SEASON 1: EPISODE 3 TRANSCRIPT

Crafting Your Own Narrative

Marcus Whitney: Very few great things are done by one person. It's usually the collective, and I think I was just trying to reground people in that fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. And I think that's one of the most beautiful things about entrepreneurship, is that it's a method by which we do some of the most fundamental human things, creating and orchestrating.

Dr. Greg Jones: Our world is facing significant challenges, and at every turn another conflict seems to await, yet we survive, we overcome, we even thrive by relying on an intangible and undeniable gift, hope. It fills us, connects us, highlights our individual purpose, and unites us in the goal to do more together. Hope fuels us toward flourishing as people and as a community.

My name is Greg Jones, President of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with people who demonstrate what it really means to live with hope and lean into the lessons they've picked up along their journey. They are The Hope People.

Today's champion of hope is Marcus Whitney, founding partner of Jumpstart Health Investors and Jumpstart Nova, the first healthcare venture fund in America investing exclusively in Black founded and led startups. Marcus embodies the entrepreneurial mindset Belmont seeks to instill in all our students and has used this mindset to create an ecosystem to help African American founders like himself flourish.

As an agent of hope, Marcus is driven to inspire others to find their true purpose and pursue a life worth living by developing their own identity. As you'll hear, he credits his success and the ability to find hope even against the odds from the intentional crafting of his own narrative.

Much of your life has been a kind of reshaping of narratives and who you are. Talk about how you've developed your own sense of identity and purpose and the person you've become and the leadership you exhibit.

Marcus Whitney: At some point I realized how important narrative was and how important it was for me to control mine, and ever since I recognize that, it has been a daily focus and obsession for me. It takes a lot of internal belief to fend off the narratives that don't serve you and only allow the ones in that do. I think one of the reasons why I'm pretty happy as a person is because whether I win or lose, whether I'm successful or I'm failing, it is my narrative. I put myself in the positions I'm in and whatever ends up happening, I'm okay with that. I can't imagine a worst fate for someone like me than to feel like every day I'm waking up and I'm doing something that someone else wants me to do.

Dr. Greg Jones: I love that image of controlling your own narrative. I mean, you've become incredibly successful and hopeful, joyful, happy as a person because you have that sense of your own narrative that you're writing that script. Talk about the decision to become an entrepreneur and how you've been driven in that direction in terms of your own sense of vocation and the narrative you've claimed.

Marcus Whitney: So I didn't finish college, and I think the truth about that is that when you don't have experience, when you don't have a track record and you also don't have a college degree, there are some doors that are simply closed, no question, and so I think some people may obsess about the doors that are closed. I just had a mindset that those doors were just not my doors and I started to look for the doors that were of my doors. Then I had to go through the long process of learning how to be an entrepreneur, and I think I'm still in that process today, but it has been an incredible joyful learning process. You have to really be in the market to get the lessons from the market, and so I've just been working on that.

Dr. Greg Jones: Where do you see signs of hope in your life?

Marcus Whitney: I see signs of hope in the time I spend with my family and in the community and in the work that I get to do. On the family side, I've got two boys that are 24 and 22, and they're great young men. One is a Marine, the other one is soon to be computer engineering graduate from college. They are part of a generation full of great young people, and I'm excited to see what they're going to do.

I have a lot of hope when I see the way that our community, particularly Nashville, still comes together for important things. I feel like I got my first real taste of that when the flood happened in 2010. There have been many moments since then, and I think maybe more moments in the last three or four years than in the previous 20 that I've lived here altogether between the pandemic and tornadoes and really, really unfortunate events like what happened in Covenant.

Watching our community continue to come together even as it expands and grows and makes room for new people is a very hopeful thing for me. And then my work is hopeful. I'm a venture capitalist and I'm investing in people with vision and passion and who want to make the world a better place through their ideas and through their hard work. That's hopeful.

Dr. Greg Jones: You're known as an agent of hope who really makes other people better and inspires others. How did you begin to envision that kind of role and that kind of impact that you want to have in other people's lives and in the community and the world?

