Episode 52 - The Secret Farm League of Faith Driven Entrepreneurs: Jon Hart of Praxis Academy
The team talks to Jon Hart, Partner at Praxis Labs about his work with Praxis Academy, a week-long on ramp into the Praxis community of redemptive entrepreneurs targeting the under 25. For 5 years, this organization has encouraged college-aged entrepreneurs to more actively view their aspirations within the context of their faith, impacting 750 people, from 160 universities and 20 countries. Reminiscent of and deeply influenced by the 18th century Clapham Group of England, Praxis seeks to encourage thought and action around changing culture by producing superior alternatives that are also redemptive in both for and non-profit arenas.
Jon explains to us how Praxis Academy is adding to the sea of vocational “hero stories” that influence our career decisions, or using his term, “vocational imagination” that include a wholistic view of Christianity because it’s just missing. University business programs spin the stories of wild success and wealth as a natural part of its cultural lore but too often the Christian marketplace hero stories have been viewed as less compelling. Jon steps us through how Praxis Academy is righting that view with thought-provoking content that includes mentorship and community. He also shares with us a few of his favorite “hero stories” of academy alum. You don’t want to miss this episode!
Redemptive entrepreneurship is an integral concept to us, here at Faith Driven Entrepreneur. We’d love to hear about your hero stories in this space, so please reach out to us in the comment section below with your favorites.
Useful Links
FDE Podcast with Praxis CEO, Dave Blanchard
FDE Podcast with Praxis Partner, Andy Crouch
We also have a very brief survey we’d love for you to take that will help us shape the direction and future of the FDE podcast. As always, we love taking your questions and hearing your comments. Feel free to submit your thoughts in general here.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
*Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Henry [00:01:59] Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. It's awesome to be back with you all. We have Jon Hart on the phone. And the first time ever we've done a new type of video recording. So we see Jon as well. Jon is one of the better dressed men in Christendom. Always great to see him and be with him. And this is an episode where we're gonna be talking about Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast ship in college. Was it look like to get out there and innovate and create as a college student finding a problem in the world that needs to be solved, doing it for the glory of God and getting out there and making it happen. And there's no better expert that I know of than Jon Hart, who's been doing this now for a bunch of years as he runs the Praxis Academy. And to Jon's going to tell us about Praxis Academy. Tell us about praxis. He's can tell us all about himself as well. Jon, awesome to have you on the program. Thanks for being with us.
Jon [00:02:47] Yeah, absolutely. It's a joy to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.
Henry [00:02:51] So tell us about Praxis and Praxis Academy, please.
Jon [00:02:55] Yeah, well, you know, Henry, I think one of the things that we all see and experience in the world is the disproportionate influence that entrepreneurs have on the creative world around us. And our fundamental thesis is that Christians, rather than sort of complaining about the culture and what's going on in the world, that a really good way forward would be that if we wanted to critique something about the culture in the world, that we would do it by creating new and better versions of culture rather than just sitting around and complaining about it. And so entrepreneurship is a great means by which you can create new things in the world and create pathways for people to actually experience those sort of better stories in the world. And so at Praxis, we work with entrepreneurs that are doing that a couple of years into building praxis. I got to join Dave Blanchard and Josh Quan in kind of the early stages. I was not a founder, but a first employee, kind of a joiner in the mission, which has been a great joy for me to get to do that. But early on, we heard from the entrepreneurs, man, I wish this was around when I was in college. I wish there was a robust Christian expression of how to integrate my faith deeply into my venture while I was learning about what it meant to be an entrepreneur in college. And so we started the Praxis Academy. At that stage in our first year, we just tried to find 100 college students that cared about their faith and were interested in entrepreneurship. And we did that. And it's kind of grown ever since then. We now got to do it for the past five summers.
Henry [00:04:19] Past five summers. And you're more than 100 now, right?
Jon [00:04:23] Yeah. Yeah. We've kind of taken a slow growth approach, as we've seen just really great young people apply. And so we've now had the privilege to work with 750 students from a hundred and sixty different colleges and universities in over 20 countries.
