Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, explains the key business point on which he disagrees with Bezos, breaks down risk tolerance internationally and domestically, shares the historical lesson we can learn from Nikola Tesla, and talks about keeping the hunger and the naivety that is your spark.

Special for Action Catalyst listeners: visit the link below, or use code "Action25" at checkout at MutomboCoffee.com to receive 25% off your order.

https://www.mutombocoffee.com/discount/Action25

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I'm enjoying this. So until you kick me off, I'm good

to go.

Awesome. I know you are a contributor to Forbes

Middle East. And Jeff Bezos said, and I'm heavily

paraphrasing that he mentioned, how the US is such a good

fertile ground for business, partly because of the risk

tolerance of the money in the US that that there are many

organizations that are have a high risk attitude towards

venture and taking bets that isn't as common in other

countries. But I think you have an interesting perspective,

because I'd be curious your thoughts about the risk

tolerance in the Middle East for investments from an uninformed

perspective over here, it seems that it's quite high, but you

might have a different perspective on that so. And I

think even your greater comment on the economics of risk, risk

in general would be interesting.

Yeah, I'm familiar with Mr. Bezos comments. There

are a couple of things there. I think venture capital and PE do

not have a high risk tolerance and so and it seems that I'm

going against one of the world's richest man when I say this. So

let me really sort of unpack that. Yeah, what you find when

you talk to sophisticated investors, it's all about the

risk mitigation. These guys don't make money by taking non

risk adjusted risk. It is all about a risk adjusted risk. And

so because of the size of the capital pool, you have different

kinds of risk players who are comfortable with certain kinds

of risks for startups or certain kinds of risks for growth

companies or certain kinds of risks, right? And so what are

the things that and I'm sure that that Bezos would agree that

when you look at a capital stack, you will find that there

is ample capital for whatever risk level that you want,

sufficient enough to have a very robust, robust market around. So

it's not so much that the US has a super high risk tolerance, but

that there is enough, there are enough players, wherever you

want to be on the risk spectrum who are comfortable with

understanding that particular risk at that development, and

the mitigants for that risk, and that's who they bet on. They

don't bet on the guy who's taking the most risk, or, you

know, the company, or the team, or the woman who's taking the

most risk. They're betting on the company, the woman, the team

that knows how to mitigate the most risk for that type of risk.

That's the bet.

And I think you're probably dead on that, that

Bezos would agree on that. I think his, he probably operates

with a different definition of risk that the average person and

probably lines up with what you just described.

Right? So let's, let's dig that a little bit deeper.

What we have, you know, this kind of links to the Middle

East, and it links to Europe, where I've been fortunate to

have done some work with the European Commission and other

capital providers across the world. And so one of the things

that the United States has is reasonably patient capital. Very

little capital is patient, and certainly not PE and hedge fund

capital, but it's reasonably patient, meaning, meaning that

it can be sticky, that if, depending on where you are in

that capital structure, if you need three years of capital, or

if you need five years of capital, or you need seven years

of capital, or you need 10 years of capital, right? There are

capital providers that are willing to take that turn,

provided that Dominicans are there and that, you know, I had

the pleasure, I was asked to advise a particular group,

several groups of the European Commission around this very

point. I know if you just saw recently where the commission

has now allocated $200 billion for AI development, and it was

100 almost 100x and what they had internally thought they were

going to put into AI just a year ago. And so I've lived in

Germany. I've spent a lot of time in in Switzerland and

Austria and talking to Europeans where these sources of capital

are. Spend a lot of time in London as well. One of the

distinctions between sort of European risk taking and the US

is and I. Take it from the entrepreneurial side. So the

European Commission asked me to go around Eastern Europe, to the

Balkans and all these Eastern European countries, including

Ukraine, and meet with entrepreneurs and accelerators

and incubators. So this was, just may have been about 10

years ago, on this very question of, you know, you know, appetite

for risk, etc. So from the European Commission perspective,

they had the Chinese and the Asians, tons of capital, very

assertive, very aggressive to their East. And then they had

the Americans, very end of that innovative, very assertive, very

aggressive. And the Europeans were getting bookend and

squeezed. And so having been an American that had lived in the

Middle East, who was now living in Europe, I was living in

Europe because my former wife is European, German, and so we were

started a family there. And you know, you're at a dinner party

here and there, and people start asking you questions. And before

you know, if you're saying, Can you come to Brussels? So I ended

up doing some work in process. So the point is, is that the

entrepreneurs, the best, most innovative talent that's coming

out of these countries is, I would say, superior to the

talent coming out of US universities. But the

incentives. So think about it this way. I had the pleasure of

getting a philosophy degree at a liberal arts school. You don't

have that kind of luxury in many of these eastern Europe. It is

physics, it's math, it's engineering. You make stuff.