Marcus Whitney: I think I was molded to be the person that I am by my parents and my environment. So I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I'm my mother's only son and I'm my father's youngest child, and they both put a lot of effort into making me a person who cares about their community, and who shows up for things, and who when they see something wrong tries to within their capacity make it right, whether that's individually or working with other people collectively to do that. I just feel like I'm continuing to be who I was raised to be.

And also I had great teachers all through elementary school and high school that were very, very important in shaping the way that I saw the world. I had great coaches. Sports has become in my later years a really important thing, because it just reminds me of the importance of sportsmanship and skill development and working really hard towards a goal. And I had incredible coaches, especially in high school, especially in wrestling and track. I had great adults around me while I was growing up.

Dr. Greg Jones: You've continued involvement in athletics now in jujitsu. Talk about why that matters to you.

Marcus Whitney: I think a common theme for me is I am very leery of narratives that become conventions that impose limitations on people. I think one of those narratives is that basically after whatever your academic athletic career was if you are not a professional athlete it doesn't really matter what you do in athletics, and so the best you really can do is just work out to try to stay in shape. I think it's really hard to find the time to work out and stay in shape.

Adults get busy, and if you happen to be fortunate enough to be a successful adult then you're really busy, and justifying finding time to work out when you have all these responsibilities in your very successful adult life is very difficult. What I figured out was that I perform better in my work life and my community leadership life when I am healthier, but I didn't like this narrative that I found really difficult to keep up with, so I shifted that for a different narrative, which was I am going to be an athlete again. I just decided to take on the identity of an athlete, and I decided to do jujitsu because I was a wrestler in college.

I always loved martial arts, I always wanted to do jujitsu, and I just didn't find the time to do it. But I made time once I decided I was an athlete, because if you're an athlete you train. You don't find time for it, you do it. Other things have to give way when you're an athlete. And so I've been on this journey over the last six years of becoming the athlete I am today.

The reason why I like jujitsu is because it is an activity that forces me to be fully present when I'm doing it. I cannot be thinking about some blog post I need to write or some investment I'm trying to get done or some board meeting I have in a couple of weeks when I'm on the mat and someone is trying to choke me out. I have to be very present in the moment when I'm on the mat. It is a form of meditation, it's a form of practicing presence, and it's also a great way to stay in shape, so it's become a really, really important part of my life.

But I wanted to kind of walk through the whole narrative thing, because as much as I love jujitsu somebody else might love tennis, somebody else might love golf, somebody else might love basketball. The main thing is at 47 I think I'm close to the best shape I've ever been in my life. It's hard to really recall what it felt like when I was 17, that's 30 years away, but certainly as I think about my adult life I am in incredible shape relative to any other point in my adult life, still getting stronger. So I'm trying to model for other people, because I believe they would be happily surprised to see how much left in them their body still has for them if they would embrace that identity.

Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. A couple of years ago you started Jumpstart Nova, the first venture fund exclusively focused on Black, founded in Black led healthcare. How did that come about? What inspired that? Tell us how it's going.

Marcus Whitney: It's going great. What inspired it was a moment in time, just rewinding the clock back to May of 2020, and we're pretty deep in the beginning of the pandemic and it's very scary because we don't really understand coronavirus yet. And at the very same time Americans are willing to go out in public and protest for the right to be seen as equal and not be judged based on their race in 2020.

So that narrative we shared as a country, I think very few people could not be affected by that and not be forced to do some reflection around that. My own reflection was that I'm a Black man living in the southeast United States, living in Nashville, Tennessee, who is fortunate enough to be able to work in the venture capital industry, and even more specifically work in the healthcare segment of the venture capital industry, so there was something for me to do in all of this.

My general operating mindset is not that of an activist, although in society we need activists, we need poets, we need everybody. How I process and show up in moments like that is how can I create a sustaining venture that will solve one aspect of a much bigger systemic problem? I can't solve the whole problem, but I can focus on one piece of it and I can create a sustainable venture that can actually address that issue, and so that's what Jumpstart Nova was.