Henry [00:04:37] And for those of us on the podcast listening right now, I don't know a lot about Praxis. Praxis started out of this inspiration that came from the Clapham Circle, a bunch of folks in the mid eighteen hundreds in England. Right. Who wanted to solve some of the problems that you're alluding to. Right. They didn't like the culture and they went ahead and created it. And a whole bunch of entrepreneurial initiatives came out of that area, right?
Jon [00:04:57] Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So the Clapham was their kind of most famous member was William Wilberforce. And he is often sort of credited with the abolition of the British slave trade. But it really wasn't just him. And it's often a heroes myth that there was a single person that did that, saying when the reality was Wilberforce just committed a whole group of people and they launched over sixty five different initiatives, some of them for profits, others non-profits, others just kind of publications and content pieces that were getting the message out about the horrors of the slave trade. So the sort of Clapham Group really animated a lot of our work and our thinking.
Henry [00:05:35] And similarly, Praxis Academy is not just about Jon Hart. Right. There are other people involved in Praxis Academy.
Jon [00:05:41] Yeah, exactly. In God's sort of grand scheme of things, I sort of got an opportunity to be a part of the team that started this. But I certainly am just one very small part. I always say that I stand I'm sorry. I stand on the shoulders of giants, though, in terms of the people that come before us. And, you know, and frankly, it's people like you, Henry. You know, you've spoken and mentored there before and given your time to these students and it's people like you that are willing to spend time with the next generation and invest in them through mentoring and being there and telling your stories.
Henry [00:06:11] Well, it's a special treat being around an organisation that's really intentional about loving on faith driven. Raising Praxis does it extremely well, and you've been doing it now for five years working with college students.
[00:06:22] Tell us about those college students in where they're coming from and what some of their stories are.
Jon [00:06:29] Yeah, well, the students are kind of coming from all over the place. You know, we've made a pretty intentional effort to try and get the word out to the Christian schools as well as the non-Christian schools and really work to try and find them. Maybe one or two students at a Stanford or Berkeley or Harvard or a place like that where we might have the same amount of effort to find 10 students at Wheaton or Gordon or Biola, a place like that, that we have to sort of find that one that's at Stanford, because there are a lot harder to find. But we think that's really important to have students from both backgrounds in terms of what they're studying. It's everything from sort of traditional business or computer science, engineering, things like that to some people interested in nonprofit or social issues or education. So we try to recruit a really diverse class that are interested in various issues and have different skillsets to bring to bear to knowing that entrepreneurship requires a diverse team in terms of their backgrounds and their skill sets to bring to bear to try and work on a problem.
William [00:07:29] Jon, you mentioned standing on the top of giants. The things I love Praxis about is I think they're so good.
[00:07:35] You guys are so good at sort of casting big visions and thought provoking ideas. And one that I've heard you talk about as four college students around vocational imagination and fitting that in with kind of the hero's journey. Could you walk us through that thought concept?
Jon [00:07:51] Yeah, William. Well, I think some of this is Jamie Smith wrote a book called You Are What You Love. And I think that's been formative. He's given a few toxic praxis events. So some credit to him on this. But, you know, as we go into an institution, I think it has kind of its own version of the hero's narrative. So, you know, if you're an undergrad at Stanford, the hero's journey is for you to become an entrepreneur, because that's the stories that they tell and retell and celebrate in that culture. If you're at, you know, Wharton at U. Penn, there's sort of a direct pipeline into the finance industry and Wall Street in New York City. So that's sort of working on the people around there. So if you're in one of those environments and this is true of the Christian schools, too, that they have their own kind of tracks and the sort of places where they said these are what our alumni go on to go do in the world. And so those stories, I think, form are vocational imagination. And the stories that we grew up around, I think some of that's maybe my parent was an entrepreneur or my parent. My dad was a teacher, for example. I had a little bit of an imagination around that. So I think we all grew up with those and that largely shapes our imagination. Then I think we rely on the church or campus ministries, other places to get information about what our Christian faith has to say about our vocation. And I think where I've seen a little bit of a problem, well, I experienced the problem. So I went to a University of Minnesota and I was attracted to their undergrad business program, which is pretty highly rated at the time I was there. And they were immediately telling us that we were going to go out to become industry leaders and all these different places and become CEOs. Things like that. And so that was kind of the the hero's narrative of the school. And then I was around a bunch of Christians and two of my friends actually started a Christian business group at the school when I was an undergrad there. I was on the leadership team all four years while I was there. And the main thing that Christians who we invited from the business community to come talk to us about, what does it mean to be a Christian in the marketplace? The meta narrative was sort of be nice to people, never do anything immoral, have a high ethical standard. Once you climb the ladder and get in a place where you know, leadership, you should do servant leadership and then give money to the church and missionaries. That's the primary thing that it means to be a Christian in the marketplace. And I went out and tried to live into that vision. Now, unfortunately, the vision that my school was casting about being a CEO was a little bit more compelling than the Christian vision that I was given. So I was definitely skewing toward that one and emphasizing it in terms of how I worked in the way that I worked. And it played out in a particular situation where I was actually negotiating a contract on a commodity piece of hardware. I was working for a large retailer and I had all the leverage in the negotiation process. And I basically negotiated a vendor way below the costs that they said that they could get to. And I threatened them with pulling them from the front page of this advertisment, which would cost them millions of dollars. And that's the thing that got them to the lower price.
