It's gotta be something that's defensible, that nobody else can lay claim to.
The way you talk, the way you speak and the way you love your city is what's gonna make the largest impact
across our state. You can do extraordinary things here, not just good things here and be remarkably successful.
If every resident of Indianapolis could do one thing to make our city better, what would that be?
From South Bend to Evansville and everywhere in between. This is Get IN, the show focused on the Hoosier State and the incredible stories happening here today. I'm Nate Spangle, founder of Get Indiana, and I will be your host for today's conversation. Before we dive into today's episode, a quick shout out to our friends at NCW.
The team that's been building one of the fastest growing staffing and recruiting companies in America for over 25 years. They specialize in the skilled trades, but here's the thing, they're also growing their own internal team. If you or someone you know is interested in recruiting sales or just making businesses run smoother, you'll want to check them outat teamncw.com.
This is just another job pitch NCW has been voted A top workplace by the IndyStar. Landed on the IBJ Fast 25 list and made the Inc. 5000 list multiple times. I'll tell you, I've got plenty of friends who work there and they all love it. Go check out teamncw.com. Now let's get into the episode. My guest today is Kristian Andersen, the co-founder and partner of High Alpha, a venture studio based right here in Indianapolis that conceives launches and scales enterprise software companies.
Uh, they also do tons of investments all across the country. These guys know software when it comes to, uh, and are leading the charge here in Indiana. Before High Alpha, he founded the design and innovation agency Studio Science and co-founded software slash venture firms, including Visible.vc, Lessonly and Gravity Ventures.
He is deeply, deeply, deeply connected to Indiana. He's invested in building startup ecosystems in Indianapolis and works to attract, retain, and grow talent all across the state of Indiana. I am really excited for this one. We're gonna have a ton of fun talking all things Indiana, how we market ourselves, how we compare and contrast versus our national competitors.
We might even throw some buck hunting in there. Who knows where the conversation's gonna go. Kristian, welcome to the show.
Great to be here.
What I do wanna start with is, we're just gonna dive right into it. Let's go. You're not originally from Indiana, correct?
No, I am. I am an adopted son.
Oh, of the Hoosier State, the, the Hoosier by choice, right?
That's right. Okay. So where, where is, uh, birth home? Where'd you grow up?
I was born in New York. My, my dad and, and, uh, mom actually met in Alaska when my dad was in the service. And my mom was teaching schools, uh, or teaching school up there. And, uh, they, they met and fell in love and got married and, and started their life in New York, which was where my dad was from, but when we were five, uh, and my dad had built an amazing business there.
And, but my mom grew up, uh, in Arkansas in a very, in a very rural context. And, uh, I think they wanted to raise the kids in that context. So when I was five, we moved to Arkansas. And, you know, I like to think that I've got, I've, I've borrowed kind of the best of both of those worlds. My, my wife said. My wife Brandi said, I pitched myself as half country and half city and, and she found that quite interesting and attractive.
But once we got married, she realized I was 95% country and only 5% city. So she feels like she,
do you feel like
duped?
Uh, well, I mean obviously an extensive career in tech entrepreneurship software. Do you feel like having 95% country has been helpful as you walk into, I'm sure board meetings and this, that like these crazy meetings where everyone's buttoned up suits, big Silicon Valley money.
Yeah. And you walk in there, this guy from Arkansas, those raised in Arkansas.
Yeah. I mean, I think in, in a way it's kind of calling the bluff of the kind of tech intelligentsia a little bit who are so, at least on the surface, enamored with the idea of diversity. Um, and yeah, I, I think there's, uh, kind of.
Uh, psychographic and ideological lack of diversity in tech as a general rule. And I would say that urban centers are grotesquely overrepresented in those rooms. So it's been an advantage in that. A, I do think it, I bring a, a slightly divergent experiences and, and context and, and I also think it, you know, to some extent it kind of keeps people guessing.
