Dave Blanchard (Co-founder & CEO of Praxis)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the gospel influences the work of our guests. With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode.

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Hey everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every week I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft with we talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work. I am so excited about today's guest. He's one of my favorite people doing this work in the world. His name is Dave Blanchard, and if you've read my book called the Create, you will recognize his name. Dave is the co founder and CEO of Praxis, one of my favorite organizations that exists to most motivate, educate and resource Christians to pursue redemptive entrepreneurship through their accelerator program. They've helped, I don't know, like 150 companies, 92% of which have survived, which is a startling number. So Dave and I sat down and we recently we talked about what's the difference between work that is exploitative, ethical and redemptive. Right. We talked about why Christ followers might want to be looking for, quote, brownfield opportunities at work instead of, quote, unquote, greenfield opportunities. And we talked about the value of dedicated competency days within each workweek. You guys are going to love this gem of an episode with my friend Dave Blanchard. Dave Blanchard, thanks for being here.

Totally my pleasure, Jordan. Thanks for having me.

I can't believe it's taken us this long to get you on the podcast. We're like 100 episodes deep. And Dave Blanchard, one of my favorite people in organizations, hasn't been on yet, so. Hey, I appreciate you doing this. All right, let's start here. For those who don't know what's Praxis.

Yeah. So Praxis is an organization created to advance redemptive entrepreneurship, which is really something that is defined by an idea we call creative restoration through sacrifice, that we're made in the image of God, that we are made to be part of renewing all things, and that we're supposed to do that on behalf of others. We started about 10 years ago and have a focus on three things, really building ventures that are acting redemptively building community around this idea and then publishing content that helps people advance their craft.

And you guys produce some of the best content in this space, in my humble opinion. So we've known each other for years. I was thinking back to when we had lunch in New York. I mean, it's been a long time, and somehow I'm not sure I've ever heard the founding story of Praxis. How did this all come about?

Yeah, happy to share. So, really, there were two converging paths. That's the path of myself and my co founder, Josh Kwan. Josh was the director of international giving at the David Weekley Family Foundation. David's the largest private homebuilder in the country and commits half of his income to global poverty work. And Josh was tasked with finding a portfolio, particularly looking for Christian leaders. Although a lot of times, frankly, the most excellent leaders they found doing that work were not Christians. And so he lamented that. And his desire was to create a stronger pipeline of investable impact leaders. And so he was kind of charting on that path. And I was at the same time, before we knew each other, working at a design and innovation firm called Ideo, which was one of the kind of primary advancers of human centered design. And while I was there, I was able to talk the partners into letting me help design our startup practice of how the firm worked with startups they'd never figured out how to do things on kind of an equity basis and what to do with the emerging startup ecosystem. And so though that work has gone and been carried forward far beyond the imagination I gave it, at that time I was doing research on Y Combinator and techstars and Draper Richards Kaplan foundation and a bunch of these new firms that were supporting entrepreneurs in their work. And so I met up with Josh and we started to have a dialogue around this. And we realized that there were a lot of different players with a lot of great things they were offering entrepreneurs. But there was no one who was kind of having a faith first conversation and saying, hey, who the founder is and where their identity is and what's driving them is really going to drive a lot of the outcomes. And it's not just about billion dollar exits or even a million lives out of poverty, but actually founder formation and the world we're building as entrepreneurs and what we're fundamentally telling about the world. And so that's the birth story of Praxis, is what Josh and I coming together to say, let's start one accelerator program that finds a dozen entrepreneurs every year who are Christians in business and nonprofit and just help them be surrounded by mentors who believe the same things about what the world should look like and who fundamentally want to help them advance their venture.

I love it. And give us an idea of the scale of what the Lord has done through your work over the last 10 years.

