is enormous. Are there visions about like where else to take this what other industries that this tech could be applicable to. Absolutely.

Eric Frost : So I’d say that we like to say it’s like AI for healthcare spaces we don’t actually use the word hospital because if you think of the the sort of boomer generation the amount of costs. And then there’s the people who are going into senior care facilities and that that industry already being really short staffed. Obviously any sort of retirement home senior facility these devices could be in as well. I’d say those are like those hospital slash healthcare adjacent spaces.

But then you think of cruise ships which as we saw during COVID were enormously restaurants and hospitality spaces hotel rooms all the places where you felt most vulnerable during COVID are amazing sort of early markets for this technology honestly.

Anthony Codispoti : Let’s talk about 3D printed batteries. Oh yeah. You’ve got to get somebody in your portfolio that you’re pretty excited about in that space.

Eric Frost : Yes very interesting company they’re called material. The first company in the world to ever successfully print a lithium ion battery. What’s interesting about that is you know obviously the majority of our battery infrastructure right now is overseas and as we know with tariffs and foreign relations our supply chain is getting more and more complicated so building out efficiently building out a domestic supply chain for batteries that are don’t look like Tesla’s Gigafactory they look like small 3D printers.

You know that you can easily scale up that are portable that you can move to different spaces that’s really exciting. But I think what’s especially exciting about what materials doing when they 3D print batteries is they can do what’s called conformal printing so they can print the battery to fit the product not the other way around. So instead of having to design your product around existing battery form factors and shapes they can 3D print a battery that fits in the empty spaces or the available space of your product. So you’re getting better power density lower weight a lot of design freedom in the way your product looks the way it’s shaped you know the way it so when we think of next gen wearables like augmented reality glasses small earbuds drones things like that that have limited capacity. This is the perfect technology for any of those kind of emerging next gen tech spaces.

Anthony Codispoti : So I don’t understand the construction of your typical battery. Obviously there’s some sort of the part that’s the actual fuel cell right but then there’s some wiring that goes to it you’re not 3D printing the wiring but you’re 3D printing everything that the wiring connects into is that an accurate way to think about it.

Eric Frost : Yes so so if you think of a traditional battery like a double a battery even not not just talking about the batteries that go in your Tesla or whatever. Think of a battery there’s that round part on the top that they call a current collector.

They’ve actually eliminated that in addition. So what they do is they have what are called nano wires that turn the entire surface of the battery into something that charges or discharges. So that’s part of what allows them to shape freedom as well as these nano wires like we’ve gotten rid of you know there’s no jumper you don’t hook the jumper cables on to the current collector. Yeah it’s the whole the whole service of it becomes that sort of charge and discharge available surface so that also creates a lot of design freedom which is really interesting especially in these next gen spaces.

Anthony Codispoti : So something like what you’re describing and 3D printing in general in my experience is really great for prototyping. Do you see this being scalable can it not just be used to be like OK we’re visioning a new product what would it be like if we constructed a battery of this shape and size and put it here but OK now we know this is what we want now let’s make 10,000 of them.

Eric Frost : Yes, yeah so so it is scalable one of the things it’s scalable in multiple ways so I would say they can scale it up to produce if say someone needed 100,000 battery packs or batteries that that is very possible. One of the other things that’s interesting is although the first thing they printed was lithium ion they’re actually chemistry agnostic so they can print any chemistry of battery but what’s even more interesting is they can test those those new chemistries really efficiently so instead of having to build the facility to say do a sodium you know dry sodium cathode battery or I’m not a battery chemistry expert but there’s all sorts of new ones that are coming out. They can just print that for you on their existing 3D printer so you can iterate battery chemistry much faster without having to you know have the capital expenditure of building out factories.

Anthony Codispoti : Have you actually seen the printing process the manufacturing process.

Eric Frost : I have yeah yeah we’ve seen it fascinating to me

Eric Frost : in the lab they’re actually just got a new space and our scaling in their initial lab was was outside of Austin their new lab is in Miami outside or yeah in Miami they just got a new warehouse.