I mean, I did not grow up in the Bay Area. I did not go to Stanford. You know, I don't. Own any wingtip shoes. Uh, part of it is I think you, you show up differently, at least from a veneer perspective, but I think more importantly it's just another kind of diverse node. In those discussions,
was it ever limiting for you?
Like as you were trying to advance this career in tech and entrepreneurship and they're like, oh boy, the hillbilly from Arkansas is coming into town.
My mom taught me how to throw a knuckle ball and shoot a gun and you know, my dad. Taught me kind of the language of the high arts and how to navigate a 16 piece place setting.
Right. So I was able to kind of bring those, those, and, and I don't want to, I'm being a little campy when I Yeah. When I say that. Um, but no, I, I never, I never thought my, uh, Arkansas roots were Yeah. An impediment.
How did you end up coming from Arkansas to Indiana?
I went to school. I went to college at Anderson University.
What, how did out of everywhere you could have gone all across the country. Yeah. Why did Anderson University call your name?
You know, this is, this is a long, you know, today I have six kids and two of them are in college. And each one of them applied to lots of colleges. You know, when I was a kid, you didn't do that.
You didn't apply to 24 schools. There was no common app. So I applied to three schools. Uh, one was in state. In Arkansas, and I, and I, I knew I kind of wanted to go somewhere else. Uh, one was Anderson that I was, I became familiar with through a family friend, didn't know anything about it.
It was like, yeah, come to Indiana.
And then, and then one was Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. And, uh, I did not get accepted to Carnegie Mellon. And so I was like, well, I guess I'm going to Anderson. And literally loaded the truck up and, uh, drove to Anderson, Indiana. Had
you, had you been to the state of Indiana before?
Yeah, I had been to the state of, I had, I had visited the university once, kind of on my truncated college tour.
It's funny, I remember I was very sick. I was like, had a really bad cold and my, I, I was like loaded up on, uh, like Actifed. And so I, I have very foggy memories of my campus tour. I do know that they arranged for me to meet with the, at the time, president and I fell asleep. During that brief interaction because I was so loaded up, like with the president.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like
you are talking to the president
and and I just straight up nodded off. Yeah. So obviously amazing first impression, but they let me in anyway. And, and that's what, that's what brought me to Indiana and, and you know, was the beginning of my love affair with this city and the state.
You know, when you start to to go away, how far is Arkansas, how far was home from Indiana? From Anderson?
Almost like 700 miles.
Wow. You're 700 miles away from home. Mm-hmm. What were the things about Indiana that made you feel at home? And what were the things that made you feel 700 plus miles apart?
You know, it did feel very different to me in a way it was exotic, you know,
Indiana, the
exotic I know.
Isn't that, isn't that funny? I loved my time at Anderson University. I, I remain a staunch supporter of that university and its mission. I also have a soft spot for the city of Anderson, but you know, the city of Anderson's, it's been tough sledding for that, for that community and, and it was tough sledding when I showed up in 1992.
You're there in 1992, was it? Was it GM that left town? What? There was something big maybe Dell or something? No, there was some big businesses that left.
It was like, it was the GM orbit, so there were a number of, um, it might've been Delco Remy at the time, but there were, yeah, it was a big manufacturing industrial town and it, it was booming in the sixties and seventies, but by the eighties.
And you know, the fact checkers can, can see if I've got this straight or not. But I think at one point in the late eighties, Anderson had the highest unemployment rate in the country.
No way.
So, you know, when I rolled up it was kind of gray skies and you're driving past these derelict factories that are churning soot into the atmosphere.
And it was not, I, I, as I'd mentioned, I'd grown up in a place that was really aesthetically beautiful, whatever, whatever you might, whatever your pre. Preconceived notions about Arkansas might be. Yeah. It's, it's a beautiful place. And so the first thing that kind of hit me was there was almost a dash of dystopia, uh, in it.
Yeah.