[00:10:44] A number of years later, I heard about sort of modern day slavery and how many people are sort of in forced labor situations.
[00:10:53] And I reflected back to that negotiation where I was a young person trying to live out a Christian vision for my faith. But nobody had ever told me that I should apply it to things like a negotiation. I didn't think I was doing anything morally wrong until I learned that probably what happened in that negotiation when the company had to cut costs. I promise you that they didn't cut the costs from the travel budgets of the executives. They didn't start staying in three star hotels instead of five star hotels on their trips where the cost gets cut is at the bottom of the supply chain. The people who had the least amount of leverage and can't speak for themselves. And so I learned about that years later. And I kind of looked back to that situation in awe and wondered. What did I do? And maybe who did I press through that decision that I made and the way that I went about that negotiation. So I think we need a robust theology of work like faith and work that would apply to a situation like that. And so that's a lot of my personal motivation in doing this.
Rusty [00:11:52] That's really great because these are the things that we aren't taught in school. Right. You'd like to think that our ethics classes or our religion classes, if we're in a faith driven school, would teach us those things. But the application of them for the real world, the case studies, if you will, continue to be lacking. Yeah. I was going to ask you, you know, five years in now, we certainly have listeners who may well be college students who want to be entrepreneurs. And I know for sure we have entrepreneurs and business people who are listening, who have. Either children or grandchildren that they want to help explore being entrepreneurs. So over five years now, you've seen those that are prepared. Those that aren't prepared. Those who have taken the right courses or had the right experiences and those who haven't. What advice can you give? How do you get ready?
Jon [00:12:46] Yeah. That's a great question. I think the first thing that I say is get started while you're in college. That's the best time to start trying things out and learning by doing the support structures that exists for college students to be able to start. Things are very vast. And so by utilizing those support systems and structures and trying something, being a part of a competition, you're going to get mentorship, you're going to get out there and actually do the thing. Hopefully you get a little bit of failure under your belt. As we all know, that's sort of the best way to learn for an entrepreneur is by failing forward and iterating and continuing to improve that way. So I think that's the first thing. The second one is, I think, the expression of their faith. For somebody who has faith driven, it's to really start to figure that out when they're in college and have that inform not just their imagination for the type of person that they should be, but the type of product or service, the brand that they should create, as well as the sort of operational components of doing a venture. Those are all important. And too often the narrative is focused on like I'm just gonna be a good person. But there's not enough to say about what we make and how we make it. So I think getting that right in the early stages and when I say getting it right, I mean having an intention to pursue it and getting around a community of people that's pursuing it. I don't think any of us ever fully get this right. We're very specific in using language that says we're in pursuit of the redemptive edge, the Academy communities in pursuit of trying to take redemptive action in the world, because it's really difficult stuff to figure out how to do and contextualize it enough to say what actually is beyond just being an ethical good person and the redemptive sphere. And you have to actually make a certain movements to get into the redemptive sphere. And so we I was sort of postured as the pursuit of that.