Yeah, well, we've been very fortunate. The first accelerator quickly gave birth into a business track and a nonprofit track. And what we realized is that in building those kind of mentor driven programs, we ended up building community. So mentors would come and say, hey, this has really shaped my view of things too, particularly along the lines of how I might drive this Christian vision into my work and serve others through it. And they said, you know, we want community with each other. We want to think about what this means for our lives and vocations. And investors and philanthropists came in looking to fund these organizations and also said, we, we wonder what this means for our work. And so you just got the sense that this venture portfolio was building into a community of people who are, who now we describe as a community of practice, which is this sociological term, that is a group of people who are pursuing a craft together over time, which I think is really important posturally to hear from us that we don't have all the answers and we're distributing them to people. We're actually discovering them together. So that's what grew over time. And then about four years ago, we realized that this community was having a particular conversation that we wanted to give a name to. That's where redemptive entrepreneurship came from. And I have to say that once we articulated that as a specific thing we were working on that we wanted to give definition to, it really gave life to our all of our content work. And that content then, of course, has been both informed by the community and has shaped that community, which has then gone on to, of course, shape those ventures. And you can kind of get a sense for a virtuous cycle that has really allowed. Allowed us to build a portfolio of 200 ventures that have over a third of a billion dollars in annual revenue. They employ about 5,000 people, around 44 different countries. And exciting for us is we've actually seen over $100 million get placed from our community to these entrepreneurs specifically. And then beyond this kind of tighter group that's acting together, we've been able to reach about half a million people with our different content resources, which is exciting as well, because we believe this redemptive idea can apply to anyone in any workplace, anywhere in the World.

I love it. I think the tool, the piece of content that, at least for me, is most effective in defining this idea of what is redemptive entrepreneurship is what you guys call the redemptive frame. And I'm curious if, in audio format, we can talk around the wheel of this redemptive frame. Can you walk us through this tool and give us a brief synopsis of it?

Sure. Yeah, you're right. It's kind of the anchor point of our work. And we would say that there's three ways of fundamentally going out in the world to work. There's an exploitative way, which is really interested in its own things. It's interested in using the world for its own ends. This can be as a leader or an organization. It can be an exploitative. There's an ethical pathway which says, let's do the right thing. The kind of bottom of the ethical is this do no harm ide that I think Google most famously represented out in the world. And then there's this redemptive pathway, which we believe is really focused on how do we renew culture, how do we bless people instead of just respecting them or using them in our operating model? And then how do we, as leaders, instead of working on our own self and being really kind of focused on our own outcomes and who we are, really focus on serving others? And so those exploitative, ethical, and redemptive really work across three dimensions of work, which is our strategy in our ventures, our operating model, and our leadership. That's the kind of fundamental core of this redemptive framework.

All right, so let's use an example, Right. I'm sure you've done this before, right? Like maybe use the same type of business that falls into each of those three buckets. How does that business differ in the exploitative, the ethical, and the redemptive kind of frames?

Yeah, sure. So I think these things can come alive a bit when you think about the different alternatives. And there's. I guess there's some. Some easier ideas to get our heads around. So I'll use maybe one that's front and center. There's a huge economy that's been born inside of the. Let's call it the online relationship space. Right.

Good example.

And so I think about Sean Rad, the guy who founded Tinder, and he actually advances this idea that technology and desire have come together for progress, basically, and that what they're doing is advancing the culture. I would instead look at that and say perhaps from a particularly Christian worldview, that they're basically leveraging culture and in some sense using people and their fundamental need to be loved to create economic opportunity for themselves. And you have magazines like Vanity Fair who are known to be particularly, you know, thinking about the redemptive consequences of things. Basically looking at Tinder and saying, hey, this is an implosion of the youth. You know, there's, this is a totally toxic environment. And there, you know, we could unpack that for, for many minutes, an entire episode probably. But that's, you know, you think about that as exploitative, then you have maybe more ethical actors in the space who are saying, hey, we're just here to match people. We want to help people connect. We have no particular angle on how that happens, but you know, there's an algorithm behind the scenes and we get paid when people come together. And that's, you know, that's great. They're using technology, they're advancing the culture. Maybe there's kind of a do no harm ethic behind it. And people are respected as humans. We think that's fine and great and solid work. You know, that's, that's important for our society. And we as Christians should have an ethical baseline. But I think there's then redemptive possibilities. So I think of my friend Steve Zeedzik. Steve was a, he's a serial entrepreneur. Started a company called Lasting.