And, uh, and that took me, yeah. That it took me a couple weeks to get my bearings. Yeah. Uh, I mean, so 74 Anderson's, 20 GM plants claimed 25,000 workers. And by the time they started moving manufacturing to Mexico, China, India, and Brazil layoffs during the eighties and nineties. And that's, I mean, what led to that like Yeah.
That dystopian feel. Well, it was just a single threaded market. And you know, I think the same things that are true for us as individuals are true for cities, states, and nations. Right. And you know, when you are single threaded, you're at risk. Yeah. And if your economy is single threaded. You're at risk.
And when the going's good, I mean, talk to the folks that live in West Texas Right. In Midland and Odessa. When, when a barrel of oil is $140, life is good.
Yeah.
When a barrel of oil's $40, life is not good. Yeah. And that's, that wasn't unique to Indiana. It's not even unique to the Midwest. I mean, you've seen the same dynamic play out in the southeastern United States, in the southwest, in the industrialized upper Midwest, you have these single threaded economies and the, when the world changes, it changes fast.
I mean, look at, uh, Elkhart County.
Yeah.
When people are buying RVs and travel, when everyone's like not allowed to be in public spaces together, and you have to go and get off the grid. Elkhart booms baby, when things are going down and people are like, ah, you know what? I don't need a new RV this year. Or I can buy a used one, or whatever.
Then the economy suffers up there. Um, very, very interesting. So you spend four years in Anderson.
Yep.
Did you grow up wanting to work in tech?
I would say by the time I was seven or eight years old, I basically knew what I wanted to do for a living. Now I had unsophisticated language to articulate it. I would've said when I was eight or nine, I probably would've said I want to be in advertising.
Oh,
you know, for Christmas I asked for drafting boards and airbrushes and markers and, and and things like that. And my, my, uh, my folks really indulged that. They got me an Apple Macintosh II when I was 12 years old. And that really kind of changed my life. I, I became. You know, fluent in the language of technology, at least personal computing.
And, um, as I, as I grew, I, that language shifted more toward design. I was, I was always like a creative person and a very curious person. And design kind of with a capital D was a interesting road to allow me to indulge all of my curiosities.
I mean, this is the late eighties when you said design, by the time you were thinking about going to college.
Yeah. Like, did people think like clothing, like that kind of design
back, back then they would've called it like commercial design or Graphic design. Okay. But it was making things,
yeah.
And predominantly on the two dimensional plane rather that be on paper or on a computer. But I was always interested in the ideas around.
Branding and packaging and you know, my folks never wanted me to go to the grocery store with them. 'cause I would linger for an hour on the aisle studying the packaging of the cereal box or the, or the Coke. Can,
was there a design you made on that Apple Macintosh too? Like one of those first projects that you made that you're still look back on?
Like, I'm so proud of that.
You know, there is, and by the way, for those listening, uh, this was not, this was not a, uh, planted question. So it's funny that you asked that and that I have a quick answer for it, but there was a restaurant in my hometown of Conway, Arkansas called Stoby's, and it's still kind of famous.
It's still kind of famous and um, I think they claim to have invented cheese dip. So I, it's un unclear to me if this is true or not. Stoby's. Yes, Stoby's and, um. They ran a t-shirt design contest and the winner got free food for a year and I entered the t-shirt design contest. I won it. There was no contract.
It was kind of a verbal deal, like, hey, free food for a year. Much to their chagrin, they should have documented this. And so basically every day, probably 350 days out of the year, I went to Stoby's and I would bring friends and girlfriends and, you know, two meals a day and I'd be like, I, that t-shirt hanging on the wall, I design that.
I get all the food I want. And at one point the proprietor, uh, came up to the booth and was like, Kristian, listen, uh, really grateful for the t-shirt design. People love it, but you're gonna, you're gonna put us out of business, right? It's one meal from this point forward. It's one meal a week. Okay buddy.
And I was like, okay. I felt like I had already gotten, you know, you got put 10, 10 x the value. So I was happy to acquiesce and agree to that. You
got put your local
restaurant outta business. But, but that was, um. That was probably the first time I realized, hey, you can make money doing this. And I started a t-shirt design company in high school.
