In this Business Blast podcast episode, host Tyler Wagner interviews Paul Foley, founder of Smart Capital. Paul shares a formative story from his elementary school karate days, emphasizing that mastering a few fundamental moves leads to consistent success—a principle he applies to business. He explains Smart Capital’s mission to democratize venture capital by allowing everyday investors to fund VC funds, addressing geographic concentration (40% in San Francisco, 20% in New York) and demographic homogeneity (80‑85% white male VCs). Paul offers core business advice centered on singular focus, warning against hopping between industries and urging entrepreneurs to commit deeply to one passion. He discusses his personal framework for happiness, likening life to a balanced wheel of family, friends, health, wealth, and community, and stresses the need for equilibrium across these domains. Paul cites Ender’s Game as his favorite book, drawing lessons on empowering team members and decentralizing decision‑making, which he has applied to Smart Capital’s leadership structure. He also shares a motivational quote from The Greatest Salesman in the World about being a lion that persists. Finally, Paul provides ways to connect with him—LinkedIn, Colorado Startups, and Colorado Blockchain communities—highlighting his involvement in local tech events and hackathons.
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Welcome to the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can learn more about Authors Unite and join the free community at authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode.
All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Paul Foley with us. He's the founder of Smart Capital. So welcome to the show, Paul.
Thank you for having me, Tyler. I appreciate it.
Of course, thanks for joining us, man. And we'll dive in. The first question I have for you is, what's the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
Spanish. The first one that comes to mind is karate in elementary school. We had a kind of Master Ramsey was his name in Boulder. We thought we were going to be doing like jump kicks and flying kicks and all backspins, etc. It ended up there were 6 moves and that was it. And it was fundamentals. And with that, we ended up winning pretty much every sparring and fighting competition, me and the group of 5 we had. All across Colorado. So, I learned really early on that fundamentals win pretty much every day. 6 different types of moves, that's it, performed flawlessly, and mental toughness.
And what's the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
So, for smart capital specifically, venture has kind of been an old-school game. It hasn't been really disrupted since it began. What we're doing at Smart Capital is for the first time anyone can invest in a venture capital fund, which has prior been only large hedge funds, high net worth individuals, and kind of pensions or endowments. There's a huge opportunity to make it so funding gets more equally distributed, not only across the country, because right now 40% of all VC funding happens in San Francisco and 20% happens in New York. But also kind of more of a diversified funding. Right now it's something like 80 to 85% of all VCs are 6-foot-like-ish white males, which leads to skewed funding to certain demographics, etc. For us at Smart Capital, what we're doing is we're opening up the investment class, we're partnering with different micro VCs, and we're looking to get all kinds of new ideas, etc., funded.
And what's your best piece of overall business advice, and not necessarily industry specific?
That's a great question. I would say focus. I think this is one of the things that if you read every business book, they say this, the same thing, kind of a passion or a, in some cases like with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, like an obsession on something and a long-term commitment to it. I see too many entrepreneurs or people in their careers jump from kind of one industry to the next. While that might be good for like a diverse experience, it's usually not good at building lasting empires or companies. It's a kind of a focus on one thing that's really exciting and then making that industry or that focus huge.
Yes, I agree. And that goes back to like the book The One Thing, you know.
All the books are the same.
I know.
It's always the same.
I agree. And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
I'll just stay on the theme, focus. So when I came out of college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I jumped from tech consulting to selling like basically apps to small businesses, to then doing another kind of consulting, then to starting a company in ad tech and now VC finance. If I had to choose one thing, it would have been what I was really excited about in college, which was finance and venture capital, and I would have just stuck in that lane. I've been able to get pretty far, which is great, but I think I would have been even farther had I stuck with one thing.
And so to dive a little bit deeper, in your opinion, what's the key to happiness?
Key to happiness? I think you have to have a reason to wake up every morning. That sounds lame, but I think there's— if you look at life as a whole, so I like to think of it as like a circle, and I stole this from Tony Robbins, so I have to give credit to him. But basically, the idea is you categorize your life as a wheel. So you look at it in terms of family, in terms of friendships, in terms of relationships, community, obviously financial and wealth, physical health, everything that's important to you. You kind of look at it in a wheel, and if there's any one category severely lacking, that actually drives a lot of sadness for people. So I found that if I keep the wheel kind of pushing to the limit and kind of round and I focus and really focus but push myself that all those areas need to be good and not just a career or business or not just relationships or not just friendships, then my life usually is pretty exciting. I get like a ton of energy waking up in the morning and it's, it's exciting. I noticed that especially now We both are high achievers and it seems like as you keep going, there's no— as soon as you hit one thing, you got to keep setting it to the next. And that goes for like every piece because if you don't, then it kind of stalls out. I don't know.
Yeah, I always like to say the mountaintop just leads to another mountaintop. You know, that's where it always goes to. So it does not end. And honestly, even if you think you want it to end, by the time you get there, you really don't. So Next question is, what's the best book you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
Best book I read. There's a lot. I would say, well, it kind of depends. My favorite book is actually Ender's Game. It's— that sounds really tech and nerdy, but that's kind of who I am. And it was really interesting. One, it was a fascinating book, but two, it was— it had like a lot of life lessons in terms of just how you run a team, etc. It sounds weird, but we actually use this style here at Smart Capital and then for previous companies. But it's basically everyone on your team needs to be or feel empowered to do the best of their abilities and also make decisions. And if it comes from one kind of central source, that doesn't work well. So I found that for Smart Capital, I'm the CEO, I have to make every decision or have to focus on everything, an entire company, then we move really slowly. If we make it so, and this is what we've done, my co-founders, one of them is CTO, so he's product design, dev, security. Another one is COO, he is legal, everything to do with kind of HR and internal operations, et cetera. And then my role is biz dev, marketing, sales, and fundraising for the company. And then as we bring on more people, each one of them gets kind of a category which they own and control, and the company just moves a lot faster. Obviously that was a lot of business on top of this book, but that book was kind of key in that. Also that book did a really good job of when you compete, you compete to the fullest extent. You never go into an arena or anything unless you're willing to give it your all and go all out.
What's your favorite quote and why?
It's actually from The book, The Greatest Salesman in the World by Augmentino. It's kind of long and I'm gonna butcher it, but basically it's along the lines of, it's, I don't wanna, it may be bad that I don't remember the whole thing, but it's kind of long, but the paraphrase is basically, you're a lion, you go out and hunt for what you want, you're not a sheep, sheep waiting around to be slaughtered. If you're a lion, you persist and you don't stop until you get, until you eat. Yeah, and that sounds kind of gross, but no, I would recommend anyone read that book.
Yes, dude, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. The last question I have for you before we let you go is, where's the best place for people to find you online?
Um, LinkedIn would be the best. So Paul Foley, uh, if you want to connect with me, I, I do accept connections from everybody, and I do respond to all LinkedIn messages. I'm weird like that. Also, I am in Denver, Colorado. There's two communities that I love and help build, which was one was Colorado Startups. So if you go to coloradostartups.com, that'll have a list of a ton of meetups, events, etc. in the community that I go to. And then Colorado Blockchain, one of the coolest techs that I think is coming out is blockchain technology. I think it's really nascent and young. It's something that has a lot, a long way to go. But coloradoblockchain.com, there's again tons of meetups and events. We actually threw the largest Ethereum hackathon in Denver 2 months ago. So if you are looking to get involved, Canada has an amazing tech services.
Awesome, man. Thank you again for coming on. We appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely, Tyler. The podcast you just heard was recorded with Anchor. If you want to make your own, download the Android or iOS app completely free from anchor.fm/podcast. That's anchor.fm/podcast.