It was something I had proof of because we had sold four companies in our portfolio across 2020. Two of those four companies had Black founders in them. And for anyone who doesn't know venture capital, by demographic is an incredibly inequitable industry. The distribution of capital is unbelievably weighted towards white men, and then after that a very, very small percentage is split up amongst everyone else. Women receive very little venture capital. People of color receive very little venture capital.

So to me it was just a sense that we could leverage what we already had, this platform to invest in founders that we had already proven to be successful in generating returns, but do it with more dedication and do it with more intent, and maybe bust a myth by making one of the best performing funds of its era. So we're still in the process of that. We're not even two and a half years into our investing, but it's going in exceptionally well. We have incredible investors as partners, both individuals and healthcare organizations. So far we've invested in 10 companies. The portfolio is shaping up really nicely, and I think will continue to do this for many years to come.

Dr. Greg Jones: You embody what we at Belmont like to call an entrepreneurial mindset. How do you teach an entrepreneurial mindset and what do you look for when you're thinking about people to invest in, whether financially or personally?

Marcus Whitney: It takes a lot quite frankly, because when we say entrepreneurial mindset we have to acknowledge an entrepreneur is a player in the world of capitalism, right? That's the fundamental environment where an entrepreneur thrives. I've been thinking a lot about the ethos of capitalism, and there is a part of capitalism that has a strong calling for an individual to be multidimensional, high performing, and at the same time incredibly focused and incredibly ethical. It's asking a lot, quite frankly. It really is asking a lot.

When I really think about what we are looking for at Jumpstart Nova in terms of a great founder that we want to invest in, we're looking at an exceptional person that can do a lot of things. It's not for the faint of heart. There's the obvious work ethic component. You have to be willing to work very, very hard. That's table stakes. And you have to have an edge, right? You have to have an edge and you have to have an angle. I don't think there's any question about that.

And then you have to deliver value. You have to be making a product that someone else looks at and says this helps me in X, Y or Z way and I'm willing to pay for it. That's not a small bridge to cross, and so I believe great entrepreneurs are exceptional people in our society. Do I think everyone can be a great entrepreneur? I think we are collectively living up to a very small fraction of our potential, and I think we have unfortunately asked people to limit themselves to be cogs in the machine as opposed to being superheroes in our society.

And I don't mean superhero in the way that your emotions don't matter and you don't need to take care of yourself, and you always need to save everybody. I mean in that you really can make an impact, you as an individual can really make an impact in society. And by the way, that impact might just be your purpose, and you living your purpose might just make you exceptionally happy. I think there's a wonderful flywheel potential there.

But we mostly are trying to position people to be viable employees, and that's a very, very different thing from an entrepreneur. A viable employee knows how to do some task or set of tasks in a much larger organization led by an entrepreneur, right? So we're reserving entrepreneurship for the few, and that's unfortunate.

Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah. I sometimes say I want everybody at Belmont to have an entrepreneurial mindset. Whether you're going to actually start a company yourself or not, be a part of a team that has that kind of entrepreneurial mindset.

You moved from being an entrepreneur yourself to really creating a company now that invests in other entrepreneurs. What was that journey like, for thinking I'm just going to do my own thing to really thinking about creating an ecosystem that empowers other African Americans to flourish?

Marcus Whitney: I take great pleasure in partnering with founders. Probably my happiest employee window of time was when I was a programmer at Emma Email Marketing, which is no longer Emma. It's now called Campaign Monitor. It's been acquired. But from 2003 to 2007, I was the head of technology at this startup and I got to work really, really closely with the founders. I really like working with founders because I think being a founder is a pretty lonely thing, and I take a lot of pleasure in being a companion to a founder who deeply understands what they're going through and can become a trusted friend, a confidant, but also someone who can see their blind spots and can help them.

So I get to play the role of a coach at times. I get to play the role of a shoulder-to-shoulder partner at times. I get to play the role of a member of a governing body when I'm on the board and I see maybe a founder being overwhelmed by a situation and maybe not getting ready to do the best thing, stepping in from a role of governance. I like all of that, and also I think collectively when you invest and you build out a portfolio you're testing your understanding of how the market is operating and where it's going.

