Stepping into the hallowed halls of Charleston's tech evolution, we're joined by none other than Ernest Andrade, the architect behind the Charleston Digital Corridor's meteoric rise. His exceptional journey from Kuwait to the cobbled streets of Charleston weaves a narrative that intertwines personal growth with the city's thriving tech landscape. Ernest's tale is more than a story of numbers, it's a saga of transforming a modest 18 tech companies into a flourishing community of over 700, each pulsing with the vibrant beat of innovation and collaboration.
As we chat with Ernest, we uncover the layers that compose the city's allure – the intangible charm, the warmth of the community, and the strategic economic pivots that have sculpted Charleston into an intellectual hub. This episode is a homage to the city's soul, the gravity that pulled Ernest in, and the same force that continues to attract top-tier talent. It's a reflection on the hard-earned wisdom gleaned from public service, the importance of diversity in economic resilience, and the entrepreneurial spirit that fuels the city's heartbeat.
Closing our conversation, we turn to the future, looking through the lens of Ernest's vision for Charleston—a place where the digital and the historical blend seamlessly, offering a lifestyle that buzzes with tech vitality yet maintains its quintessential livability. This episode isn't just about the milestones of the Charleston Digital Corridor; it's about the passion, technology, and inclusive growth that underpin a community. Join us for a journey of insight and strategy, where Ernest's commitment to fostering a resilient tech ecosystem in Charleston is as palpable as the city's famed Southern charm.
Presenting Sponsor: Charleston Radio Group
Title Sponsor: Charleston American Marketing Association
Cohosts: Stephanie Barrow, Mike Compton, Darius Kelly, Kim Russo
Produced and edited: rūmbo Advertising
Photographer: Kelli Morse
Art Director: Taylor Ion
Outreach: Lauren Ellis
CAMA President: Margaret Stypa
Score by: The Strawberry Entrée; Jerry Feels Good, CURRYSAUCE, DBLCRWN, DJ DollaMenu
Voiceover by: Ellison Karesh
Studio Engineer: Brian Cleary
YouTube
Facebook
...
Stepping into the hallowed halls of Charleston's tech evolution, we're joined by none other than Ernest Andrade, the architect behind the Charleston Digital Corridor's meteoric rise. His exceptional journey from Kuwait to the cobbled streets of Charleston weaves a narrative that intertwines personal growth with the city's thriving tech landscape. Ernest's tale is more than a story of numbers, it's a saga of transforming a modest 18 tech companies into a flourishing community of over 700, each pulsing with the vibrant beat of innovation and collaboration.
As we chat with Ernest, we uncover the layers that compose the city's allure – the intangible charm, the warmth of the community, and the strategic economic pivots that have sculpted Charleston into an intellectual hub. This episode is a homage to the city's soul, the gravity that pulled Ernest in, and the same force that continues to attract top-tier talent. It's a reflection on the hard-earned wisdom gleaned from public service, the importance of diversity in economic resilience, and the entrepreneurial spirit that fuels the city's heartbeat.
Closing our conversation, we turn to the future, looking through the lens of Ernest's vision for Charleston—a place where the digital and the historical blend seamlessly, offering a lifestyle that buzzes with tech vitality yet maintains its quintessential livability. This episode isn't just about the milestones of the Charleston Digital Corridor; it's about the passion, technology, and inclusive growth that underpin a community. Join us for a journey of insight and strategy, where Ernest's commitment to fostering a resilient tech ecosystem in Charleston is as palpable as the city's famed Southern charm.
Presenting Sponsor: Charleston Radio Group
Title Sponsor: Charleston American Marketing Association
Cohosts: Stephanie Barrow, Mike Compton, Darius Kelly, Kim Russo
Produced and edited: rūmbo Advertising
Photographer: Kelli Morse
Art Director: Taylor Ion
Outreach: Lauren Ellis
CAMA President: Margaret Stypa
Score by: The Strawberry Entrée; Jerry Feels Good, CURRYSAUCE, DBLCRWN, DJ DollaMenu
Voiceover by: Ellison Karesh
Studio Engineer: Brian Cleary
YouTube
Facebook
...
Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, powered by the Charleston American Marketing Association, broadcasting from our home base at Charleston Radio Group. Thanks to CRG, we're able to talk to the movers and shakers of Charleston, from economy to art, from hospitality to tech and everything in between. These leaders have made a home here in the Lowcountry. They live here, they work here, they make change here. Why? Let's talk about it?
Speaker 4:Hello and welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast powered by the Charleston American Marketing Association. We're here recording in the Charleston Radio Group studios. Mike Compton here, president of Roomba Advertising goroombocom and your director of membership experience. Thanks for joining us. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, stephanie. Stephanie, say what's up.
Speaker 5:What's up everybody. I'm Stephanie Barrow, your Cama Pass president, the founder of Stephanie Barrow Consulting, a digital strategy agency here in Charleston, and I'm excited to be here with our friend Ernest. He is the founder and director of the Charleston Digital Corridor, an organization that is a nucleus of the region's tech community.
Speaker 2:I'm delighted to be here with you, Mike and Stephanie.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Spending a little bit of time with your audience. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting to know you a little bit. Yeah, and to get to know you a little bit. We awkwardly read your bio in front of you.
Speaker 5:Yes, we do, we do that.
Speaker 4:Let's get into it, huh?
Speaker 4:Ernest Andrade, the founder and CEO of the Charleston Digital Corridor, has been a driving force in the Charleston tech community for over 20 years. Through his efforts with the CDC successfully engaged the local community to support entrepreneurs and attract top tech talent to the area, accelerating the growth of Charleston's tech economy from 18 companies in 2001 to over 700 today. Ernest has worked tirelessly to foster a thriving tech ecosystem in Charleston through four pillars community talent, workspace and capital. He has built relationships with local businesses, educational institutions and government officials to create a supportive environment for tech companies to flourish. One of the CDC's key milestones has been the recent development of the 92,000 square foot Charleston Tech Center, a hub for local tech businesses to work, collaborate and grow. The center offers flexible office space, access to business resources, entrepreneur education and networking opportunities, making it an attractive location for tech companies ranging from the startups to publicly traded companies. Good Lord, I'm just going to stop right there and let you kind of go on, he's a very impressive man To talk about how that got started here.
Speaker 4:You came from Kuwait out of nowhere and decided to pick Charleston of all places. I know it wasn't the direct path that you were thinking of, but you were so open-minded that you just made the best of any situation. I feel like didn't you Talk about it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it is interesting. It's a twist of fate, as I like to call it, how I ended up in Charleston I love it.
Speaker 2:And I was originally scheduled to go to school at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Hackensack, on the Hackensack campus in New Jersey, and they had oversubscribed their foreign student quota, for lack of a better word. And they said hey, listen, ernest, you know, last in, first out, we'll take you the following semester, and I didn't want to lose six months, I guess. And Passed in first out, we'll take you the following semester, and I didn't want to lose six months, I guess. And so there was a gentleman who worked with my father in Kuwait who said hey, andy, there's this place in Charleston, south Carolina. Your son can go there, and if he wants to transfer back to New Jersey, that would be fine. And, as I said, the rest is history. I came here and never left.
Speaker 4:And that was the late 80s.
Speaker 2:And that was the late 80s and that was actually in the early 80s, early 80s it was in the early 80s and so I had just finished.
Speaker 2:It's interesting the way the Indian education system works. You finish your high school and then you go into what they call pre-university college, but this is where you decide whether you're going to be a banker, an engineer or a doctor, and they have these tracks. And so I was in the first of two years of that when my parents made a decision and this was not something that my parents were sort of unique in this regard the there was this trend basically for uh parents to send their kids to europe and and uh, you know, in america for studies.
Speaker 3:Okay, and not necessarily I can get behind that. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And the reputation of. You know there's a lot of angst around K through 12, but then you start talking about higher ed and you know American institutions are still known around the world, as you know, top notch in terms of higher ed. So you know it was this. Let's follow that pattern. Yeah and lo and behold, you know. So here's a kid born in Kuwait. You know who's. Now, then, from there, I ended up at about 13 going to a boarding school run by Jesuits, which was, I tell you, you know. Then, when we start thinking about discipline, I think it was at the level that I'd never experienced in my life before and came with in my case because I was sort of a mediocre student came with my share of canings, oh my.
Speaker 2:Were your parents strict too, no not so strict and I think, at the end of the day, it was the logistics, because of the school closing in Kuwait and not wanting to have to go into Kuwait.
Speaker 4:City.
Speaker 2:Okay, so it was that logistics, and also the desire for good education and perhaps the fact that a little bit of discipline went a long way. I guess so, and I think that at the time you don't appreciate it, but that discipline kind of shapes the man you're going to be later on in life. So you may not like it then, but I love it today and I wouldn't want it any other way.
Speaker 2:So Dad worked in the oil industry. You know there was nothing else actually at that time it was primarily. You know the Kuwait economy was driven primarily by the discovery and production and export of oil. Okay, and it's a different place today, but back then, you know, it was just kind of developing.
Speaker 5:So that's what brought me to Charleston, so College of Charleston brought you to.
