Triangle Tweener Talks

00:00:03 - Robbie Hardy
I met the matriarchs of the in of the auto industry, you know, these older women with, you know, really old gnarled hands and lots of rings. And I explained what angel investing was and you know, the two of them sort of held my hand and said, robby, you know, we're really good at giving money away, but we have no idea how to make it. Our husbands made it and sort of patted us on the head and said, don't worry about it, but I don't want my daughter or granddaughter. Will you come back and do this?

00:00:38 - Scot Wingo
Welcome to Triangle Tweenertalks, a weekly podcast by Builders for Builders where we explore the startup journey from the idea to.

00:00:45 - Robbie Hardy
The exit and all the lessons in between.

00:00:48 - Scot Wingo
With an exclusive focus on founders from the Triangle region of North Carolina. Tweener Talks is produced by Earfluence. Now here is your host, serial founder and general partner of the Triangle Tweener Fund, Scott Wingo. In this episode of Triangle Tweener Talks, we have an interview with Robbie Hardy. This episode is sponsored by Robinson Bradshaw, a full service business law firm with a passion for supporting the Triangle entrepreneurial ecosystem. Learn more about Robinson Bradshaw's startups and venture capital practice@robinsonbradshaw.com Also smashing boxes, a Durham based lean design centric digital transformation company. You can learn more about them@smashingboxes.com Special thanks to our friends at Earfluence who produced the podcast. Robby's story is one of resilience, adaptability and a deep commitment to supporting and empowering future generations, especially women in tech and entrepreneurship. Robby founded her first company in 1993 and sold the company two years later. She's helped build several angel groups in the Triangle. Most recently she founded Excel, which is a group of female angel investors that invest in female founded businesses. Finally, Robby reveals some exclusive sneak peeks about her forthcoming book. And if you're a fan of her previous books, you'll want to hear all about them. And now, here is my conversation with Robby Hardy, a 1990s era female founder, a good friend of mine and a huge asset to the Triangle startup ecosystem. Hey Robby, thanks for coming on Triangle Talks. I'm excited to sit down and chat with you. It's been a while since we actually had time to chat. We go by each other at conferences and say hello, but I haven't gotten an update from you.

00:02:28 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, it's been many years. Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:02:31 - Scot Wingo
Absolutely. So let's go back to the beginning. So you have been a woman in Triangle startups since I can remember.

00:02:40 - Robbie Hardy
Yes. Before you were born probably. Yes. My first startup was in 1993.

00:02:46 - Scot Wingo
Awesome.

00:02:47 - Robbie Hardy
Because I came from the corporate world so I had been there playing that game.

00:02:51 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. What did you do and where'd you go to school?

00:02:54 - Robbie Hardy
I didn't.

00:02:55 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so you went from high school into.

00:02:57 - Robbie Hardy
I went high school now and I did a bunch of courses. I just never graduated. I have lots of coursework work, but I never actually got a degree.

00:03:04 - Scot Wingo
Interesting. Wow, that's cool.

00:03:05 - Robbie Hardy
I know opportunities came.

00:03:06 - Scot Wingo
That's like the hip thing now.

00:03:08 - Robbie Hardy
Well, I know it wasn't way ahead of the curve. Yeah, right.

00:03:11 - Scot Wingo
Didn't think it was right.

00:03:12 - Robbie Hardy
Well, my parents. Yeah, they were back. It was okay. They were okay. Do what you do. But so I had opportunities and I also had to support my ex husband in graduate school.

00:03:22 - Scot Wingo
Ah, okay. Got it. Okay. So then you got some corporate jobs. Like what, what kinds of things were you doing?

00:03:28 - Robbie Hardy
So primarily it was in consulting to large, you know, Fortune 500, Fortune 50 companies building solutions. They were, you know, software solutions. I'm not technical. I tried to be, but I realized I was not good at it and I didn't like it. So I know enough to be dangerous. But I got in on the management side. So we'd go into, you know, Mobile Oil or GlaxoSmithKline or whatever and build a solution. The problem with it in the corporate world is that we get a contract to build some great piece of software and the management would change and we'd never finish it. And so this lack of closure became this big thing for me. We were doing sort of very successful things, but being able to actually finish things. So I started building legos when I was home so that I could actually. And I could read the directions, which I'm not a person that follows directions so that I could actually have something and say. Yeah, it was just an interesting experience.

00:04:30 - Scot Wingo
So you're a big LEGO person. What's, what's one of your favorite LEGO sets?

00:04:34 - Robbie Hardy
I have not done legos in years.

00:04:36 - Scot Wingo
Okay. But back then what was like, what.

00:04:38 - Robbie Hardy
Were, you know, you know, back then they were so. I mean, they were pretty simple. So, you know. And I just didn't.

00:04:44 - Scot Wingo
Like a car.

00:04:44 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah. It didn't really sort of matter. I just needed to be able to build it.

00:04:48 - Scot Wingo
You need to get something.

00:04:49 - Robbie Hardy
I needed to be able to accomplish. Yeah.

00:04:50 - Scot Wingo
So.

00:04:50 - Robbie Hardy
And that. Yeah. For my team. And why didn't build them with them? But it was, it was my therapy.

00:04:55 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And where were you in the U.S.

00:04:57 - Robbie Hardy
At this point, I was in. I started here and then in Chapel Hill, and then I was in Boston and Pennsylvania.

00:05:05 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so you're a native Chapel Hillian?

00:05:07 - Robbie Hardy
No, I'm a native of the. Of Massachusetts, north of Boston.

00:05:11 - Scot Wingo
Okay, and then one of the corporate.

00:05:12 - Robbie Hardy
Jobs got you here, so I came down here for my husband going to graduate school, and so I worked for the university. Actually, I worked for a daycare. I drove a bus. I didn't have a job. I was a kindergarten teacher. I didn't have a clue. I'd been here two days, and some guy knocked on my door at my apartment way out in sort of what was in the middle of nowhere in Chapel Hill, and said, we need a teacher. I'm like, okay, and let me teach you how to drive this bus. I'm like, okay. And so that's how it started. So that's how I ended up not finishing, because it was sort of one thing would lead to another.

00:05:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, found a job. Yeah. Okay, so then you're doing corporate America and then what led you to leave that and do a startup in the early 90s?

00:05:52 - Robbie Hardy
So I kept thinking there had to be something more. I was the always the only woman in the room, but I kind of didn't know that was weird because I didn't know anything else. It was the only thing I had.

00:06:05 - Scot Wingo
It wasn't weird, really. It was kind of the norm.

00:06:07 - Robbie Hardy
And so I just was sort of not feeling fulfilled and feeling like there had to be more. And I was being, you know, patted on the head about what a great job I was doing and how successful I was being and yada, yada, yada, and it just didn't feel right. So I was. I had decided I was going to leave and figure something out. And when I went to turn in my resignation, my boss said, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't leave. Of course I was a woman. And, you know, on. I was on the management committee, was a publicly traded company, et cetera, et cetera. So they said, why don't you take a leave of absence? And they kind of patted me on the head, which was very offensive. But I was smart enough not to tell them what I really thought. So I took them up on it and I took some time and I flew to Colorado and went hiking in the fall in the Aspens and sort of let them talk to me and thought, you know, I need to do something else where I can make the culture fit me and fit the team and try to build something. One of the things of building things in the corporate software world is you build the same thing over and over and over for different clients. And so I used to say that, why don't we do a product? They're like, oh, no, no, no. We want the billable hours. And so all that grind of billable hours or whatever. So I came back and I said I had figured out what the product. I thought that would make sense when we built a million times in the business and they became my first client. So I bootstrapped my first company.

00:07:43 - Scot Wingo
Interesting. Cool.

00:07:43 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. And so we. We worked for the client during the day, and we built the product on nights and weekends.

00:07:49 - Scot Wingo
Interesting. Cool. And that was here in.

00:07:51 - Robbie Hardy
That was here in Chapel Hill.

00:07:53 - Scot Wingo
What was it like a CRM system or.

00:07:55 - Robbie Hardy
No, it was a. It was a batch scheduler. So it was, you know, all the. And the fact of the matter, it's. It's still in place in somewhere. So. Yeah. Yeah. So it would. What we did is we networked PCs together back in the day when the PCs just sat idle at night. And so we networked them together because, you know, buying more mean frame time, more CPUs and stuff, was very expensive. So it was using the, you know, what was already there and making that work. So we had built this scheduling thing for lots of companies, but this was the first time that, you know, so my idea was, well, could we do this? And I. Yeah. And so we did. We built it.

00:08:35 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So they had some workload, and they would normally send it to a mainframe, which was.

00:08:38 - Robbie Hardy
Well. Right. So it's, you know, the processing of your bank statements, you know, your bills, you know, everything that would get batched.

00:08:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. You know, you guys made it. So instead of doing that, you had a cheaper one where it could go to a network.

00:08:48 - Robbie Hardy
So, yeah, the PCs, it was just. It allowed them to take another, you know, channel to process.

00:08:54 - Scot Wingo
Neat. That's cool.

00:08:55 - Robbie Hardy
Yes. Yeah. So we were at the right place at the right time.

00:08:58 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:08:58 - Robbie Hardy
As you know, who knows when that's going to be.

00:09:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And what was that company called?

00:09:02 - Robbie Hardy
CI Technologies.

00:09:02 - Scot Wingo
CI Technologies. Okay, Got it. Yeah. So you start that in 93. Was Ed involved in that?

00:09:09 - Robbie Hardy
Ed Whitehorn?

00:09:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:09:10 - Robbie Hardy
Yes. Well, he was. He was an investor.

00:09:12 - Scot Wingo
Okay.

00:09:12 - Robbie Hardy
So I. I knew you guys were connected back then.

00:09:14 - Scot Wingo
I never understood.

00:09:15 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. So we were. So I raised angel money. Ed Whitehorn, Richard Holcomb, Chris Bay. I can't. Anyway, a handful.

00:09:24 - Scot Wingo
Oldies but goodies. Yeah.

00:09:25 - Robbie Hardy
Oldies but goodies. Yeah. Yeah. Richard had just exited Hot, I think. I can't remember.

00:09:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, the timing gets all right. Cool. So. So you start this thing, you're a sole founder and you get some angel money and then tell us what, what happens on that journey.

00:09:42 - Robbie Hardy
So I, you know, I, I was, I was looking for space and trying to be very frugal. The interesting thing is I had come from the corporate world where, I mean, there was lots of money. I mean, we just threw money at things. You needed something, you just bought it or you moved it or somehow you acquired it. And I was not in that situation. I was trying to figure out how to do this by, you know, and I didn't understand. I mean, I had worked at M and A in the corporate world, but I certainly didn't understand it from the company side and so on, you know, raising money and all that was, you know, I knew about it, but it was not something that I was comfortable with. So I sat in Bruges in Chapel Hill and interviewed programmers that I put an ad on Craigslist or one of those awful things. And I hired the team and my husband was the chief technology officer, which nobody knew until after we exited because we have different last names because that would have not gone over. And so, you know, we just started building it. And my ex employee employer was, you know, having us do work for companies. We were just doing, you know, consulting work, building pieces, you know, for clients, et cetera. And so it looked like it was going to work. Was not cash flow, was not exactly like it should be.

00:11:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:11:09 - Robbie Hardy
And so I was putting some countries.

00:11:11 - Scot Wingo
You had consulting dollars.

00:11:12 - Robbie Hardy
We did, but the consulting dollars and the outgo did not match. You know how you have, oh, we're good, we can do this. For a long time I was putting payroll on my credit cards. You know, I actually, you know, there was some, you know, I didn't have a payroll. I hadn't subscribed to a payroll system. And so there was money in the bank and I used it and thinking, oh, I can pay that back in 30 days. Well, 90 days later. And so I did. And I don't ever, I don't ever want anyone to do that. Always have a payroll system. But it was just how, you know.

