The EO Visionary Voices Podcast

Brent Peterson (00:01.954)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Alfredo Mathew III. He is the co-founder of ESO. Alfredo, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions.

Alfredo Mathew III (00:14.505)
Both are good.

Alfredo Mathew III (00:22.357)
So I'm the co-founder of ESO Ventures and the founder and CEO of SPCC One. I'm a founder, right? Probably like many of the folks on your podcast, I love starting businesses, but I have not always been a founder. I was a former educator, a former nonprofit leader in California in the Bay area. And my day-to-day is I do business development. I do strategic partnerships. That's what I love most. I love, you know,

connecting all the dots between public and private systems. I really like taking something from a concept, getting it off the ground, getting it to the place where it's ready to scale, and then that's someone else's job. I'm a founder, I'm not an operator. I've learned this about myself. I like hard problems that always have a social element to it. I need to be doing something.

that is not just about me, but it's something about the community and about the world.

Brent Peterson (01:23.842)
That's awesome and a passion in life outside of that.

Alfredo Mathew III (01:27.941)
Travel with my family. I just got back from Niagara Falls. I don't know if you've ever been up. I drove all the way. I'm from New York originally. Drove up with my family to Niagara Falls. Loved it. Went through Western New York. I've hit all the national parks, Yellowstone. We're gonna go to Yosemite this summer. Go international a little bit, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Hawaii.

But that's me with a family as my own person. I've taught English in South Korea. I lived in Brazil. I've been to India. I love the world. I love reading. I love learning. I'm very curious.

Brent Peterson (02:08.652)
That's great. Alfredo, before we get started, you did volunteer to be part of the free joke project. I'm going to tell you a joke and all you do is give me a rating eight through 13. So here we go. My wife wanted to brighten up the garden, so I planted some bulbs.

Alfredo Mathew III (02:15.679)
short.

Alfredo Mathew III (02:28.021)
I get it, I get it. I'm gonna give that a nine because you gave yourself a head start, but I think that's a good nine.

Brent Peterson (02:29.324)
You

Brent Peterson (02:32.661)
Alright, thank you.

Brent Peterson (02:39.052)
Yeah, all right, thank you. A head start, I appreciate that. Yeah, just, you know, it is what it is, right? All right, so let's, you mentioned social, you mentioned business development. us where you started and maybe how did you go from nonprofit to an education to entrepreneurship?

Alfredo Mathew III (02:48.254)
Yeah.

Alfredo Mathew III (03:07.381)
Sure. So, I mean, I didn't know about business growing up per se. My father, my parents were educators. I became an educator. I loved public education. I did that work until I was almost 40 years old. And about the time I was turning 40, when my kids were young, I hit a wall and I needed a new challenge. I definitely needed more resources. And I...

recognized that all the young people I was working with needed to earn money. And I really wanted to get into career pathways and entrepreneurship. And I became a nonprofit director that did an entrepreneurship education, connecting Silicon Valley companies to high schools all over the Bay area, PayPal, Salesforce, EY, SAP, all these startup engines. And then I realized young people don't have access to Silicon Valley because there is no local.

pathway to Silicon Valley is a global talent pool and venture capital, Is looking for unicorns, is looking for 100X returns. Those aren't the businesses that the young people I was working with were pursuing. They wanted to create lifestyle businesses, Main Street businesses, products and services in communities. Could be digital businesses, but not truly scalable businesses. And so I said, that's what I want to build. I want to build ecosystems for

real people building real businesses in local communities. so I, know, what entrepreneurs do, if you see an unmet need and it's not being done, and I don't believe it can be done as a nonprofit, I believe it needs to be done as a market, market private solution. I started working at the intersection of education, workforce development and entrepreneurship. During the pandemic, I had an opportunity to get a contract with the city of Oakland to activate.

the MacArthur corridor, is a part of East Oakland, historically black community in East Oakland. And everyone wanted to start businesses. We ended up writing legislation. We built partnerships with philanthropy. We got contracts with community colleges, and I took a $5,000 contract, turned it into $22 million in contracts in two years from 2020 to 2023.

Alfredo Mathew III (05:28.924)
And that's what I like doing. like, here's an intractable problem. It's going to require resources from the public sector, from philanthropy, and definitely from the private sector. And how do we stitch kind of things together and how do we create something that can become a flywheel? So that's what I really like. And then that hit a wall and now I'm working on new stuff.