Speaker 2:Charleston College of Charleston. I ended up going to the College of Charleston and graduated. Although I did try to escape a couple of times, I got accepted to you know school back in New Jersey. You went back up, I got accepted to school in Florida at the Florida Institute of Tech.
Speaker 2:Because I was kind of thinking I'd go to more of a technical degree. I can see that, but by now it's kind of spoiled. So I spent like three weeks in one place and one in the other and I'm like no, no, no, I'm coming back here. And so just finished up my education at the College of Charleston Lovely place, yes.
Speaker 5:And then you got your master's from the University of South Carolina.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at the time there was this joint program with the College of Charleston where you could get your degree. That was offered by the University of South Carolina in Charleston. You had to take a couple of semesters, I mean a couple of classes up there. It was too convenient and what's interesting about that, I was actually heading post-graduation, I was heading towards an MBA, and there was an advisor, faculty advisor, sam Hines actually Dr Hines who recommended getting a master's in public administration, and his rationale behind that was that the public sector needed to more professionals with a business mindset in government.
Speaker 2:Got it and that's where I was heading, and I bought in and I'm not sure that's where I was heading, but that was what was represented to me. And so I headed in, got my Master's of Public Administration, and here's the one thing that I chose to do was I chose to run my time in the public sector like I was in a private enterprise.
Speaker 2:So I bought a very business-like approach so you can see everything about career-wise was not the kind of person you would find in government all the way to. I would be in meetings, I'd get presentations and some people would look at me. Who do you work for?
Speaker 3:You don't sound like a government guy. You don't sound like a government guy, I'm the boss.
Speaker 2:sound a government like a government guy.
Speaker 4:You're right, the boss, yeah, he's still coming up at that point, but he's acting like the boss, so good quality that was in college, getting your master's yes and you, you took the, the government, the. What was it?
Speaker 2:the public service route, exactly the public, you know so. So what?
Speaker 4:were you.
Speaker 2:Just you were swimming upstream the whole time exactly you know, so it was public administration versus business administration, and the little caveat was oh, it's only four more classes to get your MBA, if that's what you want.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But now I'm kind of like I'm in, I'm pregnant with the MPA. It's public administration. And then I come in to the city, and my first exposure to the city was an internship that was required to graduate.
Speaker 5:Where was this internship?
Speaker 2:This was at and it ended up being. I had a colleague in school I guess a classmate who was at the city of Charleston. She says come on over and spend, you know, four months at the city of Charleston. Wow, nice and so that was my first you know sort of experience, I guess in coming in.
Speaker 5:What's keeping you here in Charleston?
Speaker 2:It's really interesting because you have, as a student you have so, first of all, as I said, by twist of fate, I'm in Charleston. I'm thinking to myself, what about? And you tend to have this. There's this tendency to kind of look over your shoulder and go what about the bigger cities? What about the New Yorks? What about the DCs?
Speaker 5:What about the?
Speaker 2:Californias, what about? And it's states? It's not necessarily cities.
Speaker 2:But then what's really interesting is so I started visiting these places when I was a student and I would always kind of come and I'd always come back and I'm like, oh my God, I mean this place is just great. And you know, after a lot of thinking about it and being at the College of Charleston, I realized that, more than anything else, charleston had a soul. Yeah, it does, and a lot of cities might be great cities but they don't have a soul. So then I start a very sort of analytical and sort of introspective about some of these things and I'm like it's the size. It's the size of the city, right, and I didn't think of the city as this big, giant mass. I just thought of the peninsula, which was my kind of world when I was in college. I could walk from one end to the other if you really wanted to do it. But really you get into it.
Speaker 2:Now remember growing up in Kuwait. There's plenty of money, sure you, there's plenty of money, a lot of advantages to being there. But there was livability because we had all these facilities and everything else.
Speaker 2:But there, was something unique about Charleston, so I attributed it to, if I would say characteristically, it was the geography right being in this really great climate, a coastal environment where you could just get to the water's edge in a hurry. It was the people Consistently being ranked one of the friendliest cities.
Speaker 5:Well, there, was a reason. Food doesn't hurt either.
Speaker 2:Exactly, there was genuinely the food. Oh my gosh, I mean the food scene has always been kind of amazing.
Speaker 2:I'll go to other cities and I come back and I'm like, wow, I didn't really have a great meal when I was there, but I'm back. So I think you talk about the food scene, you talk about the make of the people, you talk about the geography and all these things and you actually feel like a person and that was important. So that's what kept me. And then, professionally, I was in a very unique situation right. So by now I'm reporting directly to Joe Riley and so, you know, fast forward a little bit. I end up getting married, you know, and my, my, my wife, moves from the Middle East she was in Abu Dhabi moves to Charleston and you know, and so she falls in love with the place, much like I had, except she falls in love with it more than I did.
Speaker 5:Okay, that works out good for you though.
Speaker 2:So there's this reluctance to kind of like professionally thinking, okay, I'm kind of like tapped out here. I've got to, like you know, as my sister would say, go and get a real job. So I had to start thinking about, okay, what's next? But I had this very unique situation I was in and I realized again just through this process of kind of self-discovery about myself. I realized, ernest, you have this very unique position, right, you work for this super visionary leader.
Speaker 2:The city's in the middle of a renaissance, and what you can do is add your areas of interest. So Joe Raleigh was all about place building an amazing place and I was all about the economy. So I had this sense of the two don't exist in a vacuum, they kind of exist together. So the first half of my career with the city was actually growing the place. We were 38 square miles.
Speaker 4:Yeah, talk about that. You didn't just choose to pick Charleston to live here. You grew, you were part of that growth.
Speaker 2:When I had come during my internship. I would just go here or go by and there were like 15 doors in that office and I made it a point to, kind of out of curiosity, what is going on in that office? Sure, so it was Office 1 to Office 15, and I knew everything that was going on and it was like, okay, if you're going to be a city manager, you need to know everything about what's going on, right, don't rely on somebody to report back to you. Well, I did this and it took me three days. Ask somebody what they're doing, try to figure out how long it took. Maybe with the police chief, me with the fire chief.
Speaker 2:So I had this kind of curiosity and remember, I'm in public administration and the idea was, you know, to be a CEO of like a city or a city manager. Except I realized that I'm really not a political guy and I'm not particularly fond of politicians. I've been a little more convicted and so I realized, as a city manager, if you serve at the pleasure of a politician, then you could be gone tomorrow. So the better thing to do was to become a specialist. So I had this, like now, elevated curiosity, so I would go through and find out what everybody did, and that's how I kind of one of the offices was the gentleman who ran the annexation program for the city. Right.
Speaker 2:And he said in earnest he says I'm leaving, I'm moving to Atlanta, this position is going to come open. Okay, and perhaps you should, and it looked like the most uninteresting job. Right.
Speaker 2:Every time I'd walk by he was pouring over these maps and I was like yeah, you know, not interested, except that this went on. And then his boss said you know, we've got this role and you should take a look at it. And then her boss said you know, the director comes to me and says if you're interested, perhaps you should so. So that was annexation. We were 38 square miles and again I'm very sort of mission-focused. So very quickly, when I have this brief conversation with Joe Riley about what do you want? What do you?
Speaker 2:want to accomplish with this role. And he says well, we were talking about the geography and the layout and he says I want it all.
Speaker 2:I'm like, okay, well, so that. And he says I want it all. I'm like, okay, well, so that's the strategy. Then you want it all. So I tell people I said, in terms of annexation and because of the political environment and the legislative environment, the strategy that I adopted was not to have a strategy. So my strategy was, if you verbalized what you were going to do, you'd be shut down before you even get to the start line. Okay.
Speaker 2:So the way you're going to find out what the strategy is, you're going to find out not when I'm executing it, but when it is executed. So you're going to read in the newspaper.
Speaker 5:You'll present it when it's already.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and the pinnacle of that was the annexation of Daniel Island into the city of Charleston. Nobody knew it was coming. And one day you pick up the newspaper and you see the city of Charleston moves to annex Daniel Island, and Daniel Island represented 4,500 acres out of 20,000 acres that were substantially annexed in Berkeley County. So we jumped county line, but my point being that and I remember Joe Riley referring it at one point to Charleston's Louisiana purchase so economically it was such a I was going to say how truly spectacular.
Speaker 2:You know it was to be almost in the forefront of Charleston history for all of these years.
Speaker 5:That is so cool, it was amazing.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, and I would actually, when I first knew that the mayor had expressed some interest, I was on the island before the 526, before the infrastructure was open, so I had to take the back door and I actually befriended the engineer who was in charge of the construction.
Speaker 4:He was with Wilbur Smith, a firm that was involved in construction of the bridge across Daniel. Island, that is down. Last time I tried to get there. Actually it's not working. No, no.
Speaker 5:They're working on it though.
Speaker 2:So just take it the back way and it was really interesting in all the nuances and there was one little shack and it was hilarious because affectionately I wish today that I had taken a picture of that and it was called the Daniel Allen City Hall. And it literally was a little hunting shack. It was used as a little venue.