I subscribed to Lasting for, for like 18 months. I thought like, I love the product.

Awesome, awesome. So you know all about it then. You know, for the listeners, the. Steve was working at a company called the Knot, which is the largest wedding kind of producer online. They touch about 80% of weddings. And while he was there, he said, you know, we do a great job helping people get married. We don't necessarily help them at all stay married. And would love to create a technology based mobile product that's more than kind of the weekend retreat or the book brings this connection between couples online into the mobile first setting and has done an incredible job bringing that up. Was Apple's app of the day was actually just acquired by Talkspace, who's now going to help take their latest round of funding and bring this marriage tool to the masses, which in my view is renewing marriage as an institution that people could care about in our world. It's blessing people who are inside the organization. They actually have a beautifully redemptive culture and get to build this venture that's contributing to two people's lives in such a meaningful way. And then frankly, Steve did a number of things along the way. I would say to basically say I'm going to commit my vocation to love and serve others instead of just pursuing wherever I can maximize my own financial opportunity.

So what did those sacrifices look like, by the way? We need to have Steve on the podcast to answer these questions himself. But what are some examples of that, of sacrificing one's career in order to bless others rather than bless ourselves?

Well, you know, I think it can look like a lot of different things for different leaders. So I would say there are kind of routine sacrifices, if you will, where this might be something we talk about as gleaning, which is I'll use an example of someone on our team, Andy Crouch, who had an opportunity. He wrote the top article of the year for the Wall Street Journal on Steve Jobs. And this is a few years ago at Steve's death. And they called him back and said, hey, hey Steve, or hey, hey Andy, will you do this next column we have on Tim Tebow? You seem to understand Christians and Christian culture and could write about that. And he said, you know, great opportunity for him to write for the Journal again. But he said, you know what, I have a friend who studies Tim Tebow and this would be a breakout opportunity for him to get to write. And so he passed on the article and said, hey, I'd love to hand it to my friend. Would you take him to do that? And that happened. And it ended up being that the Thiebaud article surpassed the Steve Jobs article for most read article of the year, but was a breakthrough opportunity for this other writer. And so it's kind of acts like that that you can put into your life and say, I'm going to routinely out for giving others opportunity to advance. I also think, and this is not a sector based preference or anything like that, but there are also great moments of sacrifice, like many of the nonprofit leaders in our portfolio who have basically said, even though I have tremendous entrepreneurial capacity, I'm structurally going to limit my upside permanently to do this sort of work. And so I think there's moves like that. And then frankly there's a lot of hidden sacrifices, I would say, in choices that people as leaders make on a day to day basis to give credit to others. Even as we talk about things like excellence and mastery. It's very easy to produce a team, or it's maybe not easy, but you can produce a team that creates excellent work and then absorb all of that to yourself as a leader and say, look, you know, look what I did. It was pretty amazing. And the smaller, I think redemptive sacrifices that do bless people are in passing off that and then taking, of course, the blame when things don't go exactly the right way.

I hope you don't mind, but I want to brag on you a minute to make this even more practical of what it looks like to be more redemptive at work, because I heard a really great example of this at the Praxis Summit a few weeks ago. I was sitting in on a breakout session about how we can build workplace cultures that truly bless women, specifically on our teams. Kind of, you know, kind of the ethical for following this exploitative, ethical, redemptive framework. Right. The ethical thing to do is to give standard maternity leave would be one example. Right. But one of your team members mentioned how Praxis is different, how Praxis is operating more redemptively, proactively, you know, not just respecting women on the team, but blessing them. And this woman told this great story about how she was coming back to work after the birth of child, and you guys proactively asked her, hey, what do you need to make this work? And there was this, like, really awkward, really practical thing of like, hey, I have to be at this conference for work, but, like, how am I going to ship breast milk back and forth from the conference of the home? And you guys offer to pay that. Right? Like, way beyond the ethical, but proactively going out of your way to bless others. I love that. So. All right, Dave, make this practical for somebody who's not an entrepreneur, right. Who's not necessarily shaping culture by, you know, creating something new in terms of a venture, a marketer, a nurse, an artist, an author. How can we all be thinking more redemptively about work?