00:11:43 - Scot Wingo
It wasn't as easy as it, you know, to go with, like the big ones. It was a whole ordeal.

00:11:47 - Robbie Hardy
Well, yeah, and actually it turns out there was smaller ones that I could, but I just didn't, you know, and I thought, I can do that. Of course I can do that. I'm an entrepreneur. I can do anything. That mindset where that we think we can always figure it out. And do it better than everybody else.

00:12:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. So then how big did the company get?

00:12:05 - Robbie Hardy
We were 25 people when we sold.

00:12:07 - Scot Wingo
Okay, cool. And you got acquired?

00:12:09 - Robbie Hardy
We got acquired unexpectedly. I was in the midst of raise. I was talking to Mitch Muma at Inner south, and people didn't know I was this woman running a technology company. It was a little weird. And I had gone to a trade show in, you know, in Vegas and. Which was kind of an annual thing. It's now that. It's now the. It's more hardware. I forget what it's called. But anyway, and so I get a call a few weeks after one of those trips, and I didn't, you know, I didn't know who it was, so I didn't return the call, and I didn't return the call, and I didn't return the call. And then finally a call, you know, somebody I knew who had called. They said, look, these guys want to talk to you. I'm like, oh, okay. So you know how you get so focused in what you're doing? I'm not going to be distracted by whatever.

00:12:59 - Scot Wingo
And everyone wants to sell you something.

00:13:01 - Robbie Hardy
When you start a company, right?

00:13:01 - Scot Wingo
So you're like, they're selling something.

00:13:02 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, exactly. So, long story short, it was Seagate, the hardware company, and they had. They were acquiring software companies because they didn't like how Wall street treated hardware. They wanted that multiple that you get for software. So they were on this path to acquire a bunch of software companies. It was still a tiny bit of their business, but, yeah, it made, you know, Al Shugaard happy, and that's what he wanted to do. So we had this scheduling system which worked for them for the, you know, for all kinds of reasons. It was just this person.

00:13:35 - Scot Wingo
And it's probably good because it uses the hard drive. So it probably.

00:13:37 - Robbie Hardy
It uses the hard drive, and it allowed a lot of other things to happen for other companies that they acquired that were having issues that this solved. Huh.

00:13:45 - Scot Wingo
Very nice. Right time.

00:13:47 - Robbie Hardy
Right time, right place. Right.

00:13:49 - Scot Wingo
So the trade show was probably comdex. Is that.

00:13:51 - Robbie Hardy
Yes, absolutely.

00:13:52 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. My. My dad was a Cobalt mainframe person.

00:13:55 - Robbie Hardy
Okay.

00:13:55 - Scot Wingo
And he, like, would. He loved COMDEX and would go every year and come back.

00:13:58 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, you had to go every year. I know. You go every year. It was so cold and rainy. Yes. Anyway.

00:14:03 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So you started in 93, and then.

00:14:06 - Robbie Hardy
Seagate acquired you in 1995.

00:14:08 - Scot Wingo
95. So two years. That's a fast turnaround.

00:14:10 - Robbie Hardy
It was a very fast turnaround. You know, you know how it is for the acquisition, it was not as quick as one would expect, but.

00:14:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And then do you remember, was it like an all cash or did it have an earn out?

00:14:21 - Robbie Hardy
No, I remember very well.

00:14:24 - Scot Wingo
You know, remembers the transaction.

00:14:25 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. You don't. Yeah, you have to. All those steps to get there. So it was cash in an earn out.

00:14:30 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:14:31 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. They had so much cash. I mean, they had, you know, boatloads of cash.

00:14:36 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And sometimes when you're public, the only way to spend it is on acquisitions. Like the easiest way to spend money.

00:14:40 - Robbie Hardy
Correct.

00:14:40 - Scot Wingo
Especially if it can be.

00:14:41 - Robbie Hardy
Right. So. Yeah. So there was an earn out. So I was an indentured servant for two years.

00:14:46 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Was that life changing money at that point or like, give us an idea, like the zone of.

00:14:51 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, I can't. I. I mean, I've signed a lot of documents that I can't say what it is. It was life changing.

00:14:57 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Nice. Did that, did that. Did you change anything? I've known you and you haven't ever changed, so I imagine that didn't change you, but.

00:15:06 - Robbie Hardy
Well, here's the thing. What changed is that I was all in on this business.

00:15:11 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:15:11 - Robbie Hardy
And I had mortgaged my house and we were close to foreclosure.

00:15:16 - Scot Wingo
Wow.

00:15:17 - Robbie Hardy
So it was, you know, it was, you know, trying to roll with it and be, you know, cool and going. So, yeah, it was.

00:15:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:15:25 - Robbie Hardy
I get to pay off my house.

00:15:26 - Scot Wingo
So you went from the hairy edge of, like, days away from foreclosure to selling the company, even though you didn't return the phone calls. Hindsight. You probably should have returned those earlier. Uh, but sometimes that actually works to your advantage because they're like, you know, they.

00:15:38 - Robbie Hardy
They something they thought I was playing hard to get when I was just. Yeah, I was just oblivious. Right. I just didn't want it.

00:15:43 - Scot Wingo
So then you go like, boom. So now you can solve all your financial problems. That must have been amazing.

00:15:48 - Robbie Hardy
Well, yeah, it was. You know, it's sort of weird when you go from that, from one extreme to the other. So it wasn't, you know, anything other than being able to sleep at night.

00:16:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I found it's like, for. Founders have gone through that. It's kind of like my grandfather went through the Depression. Even whenever he had money, he would never spend it. So it was a little bit of that relatively parsimonious. I'm sure you didn't go out and buy a Ferrari.

00:16:12 - Robbie Hardy
You're just like, no, but I did go out and buy a new car. Yes. Which I then sold probably three months later because it was just, it was this Mercedes convertible that was just not me. I mean I love convertible. It was just not. Yeah. So it was like this is not me when I get in. And I'm like, yeah, so cool.

00:16:31 - Scot Wingo
So that kind of like course correct to yourself.

00:16:34 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. Well you just have to find out who you are, you know.

00:16:36 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, so you've sold your company and now you're. And usually there's a lot of pain in this part of the story. So now you've sold your, your. This thing you've committed your entire life to for. I know it's only a couple years.

00:16:47 - Robbie Hardy
Right. But you know how it is.

00:16:48 - Scot Wingo
Probably working 100 hour weeks.

00:16:49 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

00:16:50 - Scot Wingo
Just like.

00:16:50 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, you've like sleeping at the office.

00:16:52 - Scot Wingo
And both of you too. So this is like a Herculean thing. And then what happened when they acquired you afterwards? What was that two years like?

00:16:59 - Robbie Hardy
So it was. So there were nine CEO. This was. They weren't sure how to handle an acquisition. You know, it's not easy to incorporate it into the business. And so there were nine CEOs, nine CTOs. The CFOs were of course all gone and trying to. And I was the only one that didn't want to be in charge of this new division because I just wanted, I just wanted out. I'd already. I left the corporate world for a reason. I really wasn't anxious to go back.

00:17:32 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:17:33 - Robbie Hardy
So it was, you know, I learned. You learned completely different things. So I sort of, you know, enjoyed the learnings. Met some really great, interesting people, met some really obnoxious. You know, the hardware culture is very different than the software culture. And then me being a woman. So I really got the real full brunt. I had more discrimination and more issues after that. Where I was supposedly made it. It was just. But it was a cult. It was really. Nobody was trying to do anything mean. It was just culturally very different.

00:18:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Was that because it was different international cultures or was it just like the hardware world was like.

00:18:11 - Robbie Hardy
No, it's just. Yeah, it was.

00:18:12 - Scot Wingo
Women are dumb and can't do hardware.

00:18:13 - Robbie Hardy
Correct. Well, women, there's. Yeah. Women aren't in it. And if you are, get my coffee.

00:18:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay.

00:18:18 - Robbie Hardy
So I had that. I, you know, I got the coffee thing in a lot of meetings.

00:18:21 - Scot Wingo
I would have enjoyed watching them.

00:18:23 - Robbie Hardy
I was very polite. That's just like. It's right over there. Yeah, yeah. But I had already, I had already had experience in that. So for my whole career. So I, I knew that game.

00:18:34 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, cool. So you did Your, your your two years, they had nine CEOs, I imagine, because they had done a lot of acquisitions.

00:18:41 - Robbie Hardy
Yes, they did. Yeah. We were the 14th acquisition.

00:18:44 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Did you lean in and like tell them how to do it or you're just kind of like a little bit checked out at that point?

00:18:48 - Robbie Hardy
No, I, you know, you try to embrace, you know, you've got two years, seems like eternity that you're going to be in. And so I tried to embrace it and try to get what I could out of it. And. But I was. And it was, you know, I didn't. I'm sure I tried to tell them how to do it, but, you know, I knew I learned quickly that that wasn't the game. And my colleagues were all, you know, the battle to be the one, you know, left standing was. So I kept volunteering. I'm good, you know, I don't need to do that. So I'll take a check. Yeah, I'll do something else. So I didn't. I probably took a much lower profile role and I worked on a couple of things because I just didn't, you know, I didn't want to go back to that.

00:19:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:19:31 - Robbie Hardy
And so I was trying to make it clear, you know, I did everything I was supposed to. I mean, obviously we had a lot of money on the line, so.

00:19:38 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Did that earn out period, end up being okay or everything was fine outs where they totally hose you over?

00:19:43 - Robbie Hardy
No, they did not. No. So here's. And the other thing is that when I'm. I knew enough from my corporate experience. So when the acquisition talks happened, started happening and we started getting serious, I asked them if I could meet some of the CEO, some of the CEOs of the companies that they had acquired. Because I did want to understand having been on the M and A side, on the company side of M and A, I knew a lot of the games that can get played. So I learned a lot that way. And so, you know, all the feedback was very positive about how, you know, how the financial transaction and basically, you know, the salaries and all that stuff and taking care of the employees. You know, with Christopher, people coming from a startup to, you know, a big company, it's a big, you know, big change. They have all these benefits that they didn't have before.

00:20:33 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, cool. Okay. So you did your two years at that point, were you thinking about your next thing or did you just do your two years and then.

00:20:40 - Robbie Hardy
No, I was always. No, of course not. No, I was thinking about, you know, I. When I. Ray Allen was a guy Who I met when I was trying to raise angel money. And Ray did not invest in the company, but he helped me. I told him I thought my weakest point was marketing. And he said, let's put in a marketing advisory board together. And he put these people together, and we'd meet every three weeks or so. He would organize it. They made introductions. I mean, he was amazing.

00:21:13 - Scot Wingo
And Ray Allen.

00:21:14 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, he founded CII.

00:21:16 - Scot Wingo
Right.

00:21:17 - Robbie Hardy
And it. CII still exists. Expounded it in 81. And it's still going.

00:21:21 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, I need to add him to my. Yeah, my OG level.

00:21:24 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, exactly. So. And, you know, I learned from him and just from everyone that my investors had been people that had been successful before and then had, you know, which is not. Obviously not unusual. And so I was really into paying it forward. And Fred Hutcheson was my lawyer. And so he started making introductions because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, so wanted to get thinking about angel investing again, which I thought I knew a lot about, but I didn't. It's always different when you're on the other side of either of these desks. But so I started doing some angel investing.

00:22:03 - Scot Wingo
And so it's probably like 1997 around this time.