Speaker 5:That was a little hunting shack. It was used as a little venue.
Speaker 2:That's when you have the time machine and you go back in time and you buy plots of land and you are like multi-multi-millionaire.
Speaker 5:now, because Daniel Allen is spectacular, exactly.
Speaker 2:So my point is okay, we go from 38 square miles and it's just me and we're now at 100 square miles. And the one thing is I'm not a management-oriented guy, I'm a development-minded guy. So, you know, I tell the mayor I said listen, I fulfilled most of the obligation. We butt up to the boundaries of the neighboring jurisdictions being Mount Pleasant, ravenel and James Island. So I said I think it's time for me to move on. And he said well, time out here, what do you have in mind? And so for a guy who, as part of this annexation process, I'm in the planning department, the annexation division was a part of planning, so I started to develop this interest in urban planning and the economics associated with planning. So naturally then I honed that into economic development. And when I'm looking at economic development I'm like why are we engaging in a race to the bottom? Why is it that the only thing we want to talk about is cheap land, cheap labor, cheap utilities, non-union something, unfortunately, that we still do today.
Speaker 2:But the pattern what I was seeing was our economic targets were contributing to wage growth. That was non-existent. Our wages had flatlined for a decade. Then I noticed the cost of living was increasing at a tremendous rate. I'm like Then I noticed the cost of living was increasing at a tremendous rate. I'm like so guess what? I hearken back a little bit and I'm like, oh my God, this is a third-world economy, the have and the have-nots. We can't have that.
Speaker 2:So I go in and this is my observation. I'm like listen, riley's a busy guy, don't go over there and ruminate over your observations. You go over there and my advice to anybody if you go to your boss, go to solutions, don't go to the conversation. So I go in and I tell him a nice thing and I say you know, listen, this is an amazing place. You know, you've polished this lump of coal and turned it into a diamond, and I think we can go further. Except we're bought into this regional strategy of pushing cheap, and I think it might be important to add a dimension that we've not previously seen.
Speaker 5:We're not going to do an about phase.
Speaker 2:We're just going to start thinking of it in terms of diversity economic diversity. So what you're going to do is you're going to focus on the intellectually driven industries rather than manufacturing-driven industries, right? And the argument was that there will always be a place south and always be a place east where you can manufacture cheaper, but you can't steal somebody of his intellect, and that's what you want, right? So that's the highest value add, where I'm the millionaire setting the direction for the work of producing the car, the widget, right. And we can't just be focused on widgets and pushing cheap, cheap, cheap. We actually can be on the other side of it. And so I just said if it's okay, I'm not divorcing myself, but I'm just going to focus on this aspect. I'm not divorcing myself, but I'm just going to focus on this aspect.
Speaker 2:And that came with a little bit of angst in the community, because some of us who were involved not excluding myself were involved with the closure of the Navy base, and the mindset was we have this economic crisis, we just need to take whatever we can get. And I'm like okay, guys, we're over the crisis, now we've got to start ratcheting up the game. And I'm thinking to myself that this is a big geography. When you start talking about Dorchester, berkeley and Charleston County, that makes up our tri-county region. When you start eating lunch in downtown Charleston County, that makes up our tri-county region. When you start eating lunch in downtown Charleston, you're not thinking about a rural sport in Berkeley County and you're not speaking the same language.
Speaker 5:What year was this?
Speaker 2:So this was getting into the late 90s, okay. Right.
Speaker 2:And so the perspective was. So I'm looking around and I'm thinking to myself look at all this stuff, look at all these cities, you know, look at RTP and look at tech starting to boom right and the whole thing. I mean the Y2K thing in 2000,. That just kind of elevated my thinking of technology Right Number one. Number two because of my background, growing up in a highly competitive environment in boarding school in Bangalore, india, which is Bangalore, india's Silicon Valley I am now starting to think about some of these guys and where they ended up. And when I started looking on basically where these folks were, they were all a lot of them. Basically a good 40% of them were in tech companies and they were doing very well, so this is how the digital quarter started to become.
Speaker 2:So you start thinking selfishly I want some of that. I mean, I want some of that for my community, right and okay, everything we have is great. I'm not one of these guys saying, oh, you know, well, look, look, you know, I'm not by nature, I'm sort of a malcontent, you know it requires that right.
Speaker 2:You know you get all these awards. Oh look, Charles, most friendly, most well, you know most this. You're like it's never, never enough, you know. And what I associate. I kept thinking to myself oh my gosh, wages have flatlined Right and cost of living has gone up, and these guys and gals are high-fiving in the corridor. What is wrong with you folks? We can do better, you know. We can leverage.
Speaker 2:In the meantime, I'm like I love this place, I want to stay here. So every Christmas I'm like no, yeah, I need to move. We talk to my family. I'm like, no, no, I'm staying here. But then again I have this aha moment. We're like Ernest, you really can be an agent of change, working for an amazing visionary, and you've got a proven track record going from 38 square miles to 100, and you have a certain. You have some professional coins that are in their pocket, right? And this leads to the whole. So I'm going in totally unaware of where we can end up, talking to somebody who's completely unaware of what the hell I'm talking about, right? But there's just this element of trust that I don't know. But this guy will somehow end up on the right side of things. But I'm not sharing, in the meantime, all of the data that I'm processing from the Indian economy, the economies of India and China, so I didn't go and, contrary to what most people would think, I didn't go in blind.
Speaker 2:Right, india is to intellect what China is to manufacturing. So guess what I did? I immediately started to focus on India and it was Jack Welch who really kind of like tipped me over the edge and he said when GE opened a facility in India, we went for cost and we didn't realize the quality of the workforce. And that's when I realized that we have got to start focusing on this. And so I said this is India, and look what we have. We've got like Shangri-La over here. I don't want to leave.
Speaker 2:And so, in order not to leave very selfishly, there are two things. I've got to create that place that allows me to exist in Charleston and not move. And selfishly. Now there's a second element. I have my daughters now two years old and I'm like, okay, what is she going to do? So now this commitment just strengthens, it just solidifies and I'm like, hey guy, you're not leaving right, because this is where I'm going to be.
Speaker 5:Yeah, this is where I'm going to be, and my daughter.
Speaker 2:You know the true test is going to be where is my daughter going to go when she graduates right? So that sets the basis for the Digital Quar's mission. Love it, and the mission is very simple To create a diverse economy under the premise that resilient and economic and resilient community is tied to a diverse economy. Right, economic resilience is tied to a diverse economy, so we've got to create a diverse economy. Remember, I didn't tell the other guys pushing cheap and non-union and everything else Please, by all means, do you right, you know.
Speaker 2:Sure, I'm not going to focus on the elephants, I'm kind of chasing the gazelles. It's a different strategy, right? Number one? Number two I said I want my kids to be able to live and work in their town. If they choose to leave, that's their prerogative, but it's incumbent on me to create the opportunities that allow them to stay over here. Now it's a shame on you versus shame on me. My community affords you these jobs at a competitive wage, all things considered. You wanna go to New York and California making twice as much. Well, your cost of living is almost twice as much right True story.
Speaker 2:So let's just kind of have a time out here and just talk about you know. So, create great jobs, diversify the economy. And the third one was we got to raise the per capita wages. You can't bump along the bottom and let people avail themselves of all the niceties. That was in 2001, when we launched. Those were the objectives. Those objectives are very, very much with us today. Those objectives are very, very much with us today. Right, so we set them up broadly enough but still narrowly focused to where we didn't have to constantly. You know how you get these groups sometimes and they're like every board meeting at the end of the year. Okay, how are we going to change our strategy.
Speaker 2:We never changed the strategy Tactics. We did, but not strategy Right.
Speaker 5:And the tactics.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and you couldn't do it any other way, right? Which leads to a second kind of take away from this whole thing. It's like so you get out and you're telling these folks I remember like it was yesterday I'm speaking to this group, a large group of very notable Charlestonians, business people and such, and I'm telling him where we could be and about this whole tech thing that I've got planned, and about two minutes into that lunch presentation, I'm feeling like a Martian. I'm feeling like, oh my gosh, ernest, they don't get it, and so it was just so far out there. Yeah, for and this is an interesting point there's no crisis, right? Why do people have to act only when there's a crisis? The problem is that when you don't have a crisis and things are okay, what you do is you cultivate apathy. It's all good man. That's a great point.
Speaker 2:And I said, if you're apathetic is when you get hammered. And I use the great example of the rubber industry in Goodyear, we won't have any competition. We're in a high, we're the kings, the auto industry. In Goodyear, we won't have any competition. We're in a high, we're the kings, the auto industry. And all of a sudden Asia starts rising. We're going to keep it the way it is. Oh, look at that tin. Can I mean the first Toyotas that came with the first Hondas? No, no, no, we're the, you know. And all of a sudden they become less and less relevant. So it is not crisis that leads to relevance or irrelevance, it's apathy. And I said we can get apathetic in looking at these accolades and I'm like can you drill down behind that accolade and put an economic value to it? So if 10 was the tops and 1 was, they were like 3s and 4s.
Speaker 1:So again, this had nothing to do with my great desire to make Charleston a great place.