They’re installing multiple printers there to sort of scale up for their first product which will be coming out later this year, which they announced at CES in January so these are this is real some of the stuff sounds like sci fi but these are real things they’ll be in products by the end of the year and they’re currently in development with multiple partners for future products as well.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, one more is there another interesting portcode that you’re excited to talk about before the next parts of our conversation.

Eric Frost : Yeah, this is fun stuff like that. It’s super fun about this stuff. Yeah, yeah. There’s a really amazing company we’re very excited about which is funny before we stepped in the interview I saw them announced that China had arrived at a world first breakthrough in this space where I’m like this is very frustrating because this company minutia is doing what they call this world first breakthrough out of China for the last two years. So there’s a company called minutia that we invested in very brilliant founding team founded by a very passionate set of co founders who’ve been living over half the team has been living with type one diabetes. So they wanted to really develop what they felt like was a viable cure and the thing that they wanted in their bodies to deal with type one diabetes. So what they do is they take stem cells stem cells are very malleable so you can create stem cells that basically mimic the healthy cells from your pancreas that create insulin in the body. So they can inject in your forearm these stem cells which are totally safe they’ve been in in certain humans for two years in a small trial and your body just starts recreating insulin naturally again. So it’s effectively a cure for type one diabetes in this noninvasive outpatient procedure that they’re currently developing so they’re going into their next accelerated trial soon which will then be one step closer to market ready.

So of course you know there’s still probably a couple years out yet from the market but the idea that you know we have basically technology that’s been proven that stable and safe. They can cure type one and also eventually type two diabetes is amazing to me and participating in something like that and helping someone realize that vision is what makes the work we’re doing a demo so rewarding.

Anthony Codispoti : So let me see if I understand what exactly it is that they’re doing they have figured out a way to reprogram stem cells in a very specific output so that when injected into somebody they just know to go and start producing insulin again which is the problem that type

Eric Frost : one is that you can just make and regulate insulin naturally and the other exciting thing about what minutiae is doing that you know there’s a couple other companies that are also on similar past their their little further behind. Like I said there was this this announcement about them doing this with stem cells in China is what minutiae has that they have a nanotechnology built into those cells where they can use a very specific frequency of light to turn the cells off if there’s a problem. So it’s effectively a kill switch that they can turn off the stem cells and basically sort of start over reboot if they need to that measure of safety is really important when you’re dealing with something that can interact with the immune system of your body. So having that technology built in is honestly a game changer and it’s something that the FDA is looking at regulating for all cell therapies basically saying all cell therapies need to have this moving forward but a lot of cell therapies have not even begun the development of this kind of safety measures. So the fact that minutiae has this work potentially license it to other cell therapies as well is another reason why we’re so

Anthony Codispoti : excited about being even the bigger technology out of sort of the two. That’s right because it would apply to so many different use cases and and so how was the light actually applied. Is it like through the scan. Do you have to go in with a scope like under the.

Eric Frost : Yeah it’s it’s a through the skin. They have part of their technology as well as they have like these sort of unique shaped cells that make it easy to track where the stem cells are. So they they 99% of the time will just stay put but what they have this way of tracking and identifying through these very unique shaped cells.

So once they find those cells you just shine a very specific frequency of light. It sounds like you would encounter in your everyday life so there’s no. It’s not like you’re going to be walking around with this and think you’re cured and you’re someone’s going to shine a light to check your ID and you’re

Anthony Codispoti : I was at the movies and all this is going to turn off. Yeah exactly. So it’s a very very specific frequency. This is technology that’s been developed and is being used in other purposes and other applications as well.

So yeah you can just turn basically communicate with the cells and tell them to turn off. So you guys are in a very enviable position there at Demos. You’ve got the respect of large brands. You know big private equity and venture capital funds that know your work and know that you guys are the cheat code for you know a lot of these companies that they’re investing in. You’ve got you know what you say 1700 deals that you’ve looked at this year. You picked four like you could sort of cherry pick the best of the best. Where do you see this going. What is the future of Demos look like.