Dr. Greg Jones: Interesting. That's fascinating. I want to turn to your experience as a minority investor in Nashville SC. You could describe that just as a hobby off to the side, and yet it seems as though it's more integrally connected to your own self-understanding and the way in which you've thought about raising funds and investing. Tell us how it's going.

Marcus Whitney: So Nashville SC was an incredible community journey. The founder was a gentleman named Chris Jones, who started Nashville Football Club, Nashville FC, on Twitter, and he wanted to fill a void for our community to make sure that we didn't go without having a team we could cheer for, and we had just lost the Metros. After 20 great years the ownership had to fold.

So I meet him in person towards the end of that first season and he shares with me this thing is going great, but we need some real help with leadership. We want to make sure the thing endures. And he invited me to join the board as the chairman, so I joined as the chairman. It was a nonprofit at the time and very, very quickly, Nashville Football Club turning into Nashville Soccer Club kind of became a bit of a barometer, at least for me, for how fast Nashville was going to grow, because I was the chairman for about a month and it was really obvious to me that Nashville was going to have professional soccer. So then it just became a question of was it going to be us or was some outside money going to come in here and do it?

I was very focused on making sure that the people that had worked in this nonprofit got to be the people who brought it to the professional level. I was very lucky to from that position get the trust of the nonprofit to endeavor to bring it to pro, to put together an investment group, and ultimately to bring professional soccer to Nashville in the United Soccer League.

And then John Ingram purchased a majority ownership in that club, and within two years we were granted a major league soccer franchise, and now we've been playing at GEODIS Park for over a year. So I mean all of that happened starting in 2014, so it's been less than 10 years, and we've already had three major league soccer seasons, one full year in our stadium. It moved really fast, and Nashville is moving really fast, and I think Nashville SC has been a really good example of that.

Today I get the absolute honor and privilege of being a member of the ownership group of a major league sports franchise, and that's really, really cool. It didn't start that way. It started as a community effort and me trying to utilize the skills that I have to help out in the way that made the most sense.

Dr. Greg Jones: That's wonderful. When you think about what's next for Marcus and what you would hope Nashville might look like as a result of your leadership, how do you think about Marcus next and Nashville next?

Marcus Whitney: I've been thinking a lot about just the next phase of my life, period. I honestly think that I've contributed in meaningful ways to the city and I think the city is growing, and it's not entirely clear to me that I'm not coming close to the end of that chapter of my book.

I feel like the city is changing and growing, and I have incredible seats to view that from. I'm 47 and I think I'm going to be, knock on wood, pretty healthy in my 50s, and I'm just sort of thinking about what do I want to do in my 50s? I don't have any good answers right now, but I will say I've never taken a sabbatical. I've barely even taken a proper vacation, so I'm really thinking about things like that.

Dr. Greg Jones: Well, if your 50s are anything like your 30s and 40s, it'll be a ride to watch. You talked about journey. You talked about authoring your narrative. You wrote a book called Create and Orchestrate. Those two words seem to exemplify your leadership in health, in athletics, in entrepreneurship, in investing. Talk about why create and orchestrate are such important words for you in your vocation on leadership.

Marcus Whitney: I think they are two of the most fundamentally human things that we do. Obviously you look around and you see creation, human creation, everywhere. We're speaking into mics, we've got headphones on, we're sitting in chairs, we're in a beautiful office in a beautiful building on a beautiful street, all created, right? Sometimes we can take that for granted. We wake up, we just start going about our day, not recognize that every single thing we use, the bed we slept in, the house we live in, the car we go to work in, all created by a group of humans, right?

And so the orchestrate part is very few things, very few great things, are done by one person. It's usually the collective, and I think I was just trying to reground people in that fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. I think that's one of the most beautiful things about entrepreneurship, is that it's a method by which we do some of the most fundamental human things, creating and orchestrating.

Dr. Greg Jones: Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself and to help us cultivate a sense of well-being for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.