Speaker 2:It had everything to do with my great desire to make Charleston a great place. It had everything to do with being able to stay here, because my wife loved it and I have a kid and basically making sure that the economic opportunities would accrue to her.
Speaker 2:But the reality is, when you look at some of these very wealthy people, they're not selfless and community-minded, they're extremely selfish. They become that later in life. So I just said that we just have to go at it and, by the way, a takeaway was now I'm coming out. Not only is the audience not bought in, but the economic development partners are like we're not bought in because we don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 4:It's still early.
Speaker 2:And it's very early, and their point is that this is like professional suicide man, we're not going to come anywhere near you, and so it was like very lonely right A characteristic that I absolutely share with an entrepreneur, so I can relate you don't have any money, you've got this great idea and nobody's going to hang out with you and you're extremely lonely, you're not sleeping at night and you're like but I'm going to win.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:Failure is not an option. Exactly, I can show that resonance Anytime I'm sitting with an entrepreneur and he says they tried to bump me off, they tried to do this, they tried to screw me. I'm like, well, I can Because it just happened at a different level, but the way I managed it was the prize is the community, the prize is not your partners.
Speaker 4:Focus on the prize.
Speaker 2:And if your partners don't get it, when there is some validation of your model, they will come on. And lo and behold, they have come on as time has gone by.
Speaker 5:You kind of had some trials and tribulations through all of this. I mean, I know you're a visionary and you had this idea of what you wanted, but there had to have been some kind of struggle.
Speaker 2:It was an absolute struggle. How many years did it?
Speaker 4:take to get to a good point.
Speaker 2:I mean we're 23 years in right but in terms of.
Speaker 2:I think, siri, it took about 10 years to kind of start to see it in a way underwater in that wave, and then you're finally not gasping for air every time you come up and that kind of thing. And ironically, it was the development of a physical facility, the first incubator on the corner of East Bay and Calhoun. That is now a Hilton resort property. It was that we all not because I'm not saying this started being judgmental, but the reality is that we're all kind of lowest common denominator and when you can tangibly see something, you go oh, that's what you're doing. And you can see people in the building moving around and, oh, he's doing this tech. And all of a sudden they get it and people are peering in the window. It was the old Hollywood video. Remember, hollywood Video's never going away. Apathy Well, the apathy where it went away and streaming came in, you know, and Netflix knocked them off. You know that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, internet will never happen, so the bottom line was you know in terms of trials and tribulations. You know, you can't. I mean, it's easier for me to say today that you will have, you will be tested. Right. And you can't take your eye off the prize. But I'll tell you the one thing that I like to tell everybody especially in a marketing world, in a world of innovation, collaboration is overrated.
Speaker 5:I don't know about that. All right, go ahead. I'm hearing you out, I'm hearing you out.
Speaker 2:So I know that you've got to be a team player, ernest, you've got to go along with the regional plan. Well, nobody stopped long enough to understand that from a region we are comprised, we're a quilt of different cities operating in a region, and so the idea is that the other thing that I realized is your economic strategy, or your community strategy, needs to be a unified, a unified series of disaggregated strategies. So by doing the Charleston Digital Court and focusing on high wage and and more rifle like a, not shotgun, I now had disaggregated from the regional strategy. So I was really the, the bastard who broke away.
Speaker 2:I was going to say you're writing your own script at this point, you know and so now if you think you're lonely, you get even lonelier, because it's like you're not just the guy, you're the bad guy. You know, you're not the guy who just kind of went out in the cold. So the idea was that there's more pressure now to produce and kind of bring them along.
Speaker 2:And I think that company X relocates company Y, 17, 30, 40. Well, you know, at 700 companies plus, nobody would question. You know that it was smart, but we had to start somewhere.
Speaker 2:And the reason I say Stephanie, back to full circle. And you said, no, why If I had gone along and collaborated I would have just been internally just very disgruntled. But I took some of that externally and it manifested itself in the development of this three-pronged strategy to build a high-rich economy. And those were the three things, sure. So my point to an audience.
Speaker 4:You let it. I mean, you didn't have to collaborate or talk about anything you let it, and then everybody else kind of jumps on board and then they can collaborate their own spin.
Speaker 2:but this is our mission and this is where we go, so every time I surfaced I was, for lack of a better word, misunderstood of my intention, and it was hard to communicate a vision. Now, keep in mind I'm communicating a vision. Yeah Well, honestly, I don't know how things are going to gel.
Speaker 4:What was that?
Speaker 2:I don't know how things are going to gel Right of course not. So I'm going to. It's like, trust me, it'll be okay, and I am rife with self-doubt.
Speaker 4:So what are you doing, though? Are you making like how did you get those first 18 companies? Yeah, what'd you do? So, well, I didn't really have to do anything.
Speaker 2:Okay, now this is what most people don't understand, right? If you're going to develop a strategy, the first thing you should do is take stock of what you have. How can I go attract Stephanie to Charleston if I don't say that Mike's already there and Mike is one of 18? Right, so in my case we might have had 18, but the public perception there was one, and the one, the Ellis Island of the tech industry in Charleston was Blackbuck.
Speaker 5:That's a good get right there.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 5:Blackbaud.
Speaker 2:Wow. And so we just talked about Blackbaud and we talked about Blackbaud and Blackbaud was attracting more employees. And what happens is that when you're attracting people who employees, you have two kind of employees, two types of employees, two types of personalities. The guy just wakes up one morning and says, oh, there's a better way to do this. I'm going to do this. I was in the shower and I basically figured it out. The dominant entrepreneur is one who has been in an environment and has figured out a better way to do it. Whatever it is, they break off and then they go put a little team together and it might be exactly something they were doing, just in a different way, or it could be a totally different batch of stew, and we're going to do this. So the initial crop of companies that were springing up were individuals, professionals, who now, basically, are feeling their entrepreneurial oats and have left Blackbaud to do their own thing, and that's how it got going. And Nate DePore he was one of those individuals.
Speaker 2:He was a benefit focus and he talked about it as cell multiplication right, you'll get one, and the one will get two, and the two goes. It becomes exponential at some point and you reach a certain point where you're not just generating three new companies, you're generating 50 new companies, 25 new companies, half of which are failing. But because the ones that are succeeding, you're not worried about the ones that are failing. And the ones who fail are not real failures. They were just testing the waters and they went on to do other things right. So failure is good. So, among other things, we embraced failure right.
Speaker 2:Agreed I couldn't, because I was talking to a friend of mine at Nike and he said, Ernest, he says the incubation period when you're trying to do something like this in a community is way more difficult than the incubation for developing a new pair of sneakers and hoping it sticks. So that was. I think I had to take a reasonably conservative approach. You can't play with the community's brand, knowing that many communities that have tried to do this have failed, Sure Right. So the idea was go in and oh, by the way, if I thought I could just keep plowing ahead, I didn't have any money. I mean, I had $18,000. That was the budget for it was just me.
Speaker 4:It's more than what.
Speaker 2:AMA has. So there you go. That's true, and it was talking to a lot of people, right, and what you do is you can't everybody's got an opinion. So what you've got to do is you've got to talk to five to see that now these, you know there's outliers. But then what's in the middle, right, it's kind of you look at it on a bell curve I just got to look at. So that's how it started to develop. And then you have this remember, this is all being produced now inside a public environment. Right.
Speaker 2:So you've got this legislative sausage, you've got to go to the incentives that had to be put together, the brand, so you're managing just multiple things. You're making sure the data's coming in, because we didn't supposedly have the data connections to do this in. Because we didn't supposedly have the data connections to do this. The professionals are a little reticent because they say you've got to work for Blackbottom and it fails. Now you've got to take these five guys who left Blackbottom and start their own companies. So if you don't play the long game, then I'm just playing a game of job hopping. It is easy to benefit yourself versus benefiting community, and so my situation enabled me to focus on community over self.
Speaker 5:Well, at some point marketing played a role in to help growing this. It did.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I'll tell you.
Speaker 2:Selfless community.
Speaker 4:That's our key takeaway right there. Right.
Speaker 2:So remember. I told you, you know now. I'm super lonely.
Speaker 5:I've got 18, you know he's got the wife and child and I don't know what I'm doing.
Speaker 2:I'm like faking it really well and I'm convincing everybody. It's like don't worry, we'll be okay, this will be okay, right. The numbers are trending up.
Speaker 2:So I'm like, oh, my god, you know. So I'm looking in the mirror every day before I go to work. Is riley better? Is the community better? And am I better? Right, you're no longer the bad guy and well, you know, well I'm, I'm, I'm thinking, I'm like a rock star, but I'm like in my own world. In my own world because it's taken. There's a lag, right I know, and so now.
Speaker 2:So it's just like. So now, like, okay, marketing, right. And what's really interesting right about marketing is, you know, with the lack of resources I'm like what is the one? Where can I go to tell the story and preserve? Let me back up just a minute. There's product development and there's marketing. Yes, when can I go and develop a product that's so strong that now I've got something to market. I like it Rather than what some companies?
Speaker 5:do. That's a good strategy.