Eric Frost : Yeah so I think for us the future really looks like building up like I said that studio model inside and then scaling up to you know our first fund had five companies our second fund will have eight companies where we wrote slightly bigger checks. Our next fund will probably be 25 companies that we’re investing in. So being able to make a bigger impact by writing more checks maybe being more involved we’re sort of evolving our model to potentially provide ongoing marketing and brand support to these startups as well.

So not just a moment in time as they’re getting started but potentially through the relationship and as they grow. Yeah just scaling the impact that we’re making doing more in these categories to help you know transform climate Ag food and health faster than what we’re doing and ultimately like you said Zeus Jones is a B Corp. We’ve always felt like business should be a force for good in the world and can be an enormously powerful force for good in the world. So the fact that we can directly more directly impact these startups you know that are solving diabetes or helping hospitals be safer like the fact that we can make more of that kind of impact is really where the future is.

Anthony Codispoti : Is there a reason that the services that you’re providing to your port codes now are sort of like just a moment in time and not ongoing is it just sort of a limitation either of your own resources or you know what the startup company can afford.

Eric Frost : Yeah part of it was a limitation of the economic model so the only way it worked as part of the initial deal you could afford our services but now we’ve restructured the services in a way that I think they’re more affordable in an ongoing way. And as companies mature through that cycle and they’re unlocking bigger and bigger rounds will still be very efficient. I think it could be a sort of ongoing partner for these companies both on the marketing and on the funding side.

Anthony Codispoti : Eric what is your superpower.

Eric Frost : I feel like my superpower is helping come up with innovative ideas that drive business. I feel like I’ve always been the person who can generate the ideas really quickly which is why I’ve been an entrepreneur a lot to my life and sort of after a while after starting four or five companies you start to get exhausted and realize I would rather just support other people. It’s a lot of work. But even even in part of that journey a lot of that is still generating these really innovative ideas for unlocking some of this growth and future things as well so I feel like idea generation really innovative breakthrough idea generation has always been my superpower. But I think a lot of that is driven by curiosity and what I would say is like just being curious and wanting to learn about all these new companies and technologies like I didn’t know anything about stem cells and nano tech you know four months ago but having to learn all about all of that so that we could properly do diligence.

Manusha as we were investing. If you can’t lean into that you’re not fascinated by that then this is the wrong industry for you because you have to constantly be learning constantly staying up with what’s happening in culture what’s happening in these markets. And I think just being relentlessly curious and consuming podcasts and media and everything you can get your hands on is a really important part of staying at the forefront of what’s happening at the bleeding edges of culture.

Anthony Codispoti : Do you think people are just born either curious or not. Or do you think this is something that can be fostered. And I’m asking as a parent. Yes.

Eric Frost : I think that it’s part partly a personality trait. Honestly but I do think there’s a lot of nurture built into that I think it’s the way our school system has evolved. I think maybe earlier in earlier educational models like a love of learning and lifelong learning was more often encouraged and now we’ve kind of gotten maybe a little over obsessed with passing tests and meeting metrics. So then that makes that that personal drive or the role of a parent in fostering that lifelong love of learning and teaching people how to learn. I think that’s even more critical if our education system isn’t delivering that in the same way that it used to.

Anthony Codispoti : Any advice either to parents or to employers or individuals who sort of say I kind of want to coach this and myself or those who are around me.

Eric Frost : I think people giving people and especially kids the time and space to go after what they’re passionate about. One of the things that I sometimes would get from my parents or people is like. Where kids being told for example here’s a good example like a graphic novel is in a book so you can’t read a graphic novel at school. I think any form of reading and a diverse set of reading across fiction nonfiction all of that should be encouraged. Anytime a kid or an employee or someone is really passionate and leaning into something understanding that that’s you know engaging them in their whole self and their interests and their passions and pursuits and encouraging those things. Be that outside of work and recognizing that that’s a valuable thing they bring to work.