Oh. And uh, that was, I was always entrepreneurial, always starting little businesses, even in, in elementary school. But the t-shirt design business was when I realized, hey, I don't have to work for somebody and I can make real money. And I did that through high school. I did that through college. Um, that was my walking around money for eight years.
Yeah. Okay. So you had had side hustles, you had done entrepreneurial things. Mm-hmm. Obviously win the t-shirt design contest and Yeah. I mean, for date night, that's not so bad as a high school kid. Come on, you end up moving. To Indiana, you go to Anderson and design is the path that you end up wanting to go.
And so you graduate. What does someone wanting to pursue a career in design, what do you go look, is it like go to Madison Avenue and try to get into advertising and that kind of thing? Where do you end up?
Yeah, so I, I took a job right out of school, um, with, uh, this was 1996 and there was a tech startup called Inner Mark.
And they, uh, they hired me to be a UI designer, which I knew nothing about, but I knew how to use. Uh, graphic applications. And so, you know, in the land of the blind, the man with one eye leads as they say. And, uh, I did that job for about six months until that company went outta business. Oh. And my boss at the time, uh, encouraged me to hang out my own shingle.
He was like, you know, you're talented, you're good. There was no severance. My severance was, uh, the graphic workstation I had been using. And he said, here's your, you know, here's your severance. And that ended up being fortuitous. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna be a freelance designer. And I moved to Broad Ripple and I rented a 200 square foot office above where the Starbucks used to be on the corner of Broad Ripple Avenue.
And
the old, so now the Thieves,
yeah. That bar. Yeah. So upstairs was this little. Lopsided. Like if you drop the pencil, it would race across the floor. It was like this crooked floor, tiny little office. And um, I was just a glorified freelancer. And, but I'll tell ya,
and this is the late nineties was freelancing.
It was probably 97
Today. It's commonplace
in
97. Not,
I would say probably, probably less common. I'd say my, my folks were probably a little concerned that I didn't have a real job.
What is this? What is our son doing up in Indiana? No, no job. Yeah, like in Brooklyn, his slanted little office.
But you know, things started ripping and me being an independent freelancer turned into me running a network of freelancers.
And then I. Hired my first team member and, you know, and then things just kind of took off. And, um, I ended up selling that company maybe 2018 or 2019 to, uh, to a private equity backed group of investors. It's still rocking and rolling. It's called Studio Science and they're doing great.
Was it called Studio Science when you started?
No, it was called Kristian Andersen Plus Associates, which by the way, this is the free advice section of the, of the podcast. My dad's given me a lot of good advice in my life, more good advice than bad advice, but one piece of bad advice he gave me was name the company after yourself. He called it Eponymous Naming.
And I think that's probably a, that's probably fine. Uh, if your ego needs it, it's probably fine as long as you're involved in the business. But when it comes time to sell that company. Yeah. And, uh, you're no longer there. It can be, it can be problematic. It can be problematic when you scale and you're not the person in the room with the client, they're like, well, hold on, where's this Kristian Andersen guy whose name's on the business card?
So when, when it became clear to me that that might be an impediment to scaling, we Yeah. We rebranded the company.
It's like we got, we paid for Kristian Andersen. All we got was plus associates.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But while running that company, it was good timing. Indianapolis in the late nineties and early two thousands was, um, no one had figured out at that point that you've gotta be in San Francisco to build a tech company.
And if you look at Aprimo and ExactTarget and Angie's List and all these companies that emerged in the early two thousands, um, they all became customers. And so as they grew to become, you know, in many cases, multi-billion dollar companies, we were allowed to go along for that ride, which was, which was pretty amazing.
And, and while building. Well, basically operating a consulting firm. We started starting companies, uh, out of the studio, and some of those companies turned into real companies, as they say.
So one, as you were working on all, like, these are the iconic brands of, I would say the late nineties, early two thousands in Indiana.