Speaker 2:You know the old fake it before you make it. They'll go market and then they'll go build a product and, by the way, it can work for a private company, right, yeah, but my point is that it was just kind of in my DNA to go build a product and you can't get slapped down. You go present it. Okay, you didn't get slapped down. There You're walking out with a smile on your face, nobody, you know, everything's pleasant, but they don't really believe. But that validation will come. So what was interesting was guess who? I realized, because we're doing something that is very unique. I don't know what their motivations were. Ultimately, if we didn't fail, they might have hung Riley out to dry, but the newspaper outlets in the region become my PR and my marketing arm.
Speaker 2:And so my press relationships become extremely important.
Speaker 4:Was that what that's called Earned media?
Speaker 2:Right and my point is that I had to. So we would have entrepreneurs go direct the media and we met with this guy and he's such an idiot and he's not talking to us and I would before and we're thinking about writing the story about this meeting and I said, please write the story, but let me give you this, this and this. So the entrepreneurs thought they could just we're going to see the government guy. How can he possibly be right?
Speaker 4:What's he going to say?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when I would push back and say, well, that doesn't have any legs, imagine being told that we have a search engine that's better than Google and it's not patented. Sure, and, by the way, you should be investing in that company, I'm Sure. I don't think so. So you became the tech guru, kind of. So what do you do? Early on, by virtue of the fact there is a now dedicated resource, you can come and speak to you also have a dedicated resource that will push back and will call you a bluff Right.
Speaker 2:And what did I do? I was completely ignorant. But all these people this is a one-man shop, stephanie, you know everybody's like oh, you must have 10 staff members. I'm jealous. Actually, I'm not Because I've got 50 members in the community who want to offer guidance. I've got them on speed dial. Depending on what the topic was you coming to meet with me about? What are you meeting about? So at 7 o'clock I'd send an email saying can you just drop something? And so I come across as being intelligent, so I would get this like with white paper.
Speaker 5:It's all about these relationships yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'm like I can't buy this and put him on my team. First of all, I had no money right, so I couldn't buy it anyway. But my point is, even if I had the money, I couldn't buy the expertise that these people brought to the party. And the people who brought this to the party. They didn't want to be found, they just wanted to offer the advice, but they were not coming back if I didn't execute. So execution of anything became paramount. Don't talk about it, don't strategize and don't go and do another study. Just go do it right. Because it's a very binary response. When you go do something, it's either oh, this was a fail or this was a pass. And if it's a pass, keep doing more and don't do that again. Right.
Speaker 2:And one of the things in terms of the relationships from a marketing standpoint. I told the guys I said there are factors outside of my control that will dictate the community's success. But one thing I'll give you is I will call it very objectively, right, I will tell you when we're wrong. And I'll tell you this when we're wrong, you will always find me, so you will always as a reporter. What happens if there's any bad news?
Speaker 4:Oh, sure, sure, sure, get on it Nobody wants to be found.
Speaker 2:Call me and I'll tell you why.
Speaker 4:You're very transparent. Very transparent until today right Yep.
Speaker 2:So marketing became important Now. So what happens is you're working on it and you know I tell people I said it's the guy in the kitchen. Approach, right, I'm in the kitchen just cooking away and word, you know, permeates through the ether that this guy's got some good food so I don't have to have a host, right. True.
Speaker 2:Because they just keep coming. The risk you run if you don't market is that certain things are changing in the front of the house and you haven't paid attention. And you're in the back of the house. Hey guys, gluten-free People don't want to do this. They stop eating beef. It's all about this. And if people don't want to do this, they don't want, they stop eating beef. It's all about the. And if you don't know, if you don't have, if you don't get out of the kitchen every now and again to take the pulse that I did very effectively in the early days, you're screwed. I love that. What is the pulse? The?
Speaker 4:culture. The pulse there is is the culture. The preferences.
Speaker 2:Who? Who would have said that you know, hey, you know my wife or I'm not going to drop with the video, I'm I'm going to do, I'm going to order videos from netflix? And who would have said, when we went from netflix, we're going to start streaming. Oh, this is a little kludgy. It's not working really well, but you see what I'm saying yeah they said, oh no, blockbuster. Now we're going to buy it for a lot of money and, and you know, wayne's got a lot of money, he'll force it to work.
Speaker 2:So my point is that don't I call it basically don't start drinking your own Kool-Aid. Pay attention to what's going on and it's so heavily nuanced that if you don't stop talking and you start listening a little bit or you start observing, you're screwed. There we go.
Speaker 5:That is a very key takeaway right there.
Speaker 2:So the bottom line is but let's talk about marketing, so we go along and things are not moving. You're relying 100% on the press at this point Relying 100% on the press and even realize that the press was coming in and harvesting some of the stories and then writing stories. So they didn't want to tell you, they were just coming to you.
Speaker 2:To pick your brain in a sense, yeah, essentially what they were doing was they were looking at what I was writing and this was what the entrepreneurs were saying we're doing some really great stuff and nobody wants to write about it. It was like hello. So I played a report, I'm writing it and we're publishing it. Good for you.
Speaker 2:Because, remember I'm a one-man shop. Now I've got to do it all right. So now I have the local outlets say no, we'll take that off your hands, we'll do it. And then what happened was, if you don't write this properly, I won't be on the phone the next time you call.
Speaker 5:No, you won't be credited as an expert.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what happens is now you're putting something, that is, you're putting a level of accountability on it. Yeah Right, so that went on for a while and then you realize it's not that, we did not engage in marketing. So now we, you know, you know when the CVB is outmarketing the CDC, the Charleston Visitors Bureau, is outmarketing the Charleston Digital Quarter by a factor of 99.9 to 1. But guess what Marketing works it does. Right, that's what people think of this is an amazing place to recreate.
Speaker 5:Thank you Travel and Leisure magazine this is an amazing place to recreate.
Speaker 2:And so we're just going to recreate. And guess who's recreating? These amazing tech folks, these amazing venture capitalists, these amazing. They don't come to town to work or to explore. They come to work to recreate Golf, food, all the things that we love, music. You know that kind of thing, nice people.
Speaker 4:So you've built a culture from what they have.
Speaker 2:So what I said is hey, wait a minute, we've got to start slowly, kind of pushing this message out. Don't make a mistake, how it manifested itself is secondary, but we did have to mark it, and so we would tell people who would talk it up, you know that kind of thing in a way they could. The papers are going to report as a matter of fact, right? But what I?
Speaker 2:didn't realize is that the newspapers reporting something, the news report. I say you know we're in a different place today, but the news outlets reporting what we did, uh, was the ultimate truth in advertising right this guy is not trying to sell us, they're just trying to inform us on what's going on. And it became more prolific.
Speaker 4:There we go.
Speaker 2:Because with the success the press releases, I'm just telling you, one day I tried the hey, can you. I got this amazing press release about this company and I got a phone call from the reporter and said we're here at Tadalko Watska in the community, we're not the PR agency for that company. Company X.
Speaker 4:Right, so I got that, but the bottom line is.
Speaker 2:So now you have enough time. So we said, okay, let's take our. We've played in the education space and let's. As we well know, since the beginning of time, charleston has been shaped by people who moved into the community. To some extent, that hasn't changed. And, by the way, here's something that just was dropped in my inbox last month, the state of South Carolina was ranked the number one state in the country for in-migration. Okay, and Charleston was ranked the number one city in the state of South Carolina for in-migration, so we are at the top of the top.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I see Right.
Speaker 2:Now here's what I would say. Right, that can somewhat be a problem, except the people who are coming in are coming in younger, they're coming in with 20 years to contribute to our economy. They're coming in more educated. They're coming in more financially well off, which is to some extent driving everything up. But remember pricing and these functions are all a function of desirability.
Speaker 5:And that's one thing we're attracting bigger businesses, yeah.
Speaker 2:So let's not go shoot the goose or the geese as they fly south, I guess, and don't leave, so they don't get the memo. Right yeah. The thing that we need to do is again keep an eye on the price, focus on growing the wages Right. So with that comes a more competitive, and that's what the pandemic did. The pandemic forced Charleston-based companies to pay wages commensurate with what's going on at the national level. It caused a 20% bump.
Speaker 4:I wasn't aware of that. That's an interesting stat right there, if you look at our.
Speaker 2:It's the first time I say 20, it's more like 12%. Okay. But a year-over-year job. We do an annual survey, which we've been doing since 2003. The fact that it jumped 12% in one year was significant.
Speaker 4:It leveled the playing field.
Speaker 2:Again. Now you know we're not here. We're actually tracking this data and we're saying attribute it to what. So when the receiving end, knock knock. Who are you? Boston, knock knock. Who are you California, knock knock. Who are you Coming out of Texas? So we're seeing these people come in.
Speaker 2:And that is a good thing for our community. I think so too, and the opportunities that exist. A very important point to make and this is the broad appeal of a show like this right when I tell folks that the makeup of a tech company is comprised only of about 20 to 25 percent of technologists. The rest of it are non-technical roles, customer success, design, marketing you know pr accounting, financial, legal. So nobody should be reticent to fully embrace the growth of tech.