00:22:07 - Robbie Hardy
So it was. I started angel investing in 95. I went. I did my first investment, I think it was in Ganymede, Tim Huntley. And then another one was with aluminum, which went. Which I put into bankruptcy. I was on their board and ended up years later putting it into bankruptcy because they were just ahead of their time. You know, it was immersed immersion technology. Big domes of. You know, and you'd go in and you could do, you know, flight simulation, et cetera.

00:22:34 - Scot Wingo
I don't remember that one. That must have been one of the UNC graphics people or something.

00:22:38 - Robbie Hardy
No, it was. Well, I think. Yeah, they were. The founders were from unc, but it was. Yeah, came up. Has had a very weird history. But anyway, they had. They just were. They had great technology. They were just way ahead of their time. And they raised $25 million. And, you know, it's the. You know, you get all that money and using it wisely is not always what happens.

00:23:05 - Scot Wingo
Fancy furniture.

00:23:06 - Robbie Hardy
Well, just a lot of things that, you know, when they really needed money, it wasn't there until the investors were. And of course, back then, that was a lot of money.

00:23:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Ganymede had a good outcome.

00:23:15 - Robbie Hardy
They certainly did.

00:23:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, that was a good one. Cool. So you started angel investing, and then I ran across you when you started Atlantis. When did that oh, that was.

00:23:23 - Robbie Hardy
That was 2000. That was 2000.

00:23:24 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so we've got a lot of time to fill in there.

00:23:27 - Robbie Hardy
It's not that interesting.

00:23:29 - Scot Wingo
So 95 to 2000. What were you up to?

00:23:31 - Robbie Hardy
So I. The whole idea of angel investing. So paying it forward was really important to me. And so paying it forward by angel investing, but also paying it forward by sharing what I'd learned with others, you know, people coming along. So I started a group called CI Partners. We went from CI Technologies, which I sold to CI Partners, and there was cii.

00:23:56 - Scot Wingo
There's like, yeah. Why did the Triangle have so many CI related companies? I don't know.

00:24:00 - Robbie Hardy
Hard to say. Maybe we couldn't get you. We got. Once you got those letters, you were stuck. And so it was Ed Whitehorn, Dave Neal, Robert Dale, me and a guy named Leonard Homer who doesn't live here anymore. And so we were working with, you know, mentoring, you know, coaching startups and looking at them for investment, et cetera. So we did a lot of that in that time. I also was really heavily involved with ced, so I spent a lot of time. And I was also learning about angel investing. And because I was in TIG, I.

00:24:44 - Scot Wingo
Was going to ask if you're in TIG.

00:24:45 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, yeah, I remember. I remember you from TIG.

00:24:47 - Scot Wingo
TIG 1, 2 or 3.

00:24:49 - Robbie Hardy
I was in TIG 2 and 3.

00:24:50 - Scot Wingo
2 and 3. Or the time frames. Do you remember? Someone was asking me about this and.

00:24:56 - Robbie Hardy
I was like, so Tig. I'd have to look. But the last TIG was coincided with Atlantis. It was all in the same time frame. I think it was TIG 2, 3 and 4. I think there were four. I could be wrong.

00:25:11 - Scot Wingo
Was there a one?

00:25:12 - Robbie Hardy
So I spent a lot of time understanding that and then spending time doing lunch and learns for ced, trying to get people to understand investors, understand what this was. So I went from sort of thinking I knew everything to thinking I knew nothing, to actually figuring it out and kind of putting the pieces together so we could talk about, you know, what is a term sheet because. And how do we treat entrepreneurs? And that was a big thing for me and part of the reason why being the only woman in my, you know, and very outspoken was hard for everybody because I don't remember. I don't know how you get treated when you came to pitch, but it was brutal.

00:25:55 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, TIG was like one of the hardest.

00:25:57 - Robbie Hardy
And it was something without cause. And I have never, you know, I have, you know, I don't care what it is, you know, your Opinion really doesn't matter whether you. I mean, because you don't know. Who knows? The pet rock is what I always use. I mean, who would have ever thought, you know, a lot of things. I mean, Google.

00:26:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:26:14 - Robbie Hardy
And so, you know, passing judgment and touting your expertise and name dropping and, you know, calling them, you know, and just being rude. And it was hard. And so I was trying to change that, you know, and so part of the way I was trying to change it was trying to educate these people who wanted to be angel investors about what did it really mean? What is. You know, I did all this stuff. What is a term sheet, what is this, you know, what is convertible debt, yada, yada, yada. But what is it that we do when we meet and talk to entrepreneurs about what they're doing and how can we help them, etc. So, yeah, that became a huge. Still a big passion of mine. So I don't handle it well when that doesn't happen.

00:26:55 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, it's gotten a lot better.

00:26:57 - Robbie Hardy
It has. But there are. Trust me, there are plenty of places where it happens.

00:27:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I kind of wish Tig still existed so people knew how. Well, they. When they complained to me, I'm like.

00:27:05 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, you have no idea. Right.

00:27:07 - Scot Wingo
Did you ever pitch that weird group in Charlotte that was, like, in this really weird retail building? They're, like, in the. You would go in, like, the back of this retail building. It was like, fake wood panel. It was very strange.

00:27:19 - Robbie Hardy
I have no. I don't think. I think I missed that.

00:27:21 - Scot Wingo
It was like 10 old dudes, like, sipping coffee, just kind of, like, ignoring you, and you're just like.

00:27:24 - Robbie Hardy
Well, it's always. I mean, you know, it's always white men over 50.

00:27:27 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:27:27 - Robbie Hardy
Right.

00:27:28 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So CD. That was the Monica dossier.

00:27:32 - Robbie Hardy
That was the Monica dossier.

00:27:34 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. She had a huge impact on.

00:27:35 - Robbie Hardy
All right, Right.

00:27:36 - Scot Wingo
Obviously. Sprue. I remember meeting him when he was like a. Yeah. Cd.

00:27:41 - Robbie Hardy
Or.

00:27:41 - Scot Wingo
I forget what his job was.

00:27:42 - Robbie Hardy
I know I forget what he was doing. But it is interesting because he had. He was. Had already been. Well, and look. And Harris. What's her first name?

00:27:49 - Scot Wingo
Tracy.

00:27:49 - Robbie Hardy
Tracy. I mean, she was. I mean, I remember her. She was an interesting intern. Stacy Scotts. And I was so impressed with her. And, you know, I was. I started having sort of always three or four women I mentored or coached who I thought had a lot of potential. And so she was one of those women. I was like, wow. And, boy, does she go places.

00:28:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I didn't see her for, like, 10 years. And I was on a plane next to her. I was like, what are you up to? And she's like, oh, I'm managing, like, $100 billion fund. And I was like, what?

00:28:17 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

00:28:17 - Scot Wingo
I forget what the number was. I know sufficiently big that I can't remember.

00:28:20 - Robbie Hardy
She's done extraordinarily well.

00:28:22 - Scot Wingo
That was amazing.

00:28:23 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, she did amazing. So. Yeah, so it was an interesting time. And CI Partners was, you know, cranking along, doing a bunch of things, and we had another. Had an idea for another company. So that's what happened in the late 90s. Not that we already weren't late, but probably 1998, we started a company called Intrasoft, which later became KV Labs, which later closed. So it was one of these situations where bad hiring by me, for one, with our. For our sales guy. I mean, I knew better. I drank the Kool Aid. My gut was screaming. I thought. But, you know, anyway, so that's one. That's a bad position to have a bad hire. And also, the product was too complicated.

00:29:21 - Scot Wingo
What was the.

00:29:22 - Robbie Hardy
So it was how to, you know, to manage your PCs through the registry, and you could make these changes to the registry to do all this stuff. And it was very powerful.

00:29:32 - Scot Wingo
It's like a very early computer. Associates manage a network of PCs, kind of remove.

00:29:36 - Robbie Hardy
Right. And. Yeah, and you could do the PCs, and of course, you could do a lot of good, but you could also do a lot of harm. So. But we got the harm, and the product actually worked, and it was great. But I think the user, you know, there's a lot of, you know, you try to look at what went wrong, because there's more lessons learned when you fail than when you're successful. And so there were. There were just a lot of things. The salesperson was probably the icing on the cake. I recognized it. I tried to go out and sell it and do, you know, talk to. I was flying all over the place. And finally I just, you know, we returned the money, whatever money we had, and called it a day.

00:30:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, tell us that was 98 to win.

00:30:17 - Robbie Hardy
98 to just before. It may have been. Yeah, may have been 97 to 99. I did. I should have looked these dates up, but.

00:30:24 - Scot Wingo
That's right.

00:30:25 - Robbie Hardy
It's close enough.

00:30:26 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Well, it was, you know, it was good that you had the foresight to say, hey, this isn't working out. What's good?

00:30:33 - Robbie Hardy
Well, yeah, you know, I. You know, I stood on the street with a cop trying to raise money. I went and talked to, you know, I had made lots you know, that, you know, a big proponent of having a great network. And I happened to have built a great network so I could go talk to lots of people about what I could do with this technology. And it just, you know, it didn't. There was lots of interest, but you know how it is. And then, you know, death. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:56 - Scot Wingo
Everyone had the problem, but they're like, weren't sure.

00:30:58 - Robbie Hardy
Well, they weren't sure they wanted to step into that.

00:31:00 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, well, that stinks. So then.

00:31:04 - Robbie Hardy
Well, it happens, you know.

00:31:05 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So you had a. You had a win and a fail. Then, you know, did you dust yourself off and jump back in? What happened next?

00:31:12 - Robbie Hardy
So, yeah, we definitely did. And we had built some inside partners. We had built some technology pieces that got sold off not for big money, but just to kind of be the core of very various things. You know, again, more back office boring stuff than anything fun and interesting. And then I got serious about angel investing. And of course, I always thought there was a better way. And I also thought it was time for there to be more women at the table. So naive. So naive. Oh, my God. I wanted to. I was going to have. It was going to start somewhere. Yeah, you do. I thought I was going to have all these women and it would be women investors. It wasn't to invest in women because there weren't many women entrepreneurs to, you know, that was, you know, not a thing. And so. But I thought there'd be a lot of women. Well, I ended up with six. And that a fund does not make. And so that took me six months. And I realized that, you know, sort of waking up that this isn't going to work this way. And there was demand and people were saying, let us in, let us in. So I did. So like in two weeks, we had 80 people.

00:32:24 - Scot Wingo
So that was Atlantis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I joined as an lp. So I must have sold my first company by then. Yeah. Okay. 95 to 98. Yep. So I sold Stingray and I price.

00:32:36 - Robbie Hardy
When was 2000. Well, because Atlanta.

00:32:37 - Scot Wingo
So I just started auction over, I think.

00:32:39 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, well, because Atlanta's invested in Channel Advisor.

00:32:42 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, those are one.

00:32:43 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah. So that was. Yeah, yeah. Because I remember your signs. When you had Auction Rover. It was. Are you roving? They were all over the triangle. I thought it was such a great viral way to do that. And the name worked.

00:32:58 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:32:58 - Robbie Hardy
You know, so.

00:32:59 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, that was fun.

00:33:00 - Robbie Hardy
It was. Yeah, that was great.

00:33:02 - Scot Wingo
So then Atlantis was one of these type of where you buy these units and there's committed capital and it's kind of. It's like a syndicate.

00:33:09 - Robbie Hardy
Well, it's just. I mean, it's a fund. I mean you.

00:33:11 - Scot Wingo
It's a fund. It's a real fund.

00:33:12 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, it's a fund. But the thing that made it really complicated and weird is then you did this. So if the fund was going to put in $5 and the entrepreneur needed 10, then people could do. They could put their own money in to make up that five. So there was always these add ons. Yeah, that was. Herding cats was better than.

00:33:35 - Scot Wingo
And it was before you could just go online and spin up an SPV with like five clicks. So you had to go to the lawyers.