Brent Peterson (05:51.758)
Yeah, in our green room, we talked a little bit about combining or putting people together, enabling people to do things. And we also talked about AI and how AI is having an impact. And I had a rant, I have a rant on LinkedIn today about the fact that people think AI will replace everything and that you'll just be a a solo operator without a team. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts on the need for a team and the need for humans to

maybe participate in the process of business.

Alfredo Mathew III (06:28.584)
Yes, there is no purpose to create power value in a vacuum. There's, mean, AI is an incredible tool. The internet is an incredible tool. This podcast is an incredible tool, but it literally is just a tool, right? We have create, mean, humans, I love our species, right? We have developed all of these tools.

But one of the things that I'm concerned about is we kind of have lost our way because I don't believe that meaning or value can be created alone. I believe that we create meaning and value in community. create with other people. And there are a lot of stakeholders that go into creating a business. Your customers, your employees, your investors, your advisors, your, your community, all of that makes a great compelling business.

I'm not in business because I just want to go to my computer and I want to put in a bunch of prompts and I want to write code and I want to do this. I'm in it because I want to learn and I want to grow and I want to have an impact on the world. And I know that I cannot have an impact on the world without being a part of the world. That's a part of my local community and globally. And I am very concerned about the consolidation of wealth.

And I'm very concerned about the bifurcation of like large companies going up here and lots of small companies not able to compete because we're competing against platforms and monopolies. And I know that your audience is a lot of successful entrepreneurs, a lot of people who have built million dollar enterprises. And that's where we need more business owners to go. We need, know, if you're not generating a million dollars in revenue,

It is very difficult to create a quality life for your family is very difficult to get to some economies of scale, but million dollar enterprises are competing against billion dollar enterprises. And I just see those billion dollar enterprises sucking all of the value out of the marketplace. And that's not what I want to, I want to see the value stay at the, at the midsize.

Alfredo Mathew III (08:50.607)
and the ground level because we, entrepreneurship is incredible if there's access to opportunity.

Brent Peterson (08:57.166)
Yeah, you know, the irony of that is that big business right now, these larger tech companies even, are requiring people to come back to work for two, three, four days a week even. And there's a reason because of community in why they want people to be together to do things and not in silos, right? So maybe talk a little bit about as an entrepreneur, as having all these tools, when do you...

draw the line at, I can do everything by myself with my JetGBT or I do need somebody to help me with something.

Alfredo Mathew III (09:34.44)
Well, I don't do anything by myself, right? And that starts with, right? Well, we're talking, I would not be where I am if I didn't have my family and if I didn't have my family support. You know, as an entrepreneur, it is ups, it is downs. You think that, my God, I'm taking off, this is going. The market changes, things change. You got to go in another direction. So when you need, you yourself need a support system and a supportive community.

But too, as I'm building businesses and I'm refining ideas, ChatGDP, it is a mirror. It is not a very critical mirror. It thinks everything I do is incredible and all it's doing is giving me back whatever I'm giving to it, just with a little more polish and refinement, it's just synthesizing stuff. It's not adding anything new. I do a lot of writing. I do a lot of reading. I do a lot of thinking. I'm trying to chart new territory.

ChatGDP is not going to find the blue ocean. ChatGDP is where everyone is putting in the same prompts, doing the same things. I need to go figure, I need to go in the real world. I need to talk with people and my colleagues make me better. My colleagues have always made me better because they challenge me. They don't think everything I do is great. They think that this could be better, that could be better. And that's right, steel sharpened steel.

Competition is good. That's also why I believe that we need more small and medium sized businesses because we can compete against each other. We can make each other better. If there's only one GPT, if there's only one search provider, if there's only one online retailer, that's not competition. That's not going to make us better. That leads to decadence and ultimately to, you know, a smaller economy.

Brent Peterson (11:31.554)
Yeah, I mean, that's so there's so many good points in there. One of the things that you had mentioned is just giving pushback. And I think that one of the one of the another part of my rant this morning was that your team will give you pushback on a bad idea because they have that institutional knowledge to know what has worked in the past. And me, let's just say I'm in a visionary and I do come up with a ton of ideas. I know that they're not all great.

but you do need that know person every once in a while to sort of get you going back in the right direction. Talk a little bit about the idea of getting feedback from your team, team building, and then the idea of how community and diversity help in building a more positive or a more productive business environment.