Speaker 4:Right. Lots of jobs to be had right there.
Speaker 2:So the multiplier effect in terms of not just in terms of the incomes, but the multiplier effect of the jobs that have become available. The other thing is that when you get in, you have to be reasonably tech savvy, which is and I'll get to that in just a minute which is why we created the CDC Learning Center. So yesterday we had a class of attendees ranging from 22 to 60 on an introduction to Chad GPT. Okay, A class, right, All right. So what we're saying is what did you teach?
Speaker 2:Take all of this right and create opportunities for everybody and don't exclude anybody from coming to industry. There might be a late bloom or later. Right.
Speaker 2:So my point is that you're reasonably tech savvy, boss. I can come in and I can run your marketing and I can use AI to make things more efficient, but guess what? You didn't have to have a technical background to do that. So my point is as technology permeates every aspect of our lives, it now means that everyone out there is now fair game to come into the industry Right, and that is a beautiful thing. I had never thought that we kept talking about convergence in the 2000s.
Speaker 2:Well, by 2010 now, it was very evident of how things are converging and by 2020, it was absolutely in full bloom and things like Chad GPT. The fact is, stephanie, that you can say I want, hey, chad GPT. Can you write the code to develop a little website to keep my family recipes, and you can get the code, snippet, that section of code that you just drop in and create a website doing it.
Speaker 2:That is wild to me Hours on top of hours of coding, which absolutely would be wild that you have to communicate with three people and everything else and oh by the way since you already design, orient a professional and SEO and that kind of thing, you can say, okay now, but my point is that two young ladies at the College of Charleston can actually create an agency just using 23 years. I've been doing this.
Speaker 5:I was using ChatGP right before I got here to write blogs.
Speaker 4:The kids, the young adults that are coming out of the Charleston, the College of Charleston, are amazing, Amazing. They're so smart. We were there doing a speed networking thing last Monday or Tuesday or whatever. I was thrown back.
Speaker 5:I was like these kids, young adults pardon me are so smart, so smart, it's impressive.
Speaker 4:So then my next thought was how do we keep them here?
Speaker 2:Well, I think again I'm going to come back to. A question comes up, right, what are you doing to attract entrepreneurs? What are you doing to attract entrepreneurs? What are you doing to attract students? So let's not be foolhardy and believe that what we got going on here is the best thing since sliced bread. Let's fundamentally accept that every community has an earnest there and they're all trying just that hard. So we have to earn our stripes every day, which means that you can't just exist, you can't become apathetic. Look at this great success. I drew a chart for somebody and I said 2010. 2001 to 2010. 10 years we were at basically about a 28% trajectory. 2010, crisis, subprime Everything at the bottom dropped out. We go from that to another 30% trajectory because tech moved in and everything became tech enabled. Right, you know tech is the answer to Okay.
Speaker 2:So then you get to 2020 and you think, oh my gosh, you know, we're all cooked here. Boom took off again. What were the two factors that contributed to our success? Since 2020 forward? The fact that working remote and working distributed accelerated at a rate like we've never seen and won't see again in our life. It was a game changer, right, which is what's causing the dead in some of these office buildings to be a challenge. Okay, number one in terms of what happened in 2020. But, number two, wage levels came up, so that's a silver lining. So we got smarter people moving at a higher rate than ever before. They were moving by the way this trickle. Somebody went and turned the spigot on a little more.
Speaker 4:Yes. Right and that's the thing right.
Speaker 2:So it just breeds fire into something that is successful. To where now? What you have to guard against is what I come back to when I started. Why am I here? I'm here for livability. Don't jam up your livability, because the next community is waiting in the wings. They'll come to us next because housing prices will be lower. Congestion is not as bad. It's all the things that we want about livability. Livability the tech industry is a lifestyle industry. It's a high lifestyle industry. I want to be on the water. I want culture.
Speaker 2:We didn't even talk about the cultural offerings in the community that we're punching above our weight class in Little Charleston, South Carolina. Okay, maybe not so little, but we're still little on a relative basis.
Speaker 4:We're a small city, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, so the idea is to engage. I mean, I think to your point, mike.
Speaker 4:We were a small city before you got here.
Speaker 2:I just fill them up with people making a lot of money. There you go. So you know, I just fill them up with people making a lot of money. There you go. So you alluded to the fact that the kids are coming out more savvy. Yeah, and what we can do is we can create opportunities for them. I want to hear that. So Amy not Amy Megan graduated from USC, okay, and her uncle happens to run the EO organization and he says you know, you might want to talk to Ernest over there EO is that what you said?
Speaker 4:Yeah, the entrepreneur organization.
Speaker 2:And you might want to talk to Ernest. So she graduates from USC business degree and she comes in. She's just very dedicated. Next thing is she's got a job. There's seven interviews. She was the only one from on the ground in Charleston. She's got a job. But what's significant about that job?
Speaker 4:First, of all, she's already several thousand above the per capita, for the region and so she keeps it up.
Speaker 2:Now she's going to be 50% above the per capita region. That is a young person's journey into Charleston. There's plenty of those. There's more of those today than there's ever been and it is not my responsibility to say, oh, you know, to single you out and single, you know because of the, because of the, the, the, just the, the fact that that tech is basically now embedded in every aspect of our life. There are more jobs in more diverse sectors, so it touches every sector and you can get it. There are more job opportunities, career opportunities available in Charleston to freshly mint graduates. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 2:As I like to say. You know, sometimes when I come full circle in these things and I have a PowerPoint up on stage said, okay, we start with three simple objectives job opportunities for the kids, which is what you just said race per capita wages and economic diversity. And so I'll start by saying these and then I'll end by saying, hey, we're more economically diverse since the city where community was founded in 1670. We have more job opportunities than we've ever had in every area and our wages basically are. Now. I mean, the last time we did the survey, the wages in the tech sector on average were two and a half times the per capita of the region.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, Okay, so my point being that, by any stretch of the imagination, whether they came along or not, the community has benefited from some of the things the digital quarter has done, and it will continue on. Yeah, but in order. Now I said you know I talked about the trajectory right. So between 2020 and 2030, in order to stay competitive, we have to invest in key infrastructure. That takes us to the next level. Okay, such as so the idea of having we have a lot of defense companies here. They don't have a SCIF.
Speaker 4:A. What now A?
Speaker 2:SCIF is a secure compartmentalized information facility. Oh.
Speaker 4:I got one of those. It is the. I really don't have one of those.
Speaker 2:It is the only place where you can take top secret federal property and discuss it. So you've got to go to NIWIC, you've got to go to a federal establishment, but when you can have one that anybody can come to and they can deal in top security and have that level of top security.
Speaker 2:That's an investment and that is more expensive than number two. Where is the lab space that an individual can go and say I want to just go tinker around and I'll draw this. This is okay. So I'm going to just kind of finish that. Physically, it's the development of a skiff. That is without public investment. There are arguments being made around the country. Well, without the private sector driving. But you know what I mean without the private sector driving. Try going to one of these entrepreneurs and saying, bob, I've got this idea for this digital yeah.
Speaker 2:And see how far you'd get Right. It'd throw you out in about three seconds, yeah, but Riley was at least indulgent. He wasn't a believer, but he was indulgent and he became a believer, right. So my point is there are arguments, people making arguments around the country that it is the private sector that will drive innovation. I'm going to tell you right now that without the public sector, without the city of Charleston, we would not be having this conversation today. They bought a piece of land worth $4 million today and gave it to their foundation for a dollar. We leveraged that to build the tech center. It was a $54 million production. We have a second piece of land and that'll be another $50-plus million production. But who seeded it? Who was my seed investor? It was a public entity. My point now is we've grown big enough to where, in order, the next level of success is going to come from collaboration between the state. Who benefit? They collect 7% of the taxes on the $120,000 income.
Speaker 4:They've got skin in the game.
Speaker 2:They've got skin. The county, the entire region is going to have to. It has now gone from being. I tell people I said enough of the I. We will only succeed moving forward if it becomes a we, and that's a, that's a wholehearted we, not a, not a yeah you know not, not a, not a, not a kind of namby pan. You're in, man, you're in, you know where your legs can get chopped well, you've been doing that since the 80s well, you know sounds like you, you, you've been all in I've been all in.
Speaker 2:I mean, what do I do right? So somebody said to me how the hell can you go from annexation to tech? And I said, well, what do you want to do tomorrow if I'm in? We're in, because you know what I tied back to where I started, it's those Jesuits.
Speaker 4:They beat you into it, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I would have loved to have known you back in the day.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, know, it's kind of funny, it's the jesuits and I love to help people like. I never got from 90 to 100. I was like, quite honestly, I was in the mid 70's to mid 80's, right, so I was like the underdog and I developed this. I can go watch a game and someone's like who are you pulling for? Well, I'm pulling for the 49ers man. So I was like the underdog and I developed this. I can go watch a game and someone's like who are you pulling for? Well, I'm pulling for the 49ers man Because I just they're the underdog in this game. I want them to win right. Not because I'm in love with either team or like.