00:33:40 - Robbie Hardy
Well, no. Yeah, no, it would just go alongside. We didn't even do an spv. It went in. It just had to be accounted for. The accounting was like a nightmare.

00:33:47 - Scot Wingo
So they would each go on the cap table.

00:33:49 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, they would. Yeah, exactly.

00:33:50 - Scot Wingo
I remember that now.

00:33:51 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. But to you it was all the same.

00:33:53 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And then how much do you remember that Atlantis first fund was about 4 million. 4 million.

00:33:58 - Robbie Hardy
4 or 5?

00:33:59 - Scot Wingo
4.

00:33:59 - Robbie Hardy
And I forget. Yeah, yeah.

00:34:01 - Scot Wingo
What were some of the investments in Atlantis? One that you remember?

00:34:05 - Robbie Hardy
Channel Advisor.

00:34:07 - Scot Wingo
Did that one do good?

00:34:08 - Robbie Hardy
Did okay. You know, the CEO is kind of a jerk. Well, he seemed like he turned out okay.

00:34:14 - Scot Wingo
So you motivate people sometimes.

00:34:15 - Robbie Hardy
Pardon me?

00:34:16 - Scot Wingo
That's how you motivate people. That's telling their dumb and.

00:34:18 - Robbie Hardy
Right. Like really good. It was very successful. Wow. I have to. I can't. I should be able to remember. I was going to. I was going to go back there and look and I was. I was not doing.

00:34:31 - Scot Wingo
I remember being on some of the committee things and what I noticed was a lot of people gravitate towards biotech. Like in a lot of these groups there's always this like gravity to biotech and as a software person, I don't understand it. I mean, I get that and I, I don't like investing in biotech because I can't discern what's good or bad. Like.

00:34:50 - Robbie Hardy
Well, it's hard enough to discern what's good and bad when you're not doing that and you have to dig a really big hole and fill it full of money before you.

00:34:57 - Scot Wingo
10 years until you get FDA approval.

00:34:59 - Robbie Hardy
Exact.

00:35:00 - Scot Wingo
So it all sounds good because they're all curing diseases which.

00:35:03 - Robbie Hardy
Right. And I think there were. Yeah. I. In. It's still that. I mean there's a lot. Well, I mean there aren't a lot of firms that invest in biotech here, but. And they weren't then. But there was a lot of. I think there were a lot of people who had been successful who had come out of biotech.

00:35:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:35:16 - Robbie Hardy
And so that's, I think that's what leaned. Yeah. Because it was like. And they didn't, you know, they didn't understand software and technology and that kind of stuff. So there was always a big, you know, push pull for what was the best things to invest in.

00:35:30 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So that pretty much your full time gig running Atlantis for 2000.

00:35:34 - Robbie Hardy
Pretty much running, yeah. And sort of. And I had a, and I had started a coaching business. You know, I had been, I'd kind of made it more formal, so I was doing a lot of CEO coaching quietly. So no one would know because you know, invest sometimes. You know, investors back then didn't. Weren't really a fan of that and they thought that their CEO should know everything they need to know. So anyway, so that has been coached.

00:36:00 - Scot Wingo
It was a weakness, I guess.

00:36:02 - Robbie Hardy
Exactly. To admit. So. And I, I mean I still have that business and I'm, I'm finally an am only taking anybody that I worked with before if they have, you know, if they're still doing. If they, you know, have a deal or an issue or whatever. But by the end of the year, it's going to be over.

00:36:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So then you did Atlantis for a while and there was an Atlantis 2, right?

00:36:23 - Robbie Hardy
There was.

00:36:23 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And then that was about.

00:36:26 - Robbie Hardy
And it went on forever. I mean, Atlantis went on until 2015.

00:36:29 - Scot Wingo
Wow.

00:36:30 - Robbie Hardy
So when we talk about a quick. It just, you know, because of the, you know, we had, we had 2008, 2010, whatever. So I stopped being, you know, heavily involved probably, you know, after 2006.

00:36:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I remember like someone just volunteered to be the administrator for kind of like.

00:36:49 - Robbie Hardy
Well, we were, they were being paid. Yeah. I mean we had volunteered. Yeah. Yeah. There was, there was enough in the, you know, the fund had a percentage to go for that. So.

00:36:58 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:36:58 - Robbie Hardy
Yes. That prolonged life a long time.

00:37:01 - Scot Wingo
So.

00:37:01 - Robbie Hardy
And Chris Maton and I were still, you know, he was our. The attorney and he was great and did a lot to help access. Yeah, he's a really great guy. He, I met him when he was a baby lawyer, but I met all these people when they were baby lawyers or accountants or whatever. So. Yeah.

00:37:18 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Chris Maton may have more coffees than I do because I see him at half my coffee.

00:37:23 - Robbie Hardy
So therefore I think he's always been a big coffee guy.

00:37:26 - Scot Wingo
He is really networking a lot.

00:37:27 - Robbie Hardy
He always does it. Always, always. And he's a really helpful, kind, thoughtful, funny guy.

00:37:35 - Scot Wingo
He's very much a pay forward, which pay a lot of our lawyers are, which is kind of unique. You would think they wouldn't be because they want billable hours. But, you know, I think they see that it comes back.

00:37:43 - Robbie Hardy
They do, yeah, they do.

00:37:45 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so then you've been doing Atlantis and then that kind of 2007, you, you, you kind of phased out.

00:37:51 - Robbie Hardy
Well, so, yeah, I had already started working on again. It was this, you know, we could sort of see the economy sort of changing and, and trying to stimulate entrepreneurship. And so I developed, along with Theresa Spangler, who just passed away by way a. And other people, A Million Dreams Across America. And so it was sort of my baby. But we did it under, you know, under the Plaza Bridge umbrella initially. And the idea was to, you know, teach people about entrepreneurship in a way that they could just pop in and, you know, to something. So the UNC business school said, yes, you can use. They were, they partnered with me and we could use, you know, their auditorium in the business school. And I had Wachovia bank as my sponsor. So I was rocking. And then the financial markets imploded and Wachovia bank was no more.

00:39:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:39:01 - Robbie Hardy
And they're like, we'd like to talk.

00:39:03 - Scot Wingo
To you about this sponsorship.

00:39:05 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. And Wells Fargo's like, and who are you? And no, we're not doing that. So we had had a few successful, you know, these things were, they were an all day. There's. I still have so much of this material. But the good news is that the Kaufman foundation, when the auto industry and the financial market, you know, imploded, they wanted to, you know, do work in Detroit and Charlotte. And so I get called, they said, we hear you have, you know, from Monica sold. And she, this woman has this program. So I went and worked for the Kaufman foundation for two years as a strategic consultant and I took A Million Dreams Across America to Detroit, renamed it, rejiggered it, and that was probably one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had.

00:39:56 - Scot Wingo
Now, I don't know much about the million dreams thing, so tell me more.

00:39:59 - Robbie Hardy
So A Million Dreams is. So it was an. You'd come. It was an all day. And we had, you know, examples. You know, what we did is we built a hot dog stand together. Because when you have, you know, if you think about the hot dog stands outside of Home Depot, I mean, obviously not literally, but figures you'll be in breaking up into groups because you have all these regulatory issues. I mean, it's it's kind of an interesting.

00:40:24 - Scot Wingo
So it's a nice on ramp into.

00:40:27 - Robbie Hardy
Startups so she could talk about all the things you have to do. And so we would have lawyer there for a session on. They could ask questions. There was some, you know, it was an education and a lot of interaction and a lot of, you know, where you could go through and figure out how to do this and you know, there were all that type of thing and then, then there were follow ons after that every month until they weren't.

00:40:53 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So it was specifically for females or it was like.

00:40:56 - Robbie Hardy
No, no, it was.

00:40:56 - Scot Wingo
Anyone that wants to start a business?

00:40:58 - Robbie Hardy
Not in those days. Yeah, no. Anybody that wanted to start a business. And so we had not. We. And it was 95, so it wasn't.

00:41:05 - Scot Wingo
Even like high tech. It was like I want to have my own.

00:41:08 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. But we didn't get it. We didn't. You know, I think it was because my, you know, I was the technology person and because I was a woman. I was the technology woman. So I think so we. We didn't not have a lot. We didn't have lifestyle and if we had. Because we screened them and we said, well this probably isn't going to work for you for these reasons. So we tried to, you know, meet them where they are and not let them come in and not be able to.

00:41:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Is this somehow affiliated with the million cups thing or that's some other million.

00:41:35 - Robbie Hardy
Oh no, completely different. That's much like. Yeah, yeah.

00:41:37 - Scot Wingo
I don't know what that is.

00:41:38 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah. You know what A million cups. That's whole coffee.

00:41:42 - Scot Wingo
Okay. We used to have one here, but it's gone now.

00:41:45 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

00:41:45 - Scot Wingo
I tried researching it. Couldn't figure out.

00:41:47 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, well, they do it in Wilmington. Talk to Jim Roberts.

00:41:50 - Scot Wingo
That'll be a long conversation.

00:41:52 - Robbie Hardy
Could be short.

00:41:55 - Scot Wingo
Tell us a little bit about Teresa Spengler. So there's a Spengler family and they like did drywall or something. Is she part of that family or.

00:42:03 - Robbie Hardy
No, no.

00:42:04 - Scot Wingo
Different. Okay.

00:42:04 - Robbie Hardy
No.

00:42:04 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:42:07 - Robbie Hardy
No. So she was here and she and I met through all the CED stuff and so she and I. And. Oh this. So this is. So they were. She and I had a company and our husbands were also involved. So that's. There's another story.

00:42:22 - Scot Wingo
Okay.

00:42:23 - Robbie Hardy
Long story short, we did some great things together but we're both strong so we parted ways.

00:42:30 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. Because founder fit thing sometimes.

00:42:32 - Robbie Hardy
Well. And two strong women was, you know, know.

00:42:35 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:42:35 - Robbie Hardy
And the husbands kind of didn't want. They were like, you know, this is Stupid. So anyway, so, you know, she went off and did her thing, and we had created this entity called Plaza Bridge. So I gave her that and said, you take it and run with it. I was doing a million dreams and other stuff. So, yeah, I got it.

00:42:53 - Scot Wingo
Okay, cool. So it must been fun to be at the Kaufman foundation, because they're like, you know, all they think about is entrepreneurship. I really enjoy their content they put out and, you know, I'm sure you got in the belly of the beast. It may not have been as sort of like.

00:43:06 - Robbie Hardy
Well, it's like watching paint dry a little bit.

00:43:08 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:43:08 - Robbie Hardy
You know, because it's a think tank.

00:43:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:43:11 - Robbie Hardy
So, you know, the entrepreneur in me is like, okay, we're going to do this. And, you know, now you get it. All these processes. Anyway, it was a. It was a fascinating experience because when I first went to talk to them, it's in Kansas City, and, you know, I'm thinking, good barbecue. Well, I wasn't. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I was like, what am I going to do in Kansas City? And so, you know, I. The car from the airport taking me to Kaufman, and I'm going and I'm trying, and all of a sudden, there's Tiffany's and St. John's and all this in this plaza. It's like, what is going on here? So it was an. A lot of money there, you know, hauls of Hallmark cards. So it was a very interesting experience, and it allowed me to go to Detroit and do all this work. And then I got to work with, for the Good and the Bad, all the other foundations, you know, Ford and Kresge and Kellogg and all of those. So it was a lot of non. You know, for me, because I'd be like, okay, let's do this. And they're like, no, it'll probably take six to nine months. And, you know, I'm thinking six to nine days.

00:44:16 - Scot Wingo
But could you dial your aspirations back out? That's all I get from nonprofits. Like, that's exciting. But we can't do, like, any of that.