You know they’re they’re outside passions or the things that they’re interested in digging into or diving into or learning more about at work encouraging those things I think is vitally important.

Anthony Codispoti : Quick fun personal story along these lines I’ve got two young boys nine and ten and we want them to read more and we’re fine with it being a graphic novel great find the thing that you want and go for it. But we decided to give it an extra level of customization so we worked on a chat GPT prompt to where it will create a story for them based on characters that it gives you know the kids give it and we’ll plug in sort of the grade level you know that it should be at the approximate reading time and you know five five question quiz at the end. And so now the kids are you know they’re not just doing one story they’re sitting down and they’re sort of building a series and a sequence and they’re taking the same characters to the next place. And the super proud dad moment sorry we’re going to turn this back to you in a second but the super proud dad moment was when my youngest started going through and making these stories and he’s like dad I think I just rather go write my own story like it’s not writing it the way that I want it and I’m like yes that’s even better go for it and so he ran up to his room and he made a comic book.

Eric Frost : Yeah very cool. I love that.

Anthony Codispoti : So we’re talking about a lot of your successes Eric and there’s been a lot of them I mean you guys have worked with some great brands you’ve got a fantastic model with the most going you get to you know pick from you know the cream of the crop. But surely there have been challenges in your life that you’ve had to overcome probably you know some serious. I’d like to hear about one of those how you got through it and what you learn coming out the other side.

Eric Frost : Yeah I think we sort of talked about my superpower was the idea generation. When I was in an advertising environment one of my early partners who I would go on who is my creative partner in that environment. And like any partner in a relationship people bring different skills and strengths to those relationships so my skill was coming up with the ideas and his skill was helping sort of shaped the storytelling and the presentation of the idea.

So because we have that relationship I never really honed those kind of presentation skills as you can imagine in my life now. When we moved to Zeus Jones there was no hiding behind anyone else or any account people or anything like that to present ideas to clients or to pitch your ideas and meetings. And now I’m constantly pitching startups pitching to potential investors that we want to come into the fun I have to get them really excited about these startups and tell these stories in a very rich and engaging way. So while I was a very good sort of written coming from a creative writing background storyteller presentations were a real sort of pain pain point and weakness for me. So in the early days of Zeus Jones I would you know stumble or potentially fail in some of these meetings and presentations and just not live up to what I felt like was the potential of the idea. And I really struggled in those days to figure out how can I get better at this and really just getting more more reps getting very very comfortable with the idea learning how to really truly internalize the material so that you can present and pivot and be quick on your feet as people are asking questions and engaging you. And then sort of starting to master that but then also helping other people as I had to mentor other creative people who were coming up in the organization who were struggling with the same issue. Figuring out okay I figured this out for myself and I’ve gotten very good at this I’ve had lots of exposure I presented at innovation conferences in front of massive audiences. I’ve done countless new business and client presentations.

I pitched the the agency and ideas over and over again. How do I now translate this to this next generation of people that was I think another challenge and another task of like okay it’s one thing to figure out this out for yourself. Now how do I teach this to someone else who might be struggling with in a similar issue but struggling for different reasons.

Anthony Codispoti : So part of the way that you figured it out was just more reps right you kept stubbing your toe and yes it didn’t work let’s try something else but did you have any mentors any courses that you took any sort of resources that you went to to try to level up that that skill set.

Eric Frost : Yeah I think listening to storytelling podcast but then also reading things like for example the book story by Robert McKee. You know that’s not about giving presentations it’s about compelling how to create the most compelling screenplay but even understanding in those situations like how to create compelling dialogue and how to tell a really compelling story from one of the people who had really mastered that in Hollywood and a book that’s considered the even though that’s not a marketing book.

Once again I think being curious and looking outside of your immediate area for some of those really interesting inspirations. I think things like that are great one of the startup leaders CEOs were working with just read Phil Knight’s book about his coaching career in basketball and said it was by far the best business business book he’s ever read. So I think looking at these adjacent spaces and taking Bobby Knight.