Alfredo Mathew III (12:24.659)
Sure. I got advice early on from an entrepreneur who said, you need different animals on your team. You do not want a team where everyone looks and thinks alike because you're not going to get right. Abraham Lincoln, that team of rivals, that is, you know, I'm the business development person. I like doing the visionary thing.

If I was surrounded by a whole bunch of visionary people who all want to go out and build relationships, who's going to build the backend? Who's going to do the administrative stuff? Who is going to look over my shoulder and check and make sure that I'm not making mistakes? I need that. I need a break. I need someone who's more operational to balance me out. But I also, need lots of things because when you surround yourself with people who are

compatible, who have different skill sets, different mindsets, bringing different expertise. That's how you can really solve complicated problems. That's how you can, you can build a great company. Of course, I have also learned the hard way. No, it's not a flat organization where we're just a collective and everyone has a voice and they're right. Cause I've tried to lead that when I tried to do that way. And it's very slow going and it's very difficult. And ultimately,

you hit a ceiling. think in any business, you're going to hit a ceiling. You're going to get right. John Maxwell says the leadership is the lid. You literally are the lid of your business. If you are a business of one, I guarantee your lid is going to be fairly low. But if you can figure out how to bring other people along and how to create a more dynamic team, that leadership is going to evolve and it's going to grow.

Brent Peterson (14:17.314)
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's such a good point. And, and, the more people on your team, the higher your, your ceiling is, right? The more opportunities you have to grow outside of whatever you think you're at. And I can speak from experience where before I joined entrepreneurs organization, I did everything on my own and I didn't realize that there was a team of a team of other entrepreneurs willing to just share their own experience, and help me grow without me just.

trial and erroring it to death and failing right often. Maybe we could kind of finish out here with some of this shared prosperity ideas that you have and how that team does really grow your business and connecting those dots help you to be more prosperous.

Alfredo Mathew III (14:51.59)
Mm-hmm.

Alfredo Mathew III (15:12.882)
Yeah. So, you know, as I shared, did ESO ventures and that business continues to grow and, you know, it's doing great work incubating businesses. We have a debt investment fund. We invest into small businesses. But in 2023, I recognized that the economy was changing. The world is changing. It is changing a lot right now as we speak. And I went on a journey over the last 18 months to really think about how do we actually create more shared prosperity?

And what shared prosperity is about is how do we grow the pie, the economic pie, and ensure that more people have an ownership stake? Because I am very concerned to this whole point about solopreneurs and how can one person create a billion dollar company? That's not what the United States, that's not what the world needs. The world needs lots of people who have an ownership stake. So I'm very interested in how do we create business structures that brought in

the, they grow the economic pie. Let's create more wealth, but let's make sure that it's more broadly distributed. And I've been watching what private equity is doing with fragmented industries, right? Let's take this fragmented industry, HVAC, automobile, car, whatever. Let's buy them all up. Let's put a backbone to it. Let's scale it and then let's exit. And I want to do that too.

but I don't want to extract all the value out of the small businesses. I really want to see how we can look at fragmented industries. The first one I'm looking at is residential electrification in Northern California. I'm interested in chiropractic practices. I'm interested in all kinds of small fragmented markets where small businesses that have something that are in existence, that have some value can come together into what I call a community corporation.

How can we get them access to contracts and capital so they can grow? And how can we compete against larger enterprises? I've learned the hard way, small businesses cannot access capital the way larger businesses can. Small businesses cannot access B2B contracts the way larger businesses can. So how do we aggregate businesses? To compete against larger players, but ensure that the smaller businesses

Alfredo Mathew III (17:37.468)
keep an ownership stake in what they're building.

Brent Peterson (17:41.046)
That's a beautiful statement that you just made there. you. Alfredo, we have a few minutes left and as they close out the podcast, they give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Alfredo Mathew III (17:44.22)
Yeah.

Alfredo Mathew III (17:54.718)
if you are interested in any of the things I've been talking about, I encourage you to watch my recent TEDx, manifesting an economic engine for shared prosperity. That will give you a sense of kind of my history and kind of what the big idea that, that I'm promoting, and just reach out to me, Alfredo at SPCC.one. You can check out my personal website, AlfredoMatthew.com.

Reach out because I am very interested in meeting other entrepreneurs, other business owners. I want to figure out how we can ensure that we're both prosperous and democratic.

Brent Peterson (18:35.874)
That's great. Alfredo Matthew III, thank you so much for being here. It's been such a great conversation.

Alfredo Mathew III (18:41.5)
Brent, I greatly appreciate the opportunity.