Henry [00:14:34] Jon, one of the things I try to avoid doing, either as a podcast host with Rustin William or in our work is Sovereign's Capital is Choosing Favorites, our favorite podcast episodes of our favorite portfolio company.
[00:14:45] And so I said that I love them all equally. And so I know that you do the same with those who have come through the Academy. And yet I'm still going to ask you, if not a favorite, maybe three or four examples you have of college students who have come in through the Academy or your future founders program that you have that have looked at culture or seen a problem felt called to solve that problem. Help us to understand what some of these entrepreneurs look like.
Jon [00:15:12] Yeah, well, you're right about not having favorites. So these are just sort of selected stories that are happen to be top of mind for one reason or another. So one of them is a young man named Charles Smith. I met Chaz while I was speaking about entrepreneurship at a conference.
[00:15:27] He was actually a film maker and kind of had stumbled into, you know, he made a video on the Vine app when that was really popular. It was like the six second video clips. And his Vine clip went totally viral. And all of a sudden he found himself with like hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. And so he was trying to figure out how do I use that for, you know, some sort of good purpose. And he ended up actually coming through our emerging founders program. And then the process really trying to like developing sort of a deep understanding of social media, how it's good in the world, what it's not good for, and how he can actually use social media for redemptive purposes and actually steward the gift that he had been given, which is the hundreds of thousands of followers. And one of the things that Chaz did is he came up with an initiative called the Light Project, where he started using a social media platform to share stories, a very personal story. And I applaud him for his vulnerability about addiction that he experienced. It's an issue that a lot of young people experience. And he shared basically the gospel through his narrative and how God freedom from this addiction that he had. And so he has a social media platform that's largely just like a lot of slapstick humor. And that's really funny. And some of it is it's clean humor. So it's good in that sense. But he kind of pursues the redemptive edge of that through these ways that he's telling a story and being very vulnerable, which anybody that knows anything about social media, influencer, they are anything but vulnerable. They're kind of always these facades and things like that. So he's really tried to break that down. I would tuned into one of the Chaz livestreams a few months ago. I think he's done like a Facebook live sharing our Instagram life. And there were literally people typing comments on there. You saved my life through your story. Thank you so much. So just just incredible. And Chaz, to his credit, he was a undergrad at UPN and then he threw a connection to Spike Lee, actually had an invitation to go study grad school at NYU and get to NYU film school degree where he could have had a different kind of influence. But he actually discerned that, you know, it really felt like God was calling in to use the influence that God had given him right now to be sort of a creator, given that he had gotten all these followers without even really trying. So I really love Chaz, the story from that perspective. You know, was another. Yeah, one more as a young woman named Shana Fowler. She went to a small school in Minneapolis called North Center College, and she found out about praxis through one of our fellows that came through the accelerator program. She was asking for some mentorship after he had come and spoke to one of her classes and he said, you got to apply to this thing, Praxis Academy. So she came through the first summer and she just had an idea. She kind of had a hunch about something based on experience she had when she had visited Uganda the previous summer and done some work there.
[00:18:14] And she refined the idea. She applied to our emerging founders program, didn't get in, but she persisted, kept working at it for another year, worked on it her whole senior year of college, and ended up getting into the emerging founders program. So she went through that last summer in the summer eighteen right after she graduated.
[00:18:30] And she was trying to determine, is this enough of a thing for me to take this full time and be a full time founder? And so she went through the program, which helped her kind of define and clarify that, as well as her redemptive vision for the venture. She ended up launching a Kickstarter campaign. Seventy five thousand dollars, sort of Kickstarter pre-sale campaign as her prototype shortly after the program. She did that in August, September and got a ton of great publicity that she worked really hard to get and made the $75000 goal. Just barely. Guy got like seventy six or seventy seven thousand and has since started to ship her products. And Good Morning America actually just picked up on her story and she was just featured on the GM, a blog. I think last week.
[00:19:14] And so now more and more people are catching on to this story and really retelling the story of Qana, which the mission behind it is for her to help young girls stay in school who are dropping out of school because of issues related to menstruation, which is a natural thing. And she kind of has this whole fourth sort of philosophy and theology of it and saying like this shouldn't happen, but they don't actually have access to these products and they live in a culture where it's not talked about. So the girls just don't go to school because they're embarrassed and they're not equipped and they don't know how to talk about it.