You make stuff, right.

And so the pragmatic and practical pool of talent at

that university, at that mindset level, they make great stuff.

And guess where those the best and the brightest go up until

recently, they become PhD students. And when you talk to

them as PhD students, and then you talk to them, I spoke at

dozens of universities, and talk to professors and departments,

those departments and professors eschew their best and brightest

doing something as pedantic is making money. Yeah, interesting.

So there's this stigma that if you're that smart, why would you

want to do what those 120 IQs guys do in London? So you got

culturally, this issue of not supporting innovation in that

sense. So you've got a lot of by best people not being trained

and how to truly be innovative. They can be inventive. They can

make, you know, you know, test is a wonderful example that's

exceptionally invented, but he got out maneuvered by Edison

others around how to make the business model being truly

innovative around those inventions. That's a historical,

culturally relevant point. Even today, his level of

inventiveness is top notch, but his ability to meld the capital

get the business model around it, he got out maneuvered. He

got outgunned by Edison and CO, right? And so when you're really

thinking about the fertile ground for risk, or fertile

ground for talent, or matching capital to talent, etc, there's

some really interesting things that I've personally had to

observe going from the just on the talent side, exceptionally

talented kids. And so what ended up happening is how they started

bridging and learning from the Americans. Then you had a lot of

and Ukraine was a perfect example of this. They started

doing it, outsourcing to some of these countries, because these

kids could code and they had good math skills and they had

good engineering skills, etc. So that's transition. And now they

realize, well, wait a minute, why am I doing the code for that

Silicon Valley company? I want to be that Silicon Valley

entrepreneur. So organically, there's sort of this shift

around all of that. So Do not underestimate a bright person

who shows up every day without the best resources and their

ability to create something that is world changing.

That's right. Well said. A question I ask

everyone, but one that I just love, in general, is, you've had

a wealth of experience. Let's say you were able to just sit,

sit on that bus from Illinois to St Louis and talk to that young

man who's riding to school every day. What advice would you

provide him, knowing all the things that you know now?

Well, as you've already picked up on, and I'm

not trying to be unorthodox, we think the young man has

something to tell me less than me telling him. And I'm going to

tell you why. Because as you start having the weight of the

world on your shoulders, you got kids, you got wives, you've got

employees, you've got bigger problems, right? You think

keeping the same level of curiosity and inquisitiveness

and maybe naivete that you can do anything you want that

should. Me, I want to make sure that this world does not beat

that out of me and beat that out of other entrepreneurs, because

it can happen. Man. You know, I remember reading very early on

about an immigrant that came out of Europe during the 30s in New

York in the middle of the Depression, and 50 years later,

he was this super rich industrialist. And they asked

him, How did you do it? He said that I never read the papers,

right? So what I would say to anyone that asked this question

is, those aspirations that we all have, those that that sense

of wonder, etc, don't lose that keep that young man and that

young woman in your spirit, because before you know it, the

world will do its best to take it out of you. So I think that

young man has a lot more to teach me than I probably do him.

That's a real value to me. Of course, I got more skills and I

got more people, etc, but the heart of that matter, that

talent, that God given hunger, that God given inquisitiveness,

don't want to lose that, because that's your spark.

Yeah, the a plus player is the person that's

humble, hungry and smart, and you could replace hungry with

curious, right? But the more these interviews that I've done,

I couldn't agree more, right? The humility and the hunger is a

good combination with intelligence. And the more I've

learned about business, the more I realize I don't know. So it's

pretty easy to remain humble in this business when you're

learning all the time.

None of us are smarter than the market, brother.

That's right. That's right. For our listeners,

please share Mutombo coffee, which I know we didn't spend

probably nearly as much time on this as we could have, because

you have such an interesting and colorful life. But where can

people learn about the Mutombo coffee, the respective social

initiatives, and how can they participate?

Mutombocoffee.com of course, we have a website, M, U,

T, O, M, B O, coffee.com we also have launched an Amazon store,

and so that will will start doing more with that. Primarily,

we've been B to B for the last few years, so we're now just

starting to which is why I'm sticking my head up and doing

more podcasts like yours, because we want people to know

that that we exist, etc. The one of the other things we will do

for your listeners is we'll create a VIP code for them, and

anyone that puts in their code when they go to the website,

they will get a VIP preferential pricing for our product as a way

for us to say, thank you for introducing us to your listeners.

Yeah, love that. Well, thank you. Wow. This

great, really great interview. I mean, really good for our

listeners. Hopefully you've enjoyed it too. Great

conversation.

I did. Make me look good, fellas, make me look good.