Yeah, I love this question. Thanks for asking it, Jordan. So I do fundamentally believe that the redemptive framework applies to all of us, whether our vocation is in the home or as a writer or whatever, the different places that God has put us in the world. I would say at the core of it is actually this idea of redemptive leadership. So you can kind of self examine and think to yourself, there's these three elements. Am I just working for myself for my own glory, for my own desires, for the things I want? How I define the good life, that's kind of the exploitative. At the end of the day, if that's your heart mode, that will flow out into everything else you do, everything you make in the world, no matter how missional it looks or, you know, glossy it is on the surface, underneath that is going to be. I'm Doing this for my own purposes. For me, I think the ethical pathway for any of us is, you know, I'm actually. I've kind of matured out of that a little bit, and I'm. I'm doing these things for the good of the world. But at the end of the day, there's still this deep identity that's rooted in how I want to be seen by others. And I don't. You know, sometimes you talk in business schools about the Sunshine Test, which is this idea that, you know, is your action. Could your action be written up on the front page of the New York Times, of the Wall Street Journal or whatnot? Which is this kind of idea that, you know, as long as it could be written up there, it's okay. And, you know, you're. As long as your reputation wouldn't be soured by that. You know, again, that's an okay baseline. But I think at the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves, okay, particularly as Christians, are we dying to self, which is a brutally hard thing that the Gospel asks us to do? And in that process, are we able to, from allowing our identity to be found just in Christ, flow out the renewal of culture, the blessing of people? Because we're not so concerned with our own ego, our own results, our own outcomes, our own resume, our own career advancement. And this is why, with much debate internally, we've settled on this idea of creative restoration through sacrifice. It's easier to just talk about creative restoration. Hey, let's just make things and renew culture and have that be good and not realize that when we die to self, there's a sacrifice of our own kind of willfulness that then unlocks possibilities for others. I love what Andy on our team says about going beyond ethics. It's really easy to be ethical if you're inside of a system that is already just. The problem is that we are never inside of systems that are already just. They always need renewal. And so wherever we find ourselves, entrepreneur or not, let's look at the place that we occupy and say, how could I contribute to a better vision for this place, these people, and who am I becoming along the way in doing that?

I think a lot of serious Christ followers can get on board with this idea, obviously, because it's so modeled in the life of Christ that, like, we are called to be sacrificial in our lives, with our income, with how we spend our time certainly outside of work. I think it's another leap to look at the 40, 50 hours we spend at the office each week and think about that redemptively. And I think the disconnect is largely in this, you know, truncated gospel that we've been sold over the last 200 years, what theologians call this two chapter gospel, that it's all about individual fall, individual redemption. But of course, we know there's this larger picture, this 4, some people say 5 chapter gospel of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and then ultimate, you know, consummation, right when heaven comes to earth. Talk a little bit about that and how that leads you to think redemptively about work. Because I think there's some people standing there, you know, listen to this saying, I don't get why does my work. But why am I called to restore culture if Christ is going to do that in the end, why does it matter what I do right now? How would you respond to that, Dave?

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. I would say at the front end, it may be that someone is listening to this or has been raised or surrounded in a story that suggests that work is primarily toil and that, you know, we should effectively get it done, make a living, and then go about doing the real work in some other sphere, whether that's the church or giving or whatnot. Work is toil. But the good news, bad news is that people who are in the church are toiling. People who are in nonprofit work are toiling. Missionaries are toiling. We're all, all part of that story. And all spheres of society, again, are part of systems that need new imagination. And so if you're in finance or you are in education or you are in the law, let's discover different places where we can be part of making things new. That's the, that's the second part. Jesus came to make all things new. This is in the scripture. And who are the hands and feet of Christ? That's you and me. And so why would we take what Jesus came to do and say, well, we're just going to wait for him to accomplish it and kind of let the ships burn, if you will, let's participate in that. And I think over time, and this is, you know, another full podcast or something, but over time, if we separate our work from our witness and we say, you know, we're going to speak it over here, but we're really not going to do a whole lot that's different, that witness is fundamentally compromised. We can't get there with people they don't understand when they look at our lives, which, by the way, takes place mostly in the 45 and 50 hours a week and say, oh, well, I'm here doing finance, you're here doing finance. We both go for the, you know, the same deals. We do them the same way. We try to make the same money. Both argue about our bonuses in the same way. We both take credit for the things around us. But you give, you know, 10% of your money to. To your church, great. I don't care. Do with it what you want to. But we're here doing the same thing. If in the other situation, you're there, you're advancing other people's careers instead of your own, you're talking about restoring trust in the financial ecosystem when nobody trusts each other and everybody's paranoid. You're raising points in conversations that actually are sacrificial because they may mean that your bosses look differently at you or think you're not working towards the same ends. Those are the sort of things that prompt questions that then give us the opportunity for witness. So let's join God in that work.