Speaker 2:So I have this kind of underdog mindset. And the reality is that you get in and just go, you know. So I'm like because they are winning right. They are the 10% of my classmates who just killed it, and so I wanted to be like them. And the way you be like them is you. I tell people I said we just outworked, you know, there's this new mindset. Oh, you know, succeed fast or fail fast. All these cliches that people throw around, right. If every cliche that somebody throws at me, I'm like yeah, there's no fast route to basically building this community.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 2:Because you know what, the first 10 years, everybody sitting on the sidelines going you'll fail, Right. So for the entrepreneurs, that's the entrepreneur mindset, right. Yeah, it's not going to work, man, you know you're going to get tripped up, you know you're going to be, you just have to go at it and a few of them crest. And those few let's just talk about those few have sold their companies, and I'm saying few less than 10, which, with a yield of $2 billion plus in this community. Dear Lord.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yield of two billion plus dollars in this community, dear lord. Yeah, which, which you don't read about? No, okay, we've had why. Why? Why the city? Basically the first facility. The city said indulge me in, you know the old hollywood video store? Here's 104 000 actually, I'm sorry, 112, number six. The new facility was 54 million dollars, including the garage. It is optimized in every way you can imagine.
Speaker 2:There is no excuse from a facility and a support standpoint. Remember, we're not the entrepreneur making shit happen, we're just the ones supporting you and making shit happen and we don't want anything from you. The last guy walked away with several hundred million. It's fine. Several of them have done that in the last couple hundred million, it's fine, okay, and several of them have done that in the last couple of years, it's fine. So that's kind of the journey.
Speaker 2:Right, you continue to invest and you're going to need to reap. But if you think you're just going to reap without investing the other communities, just just for our conversation, the, the georgias, the north carolinas and the florida will win. Our surrounding states will win. So it has to be. I want more success. I don't want the next 10 years to be. We're growing at a three percent rate right and if you make the right investments, the governor, on one hand, crows about the $1.6 billion surplus. What the state of South Carolina just did was spend $880,000 in innovation across the state of South Carolina. That should be $88 million. That doesn't sound like a lot On a $1.6 billion.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, but my point is, it is incumbent on folks like myself to work with the legislator to kind of show you what can be done. This stopped being a pilot project a long time ago, and so you know, what I would say to the folks listening is this is just a great example of what couldn't and shouldn't happen, but happened.
Speaker 4:Yeah, right, and thankfully so, because look at these statistics, you've got over 700 companies. Well, entrepreneurs, tech companies came through 230 graduates the most recent one being incubators.
Speaker 2:So yeah, quite short you know, just graduated, you know, with an average wage in the mix of mid six figures.
Speaker 2:Two billion dollars in investment yeah, we are now five percent of the regional economy take this five percent of the regional, that's huge so my point is that the, the investment by the community will yield back in the community and for those entrepreneurs who come in, they're entitled to run away with that, you know, with their bags of riches, that's what I was because I loved listening to the story of how you became who you're going to be and who you just exceed all your expectations.
Speaker 5:Probably you probably have a lot still coming.
Speaker 4:He's not done yet and I got a dad up, apparently, right.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because he did all this for his kid, I think you're doing a good job, isn't that what? I learned earlier there.
Speaker 5:You earlier there, you did all this, yeah, but I mean, you know, you know, stephanie, sorry. Yeah, I'm just curious what kind of advice would you give to someone who's trying to break into like a young adult? Like saying so you have a kid who's high school, who has an interest in tech? Like what route? Would you shift gears a lot and you know your journey has changed, so how would they get started?
Speaker 2:started. I think the first thing I would tell any young person is don't try to be something you're not right. So we have and I would love to share that with you guys and perhaps the audience at some point we have a chart that's based on your personality type You're loyal, you're rational, you're inquisitive, handsome they fall exactly. So the reality is that the tech industry wants them all. So the idea being my parents swore that I would be a software engineer, and it's not something I wanted to do.
Speaker 2:It might be different today, but working with punch cards was not my idea of fun, but yet I came full circle and I worked with the tech industry Isn't that crazy? So my point is that to be passionate about whatever they do, whatever they do, do it well, and then be curious and then just go place themselves Like I want to just come, I was joking, I want to learn how to cook Thai food, and so I was joking with somebody saying I'm going to see if they'll let me wash dishes at the Thai restaurant so I can kind of look over my shoulder at what's going on. Right, and by talking to the guys, right, put yourself in a situation, force yourself. You've got to throw yourself in it.
Speaker 3:You know, adam, nobody's going to say hey, bobby suzy, y'all, come on up, you know, let's, let's no wait did you do dishes in a thai restaurant?
Speaker 2:no but I it's on my list. You know just how am I going? To learn to cook thai food right. I love it minus a recipe and watching youtube right, actually why?
Speaker 2:why does that taste like that? So my point is back to. I think for any young person, they've got to figure out what they're passionate about and I just go through telling you that a tech company has every aspect of what somebody's passionate about. And just be better at it and work hard and have this kind of I'm just going to be the best I'm going to do and I'm going to. So what I? When I started somewhere in there when I was weaving through, I said I wanted to know that my boss, joe Riley, was better off that morning, that day, that month for what I was doing, right, and so if you go and that mindset of I'm going in wherever, whatever I do, they are going to be better for what I do, and you have this mindset of being I'm a donor, not a recipient. Right.
Speaker 2:You will go a long way, right. And then what happens is pretty soon it really becomes emancipating, because that young person's thinking to themselves who needs who more? I'm really an important part of this organization and I tell folks if you go into an organization, that is healthy, right? This is what Joe Riley said a long time back. I remember him saying this to a third party what can I do? We have these good people who come in, they learn and then they move on right right.
Speaker 2:It's a healthy situation, so anybody works with me. I'm like I want you to do the best you can and I'm sure somebody's going to pick you off and go, and then I struggle basically, but it only takes me about three days, three weeks, to kind of get back know from the loss of that person because I'm running lean.
Speaker 2:Now, I think one of you guys had asked early on right, we started out as a one-man show, basically a one-man shop, and we existed as that for 10 years. Today we are just a three-person shop. So my, yeah, we're three. Today we are just a three-person shop. What? Yeah, only three.
Speaker 2:Charleston Digital Court is run basically by a marketing coordinator who we just hired out of SCAD in December Good for you, so we were a two-person shop, who just went to three-person an operations manager and myself Wow, I had no idea. And an amazing, amazing brain trust of community-minded folks who want this community to be what we are making it and want it to be better.
Speaker 5:They've bought in.
Speaker 2:They completely have bought in and they all have advice and all we have to do is just go and execute some of the wonderful things we hear that day, that week, that month. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And look, if you do it well enough, you end up, you know being so. We're very proud, you know, of meeting those objectives. More importantly, when I talked about being selfish, this isn't about what I was doing, right. This should be will and should be, by design, felt for generations beyond people in the workforce today. That's the idea, right? I'm a very accomplished surgeon. I'm a very accomplished son. What's my daughter's son going to do? It's about them, right, and that's the mindset. It's this kind of go along. So I was thinking what about my daughter, right?
Speaker 2:She can go. They can go work anywhere in my daughter, right right, she can go. They can work. Go work anywhere in the world they want to, but can they work in charleston and have an amazing full life full life be able to afford that house.
Speaker 2:That's up 200 from basically 10 years ago right and I can think so we wake up with that kind of mindset we don't wear it in a sleeve, but we're very deliberate in what we do, we're we're pragmatic and you know the approach and we're perfectly fine saying no. We don't try to be everything you know to everybody and if there's, if there's, it's not going to be a no, for no sake.
Speaker 2:It's a constructive no right so I think that you know that's and we're very sort of value-oriented. So to me I mean just sharing that sort of mantra just go for it, but be sort of deliberative and have this kind of I'm in to win, don't get in. If you want to just kind of go in and and and if you're going to come at it in a media with a mediocre mindset, things like chat, gpd, will, will, will, will replace you. But if you come at it with how do I use these tools Right? So my point is you use technology to command it and if you're not careful, it will command you.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that's a good way to look at it. It is it really is.
Speaker 4:So what are you doing to intentionally bring technology to minorities and women?
Speaker 2:Great, great question, mike, so early on. You know, you look at Microsoft, you look at all the big companies, all the you know the Google and everything else, and they're like you know, oh my gosh, you know it really, it's really we're off. You know we need to bring more minorities. I'll tell you the one thing that is extremely important to me, and that is, if you hear it come out of somebody's mouth, what they are referencing is they're referencing a condition, an economic condition that existed 10 years ago or five years ago.
Speaker 2:They're not referencing what exists today. And I'm going to give you a case in point. We had a class yesterday on Chad GPT. 50% of it was female. Within that female audience, we had an African-American and we had a Hispanic we're not just talking about. Nobody seems to want to include the Hispanics in that count. Well, guess what? One of our partners is the Hispanic Business Association, right? 50%. Everybody say well, you know, don't leave it. 20%. Okay, number one. Number two when we started the year at the Tech Center at the flagship, we started with one woman entrepreneur, right.
Speaker 3:Okay, we're six weeks into the year Already. Let's do the day, good Lord.