You know, like
Yeah,
the ExactTargets, the Angie's List, Aprimo, all of those, which, so you were doing design and brand work with them? Yeah.
Yeah.
Which brand was your favorite to work on?
Oh, I probably, I won't an, I won't answer the question that way, but what I, what I will share, you know, before you hit record on this, you had mentioned that you were in Greenfield, Indiana with Chris Baggott.
Yeah.
Every few years I'll email Chris and I'll remind him of this just because I just feel a lot of gratitude toward him and, you know, his business partner Scott, is now my partner at, at High Alpha. And, uh, I think without Chris kind of taking a shot on me, I walked in, ExactTarget was doing a website.
Redesigned, and this is when they were like turning into a real company and they had some real agencies in there pitching this. And I was, I was in a room with Chris and his team, I think at the time Chris may have been running marketing for them, and, uh, did my little spiel and left. And he called me a week later and he said, you've got the job.
And he said, I want to tell you we've got a little scorecard for how we're rating the, uh, the agencies. And he's like, your scorecard was just amazing. You know, high on cultural fit, um, high on kind of strategy, and very low on price, meaning. Uh, I, I thought there was no way we were gonna get the, the project, so we just kind of wrote a number in, uh, having no idea if we were gonna be high or low.
And Chris was like, you were actually the most expensive of everyone we interviewed. And he goes, that's a good combination. Like when you're a great fit across all these dimensions and you're expensive. Um, and, uh, I don't know if he was pulling my leg or not, but they hired us. And, um, that was really, that was really important.
That was really catalytic. For us. And, um, that led to a lot of other really important opportunities for us down the road.
Yeah. I mean, today, the work that you're doing with High Alpha, kind of like, I think that everyone thinks that everyone that, uh, was involved in ExactTarget is now involved in High Alpha and it's like, it kind of just all blends together, you know, like, oh yeah.
Those guys that did that thing. Yeah. Yeah. That like one out of every three people in Indianapolis, especially the tech community worked for. Yeah. It's like, oh yeah. Like I feel like y especially as I started to like meet new people, they're like, oh yeah. Where were you from 2008 to 2011? I was at ExactTarget.
The most powerful economic development force on the planet are really successful for profit enterprises. And that's not to besmirch all the nonprofit economic development organizations 'cause they're vital and play really important roles. But if you really wanna transform a community, you wanna transform families, you wanna transform as an individual.
Um. One of the most important kind of crucibles for that are really successful kind of hyperscale businesses. Yeah. And, and if you look at the impact that ExactTarget had on Indianapolis for well over a decade, it kind of can't be over. It can't be overstated. Not just because it's shone a light on Indy or it, or it confirmed the hunch that breakout businesses can be built anywhere.
I, I think it taught hundreds if not thousands of people about the power of entrepreneurship and really emboldened those folks to go do their own thing.
Chris told me this story yesterday, crazy. He said when they needed to raise their first 200,000, he went door to door through his neighborhood trying to get, getting $5,000 checks.
Yeah. And each one of those $5,000 checks. Turned into over a million dollars.
Hmm.
Like, so his neighbors, friends, people that he just like, that trusted him, that saw him working on this at the time, like software computer, the computer guy down the street, $5,000 investment turns into a million dollars.
It changed people's lives, but not only because of the financial windfall it created, which just in and of itself is incredible.
I mean, that's huge. Pay off the mortgage, send the kids to college, et cetera. Mm-hmm. But the way those dollars then get recycled into the next generation of founders and entrepreneurs, the impact it had, uh, on the second and third concentric rings. So think about the attorneys and the PR professionals, the design
firms,
and the design firms, and the folks building affordable housing in downtown the, Broad Ripple.
It's really hard to measure the kind of pure economic impact of that, but it was big.
Yeah. And how do you feel like, so you came to Indiana in the early nineties.