00:44:22 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

00:44:22 - Scot Wingo
Why not?

00:44:23 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. Because that's not what we do.

00:44:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:44:25 - Robbie Hardy
So we did. I did have some influence on him because I was annoying, and I. They figured it. Maybe if I do something, I would, you know, let her do something so.

00:44:33 - Scot Wingo
She'Ll get out of room.

00:44:33 - Robbie Hardy
Right. So. And so it was. It was amazing. You know, we did these, and there was a lot of money to work with because all these foundations wanted to have their name on this, you know, rebuilding of Detroit and stimulating entrepreneurship. So we did these sessions on Saturday mornings where it was open to hundreds of people. And people would come in on a Saturday morning early. Your head would be down anyway because you're thinking, why am I not still in bed? But these people didn't know what they were going to do, and they'd leave with hope. So I just got to work with incubators starting and accelerators starting. There was a woman's foundation, and they asked me to speak to them about angel investing. They wanted to do a fund. When have women investors? So I met these matriarchs of the. In of the auto industry, you know, these older women with, you know, really old, gnarled hands and lots of rings. And I explained what angel investing was, and, you know, the two of them sort of held my hand and said, robby, you know, we're really good at giving money away, but we have no idea how to make it. Our husbands made it and sort of patted us on the head and said, don't worry about it, but I don't want my daughter or granddaughter. Will you come back and do this again and let them be there? So that was a. That was a great experience, which was kind of the stimulus for me to figure out how to do a woman's fund again after my fail in making Atlantis be a woman.

00:46:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. What. That area, that time frame seemed to have a big impact on you. Are there any interesting. I mean, that's a good story. You know, did you. You know, I'm imagining these kind of grizzled UAW workers that are unemployed that may have an idea. Did you have any interesting success stories or you remember any stories from that?

00:46:27 - Robbie Hardy
No. Well, because they. They were. We didn't see them. You know, I was. You know, we were seeing a different. Where they weren't cohort. We were seeing a different mob every week. So we didn't really get to follow them. No. So it was a. It was completely different. So. And I learned a lot about that, too. It's. It really teaches you how to meet people where they are because they're so different every time and not, you know, have any. Any preconceived notions of what's going on?

00:46:57 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Cool. Did you go back and do the thing for the daughters and granddaughters?

00:47:01 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

00:47:03 - Scot Wingo
Did they ever do a funder.

00:47:04 - Robbie Hardy
They did.

00:47:04 - Scot Wingo
Okay, Interesting. Cool.

00:47:06 - Robbie Hardy
They did.

00:47:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So that had an impact. And then you wanted to start. What time frame are we in? Kind of after this Kaufman era.

00:47:12 - Robbie Hardy
So I was with Kaufman. I left Kaufman in 2010.

00:47:17 - Scot Wingo
2010.

00:47:19 - Robbie Hardy
And so burned out. Oh my God. I thought, I'm never going to work again. I'm not doing anything else. I can't. I was anyway, and the great financial.

00:47:27 - Scot Wingo
Crisis was like, it was kind of like Covid. It was like one of those two year periods that aged you like 10 years.

00:47:31 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah, it was. Yeah, it was hard. We did a little bit of work in Charlotte, but not nearly. I mean, the need in Detroit was just massive. And of course I went there thinking, I don't want to work in Detroit. I mean, I can remember being again, back in the back of a car coming from the airport and going through all this, you know, eight miles.

00:47:51 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:47:52 - Robbie Hardy
So anyway, but it. Where it all ended up working out very well and I met some very interesting people. Great experience.

00:47:59 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah, the car people are interesting. The whole.

00:48:02 - Robbie Hardy
And the whole city is very interesting. And you know, everybody. And all the people from the foundations and everybody's trying to do the right thing.

00:48:08 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:48:09 - Robbie Hardy
So it was very good.

00:48:11 - Scot Wingo
So it's 2010, you're done with Detroit, you're exhausted.

00:48:14 - Robbie Hardy
I'm done with Detroit. I'm exhausted. I headed to Hawaii for Christmas. My daughter and her husband moved there in 2004. So we would go there every year. We'd rent a house and whatever. And I was trying to think about, of course I was thinking about what I was going to do next. I was still doing my coaching business throughout all this, so that was always there. So that filled my cup in many ways. And my mom passed away while I was there. And so it was one of these things where my husband and I said, maybe we'll move here. And our daughter and our husband kept saying, you'll be fine here. You both can work remotely, you'll love it, et cetera, et cetera. So here is Hawaii at this point. Yes, we were in Hawaii. So we moved to Hawaii in 2011. And I was doing. I was still doing a lot of coaching here. And the six to five and six hour time difference was painful.

00:49:18 - Scot Wingo
And we didn't have. We had no WebEx or something.

00:49:21 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, we had the phone log me a lot of phone. A lot. Yeah. And there were. Yeah, it was just hard, but it was very interesting. But the other piece that happened is we've been coming to Hawaii for years, renting houses at Christmas and having a lot of friends and family come. And I got to know this company that, you know, this property management company that rented houses, et cetera. And so I was. Got to know the owners and they asked Me if I'd help them look at the business and see if there are other ways, you know, they could make money or whatever. So I did, and I discovered that they were embezzling money out of their trust account.

00:50:03 - Scot Wingo
Oh.

00:50:04 - Robbie Hardy
So that was like, okay. So the entrepreneur in me is like, I can do this. I don't know anything about this, but I'm here in Hawaii. I can run this business. So I took over the business and said, I won't turn you in. We'll figure out. You know, we had let everybody know, we're going to pay it back and I'm going to start another business. So Ann Miller, who I had done. Who worked for me, and then. And then she did Atlantis. She finished out Atlantis, and then she went off on her own doing stuff. So she was the same person doing all the, you know, the infrastructure and the financial. And I was the person in Hawaii trying to sort of manage it all. So I had a vacation rental business called Paradise Luxury Rental.

00:50:45 - Scot Wingo
That's a tricky situation to get yourself into, in and out of.

00:50:48 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, yeah, I know. It was. It wasn't without a lot of issues, but it was. It was. Yeah, it was interesting. And of course, the owners were used to whoever is managing their property being very subservient to them, and I don't do that well.

00:51:03 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:51:06 - Robbie Hardy
I mean, I can be polite in respect. Yeah. And so it was. But they, you know, I went and actually I flew and saw all of them. I met them wherever they were, if they weren't in Hawaii, to sort of talk about it. Because these were. These were, you know, significant, you know, you know, 12, $15 million homes. And so that part got settled and hired people and kind of changed it around. Added a co concierge service, because these people are coming and they didn't want to have to think about anything. So that really increased. That was what I was starting with the other person. And then President Obama would come to. We were living in Kailua, Hawaii, and that's where it was paced, and that's where he would come for Christmas. So we had the contract to put the Navy seals and all these people in houses within a certain distance of where the President was staying that it had to be if it was a situation room or the medical tent or the whatever. So that was interesting. So, you know, the thing of it is, is you just never know the experience that you might have when you say yes.

00:52:10 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, interesting.

00:52:11 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

00:52:11 - Scot Wingo
I bet you automated a lot of their systems, too. They probably had paper and you.

00:52:14 - Robbie Hardy
Well, the interesting thing Was. I mean, it was. Yes, but they were a bunch of new products. There were a bunch of products. And so we tried a bunch of them, and Robert would try to make it work for me. I'm like, I can't. You know, but eventually you just, you know, you had to. It had to work for so many people.

00:52:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:52:32 - Robbie Hardy
But, yeah, we found a path.

00:52:35 - Scot Wingo
You're obviously back here now. So then.

00:52:37 - Robbie Hardy
So I left there in 2013.

00:52:39 - Scot Wingo
What was the impetus for that? Why'd you come?

00:52:41 - Robbie Hardy
So we'd been there three years, and while we loved it, we just kind of couldn't find our tribe. And it was, you know, if you wanted, you know, we're foodies and, you know, wine people and whatever. And so that just didn't quite work out. It was great to be with our daughter and her husband, but so we thought, okay. And it was. And it was really hard. I mean, Robert and his brother had a business, and it was. The time change was just exhausting because that was in Virginia. So we decided to move to Napa. We'd spent a lot of time in Napa in our lives, since there were nine people. And so that would be five hours to Hawaii, five hours here. And so we moved to Napa, and that's where I wrote my first book. So I. Which was kind of another one of those things. I thought, okay, so my. The vacation rental business. My daughter and Anne carried it on until they didn't and they sold it. I had been in lots of wineries, and I thought, there must be something here I can do. I'm sure I can make something better, of course. So I started meeting with all these wineries and winemakers and whatever, and their biggest problem was not making money. You could put in a million dollars and come out with nothing. And it was just sort of so obvious to me. They were pouring most of it, you know, in their tasting rooms, doing. They did just an amazing amount of charitable events that are. They're assumed that they can. All these wineries can do that. So I did a little bit of work for doing that, but I couldn't charge them for it because it was just so obvious, you know. So anyway, so I did that.

00:54:19 - Scot Wingo
Bigger trades. You got some vino on the.

00:54:21 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. And so. And so then I started. You know, I had always been. Wanted to. There were three books that I had wanted to write. What I was trying to do is I really wanted to have an impact on women, and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I had tried a million different things. And I wanted to be able to change that world. And it obviously is harder than one thinks, but my naivete was that of course I can. So I decided, well, maybe a book. I'd done all this mentoring and I had done all this speaking, et cetera. So I started writing a book and. Which I knew nothing about. And so I ended up.

00:55:01 - Scot Wingo
Did you have a publisher? Like, did you do a treatment and then get a publisher wrote it?

00:55:05 - Robbie Hardy
So, no, I didn't. I waited. I didn't do a publisher. And then I got introduced through this weird circumstance up to this woman who was kind of. She was a writer and she was a coach. She coached people writing books. And so I met her, we hit it off. And so she helped me through. She would, you know, come, we'd meet and I would. And interesting. I couldn't figure out. I think it's being too. Anyway, I couldn't sit at my desk and write. And so I walk a lot. So I was. There were vineyards all around us. So I started walking in the venues and I'd think of all this stuff. Of course I couldn't remember it. So I just started recording on my phone and started transcribing it back in the day when it was not a lot of that, but there was some. And that's how that book was born. And she helped me and coached me, and I still work with her.

00:56:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, very cool.

00:56:02 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. But I did not. So I talked to publishers and again, it was like, no, I don't want to do that. No, I don't want to do that either. So I self published it.

00:56:12 - Scot Wingo
Pretty cool. Yeah. On like a Lulu or one of those. Or like the Amazon.

00:56:16 - Robbie Hardy
Amazon, yeah.

00:56:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:56:17 - Robbie Hardy
And yeah, Lulu was in a. In its weird space at that time. Yeah, I did. I talked to. Anyway. Yeah, that was kind of a weird time because that was 2016.

00:56:26 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

00:56:27 - Robbie Hardy
So, yeah, So I did that.

00:56:29 - Scot Wingo
And what was the book called and.

00:56:32 - Robbie Hardy
How did it called Upsetting the Table. And it was the first book and it was about. And I told it as a fable. It's actually, you know, a story where there were characters, et cetera. And it was about a woman climbing a corporate ladder and trying to help them. So I did it that way because I felt like people might be able to remember it better versus, you know, when you walk in the room, you do X, Y or Z. It's like, oh, Jessica did whatever. So the funny thing is, is that people would ask me about Jessica and other characters. And of course, when I was fresh from the book, I It made sense. But when I got away, I was like, who is. To myself, who is Jessica? And so it still happens today. So. Yes. So I. So that was the first book and the second book I just did in 23, which was called Fed up to Startup, which was the story of a woman starting leaving, you know, leaving the corporate world and starting a software.