[00:19:43] So she's actually helping by just developing a pair of panties that will help with that issue. So anyway, we're seeing all kinds of expressions of this, you know, Chaz's and film. You know, Shane is more of a social enterprise type of a model, but doing it in this sort of beautiful, redemptive way.
Henry [00:20:00] Give us one more word. It's kind of like 1850s London, kind of there's a problem and eyeopener in college and sees a problem.
[00:20:08] Life shouldn't exist this way. And I love hearing it through the lens of a collision because, you know, we've gotten older and all of us are out of college. And some of us just kind of subscribe to the fact that the world is this way and we almost have blinders. And yet there's something really beautiful about a college student that just says waysand this shouldn't happen. Why is it this way? Give us an example of one of those that comes in through maybe the Future Founders program where they're saying this is maybe like Shiina, but give us another one, too.
Jon [00:20:37] So another story, Henry, is there's a young man, his name is Grant Hensel. And he when he was in college, he got really interested in the generosity conversation and through a number of formative experiences, really decided to pursue what it meant to be generous in the world. And in the process, he got interested in nonprofits and he found by talking with a lot of nonprofits just how far behind they were on technology. And, you know, just sort of modern technology such as like MCO and digital marketing, when they were trying to get their message out and be able to get more donations to come in and grants actually had an opportunity to go work at a really good consulting firm out of college.
[00:21:16] And he had this idea, but instead he decided to go out and pursue a skillset first, which is something we advocate for a lot. And the Academy knowing that the people who are going to start right out of college are pretty rare. But he kind of set out with this problem in mind, and he started building a skill set by being a consultant during the day and then did a lot of nights and weekends kind of working with nonprofits and just learning more about them. And eventually started a venture to actually help nonprofits take advantage of the Google grant, where you can get a lot of free advertising through Google, just through this grant because you're a nonprofit. And he eventually built up his client base and this nonprofit that he served enough to be able to launch the bigger idea that he had, which was an app called the Roundup app that would connect to your credit card and actually be able to round up transactions and donate them to a charity of your choice to make that easier for nonprofits to fundraise. And not only easier to fundraise, but actually that these nonprofits would be more top of mind for the people that cared about them. Because when you're everyday transactions are being rounded up, you're kind of being reminded that you care about this nonprofit in this cause and that you're a part of it through these round up things. So it's not just about fundraising and actually shapes the people who are donating it to as well. So that's an example. Grant, he came through our Emerging Founders program after he had launched the other venture and was making it his full time career because he kind of had to go through that leap couple of years out there building a skill set. And then he made the leap to go full time on the venture. And we kind of came alongside of in the emerging founders with that last summer.
William [00:22:45] Thanks so much for sharing those stories. I want to I want a pub back to one thing that we talked about earlier.
[00:22:51] As I said, I love Praxis's view of redemptive ideas and thoughts. And you mentioned that conversation around negotiation. And I just want to let our listeners back into that a little bit, because I think we would pray both agree that negotiation at some level is not all bad. Right. So maybe take us back through that example and what parts you feel were redemptive and how you actually think about all these businesses negotiate and you try to get good deals. And some of those things are necessary in building business. And that's just the way business works. But if you just take us through that story again, you talked about some of the negative externalities, but just how you process that and how you think about negotiation on the whole.
Jon [00:23:30] Yeah, that's a good question. And I want to be careful with that story and not say, you know, I did the whole thing wrong and I don't know the total sum of the consequences for my actions. My point is that nobody ever taught me to be really intentional about thinking holistically about that negotiation. So when I think back at it, you know, one thing is just having a more holistic approach and saying, hey, if we do cut these costs, how is that going to affect the people that are making the products? And what is your supply chain look like and what a supply chain transparency look like for your company? Something like that. So I think that that's one and I would say that even no matter what environment you can have, you approach that as a invitation to a conversation about supply chain transparency as opposed to, you know, hey, I'm a Christian, so I believe this. And I think that they're doing this wrong. That's kind of this very accusatory approach to it versus an invitation to say, hey, you know, I read these statistics about forced labor in the world, and I know that that sometimes happens at different places. And I'm not saying that it's happening in your company, but I want to open up a conversation about that. And that would be with the vendor as well as an internal conversation with my other teammates and other people that would be negotiating on similar contracts. And that way we at least have kind of a more thoughtful approach to that that hopefully is more holistic and again, just invites a conversation for people to be more thoughtful and holistic in the approach and then the Praxis of it.