Yeah,
you moved to Indy in 97. Mm-hmm. And then the next decade, uh, over a decade, ExactTarget ends up ripping. Yeah. How did Indiana, how did Indianapolis change from the time you arrived to ExactTarget's IPO then acquisition by Salesforce?
I think probably the most important thing that happened was the collective ambition level of the citizenry. MO went up. So people who had lived, people who live in Indy and maybe this transition to another topic, but I think the whole idea of like, Hey, it's nice place to live. You can buy a big house for less money than in Chicago, and the schools are good.
And, you know, it was a very like, safe, comfortable place to live. Um, I wouldn't say particularly high on ambition like unilaterally. Certainly there were exceptions to that. We have some. Unbelievable companies based in Indianapolis, old companies that were very high on ambition.
That's so medicine to the globe, you know, like, yeah,
yeah,
there's some big companies doing
stuff, you know.
Um, but, but I would say it was a not a particularly ambitious place. And, and there was a lot more that went into this than just the breakout success of ExactTarget and Angie's List and so forth. But it played a role in people realizing you can do extraordinary things here. Not just good things here. Um, not just comfortable things here, but you can do really hard things here and be remarkably successful at it.
And I, I think the city found another gear
Yeah.
Over those 10 years. And I think the collective ambition of many of the, the leaders in the city, uh, increased. And, and at the end of the day, like. That's kind of what matters. The ambition level of a citizenry is so important. Their own kind of self-conception and identity around where they live mm-hmm.
Is really important. You look at, you look at the, the cities that get a lot of press today for being kind of outsized successes breakouts. You take your Nashville, you take your Austin. What's important to acknowledge about both those communities is the people who live there are extraordinarily proud.
They won't shut up. It's like a person who does CrossFit or is like vegan or carnivore. Yeah. Like they don't stop talking
about it. Yeah. That's how you actually know when it's working. And you know, you go to Austin, you walk down sixth Street, there's a t-shirt shop, and the t-shirt hanging in the window says, welcome to Austin.
Please don't move here. Okay. That to me is like a high. Now is there maybe a little too much hubris in that particular community? Possibly. But that's how you know when it's working.
Here's a question for,
and then let me, let me add one more thought there.
Yeah.
One thing that, uh, I'm mildly frustrated about in Indianapolis, um, and I like to talk about Indianapolis as opposed to Indiana because people live in cities, they don't live in states.
Okay. So
we'll agree to disagree there.
You know, I, well, I know, and every time I talk to somebody who's thinking at the state level, that's always like problematic. But the reality is people live in cities. Uh, they, they don't live in, I mean, it's a, it's, it's a bit hyperbolic, but I think you kind of know where I'm going with that.
Mm-hmm. What I get really frustrated about is when I'm in a room with some, a recent transplant, or I'm at a dinner party with a recent transplant, and somebody comes up and goes, why, why did you move here? Why did you move to Indianapolis? I, it infuriates me, you know, the idea of there being like, some skepticism about, well, did you marry somebody from here?
Or did you just come for the job? As opposed to that frame of like, well of course you what took you so long?
Yeah.
You know, like, what took you so
long? And, or similar, it's like, oh, it's pretty good for Indiana, like for Indiana at the end of whatever. Like, oh yeah, St. Elmo's Steakhouse is pretty good for Indiana.
Yeah. I'm like, it's just pretty good. Like, it's just good in general. Yeah. Like, it doesn't have to be Okay. So I have a whole theory and I, and I would be curious to hear your perspective. So I'm a state guy, so I like love because I do think that the, the piece that we get is, it ends up being rural Indiana versus urban Indiana and like Indy versus the rest of the, the state.
And it's like, no, because in Indiana, like you want to go down to Brown County because there's cool stuff going on there. You wanna go up to the dunes. The whole state has to be this ecosystem that works. My question would be, do you think that Austin is successful because, do you think Nashville is successful because of the state making this campaign, this marketing campaign?
Yeah. That just trickled down to the people, or what do you think changed in the people to bubble up this sense of local pride?