00:57:28 - Scot Wingo
This is still Jessica. A new cast?

00:57:29 - Robbie Hardy
No, it's Rebecca now. Yeah. So there's all these characters because they come together in the third book.

00:57:33 - Scot Wingo
Oh, okay. So this is a trilogy. You're doing this.

00:57:36 - Robbie Hardy
Star Wars. Yeah. Right. So they. Yeah. So then the third book, which keeps other things keep getting in the way, is about women angel investing. And again, what I learned over the years about women is that they like to know what they're doing. They don't like to jump in when they don't know if there's enough water in the pool, where I probably will jump in and assume that I can fill it. That's not normal. And so trying to help them feel comfortable and not in a way that you educate them like they're in a class or anything, but through anecdotal, et cetera, et cetera. So I have it all outlined. I have it. I've got, you know, how do you talk about a safe or, you know, what is that? And making it so that it makes sense and they can, again, relate to it. Because I've been successful in the first two books where people comment, you know, the feedback I get is, oh, my God, that just makes so much sense. And they'll, you know, I can remember that now. And so. So it's helping them, trying to help them feel comfortable. Because my mission is to, you know, it has been that way for a long time, is to increase the number of women angel investors so that we can increase the money going to women instead of me bitching at all the white men that I would invest with. Why can't we do this? It was finally, I looked in the Mirror about 10 years ago. I was like, okay, yeah, this is your fault. So get on.

00:58:52 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, there's also a pipeline thing, and we'll get to it. But you talk a lot at university. We'll get to that. Can you tell us the name of the character of the next book? Give us a super secret preview. We've had Jessica and Rebecca.

00:59:05 - Robbie Hardy
The. Yeah, Jessica and Rebecca and Louise.

00:59:08 - Scot Wingo
Louise.

00:59:08 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, yeah.

00:59:10 - Scot Wingo
All right.

00:59:10 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah. Louise was an investor in Rebecca's company.

00:59:13 - Scot Wingo
Is this the first time this has been revealed?

00:59:16 - Robbie Hardy
Yes.

00:59:16 - Scot Wingo
All right, all right.

00:59:17 - Robbie Hardy
On. Right on. Here. Yeah.

00:59:18 - Scot Wingo
Super.

00:59:19 - Robbie Hardy
Yes. And so, you know, Liz and other characters. And Jessica from the first book is also going to come in there because she ended up leaving trilogy.

00:59:25 - Scot Wingo
It all comes.

00:59:26 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, well, we'll see. But it's really. I'm just lazy using those characters and. Because it's kind of fun to do that because it gives you some storyline and whatever, but they can help tell the story. So that. And what it could be, it isn't. I mean, it's aimed towards women because men are more able to, you know, follow their colleague, whereas women really want. If it's about money, they want to understand. So cool.

00:59:49 - Scot Wingo
And it's oddly autobiographical.

00:59:51 - Robbie Hardy
Well, it's always from my. It's from. Well, the nice thing is I can make, you know, I use the core of it is my experience, but I can, you know, tweak it up to make it more interesting.

01:00:00 - Scot Wingo
It's kind of fun putting it on other characters because it doesn't feel like you're talking about yourself, which is awesome.

01:00:04 - Robbie Hardy
Well, and you can also change things that, you know.

01:00:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:00:07 - Robbie Hardy
For whatever. For the good or the bad.

01:00:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. And then she married Tom Cruise.

01:00:14 - Robbie Hardy
And.

01:00:15 - Scot Wingo
He whisked her off to Hollywood. Okay, so you did your first book. You put that out there. And then. So that was 2016.

01:00:23 - Robbie Hardy
Correct.

01:00:24 - Scot Wingo
Then what did you do after that?

01:00:26 - Robbie Hardy
We moved back here.

01:00:27 - Scot Wingo
Okay, and then what was the impetus for that? Got burned out on Napa.

01:00:31 - Robbie Hardy
No. God, we loved Napa. I mean, it was. It was a really great experience. And it was another experience where I ended up meeting a lot of interesting women. Women winemakers. That's a whole nother world. And investors in wine. So I was. When I was there, I didn't know anybody, but I met people. You know, you meet people, you know, sitting at the bar and all the restaurants because your locals sit at the bar and you kind of get a different. You can sort of see what to have on the menu, and they help you out because it's expensive and you meet all these fabulous people from around the world. And through all that, I met a couple of women who were local. And I get invited to be in a book club. Now, I had never been in a book club my whole life because I was always working and traveling, and I didn't understand how that worked. So I said yes to both. And one was in the afternoon, which seemed very odd to me. How could anybody have time in the afternoon to do a book club? Obviously, that's why people have book clubs. So slow to learn. And the other were all women. Winemakers.

01:01:37 - Scot Wingo
Cool.

01:01:38 - Robbie Hardy
And, yeah, they couldn't be any more different. So I learned a lot about both sides of that coin. So it was. It was a great experience.

01:01:45 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Did it have you wanting to have a winery or.

01:01:48 - Robbie Hardy
No, I actually. I knew enough about that. I knew about enough about that not to. Not to have a winery. Yeah. Because that was another experience way back between when I left the corporate world and when I actually started. Or as I was leaving. And I started CI Technologies, which was a children's. It was kind of on the side, a children's clothing. It was a Color Me Tea for the girls and an Explorer bag for the boys. And I was, you know, I was doing. Making glue bags and sequin bags and pom pom bags in my basement, and it was all getting packaged together. And I had sold into Nordstrom and Bed Bath and Beyond and was thinking I was rocking it because this was to get kids away from the screen. This is back in the day. And little did we know what would happen with screens. And I was sick, and I started. I was looking at Excel spreadsheet, and I started. I was, you know, in bed. I had the flu or something. And I started looking at it and I started. And it was like, I'm not going to make it. This will never make money. You can't make money in volume for this. So it was one of those things. It's funny how you kind of recognize. So I've had a few of those. Recognizing that this isn't going to work.

01:02:57 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:02:58 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

01:02:59 - Scot Wingo
So then why. Why'd you go from Napa to the Triangle?

01:03:02 - Robbie Hardy
So Robert was. We were on a plane all the time. I had actually picked up some clients in Virginia. We were there that much. And so we decided we needed. We'd come back for three years, and then we'd moved back. So we rented our house and we came back. And I was not going to get back involved in the entrepreneurial community. I wasn't going to do anything.

01:03:23 - Scot Wingo
Didn't even tell me when you were back.

01:03:24 - Robbie Hardy
I was not. And so I got invited to something. It was at the. The Bull. The Durham Bull. You know, that used to be the pnc. I don't know who it. It owns it now. We have that conference space. And so I came in and I got in the elevator to go up, and there was Jim Verdonic. And I'm like. And he's like, robby, what are you doing back? Oh, you must be going to do the angel for the Women's Angel Fund. I'm like, so yeah, that was the end. Anyway, so I just, you know, one thing led to another. The business that my husband and his brother had got sold. So that's sort of whatever. And we just started getting back, and we had a lot of friends here, so we just started getting back, and so. And then the fires started in Napa, and we were very lucky. We came close a couple of times to the house, but not. And so then one day, somebody called us and wanted to buy it because they wanted to buy our house and another one to do a hot air balloon business.

01:04:27 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so we sold. Interesting. So you don't have the Napa property. It's a hot air balloon business.

01:04:34 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, well, actually isn't a hot air balloon business either, but it didn't work out. Yeah.

01:04:38 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so then. So what time frame did you move back to the triangle?

01:04:44 - Robbie Hardy
The end of 2016.

01:04:46 - Scot Wingo
2016. Okay, so then what'd you do between there and, you know, what was next? So you got back into the entrepreneurial community.

01:04:54 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, I did. I was. Yeah. And so I was. I did. I was doing a lot of coaching. Yeah. And I also started a million dreams across. No, I'm sorry. I don't know where that came from. Empowering women. And so I was, you know, I was working on a variety of things, and it was still my way to try to get women to be able to stand tall and on the room and increase their self confidence and know that they're enough, et cetera, et cetera. So empowering women together was born, and it was successful. I mean, I just did it on a whim. Back in 2003, when Wilmington was barely beginning as an entrepreneurial thing, we did. CED did an event down there, you know, sort of where the ocean meets the. Whatever, the future. And so I was on the planning committee, whatever. And somebody dropped out, a panel dropped out. And I was driving back from a meeting down there, and I had said, oh, I'll take it. So why this came about, I don't know. But I decided we would have 10 women, and we would talk about. Each would give a lesson about, you know, what are the things that you should know about being an entrepreneur or whatever.

01:06:14 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:06:15 - Robbie Hardy
And so we got these 10 women together, and we put this together, and we had the. And. And I knew it would be different to see 10 women sitting at a panel in 2003.

01:06:26 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:06:27 - Robbie Hardy
And everybody had a really, you know, it was very crisp messaging. This is what you do. You know, I still have the slides. There's hysterical. When we were finished, the room Was packed because the curiosity. And the first people thing people said is, why are you all wearing black? Now, we thought we had just imparted all this knowledge and you just wanted to say. But, you know, so it was. It was. It was successful, but in a weird, weird way, we went back the next year and did it and it was. What do we wish we knew last year that we knew this year and every. And I got them all to wear pink. Now that's. And this is not a group of women that easily wears pink. So it was that kind of, you know, we are here and we're not going anywhere.

01:07:16 - Scot Wingo
A little bit of a middle finger, like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:07:19 - Robbie Hardy
But it was pink.

01:07:20 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. That's good marketing. It got someone's attention, right?

01:07:23 - Robbie Hardy
Well, yeah, it wasn't as good as are you, Roman, but hey, any.

01:07:27 - Scot Wingo
Anytime you get someone's attention is. That's half of.

01:07:29 - Robbie Hardy
Right. Well, exactly. And so eventually, you know, it. I mean, it did. It started to change some things.

01:07:35 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And then how did that morph into empowering women together?

01:07:38 - Robbie Hardy
Well, that was way. I mean, that was long before that. But it was so. So I'm sorry. Yes. So what I was going to do in empowering women, I was going to bring back that 10 women panelists. Like a restrictive. Yeah. And every month there would be a different topic. So the, you know, I want to talk about failure as the first one. So I got as many of the 10 as I could back and filled in with others. And so that's how it started. So, you know, it was an hour and a half. Each of them would give their, you know, advice, they'd talk. You know, then it opened up, the interactive part being the majority of it, which is, of course, what I love. And. And we were doing it at first flight and it went from 30 women to 40 women to 50 to 60 to 70. And the room only holds 75. And it's not comfortable then. Yeah. And we couldn't go any bigger. And it just took off and it was just me. And I was doing other stuff, too. I was still coaching and doing. Anyway, so I thought, you know, this needs more than me. Plus, I was trying to start Excel. So I met some people and I said, you know, somebody needs to take this. And so. And now. So Bobby Francis or Frances. Bobby. Sorry. She thought, well, we can. We'll take this. And they're a financial advising firm whose name escapes me at the moment, which is not good. And so they started. Then they changed it. They did it to try to, you know, Give back to women and try to get more. Obviously they're trying to get more women clients, but so it still lives. And just in a very different fashion. But it was. It just was crazy. I mean, you know, if I'd planned it for a year, it wouldn't have happened that way. It just.

01:09:27 - Scot Wingo
It resonated, I think maybe.

01:09:30 - Robbie Hardy
So a lot of things have come from that. You know, other things. There's a lot of, you know, little kinds of things that are trying to do similar things.

01:09:37 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I think by, you know, 2003, it was too early, but by 2015, there was like, the pipeline was filling up and people were ready to receive your message better.

