Welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Lawrence Chavez and our topic is Scarcity, Abundance and New Mexico's Permanent Bond. Lawrence is a passionate innovator focused on meaningful innovation. He has been on both sides of the table and understands the demands of both the investor and the needs of the founder. Most recently a CEO and founder of Everyday Context. Previously, Lawrence co founded Lotus Leaf Coatings, an advanced materials company, in 2011.

Prior to 2011, he served as a Venture partner with Flywheel Ventures and managed the New Mexico Gap Fund 1, a seed investment fund. As well as serving as interim CFO was Astria Semiconductor. Lawrence also served on the boards of ABQID Fund 1 and Arrowhead Innovation Fund, both focused on seed and early stage investing in New Mexico. Lawrence, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Paul. I'm glad to be here.

As we were talking about in your bio, you've been both an entrepreneur and an investor, both sides, for many years. How does that dual lens shape how you think about New Mexico's economy in general and the permanent bond in particular, which we're going to get into?

So and again, I've been around joined the New Mexico Angels in 2004, so over 20 years ago. And so I've been in this space for a while and I've seen a lot of stuff and the way that shapes my view of what's going on in New Mexico is New Mexico is a challenging environment to raise capital. As a startup founder, it's a challenging environment for businesses in general. We can talk about that in a little bit. So I think from the investor side of things, investors need to recognize and understand that in many cases New Mexico founders are in a different place than founders might be elsewhere around the country. And so part of that is that empathy and understanding of those founders, but also a responsibility on the part of the state and the broader community to help nurture and educate and bring up those founders. And I think we've done a decent job of that, but we could do so much more.

Your brother, who is also a significant player in this space, has talked about sometimes there's a product market disconnect between what VCs who aren't investors, who aren't familiar with New Mexico are looking for in terms of investable startups and what's actually, you know, coming up through our ranks. We're a rural state historically haven't had as robust an ecosystem as many other places. And now VCs are starting to look at New Mexico, get excited about it, but we're still, you know, navigating that gap. Is that fair to say?

That's fair to say. So a couple things is number one, not all VCs are equal. And what I mean by that is they focus on different things. There's life science VCs, there's deep tech VCs, there's cleantech VCs, there's VCs for consumer products. So when a founder and entrepreneur is looking at those, those type of looking for funding, not all VCs are the same. If you're a consumer products company, you're not going to a deep tech vc. Or if you do, then you're going to get a quick no. So understand that you need to focus your efforts on the flip side of that.

As we look at recruiting VCs, we need to recruit VCs to New Mexico that matches the stage and thesis of New Mexico companies. And I think there's been a disconnect in that in the past. We try to get, you know, large VCs that, you know, whose minimum funding round is $30 million. And then you have a bunch of companies that are presented to them that need a million, 2 million to get to the next stage. They're never going to get funding from those VCs. So we need to, as a state and a community, be better about that product market fit. What is the product? The product is the New Mexico companies and how do we present those to the outside world?

Great. So we're going to get into some of the issues about the permanent bond and what some of the exciting developments and some of the disconnects here and some of you are thinking about how we might change that. Before we do that, not all of our listeners know anything about New Mexico. I happen to be here. I love this place. You're here. There's a lot of awesome people here. But for somebody who doesn't really know New Mexico's economy, we're going to be referencing it a lot.

What would you want somebody who's not as familiar with our economy to have some background to understand the rest of this conversation?