Speaker 2:And we have four women entrepreneurs in the building, two of which have benefited from our diversity initiative. A diversity initiative isn't just putting them, discounting some space and saying come on over, you know. It's putting them with mentors, helping them with whatever they need, right. So we distinguish ourselves from traditional incubation in that we're not going to give you a steady ration of things you should know. We're going to tell you if you want to be an entrepreneur. You tell us what you need when you need it. So it's on demand, right. I'd like to meet somebody at Capital. There's a gentleman who mentioned it in the class yesterday. He's a second, he's a serial entrepreneur and he's got this transcriptionist service, medical transcriptionist service.
Speaker 2:I just happen to have a venture capital firm in town for the last two weeks, okay, and they're meeting at two o'clock because he just said I'd like to right, so I want to come back to the minorities, so so, so um, having a diversion diversity initiative uh anybody who comes into the learning center who is underrepresented doesn't pay for the class okay right.
Speaker 2:so that's, that's the other thing. You just use a code to kind of get in and I say that if we keep, it's already the trajectory is already rising. But you just keep at it. Yeah, you keep at it. You know, I've got two girls at home, so I'm more sensitive to women in the workplace than almost anybody. But I'm not going to wear it like a chip on my shoulder. I'm going to say what option does they have? Right? And I tell them the one thing I would say about diversity and minorities anybody who comes to me who is in that category, I say you have to work harder than any of them. I did, yeah, Right. Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2:You know otherwise and you it's just the reality, right? So don't think there's this tendency to think, oh, you should give me a handicap because no no, no, no, no. You're going to get a handicap, but you're still going to have to work harder.
Speaker 5:What I'm giving you is just a small part as a woman. That's a true statement. It's a true statement.
Speaker 2:So what do you know? How do I feel about it? Don't want something for them that they don't want for themselves. The reality is, for those who want, there is more opportunity. Again, I said there's more opportunity today. Just ask me what I'm doing, not what I think should happen. Right, and that's the thing I just can't get into meetings and I'm like listen, I know the issues. I didn't come here unprepared, I just want to know what you're doing. That's what we're doing. We're incentivizing at a higher level and there are some glaring facts that we can get into about what we've learned from doing that.
Speaker 5:That will help shape. Send some of these far away so we can have them on the podcast. That would shape some of these away, so we can have them on the podcast?
Speaker 2:yeah, that would. That would shape something that'd be great. So to have two women entrepreneurs and say you know, you know, talk about you know. We've got two right now. One is a little camera shy, the other one is great. She's like my god, this is great I just tell my needs are away.
Speaker 5:Exactly I want. I want to hear, I want to close that with your elevator pitch.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I want to I want the, so we want, we want entrepreneurs and tech companies to come to you right, right and so what?
Speaker 4:we're doing too is we're selling Charleston as the American Market System. Charleston Podcast. I looked you guys, you're here because I wanted you, because all of the stuff that you've done for the city, but the CDC really looks like a future AMA, like why can't Charleston be a marketing hub? Yeah, like you created. I mean I'm not you, I can't take, you know what I mean. But we're going to build, we're going to keep at it, right, we're going to be persistent and work hard, yeah, so what's your elevator?
Speaker 2:pitch, I think okay, here's what I would say. First of all, unlike traditional economic development, where incentives are why you're here, right Cheaper labor, cheaper land, oh, and, by the way, we'll give you this what we said is we're going to create an optimal environment for you to succeed, right, that is, if we can just clear your mind to focus on the one thing that will drive success. Well, we have done that. Anybody who comes into the flagship it is this mantra to anybody around me we want you to focus on being successful and we will take care of the rest. There is no baggage. I mean the rest being anything. Tell me what you need and you will get it.
Speaker 4:Pretty resourceful dude.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's the point, why? Why can we do that? Because we are singly focused on tech entrepreneurs. Everybody can say that but oh, go around, oh, she's port. Go around, over there, they're manufacturing. Go around over there, they're distribution. No, no, no. None of those guys are entrepreneurs. I don't need to have those conversations. I need to focus on what is next in terms of tech and I need to basically, I need to very quickly, as the concierge, as the conductor, get you to those no-nonsense resources where you can be successful and everything else just goes away, right and depending on how bad I want it.
Speaker 2:I mean even financially, things can, can go away. You know, right, because we want you to focus on that right. There could come a day, basically, where we have, you know you're coming into, the green line, red light, or, you know, red line, green line. The green line is everything is on us, everything's on us.
Speaker 2:You know we'll take a small piece of the company the red line right now is now is you pay your small subsidized, but the bottom line is that when you grow from 18 companies to 700, here's what I would say, mike, it's the stew right. Let the results speak for themselves. This is why you want to be here, not because I sold you better than the next community, because we have the ingredients and, at the end of the day, that a thing that touches my soul, that doesn't touch your soul, it doesn't touch her soul. If charleston is the place that touches your soul, then you need to be here boom I love it, so okay thank you all.
Speaker 2:Fine then thank you, this was exciting yes, very fun.
Speaker 4:Thank you, ernest. Uh, how do we, how do they get a hold of you?
Speaker 2:So I think that I mean everything you know in terms of the Charleston Digital Corridor everything revolves around CharlestonDigitalcom, charleston Digital Corridor and then in terms of the CDC Learning Center, which is our new initiative which we launched in September, which is all kind of focused on tech ed it's cdclearningcentercom, cdclearningcentercom, very very simple. They just kind of track with our name.
Speaker 4:And you just had a session on AI.
Speaker 2:We just had. So we have a series on AI and we've got an amazing session on. It's a four-hour session on developing your sales playbook for an entrepreneur. Oh.
Speaker 2:And that is from a guy, a Canadian entrepreneur, who settled in on building facility number one original flagship and cash that he sold his company to. And he says I'm here and I'm ready to give back. What you did for me was amazing. So he's got this amazing class and again for underrepresented folks, they come in at no charge but they'll learn a about. And he's and this is how he prefaced. I thought we do. I was joking with my co-founder. I thought we knew a lot about sales until a silent investment company mentioned about this. We need to go to this boy, did we not know?
Speaker 2:nice so it's a very comprehensive four-hour session and, uh, that's, that's what's coming up next week.
Speaker 5:I love that and for someone who wants to sign up, it's cdclearningcentercom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cdclearningcentercom. And, by the way, full circle. We are now spending money to market the CDC Learning Center.
Speaker 4:Look at that Look at that.
Speaker 2:We are not just building product, we're not just the kitchen. I've got one leg in the kitchen and one leg basically hosting.
Speaker 5:Hey, we want to help. Yeah, so listeners, go ahead and follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook right, yeah. At CDC Learning Center.
Speaker 2:Yep, exactly, love it, you know, and yeah, so we're just getting started on that and it's pretty soon you're going to have a robust curriculum. I mean everybody, we get these surveys, we do a very aggressive survey and everybody's like we want more.
Speaker 4:Awesome.
Speaker 5:We'll be sure to push that out to our own LinkedIn network, the Charleston AMA, because all those classes are very vital.
Speaker 2:And I would add Stephanie, this is not again, you know. So you become one of the army, right? Yeah, so we're looking for.
Speaker 2:One of the elements of marketing is how you use these low to no cost tools when you're starting up you know, in this lean startup model, right, we're looking for somebody to come in for an and start to come in and talk about. These are all ways, these are all online tools that are available. Hey, by the way, you might want to ask them to do a Google review. Sure, you know so. So we're looking for somebody from the you know the talk about. You know somebody from the marketing association, a professional who can come out and say we're leading this class, and these are the things you need.
Speaker 2:I'm interested if you need someone that creates these synergies with the organizations and, similarly, the partnership would be like guys, I'm not getting anything, but you guys get a 50% discount on any class they offer. Moving forward, that would be like guys, I'm not getting anything, but you guys get, you know, 50% discount on any class they offer moving forward.
Speaker 5:That would be great. Maybe we can do like an AMA panel where we could eat like three or four of us to come in and share our knowledge.
Speaker 4:Whatever you need. Whatever you need, we're here to help. You got my number. You got Steph's number.
Speaker 2:This is the formation of a relationship. Rather than you know, there's the AMA over there and the CDC over there.
Speaker 4:That's exactly it.
Speaker 2:But, now, that's what I look for right to have what I call meaningful partnerships, yes.
Speaker 4:Well, thank you for this meaningful conversation. It was wonderful.
Speaker 5:I enjoyed being here, learned a lot. We always love to see you.
Speaker 4:Even Brian learned a lot.
Speaker 5:And please send some of your people from Digital Quarter our way, absolutely, absolutely your marketing director yeah, that person, he she needs to join our club.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I'm going to go back and tell her that, yes, awesome, and pay for it for her too. Absolutely, yeah, sure, absolutely, I'd be happy to do it.
Speaker 4:All right. Well, before we leave, Steph, do you want to close us out or do you want me to?
Speaker 5:no-transcript who is our intro and the beats on the way out. So, uh, thank you for being with us today.
Speaker 4:Ernest and mike and stephanie would like to say goodbye so see you next time charleston bye charleston.