Amen. Well said. And we forget, I think, a lot of times in the church, we neglect the ascension and that the Spirit came and we are now God's hands and feet doing redemptive work out in the world. Right? Yep. Jesus empowered his disciples and said, go out. You're going to do greater things than even I did. I think a lot of times we neglect that. Hey, last year, March 20, 2020, you, Andy, some other people at Praxis published what in my opinion is still the best piece about how our work should change in response to the pandemic. This piece titled Leading beyond the Blizzard, where you guys basically claimed, you know, before many others did, that we're heading not just for a blizzard or a winter, but this kind of mini ice age, or little ice age, I think, is exactly what you guys called it, in which kind of everything's gonna change.

Right.

So I'm curious for you. We're recording May, June, can't remember what month it is, 2021. A year later, what opportunities do you see for Christian entrepreneurs and workers in general as the ice of this mini ice age starts to thaw? What are the opportunities here?

Yeah, well, I think, again, you know, to maybe beat a dead drum here. But they come back to the redemptive framework in the sense that there are going to be myriad economic opportunities. And I think that's what a lot of the business world wants to talk about. Where can we make money in this new world? Fine. Businesses make money. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't think economically but for that to be the primary driving motive to say how can we leverage this cultural moment and use the people around us to do that so I can, you know, buy a yacht someday? That is one mode of operation that most folks I think will take and that will rise and fall with that and there will be much that happens. I think the ethical take, if you will, is okay, so how do I make sure to navigate the storm? That's been a bit of the last year, but okay, I understand what happened last year. How do I understand what's coming and make sure that my organization, my venture, my portfolio is not in danger and can survive through this and hopefully thrive through it and be okay. And oh, by the way, the workplace is changing. How do I adapt to the hybrid workplace and remote and how do I make sure that, you know, we do the right thing here and just kind of maintain functionality? I think, and you know, there's opportunity in that too. There are organizations that will manage that better than others and leaders that will, and they'll attract new resources and team members and so on. But for me, I think, and I would say for us as practice what we're interested in, as this thought comes, to use your words, what are the redemptive opportunities for us to lean into? And as we think about that, you know, one of the things we've talked about is the difference between this sort of let's find blue oceans or greenfields idea and instead let's look at maybe brownfields. Let's look for places where the most brokenness has happened through the pandemic. Let's look at the people who are at the bottom of this, you know, what they call K shaped recovery, economically speaking, where a bunch of people have done really well and a bunch of people have done just terribly. And let's go down to the bottom of the decay and understand how has labor been affected, how have families been affected, how has education been affected and what new things can we give birth to that will really take place in renewal? I'll use just one example of a person in our community, Julie Alamon, who's a philanthropist in San Francisco. And she and her family got together and said, you know, we want to not just look at education and what's happened to students in particularly low performing schools, but let's look at mental health in education and build a, both a philosophy and a strategy there. And so they did that and they actually came up with a one time million dollar plus portfolio grant across seven different organizations who had creative ways to address mental health in the years to come for some of these students who've been, you know, mostly trapped at home on zoom, even if they're kindergarteners. And so it's those types of moves, those types of ways of thinking about creative sacrifice, a creative restoration through sacrifice in this moment that I'm most excited about now.