Rusty [00:24:54] That's really helpful. Again, I go back to having real life stories, you know, and real life applications that we can take and apply our faith against in our entrepreneurial efforts. You just don't get every day and everywhere. And so we're trying to do that here. But I applaud what you're trying to do, certainly with Praxis. Because if we can establish these early, as you said, you know, one of those lessons was to establish our faith early. But if we can establish these patterns and these understandings that we can take forward, you know, we're just going to be better. And so it's good that we're there were diving back in. So what do you see for the future? What's next for the efforts you've got in place?
Jon [00:25:36] Yeah, well, we're continuing to grow the Academy week. That's the kind of our flagship program where we recruit students from all over the world to come together and learn about these things. And it's not just learning about them, but it's also making connections. So one thing that's happening at the Academy week this summer is we're putting everybody into cohorts that are specific to their area of interests. So some people might be interested in human trafficking or in education. Ed tech startups. They might be interested in regular tech startups. We're gonna group them together so they start to build friendships and community that are working in that sector. And then they can start to process the question of what is the redemptive edge of being in a tech startup? What is the redemptive edge of an education startup? So we can help them process specifically for their context and build the relationships with others that are going out into that same field to pursue it. And so we see that growing. And a bigger hope is that they would actually choose to move to certain cities and into certain industries together with that redemptive mindset. And in the context of community of other people that are also pursuing it. So we see more of these kind of Clapham type groups. Our hope is that more and more of them are burst at the Academy and they meet one another and then decide to move into certain cities where a lot of the influence of that industry might sit like Silicon Valley and then begin to just pursue this stuff and commit to it over the long haul of their lives.
Henry [00:26:57] If you're a student or know somebody who's a student that might be interested in this, how do they get involved? You have a or applications close for the summer. What's it look like?
Jon [00:27:08] Yeah. So we do an application process every spring. The kind of final round of the applications actually open right now until May 1st. And if somebody heard this on May 3rd and they still were interested in that, I'd just missed it. They should certainly reach out to us because we can extend the application by a couple of days. But that's they apply to the Academy week. And if they're interested in that emerging founders program, which is a continuation for the people who are founders and going full time on their ventures, they actually apply and come to the Academy week first and then kind of that's an on ramp into them getting into the other programs.
Rusty [00:27:39] The life of a podcast, we hope will live on. So even next year or. Going years should be sometime in the spring.
Jon [00:27:48] Exactly. Yep, our recruiting cycles, usually in the spring, the event always happens. The first week of August, which I'll make note is important because it allows most fuel to still do like a 10 week internship. Come to that even before they have to be back at school. We also have people that are a couple of years beyond college that also apply income and so they can often get that week off of work.
Henry [00:28:09] One question we like to ask, Jon, of our guests is something that they're hearing from God maybe in scripture devotional time, something that they see this made impact in their spiritual life, maybe even within the last couple of days, last couple weeks. But how you see God working in your personal life, how genes do that?
Jon [00:28:28] Yeah, that's a good question. You know, Psalm 65 has been a big one on my mind just in the last year, especially, you know, I'm a person that there is a lot of burden.
[00:28:39] So when I see things happening in the world that break my heart, I often allow them to break my heart. You know, you just open up the news every day and there's different tragedies and things going on or injustices in the world that can really sort of break our heart. But I think without the gospel, you know, it just doesn't go anywhere. It can be pretty hopeless. And so some sixty five has been a big encouragement to me. In particular, it talks about the God of our salvation, who is the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas, the one who, by his strength, established the mountains. And that's just such a good reminder that even in the midst of often what we see as sort of chaotic news cycles and a lot of injustice in the world, that our hope is not in what's happening in the world, but our hope is in the God of our salvation and that he has the power to sustain us and compel us to action in the everyday, even though our hearts might be broken.