01:09:45 - Robbie Hardy
Right. And so this was in. This was in, like 2018.

01:09:48 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:09:49 - Robbie Hardy
At empowering women. So it was just. Yeah, I was using the 2003 as, you know, we took that and did that again and sort of. And it worked then, and it worked extremely effectively. And the fun part is sort of like when I get stuff about the book, I still get people saying, you know, I met my now business partner, or I met so and so at empowering women. I met all these people. So they made all these connections.

01:10:10 - Scot Wingo
That.

01:10:11 - Robbie Hardy
Which is what it was all about, so. Because the power of connections is powerful.

01:10:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. And you said that you were trying to start Excel. Say more. What's Excel?

01:10:21 - Robbie Hardy
So I was trying to start. It was nameless. It was going to be a women's angel fund. And. And I had been talking to people around the triangle, trying to figure out what was the right model. And I got invited to talk to some women's groups who did public investing. They did those investor dinners, and they'd invest in public companies. And so I would talk to them about what I was thinking, and somebody would raise their hand and say, what's an angel? So that's where we were. But through all those conversations and conversations I had all over the country were women were interested, but they weren't interested in putting forth 25 or $50,000 to figure that out when they didn't know better. And understanding equity, while it has a lot of complications to it, but that's what the lawyers do. But in theory, it's manageable to understand, but it was. It just didn't resonate. But everybody understands a loan.

01:11:26 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:11:26 - Robbie Hardy
And having been involved with so many companies over the years, you know, there's plenty of things that companies need that equity isn't necessarily required. If you need to be able to buy more volume or you need to be able to buy, you know, more buck and whatever it is that you need to, you know, use money for. And in my humble opinion, it teaches people about managing money and it's other people's money and how do you not abuse it and how do you make it work and how do you leverage it and all that kind of stuff. So that's how it came about.

01:11:57 - Scot Wingo
So it's good for first time investors because if you're a first time angel investor, as you learned at Atlantis, this, you start in, it's like a 10 to 15 year payback period. That's a very long emotional period to have invested money. And then, you know that J curve they call it now and then also it hurts because you get your losses first. So you take this risk. You get punched into the face, and then after you're punched in the face, you get your middling returns next. So you're like, okay, I got a little bit of money out of here, but it wasn't what I put in. And then your wins come so much later.

01:12:29 - Robbie Hardy
Right.

01:12:30 - Scot Wingo
So what's nice about debt is you start to get some money back pretty quickly almost immediately. Right.

01:12:35 - Robbie Hardy
Like there's. We cut the, you know, so the buy in was $10,000 and they can get, you know, paid back twice a year. And still it's all, you know, knock on wood, even though this isn't wood. So it was a. It's a whole different, you know, it's like, how does this fit in the triangle model? So there's been a lot of noise and good and bad or whatever. And So I contacted 25 women and said, this is what I want to do. Will you come help me? 15 of them showed up for a meeting. 14 because one of them moved to London. So that didn't work. And so they worked with me. And, you know, they weren't all experienced investors, but they sort of found that interesting. And so, you know, we worked through and they got. I wanted their buy in or not. I didn't want it to be the Robbie Hardy way. I want it to be where all these women would understand it and could speak about it in a way that, you know, made sense because they really understood it.

01:13:38 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:13:39 - Robbie Hardy
So that was a lot. That was a much longer process than normal. But it came to. It came together in 2019. And it was a network, not a fund.

01:13:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay. So it's kind of like a syndicate kind of a deal.

01:13:53 - Robbie Hardy
It's. Yeah, it was just. Yeah. And of course it was. What we were trying to do was let women feel in control of their money. What we did to them is they had to not only pick the company, they also had to figure out how much, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So.

01:14:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah, so that.

01:14:08 - Robbie Hardy
So, yeah. So the. Yeah, so. So that beginning was. It was. It was interesting. So we'd moved it to a fund in 21.

01:14:17 - Scot Wingo
Okay. So just so that listeners and watchers understand, it's X, E, L, L, E.

01:14:23 - Robbie Hardy
X, E, L, L, E. Excel Ventures, ExcelVentures. ExcelVentures.com.

01:14:28 - Scot Wingo
Yep. And again, it's X, E, L, L, E. Whenever I tell people, they. They think E X. Yeah.

01:14:34 - Robbie Hardy
They think it's not the spreadsheet.

01:14:36 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, yeah. And then that's clever spelling is the E L, L, E nod to women. Yeah, yeah, that's what I assumed. But I wanted to hear from you.

01:14:45 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah.

01:14:46 - Scot Wingo
And Jennifer was involved in that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So it started as a syndicate in.

01:14:52 - Robbie Hardy
2019 and then moved to a fund in 2021.

01:14:56 - Scot Wingo
21. Okay. And it's still ongoing.

01:14:59 - Robbie Hardy
It says they're getting ready to raise fund too. So I. So I am sort of chair emeritus. I stepped away because it was really too much the Robbie Hardy fund. And, you know, I'm getting older and so, you know, you know, you need to always pass it, you know, you know, so it was. Not everyone thought I was, you know, just abandoning it and. And lots of bad blood, so to speak. But it has worked out. You just sometimes have to take that leap and struggle, whatever. But they have really figured it out. And it's fun to watch these women who are now on the screening committee or on loan review and who didn't know anything about it, but now they're comfortable.

01:15:47 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I've sent a lot of female founders to you guys.

01:15:49 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. And so it's. Yeah. And of course the difference is we can't take them too early. They have to have revenue because they have to be able pay loan back. So.

01:15:56 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:15:56 - Robbie Hardy
And we won't even sometimes, you know. And so with all. Most of the work is done, looking at, you know, how do they make money and all those kinds of things, you know, it's a very different due diligence than what you do for equity. So that was. That was new and interesting for me also. And so, you know, we also don't want to burden an entrepreneur when they think they need $100,000. You know, they can't afford to pay back a hundred thousand dollars. And that would be, you know, if they were trying to raise money, I mean, it would, you know, you don't want to burden their Books with something that you know is going to keep an investor from investing or them to be able to be successful.

01:16:31 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So what's the usual amount that you guys will do?

01:16:34 - Robbie Hardy
Well, they always ask for 100, of course, if that's your math, 25 to 100. So it is now it's mostly tranched instead of like you know, 25 milestone based or something. Yeah. So that they. So that there's. We don't get them, you know, out of whack.

01:16:52 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Good. That's a neat model. I'm sure. Do you guys think of it kind of like venture debt where you like to come in with a round or it can be independent. You're just looking at cash flows.

01:17:02 - Robbie Hardy
We don't come in with. We don't. Yeah. No, we don't do it with a round. Okay. It's. It's a unique. It's to fill some. Just help solve a problem. Some problem they have that can be solved with this, this amount of money or take them to the next level.

01:17:15 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:17:15 - Robbie Hardy
With this amount of money there's.

01:17:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Sometimes buying some inventory can be a good thing.

01:17:20 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. And buying some equipment or something. Right, exactly.

01:17:22 - Scot Wingo
Those are really good for a debt where you can kind of like tie it to a thing and of course.

01:17:28 - Robbie Hardy
You know, things happen.

01:17:29 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:17:29 - Robbie Hardy
So.

01:17:30 - Scot Wingo
So how many do you know? How many companies you guys have?

01:17:32 - Robbie Hardy
I think we have. I think there are seven.

01:17:34 - Scot Wingo
Seven.

01:17:34 - Robbie Hardy
Don't quote me on that though because it's on the website. I should know because they just, they just sent out the report of, you know, guess they're getting ready for fun too. And.

01:17:42 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:17:42 - Robbie Hardy
So.

01:17:42 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So female founders only.

01:17:45 - Robbie Hardy
They have to be. They have to be. You know, it can be. There can be men in the C suite but the woman has to have at least 50% ownership.

01:17:52 - Scot Wingo
Okay. And then it's a debt kind of component. 25 to 100k. And people go to the website to start the process.

01:17:58 - Robbie Hardy
They do.

01:17:59 - Scot Wingo
They have to have some revenue.

01:18:00 - Robbie Hardy
Yes.

01:18:01 - Scot Wingo
They have to have some precede. Kind of. I've got an idea is not a really good fit.

01:18:05 - Robbie Hardy
Well, unless you define precede is when you're going to raise $5 million. So you know that's.

01:18:09 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:18:09 - Robbie Hardy
I mean I've been spending time in the biotech world so it takes on a whole new level.

01:18:13 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. For me precede is like I've got an idea.

01:18:15 - Robbie Hardy
No, I'm with you completely. I just want for the audience to know that we really mean precede. I don't have any revenue.

01:18:21 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:18:21 - Robbie Hardy
And maybe I don't yeah, okay. I'm just getting. I'm just getting started.

01:18:25 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So you. You kind of saw that through the syndicate phase to Fund One and two.

01:18:31 - Robbie Hardy
Got the fund up and running and then have just. I'm still there as an advisor, you know, I help them do things. But it's run.

01:18:39 - Scot Wingo
Yes. So when you converted it to a fund, that solved some of the complexities of people having to decide.

01:18:44 - Robbie Hardy
Exactly.

01:18:45 - Scot Wingo
So then they just, like, would put X in.

01:18:46 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, they just put. The minimum is 10 million and. Right. And they can put more or less.

01:18:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Okay, cool.

01:18:51 - Robbie Hardy
And Pappas Capital actually is an investor.

01:18:53 - Scot Wingo
Oh, interesting. Very cool.

01:18:55 - Robbie Hardy
I've known Art for years. He was an investor in Atlantis.

01:18:58 - Scot Wingo
I didn't know.

01:18:59 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah, it was.

01:19:00 - Scot Wingo
Because I know I've met him somewhere. It must have been in Atlantis meetings.

01:19:02 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, well, probably. I don't think he was. He never. I mean, because it's not his. I mean, you know, he's a biotech guy, but, you know, he wanted to sort of see what's going on and he want, you know, likes to support women, so.

01:19:13 - Scot Wingo
Very cool. What. What size was fund one and what do you think fund two will be?

01:19:18 - Robbie Hardy
Fund one was under a million dollars. You know, it's. The other thing is, we couldn't have too much money to, you know, until we. The process needed to work before we, you know.

01:19:27 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:19:27 - Robbie Hardy
So fund 2. The goal is 2 million.

01:19:30 - Scot Wingo
Awesome. 2x is pretty amazing.

01:19:33 - Robbie Hardy
So now there's a lot more women that understand. I mean, there's been a lot of education that's happened. There's a lot more. And so now, you know, and women have learned, I mean, not that they didn't know this before, but there are more people who are sort of out there networking, and there's now a lot more opportunities here in the Triangle for women to, you know, come in. So, you know, a lot of conversations with all these other groups that are popping up.

01:19:54 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, we don't track it, but Crunchbase does. I think they say 23 to 30 of the tweener funds investments are underrepresented.

01:20:04 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, nice.

01:20:05 - Scot Wingo
Break that out.

01:20:05 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:20:05 - Scot Wingo
I think the biggest class is women. And then. Yeah, then the other classes. But, yeah, it's a. You know, it's been interesting to watch that. Just like, seeing the pitches and things coming in. The number of female founders is just up.

01:20:16 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, starting. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we had the pandemic, heard it and then it's, you know, it's coming back. But the tweener fund is brilliant. So thanks.

01:20:25 - Scot Wingo
Okay, so you were doing all that. Was there something else going on in parallel or. Excel Ventures took the bulk of your.

01:20:31 - Robbie Hardy
Time in Excel Ventures and the coaching took the bulk of my time. And I was writing my second book.

01:20:37 - Scot Wingo
Second book? Yeah. Okay, so then what, you. Somewhere between 21 and 24, you phased out of Excel?