It's beautiful. You know, one of the things I've always appreciated most about you and the team at Praxis is just this extremely high commitment to excellence. Right. So to get you to get up on a soapbox and talk about the obvious here, like, what ways in which does the gospel specifically connect to that commitment? Commitment to excellence. Right. Because, you know, lots of high performing professionals had this commitment to excellence. There's this difference of sacrifice here. But what in the Scriptures leads you to just this commitment to really high standards?

Yeah, well, I think there's a number of things that we need to think about as believers relative to. To excellence. First is, and I think this goes back to Francis Schaeffer, sort of a social commentator, who, you know, really made the case that the more we do our work with excellence, greater our witness. And I think that's completely true. I would give a bit of a spin on this too, that I think we so often locate excellence in product. But I think the more we think about what I'll call kind of holistic excellence, which is, you know, who's the organization becoming? Who's like, how are we doing? Organizational culture? Do we have excellence inside, not just the performance of the individuals, but actually the way that the organization is contributing to those individuals.

Are they flourishing maybe?

Are they. Yeah, exactly. Are they flourishing? Because that has to be, to me, integrated with product excellence. And it's very easily, it's actually very easy for one of those things to get out in front of the other. I might say that, you know, not to paint sacred secular divides here, but perhaps the world is better at shipping incredibly excellent products, whatever come of the people who do it. And maybe there are elements of Christian culture that are better at creating places where people feel like they're flourishing, but the product maybe is lacking a little bit. And I would actually argue that true excellence is a cohesion of those two things. Those are actually false versions of it. That's a major way where I think as Christians, we can kind of redefine what excellence is. And at the same time just really knowing and really connecting back that, that it's better for us to do a few things well with integrity than to. It's kind of a version of you know what? Does it profit you to gain the whole world but lose your soul?

Yeah. Amen. Well said. You're an exceptional founder. You guys have helped accelerate the ventures of a lot of other exceptional entrepreneurs. What's the delta between good and great in terms of entrepreneurs? Like, when you guys are evaluating teams applying for the accelerator, what are you looking at most? I mean, obviously you guys are looking at the redemptive edge, specifically within Praxis. Right. But if you were doing this at ideo. Right. Again, like, what are you looking for?

Yeah, it's a good question. I would say the difference between good and great is, I think three things come to mind. First is maybe first is last. But I'll say it like, I think the willingness to endure pain is the difference in the sense that if you're only doing what you kind of emotionally desire and your work ends with what you feel like, you won't get there. You'll build a culture of whatever your talent ceiling is. For some people, that's still great, frankly. But for most of us, it's not for most of us. So I think there's this, you know, you can put whatever word next to that you want. Grit, persistence, a lot of things that are floating around. I think the second thing I'll mention is just vision. You can't be great without a vision for it. You can't build something great. And so that vision, to me, is not just a thing that has been given, although certain people, I think, trend more towards it. But it also requires disciplines of reflection, being able to, quote Scott Belsky, pull back from the reactionary workflow and think about the greatest problems of our time. So there's a discipline in vision as well. And then the last thing I think from particularly from RC and maybe, maybe less the idoc, but is a spiritual maturity that is not age dependent, but actually heart posture dependent. So does this person come in with just a true conviction and humility to put things in a particular direction? The reason I include that in the list is because I think if you don't have that kind of deeper, I've got to do this thing, and I feel called to it. Your vision will become kind of distorted over time because basically your vision is one for yourself. It's not a vision for a particular mission. And so you're kind of willing to go wherever it takes to get personal acclaim, which I think actually can separate the good from great. And again, we can have a larger conversation about how you define great anyway. But to me, a, there's a humility and a service nature to that work.

At the summer you were talking about the Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. I'm not a huge Simon Sinek fan, but I really enjoyed that book. Yeah, I just really like the way he thought about it. In this kind of role of the Chief Vision officer. You guys just brought on a managing partner at Praxis. I'm assuming you're moving into more of this chief Vision Officer role. Is that a correct reader?