Anthony Codispoti : No that would be the coach Phil Knight is the Nike guy.

Eric Frost : Oh sorry.

Anthony Codispoti : Phil Jackson sorry Phil Jackson that it’d be Phil Jackson famous obviously of 90s and all that so yeah sorry. I misspoke Phil Jackson you’re right Phil Knight shoe dog Nike guy Phil Jackson basketball coach. Phil Jackson’s book and I think you know that there are lots of that would be a very unconventional sort of CEO style as well so I think there’s something really interesting about the energy that he brought to those teams. No. What’s something you wish more people understood about your industry Eric.

Eric Frost : You know one of the things we’re trying to do in Demos is bring an unconventional set of investors into the fund. So a lot of the people were bringing in our first time venture capital investors were sort of broadening you know the demographics or the profile of the typical venture capital investor. A lot of them are business or agency leaders. No people who have had successful business careers but want to continue to make an impact want to be part of a community that’s talking about all these things at the bleeding edge of culture and business. So I would like more people to understand that you can actually get it’s easier to get involved in venture capital than you think it shouldn’t be an exclusive club of West Coast very wealthy elites who are just enriching more West Coast elites.

You know it can be all sorts of people are involved it’s actually the best performing asset class of the last 20 years. So you know thinking about maybe moving a small part of your retirement or part of your net worth into something like venture capital. And I think you can find there are lots of different venture capital companies you can find one that’s really values aligned you can find one that’s investing in your local community.

If you want that or if you’re passionate about climate and food and health transformation you can find someone like us who’s investing in those thematic spaces that are personal passion or maybe an interest area of yours.

Anthony Codispoti : Well it’s a good question then like how would people get in touch with you. Follow your story contact you they’re interested in either your services or you know they’re interested in investing.

Eric Frost : Yeah so you can reach out to me through the Demos website which is Demos Demos funds dot IO that’s our website where we’re posting news about the new companies we’re investing in. We also have a presence on LinkedIn or you can find me on LinkedIn where I’m constantly posting news of the companies that we’re investing in the work that we’re doing for those companies and all that good stuff.

Anthony Codispoti : One more question for you Eric before I ask it I’m going to invite everybody to go ahead and hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app we’ve had a wonderful interview today with Eric Frost from Demos Ventures and I want you to get continue to get more great content like this. So last question for you Eric I’m curious to hear we had a nice conversation here I hope we stay in touch let’s say we do and a year from now you and I sit down because you’re celebrating something you’re very excited what’s that thing that you’re celebrating.

Eric Frost : We’re we’re imminently looking at our first what they call liquidity event which means an exit from a fund one company. And that’s really what you need to like show you know we have lots of on paper valuation increases you know we’re tracking in the top 1% of funds for every first fund but really it’s that return of capital to investors that’s that’s the rubber hits the road moment. So I think we’ll be celebrating that within the next year we have line of sight for one of those companies into into a pending liquidity event so we’re excited about that

Anthony Codispoti : probably don’t want to mention their name at this point I’m guessing I can’t really say but.

Eric Frost : Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. And once that happens like you said that’s sort of like proof of concept I would think that funds start to flow a lot more freely your way because it’s like, okay, we bought into the model up to this point Eric we see the value that you guys provide. And now, like their dollars and cents we can see it on paper to like we want we want to be a part of this right that’s that’s sort of the mindset.

Eric Frost : That’s exactly right. As soon as you do what you said you were going to do, then people tell their friends about it and recommend you tell the people and you start to have my partner who’s the financial guy who has the fund management experience has gone through this process and he’s like we’ll get to the point where people are coming to us saying, you know, I really want to invest. And that’s after generally you’ve delivered that value back to your existing investors.

Anthony Codispoti : It makes a lot of sense. Well, Eric Frost from Demos I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today I really appreciate it.

Eric Frost : Yeah, thank you very much. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Anthony Codispoti : Folks that’s a wrap on another episode of the inspired stories podcast thanks for learning with us today.