Daniel P. Driscoll

Ended up not wanting to do the law full-time, so went into finance.

My wife had then gotten into med school in North Carolina, did finance for a couple of years, and then she was pregnant with our now nine-year-old Daniel Jr.,

living in a different city than me.

So moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was, and full-time dad for about a year.

Completely ran out of money.

I think we were like negative $25,000 in net worth when my son turned one.

Ended up meeting a guy who had sold his business for a bunch of money.

And then spent the next kind of five or six years in like the private equity venture capital world.

Ended up as COO of a couple hundred million dollar VC fund that a friend ran.

And that time was amazing because what you realize, and we give Silicon Valley a lot of credit for this.

I think...

probably you've experienced this too sean most people that start their own business are scrappy and hungry and looking to provide value to their customer and they speed through innovation and they get there quickly silicon valley kind of famously with the venture capital dollars could go even faster and even bigger to do that but essentially the model's been around since i would guess the beginning of humankind which is if you think you have an idea that's going to be helpful

come up with a minimum viable product, get it into the hand of your customer, have them use it and learn from them, do they like it or not, pivot it and innovate it and make it better, and then keep doing that cycle throughout time.

And so those kind of lessons of how these companies were able to innovate and these amazing American success stories happened

were incredibly valuable to kind of reshape my brain on how things could occur and when you had a good idea how you could scale it really quickly and so ended up doing that for a couple of years quick pause for 10 weeks to run for congress in the mountains north carolina um absolutely got my ass kicked i think i out raised the field like two or three two or three x and just got dominated

COVID hits, my wife ends up switching med schools, or excuse me, switching residency programs to be in North Carolina.

We're down together as a family.

And so I think it was like 23, 24 were the first two years in like 16 or 17 years that my wife and I had lived in the same city.

It was a remarkable period of reset.

I was helping the VC fund, traveling a bit, getting to be a much more present dad.