Yeah, I think that was a really first of all a gift from God to have Sajan George join our team. And we in talking about this, another book to name check. Is this fairly familiar one these days, Traction Rocket Fuel, that series. And we had been talking through that a bit and I think one of the things that attracted Sajan and I to work together at that level of the organization was that as we described it, I'm probably 75% vision and 25% operations. And he on the right, I think he can be visionary too, but in the right kind of stage of the organization, kind of prefers the 25 vision and 75 operation, which is not this kind of binary. Hey, I'll come up with the ideas and you push the buttons over here. But this collaborative acknowledgment of each other's giftings and I think, you know, sometimes there is a transition that happens where basically the CEO goes into kind of like I'm going to go off into the corner and and like be the thought leader or speak and let the organization do its thing over here. And that's definitely not what I want, but I definitely recognize that for us to work over the next decade and two decades to come, I was quickly becoming a bottleneck to the organization, actually managerially to really let our team unlock new possibility. And so the AD of Sajin allows me to go into more and more vision work and more and more kind of ideas work around who we're becoming and what redemptive entrepreneurship is.

I love that you mentioned that Scott Belsky quote, stepping back from this reactionary workflow. What does that look like practically for you? How do you do that?

A couple ways, I would say. One, the best I can through very structured schedule in the work week. So we actually value that for all of our team members. And one of the things realized a couple months ago was just that in this new Zoom land that we all live in.

That's a great movie title. Yeah, if you're looking for money.

So, you know, we just realized we were just getting overtaken by meetings and connection. Any Time of the week. And so we have now two things on Mondays, every Monday, a what we call competency day, which is effectively a version of Cal Newport's idea of deep work work for all of us. So we don't have meetings. We don't do a whole lot of internal communications that day. It just allows us to get stuff done. So that's, for me in my seat, a time for me to do vision work at either, you know, the 30,000 foot level or the thousand foot level. There's some vision happening there. And then we have also flexible Fridays, which allow us to. We don't have recurring meetings and things like that there and allow us to drop in, design sprints, things like that, for us to do vision work together as a team. So we, you know, we don't have to say, oh, well, let's do that meeting in six weeks, because none of us have time for it. We always know there's some margin there. So the other thing I'd add is I have actually, with my wife, developed a mutual cadence of overnight retreats. So about every two months, she will and I will both independently go away for an overnight 24 hours. Usually take one book with us and just sort of have some solitude and say, okay, God, what? In all that reactionary workflow that I just did, what do you want to tell me now? And I have actually found. It still surprises me, you know, a decade later or whatever, that the more I'm seeking God, the more ideas kind of spill out of my brain. But if I'm seeking the answers to an idea, the harder it is to find it on my own.

That's really. That's really good. I'm reminded of this quote. I was reading this book. I can't remember the title, but it's talking about walking. But walking is like a spiritual discipline as a discipline of solitude. It's like walking opens up doors that basically sitting in front of your computer only, like, strains against. Right. I think there's a lot of wisdom to that. So, typical day in your life, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. Dave, what does the TikTok of your day look like?

Yeah, so I'll say, I think every quarter or so, I'm rebooting what that looks like. Not, you know, in some radical sense, but to accommodate for new seasons and what's happening at a baseline. My goal is to go to bed at 9:30, get up at 5:30, spend that initial part of the morning, let's call it 5:30-7-OR so in some sort of devotional or reading block in confession. There are many mornings where I feel the pressure of the day coming and also pop into work. It's one of actually my goals going forward for the rest of the year is to not do that because I just need that morning renewal especially. We have three boys. It's a chaotic house, they're lovely, but that when they're up there's no rest per se. And so I try to do that. I fit in 30 minutes of exercise in the morning. I'm a peloton fan and so I've got one of those. I do that, it's simple. Reduces my commute to the gym, which I used to have, and then have a family breakfast and get to work usually around 8:30, 8:45. And then as we start the day we have a four week rhythm at Praxis. So every other week this is one of them. I'll be starting this in just a few minutes. We have have structured team meetings where we have kind of two teams that are focused on different areas of our work. And Sajid and I meet with those teams, hear their updates, the major issues they're facing, think about how they're doing. That happens on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And then we do some brain trusts where we help solve each other's problems, do partner meetings and so on. You can guess, kind of my day is full. Particularly moves Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays are full of primarily meetings with the Mondays and Wednesdays that are blocked off off. And I try to wrap the day with our practice prayer at 5:15, which you do for 15 minutes as a team, which has been really great. We actually, if you can believe it, our partner for theology and culture, Andy Crouch, has coded a python based slack bot that. Yep, you heard that right.