Henry [00:29:32] That's a great word. Thank you, Jon. Good being with you. It always is. Thank you for your flexibility. Thank you for sharing your story and excited to hear about how prices Kaddoumi works this summer. And just more, folks, it'll come together and community. Maybe you look to go to a city together and then just look to solve the challenges that they see in their own culture and not just kind of ride it, but look down and make their own culture. So thank you.
Jon [00:29:59] Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Henry [00:30:00] You know, after talking to somebody like Jon, I just I really am impressed by the fact that there are a bunch of folks, you know, I've got three teenage boys and wondering how they view life and how much of the world they take for granted and how much the world they look at and say, gosh, that's broken. We need to change things. And colleges have been a great place for people to look at what's challenging in society and then try to make some changes. You know, I think back to the 60s and there must have been college movements well before then. But there's something unique about that age between 18 and 22 where you say, I really want to make a difference. And I know that, Russy, you're really involved in a life of Purdue and you get that sense for that viva that creative energy of let's fix the problems that are out there and to be able do that through a faith lances to me, really impressive. Yeah.
Rusty [00:30:53] I think that my biggest takeaway from all of that is, is that what he said about that? We need to find our faith early, establish how our faith is going to drive us going forward into our careers, and especially for an entrepreneur. And, you know, one of the great things that's going on right now is across the country, across the world, entrepreneurialism is alive and well on the college campuses. You know, to your point of those are the years we want to make things different. We think we can conquer the world. We see problems to be solved. And now the universities are stepping in and giving a platform for students to be able to incubate ideas, transfer intellectual property. So it's not just the Stanfords of the world. It's across the country. And even in small liberal arts schools, we're seeing it. So I just thought the lesson of that is awesome. That is great. You're gonna go do that. You're going to change the world. You're going to solve a problem. But don't go there without having the grounding and the disciplines that come with your faith. Because if you do that while you're in college, I mean, you and I can speak to this all day long. Right. If you do that when you're in college, the grounding that you'll have going forward into the quote unquote, real world will be so much better, be so much better. So, yes, I thought that was great. I'm a big fan of what they're doing. And. And I think if we've got any listeners here who, you know, get know somebody, it's just, you know, they're on a college campus or they're on the way the college campus. Have them look at what Praxis is doing. You know, there's good stuff there.
Henry [00:32:29] Now, there's something really sad, this Praxis Academy program. Gosh, I wish it existed when I was in college. I wish I knew Jesus when I was in college, too. When you get to innovate and create in community with other people that are sharpening you. And one of things he didn't mentioned, but I will plug in for prices academies. They surround you with World-Class mentors trying to figure out how to do channels the marketer or intellectual property or customer acquisition. They've got some of the very best mentors that come in and spend time with the students and the fellowship is amazing. But it starts off, as you said, it's do you know God? And how do you get to know God through your entrepreneurial enterprise and endeavor. And it speaks to identity and leaders transformed and all that.
Rusty [00:33:10] So, yeah, there's probably no such institution. But just as you said, fellowship, I think, you know, even if you can't tap into the Praxis Academy, there's somewhere on your campus or on a campus or other believers. So there is probably a fellowship of Christian entrepreneurs instead of, you know, FCP, if you will, instead of Fellowship of Christian Athletes, that, you know, fellowship of Christian entrepreneurs under a campus that you should tap into. We know from the experience of working with entrepreneurs, being entrepreneurs, funding entrepreneurs, that too is better than one and having a partner going into a business, being aligned values, principles with faith. Underneath that is the underpinning of those values and principles. You just have a better chance. You just have a better chance. So seek out those those others within an institution.
Henry [00:34:03] And if you have any other stories that you know about there, we heard some from Praxis Academy. But if you have other stories you've heard of faith driven, answered Mars, innovating, creating in college. Let us know if you think that this episode might be an encouragement to a college student. You know, please send it and let us know the feedback. We've been really encouraged by the way the podcast listener base has grown. I can't think of a segment in society that I'm more interested in serving than college students and being able to get out there and and help. And support them. So thank you for tuning in. Always great to be with you. Have a great week.