01:20:44 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, I phased out of Excel. I published my book in 23, did that whole shtick and still self published. Still self published. Yeah, I know. It was. It is interesting. Yeah. And I had people, you know, this. It wasn't. It isn't that people don't want to publish you. It's just you have to want to do. And at the end of the day to. In this market the way it is now, I mean, the difference is, you know, unless you're, you know, Michelle Obama, I mean, you know, you have to have a.

01:21:14 - Scot Wingo
A lot of. It used to be having a publisher, they could actually, you know, open doors. Yeah. Generate demand at Barnes. They would get Barnes Noble to order like a bunch of copies or something like that worked. But like now.

01:21:23 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, no matter. It doesn't matter. I mean, it matters for some people. And so I was trying to figure out what I was. What else I was going to do. And Brooks Malone introduced me to a guy at Duke, Jeff Welch, who runs Duke New Ventures, and you know, which is a mentoring program, which I didn't know about, but. And so I had lunch with him and I came armed with names because I figured he was looking for mentors and he was. But he wanted me. And I was like, I haven't worked for anybody since 1993. You do not want me. I do not. Yeah. I don't herd. Well, I'm anyway.

01:22:05 - Scot Wingo
Hard to manage. Uncoachable.

01:22:07 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. All those things. And so. Yeah. So we decided to give it a try. And so that was in 21. And so, you know, I'm still doing it. It's been a fascinating experience.

01:22:20 - Scot Wingo
Now, are you mentoring students or no?

01:22:22 - Robbie Hardy
They're mostly. No. Well, they're PhD students. So, you know, if you are at a university and you're a PhD student or you're a faculty or a secretary or whatever, the university owns your intellectual property that you produce. So if you're an undergrad, it's yours because you're paying tuition, depending which way the money goes. If you're in the business school, you're paying tuition. Not. But anyway. But all these others are getting stipends or salaries or whatever. So there are. There's a healthcare group part and that's the majority. There are there, I think there are nine of us, there are six there and then there are three of us in the software hardware side.

01:22:57 - Scot Wingo
Okay. And you're on the software side.

01:22:59 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, and so. Yeah, and so I have, I have met people that I otherwise wouldn't have. You know, I get to see. I'm doing a lot of AI stuff that's actually sort of, you know, it's also got a medical component. So it's sort of software as a medical device.

01:23:14 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, all that stuff is all squished together.

01:23:15 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. So it's really, I mean, it's really fascinating to do that. And so these people, you know, they all have full time jobs and some of them want to leave, some of them don't. So it's about recruiting, it's about helping them. The goal is to help them commercialize, you know, has to get licensed out and do they form a company or do they just license it out? And do we need to find a management team for them? And they don't. I mean, you really take them from the really early stage to kind of.

01:23:42 - Scot Wingo
Figure out, because they're scientists, they understand the technology, they have no idea how to do any of this. Yeah.

01:23:45 - Robbie Hardy
And. Yeah. But. Yeah, so I have just, I've just. It's been a great experience. So it's been a big, wide variety of things.

01:23:52 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So that's the. Let me, let me kind of restate it. So I haven't. So that's the tech transfer kind of group.

01:23:56 - Robbie Hardy
Well, it is under text transfer. Is. Is this Duke New Ventures?

01:24:01 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So then these ideas are coming out of students and profs, mostly PhD students. And then you guys are figuring out.

01:24:07 - Robbie Hardy
You know, so they come in and they, they say, I need help. And so they get screened and whatever. And then one of us gets brought in to say, yeah, I think I can help them. And so we. Off we go.

01:24:18 - Scot Wingo
Yeah, this isn't. Yeah. So this is one of the things that Duke does that's entrepreneurial. Then there's Jamie has.

01:24:24 - Robbie Hardy
Jamie Jones. Oh, yes. And that's mostly undergraduates.

01:24:27 - Scot Wingo
Yep.

01:24:27 - Robbie Hardy
And some graduate students.

01:24:29 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:24:29 - Robbie Hardy
And it's like everything else in a university. Lots of silos. And then there's another group in the Pratt School of Engineering that does the same thing.

01:24:37 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:24:37 - Robbie Hardy
There may be some other group that I don't know about, but yeah.

01:24:40 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Believe it or not, I haven't met the Pratt people yet. That's on my pretty party for me. Yeah, yeah. They seem like they're up to really cool stuff over there.

01:24:48 - Robbie Hardy
The really cool place is by biomedical engineering.

01:24:50 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. I can't understand that, though.

01:24:52 - Robbie Hardy
No, you. Yeah, you. It's like.

01:24:53 - Scot Wingo
It all sounds good.

01:24:54 - Robbie Hardy
No, no, no. This is. This makes all. Yeah, if I can understand it, you can understand. Trust me. Trust me.

01:24:59 - Scot Wingo
Okay. They always have, like, nanotubes that'll, like, swim through your bloodstream and do stuff.

01:25:03 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:25:05 - Scot Wingo
Cool. So you enjoy, like, seeing all that new technology and.

01:25:08 - Robbie Hardy
Well, yeah. So there are people out of. Otherwise not met. Completely different issues. Lots of interesting things. So. Yeah, it has been. It's been fun.

01:25:18 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Is there a classroom component to that or.

01:25:20 - Robbie Hardy
No. Yeah, no, it's all. It's all code, and most of it's all on zoom.

01:25:25 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:25:25 - Robbie Hardy
Interesting, because these guys have labs or whatever. So, you know, I started. I had a fencing coach who wanted to be able to make fencing. Teach people fencing. So it'd be 3D, but the technology, we couldn't get it fine enough. Because the way fencing works, you have to get, you know, the point has to be. Yeah. So that didn't work. And I had a guy who was in, you know, film school who had done a way to take, you know, film apart and create something else out of the existing film. So. Yeah, that along with, you know. Yeah.

01:25:54 - Scot Wingo
So first, that kind of variety, having been super myopic, is hard to deal with, and then you get kind of addicted to it. It's kind of like.

01:25:59 - Robbie Hardy
Well, yeah, I mean, I've had a lot of variety in the coaching business. I have, but this is just completely different.

01:26:05 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:26:05 - Robbie Hardy
And. Yeah, so it's been great fun. You know, I'll probably be done. I'm not taking on any new clients. I'm just finishing up with the ones I have.

01:26:13 - Scot Wingo
Okay. Are you going to retire again?

01:26:15 - Robbie Hardy
I am. Well, I'm going to. I'm going to do. I'm working with a bunch of women's. There's some international women's organizations and whatever. So I'm going to go back and focus, like, you know, because after a while, it's like I get tired of listening to myself even talking to these four people that I coach and mentor, you know, so it's like, I need a break.

01:26:34 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. So you're. You're doing that, but phasing out. You're phased out of Excel. What else are you up to? So you're going to start doing this.

01:26:42 - Robbie Hardy
Work on my third book.

01:26:44 - Scot Wingo
Working on the third book. Got to get that.

01:26:45 - Robbie Hardy
I think that's enough. Yeah. And I'd like to. Yeah. And I just think it's time for me to. But I, you know, I won't see you slowing down. No.

01:26:53 - Scot Wingo
Well, I think you go. You kind of. Then you.

01:26:56 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. So. Yeah. So it's. Yeah. So it's funny. Sort of right now I'm like. I got tired. What I realized when I just came back from. I was in California last week, and I realized that what I was wanting to get rid of was always doing this. Oh, God, I have a, you know. Oh, I have to get here. Oh, I have a bloom. Oh. You know, because I have, you know, too many clients, too many appointments, too many shifting of gears, and that's what I need a break.

01:27:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Yeah. Get off the treadmill.

01:27:18 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. Get off that. Yeah. You know.

01:27:21 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Is her daughter still in Hawaii and you go see her?

01:27:24 - Robbie Hardy
She is, yeah. Yeah. They've been there since 20 2004.

01:27:27 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Any grandkids yet or.

01:27:29 - Robbie Hardy
No, not going to happen.

01:27:30 - Scot Wingo
All right. Not going to happen. No.

01:27:31 - Robbie Hardy
They decided. No. They were never on the same page. They're very happy. So all is well.

01:27:35 - Scot Wingo
All good. Yeah. Well, anything else you want to share with listeners and readers before we wrap up? That's a. That was a. You know, I learned a ton of stuff. I think I knew like, 80% of that, so. I knew 20%. I learned 80%. So.

01:27:47 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. Well, no, it's fun to talk to you. I'd love to be interviewing you because I've been following you all these years. And so it was, you know, maybe.

01:27:54 - Scot Wingo
You start a podcast.

01:27:54 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah, Well, I already. I did that once.

01:27:56 - Scot Wingo
Okay.

01:27:58 - Robbie Hardy
And I thought about doing it again about women investing, lasting. Because. But I'm not. I'm trying to figure out the. Right.

01:28:03 - Scot Wingo
There's probably something around your books that you could kind of.

01:28:06 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

01:28:06 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. There's a lot of. I don't know, there's this new book, Likable Badass.

01:28:11 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I know. Yeah. I'm gonna meet with. I forget her name, but yeah. So she and I have been talking on.

01:28:16 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:28:16 - Robbie Hardy
Angela.

01:28:17 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. And then I think the author.

01:28:20 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

01:28:20 - Scot Wingo
And then a lot of the people I know in the triangle that are in our startup world. Right. Have really globbed onto that.

01:28:25 - Robbie Hardy
Oh, yeah. It's great.

01:28:27 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:28:27 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

01:28:28 - Scot Wingo
No, that's an example of where your book could be a framework for.

01:28:32 - Robbie Hardy
It could be. Oh, yeah. It's not that. Yeah. I just said. Yeah. I have to decide.

01:28:35 - Scot Wingo
The Hardy trilogy.

01:28:37 - Robbie Hardy
Decide that. That's a good idea. We'll see.

01:28:39 - Scot Wingo
Yeah.

01:28:39 - Robbie Hardy
So are you enjoying doing podcasting?

01:28:41 - Scot Wingo
I do, yeah. I've been doing it for A long time on E Commerce.

01:28:44 - Robbie Hardy
Right, right.

01:28:44 - Scot Wingo
Like a super vertical. No one in the triangle really listens to it, but it's.

01:28:48 - Robbie Hardy
That's okay.

01:28:49 - Scot Wingo
But, you know, I've been doing that for a while. I like the fact that you don't really prepare for it and, like, the conversation meanders. I kind of like that versus writing. You have to have a whole. You have to have a destination. You gotta have a framework for getting there and all that stuff. So I like kind of the unstructured nature of podcast.

01:29:05 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah. Well, you can do the same thing. Then you get somebody to help you structure it. It's like, yeah, you write it and then they go, well, yeah. So, yeah. So in the whole public self publishing, then you do hire people to do editing and stuff that. Because they, you know, you drop characters off. I mean, it's amazing the things you do that when you get your back and it's all red, you're like, oh, my God. But then you start reading that, you know, he introduced Liz here, but she, you know, she just never appeared again.

01:29:28 - Scot Wingo
Yeah. Like, oh, yeah. About Liz.

01:29:30 - Robbie Hardy
Yeah.

01:29:31 - Scot Wingo
Well, cool. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for the time. Thank you.

01:29:33 - Robbie Hardy
Appreciate it.

01:29:34 - Scot Wingo
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

01:29:36 - Robbie Hardy
Thank you. And we'll see. We'll have to see each other more.

01:29:38 - Scot Wingo
Absolutely. Sounds good.

01:29:39 - Robbie Hardy
Thanks.

01:29:45 - Scot Wingo
For more tweener content, check out the Triangle Tweener time substack@tweener.substack.com for more tweener content, check out tweenertimes.com thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon on Triangle Tweenertalks.