It's amazing.

Yeah. With the work of Mary Elizabeth Goodell and our community manager interacts with our air table and helps us actually pray for every person in our community throughout the calendar year. So it prompts us for five or six people every day. We think of them, ask them for requests and pray for them as a team and then yeah, try to be with the family for dinner every night when I'm at home and put the kids to bed. Trying to take our two elderly boys one night and our other boy, three year old the other night to trade off with my wife. So that's my general day.

That's pretty similar to mine. I love it. All right, three quick questions to wrap up. Number one, which books do you find in general Recommending or gifting most frequently to others.

Okay, well, I'll try to be original here. And it actually connects with what I do. So I would say probably my most frequent gift is a book called Alternative to Futility. It was written in 1949 by Elton Trueblood, who is a kind of a Quaker minister and public leader. And he really talks a lot about the. The purpose and beauty of redemptive fellowship and actually connects this back to our vocation and what we should be doing as Christians to renew the world with a really prophetic voice for that time, with kind of the futility being just large rooms where nobody knows each other and kind of devoid of this deeper connection. And so short book, a powerful one that. That I got from a friend and have distributed many times since. Other book I would say is a book called Ordering youg Private world by Gordon MacDonald.

Yeah, I've heard of this.

Yeah. Older classic, pretty straightforward, just about. Hey, you know, if you're gonna. I think the. The. The lead quote is. Is one from Socrates, which is, beware the barrenness of a busy life. Which, if you're like me, I could hear that quote pretty much every day and be reminded by it and have tried to read it every year or two. Just as something that is so critical to what he talks about is not burning out when you're 40, which is, you know, just the line I crossed and ending well, which is something that very few of us do.

Well, that's good. Hey, who would you most like to hear on this podcast talking about the redemptive work they do in the world? Entrepreneur or not?

I will nominate one of our board members, Mike Bontrager. Mike is the founder of Chatham Financial, a company that he ran for about 35 years and was actually kind of implicitly referencing him earlier in the podcast. He built a company, about 500 people across nine global offices that worked in the derivative space in finance with a kind of. As an advisory firm. Their primary purpose was to restore trust in the financial systems. And there's just some beautiful stories of how they, as an organization kind of intervened in that. But that wasn't just Mike's only thing. I think the current work he's doing with something called Square Roots Collective, which is a locally focused group in Kennett Square, where the. Where he's located, that's really focused on the renewal of that through everything from real estate renewal to telling some beautiful stories, including those of the Underground Railroad that passed through that area of the world.

Hey, one of my favorite episodes is actually a Praxis alum, our mutual friend, Brett Hagler. Episode 35 Terrific episodes. If you haven't listened to it, everybody go listen to that one, too. All right, one thing from today's conversation that you want to hammer home again, you want to reiterate before we sign.

Off, I would say for all of you who think that redemptive work is located outside of your grasp because of the place you work or the boss you have or the agency you lack, I would just encourage you to take that to the Lord in prayer because. And I would say take it to the Lord in imaginative prayer, because I believe that he has given us all a possibility and an opportunity to love others through our vocation. If we're really willing to just ask the question how.

Amen. Well said. Hey, Dave, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you and your team do at Praxis every day. Thank you for helping us clarify these lines between the exploitative and the ethical and redemptive work. And thank you for just coming alongside so many founders to create cultural goods that bring us closer to the kingdom being on earth as it is in heaven. Guys, you can learn more about Dave and praxis@praxislabs.org Dave, thank you so much for joining us.

My privilege. Thanks for having me, Jordan.

Now you guys can see why I love Dave and Praxis so much. Much. I hope you guys really enjoyed that episode. Hey, if you're enjoying the podcast, do me a favor. Take 10 seconds right now to go review rate the podcast in the podcast app of your choice. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week.