I, I think the state, not the borders of the state, but uh, decision making at the state level does have some impact on the cultural and economic vitality of their capital cities.
Okay.
For sure. If you look at Nashville and Austin in particular, they're such great comparisons for Indy, right? They're both topographically undifferentiated. There are no mountains, there are no oceans. Right. They're, they don't have big global airports. Um, you know, in the case of Austin, they don't even have a professional sports team.
Right. So why have those cities grown the way they've grown? Why, why has net migration been as high in those communities as it's been? Well, I'd say at the state, so I'll bring it into two pieces. One is like the mechanics and one is the perception. So the mechanics of both Nashville and Austin are, they're both in states that have no state income tax.
Now, that may not sound like a big deal. It's a very big deal actually. If you look at basically all of the highest growth capital cities in the states in which they reside, no state income tax, Florida, Washington State, Tennessee, Texas. Mm. Um, why is that? Does it really matter? I mean, Indiana, we have a very low state income tax.
You know how, why does that matter? Well. It's basically hanging up a big neon sign to entrepreneurs saying we're open for business. And if you look at the companies that have moved to Nashville and moved to Austin in particular, many of them did so because there was no state income tax. So I do think the state, like at a governance level, and, and that's a, that's a big one, the income tax piece.
There's lots of other stuff can create the context for cultural and economic flourishing, but they can't do it on their own. In the case of Nashville, um, Nashville was really kind of a provincial backwater 25 years ago.
Provincial backwater.
Yeah.
What do you mean by that?
What I mean by that is, so I guess you gotta start with what is Nashville today?
So huge net migration, economic expansion. Kind of hitting on all cylinders kind of culturally and creatively. Right. It's the country music capital of the world. It's the bachelorette capital world. Yeah, I was gonna know
Cowboy ads, baby,
let's
go. It's, it's a huge tourism business. But if you go back when I was a kid growing up, Nashville was Hee Haw.
You probably don't even know what that is, but it was a TV show that came on, I think Saturday nights that was like a folksy country and western kind of variety show. And the Grand Ole Opry.
Yeah. It was like Dolly Parton and Cracker Barrel.
Yeah, exactly. And, and it was, and I don't wanna speak for the fine people of Nashville, of whom I'm big fans.
Um, but there was, there was a lot of people involved in shaping the identity of that community that wanted desperately to get away from that, this kind of rural, provincial, hick town kind of vibe. And what Nashville did, which is what I think all great cities do, is they didn't try to invent. Or, or make out of thin air, a net new identity.
They kind of mined the history of that community to say what is true and good and virtuous. That is highly differentiated from everyone else because cities are businesses and their citizens are their customers. So it works very much like, uh, the marketplace. Yeah, right. What's your value proposition?
What's, who's your ICP, et cetera. And what Nashville ended up doing was saying, well, you know what? If you can't beat 'em, let's lean. If this is the perception of our community, let's lean into that 110%. Fast forward 30 years, Nashville has fully embraced its kind of country chic identity. My daughter just started her freshman year of college in Nashville.
Right. So I'm getting like a, I'm getting like a very up close, uh. View of like, what do young people find so winsome and interesting about that community? Well, it's the very thing that the city tried to run away from 30 years ago. The honky tonks, the country music, they, they kind of wrapped their arms around and said, no, nobody else has this asset.
Now, today, that asset may not be widely embraced, but nobody else has it. So this is our point of difference, and we're gonna put basically all of our eggs in one basket. And if, if you think about like what really drives the commercial engine of Nashville, it's not country music, it's healthcare. Right? I wanna say like the vast majority of hospital beds in the country are managed outta Nashville, Tennessee, right?
HCA bought a big company called HealthSouth. And, and so it's, it's like a healthcare town. Oh, for sure. But the message, the external message to the world is, it's a great place to have a bachelor party, right? Yeah. You get to wear a cowboy hat and nobody's gonna make fun of you. What I find inspiring about what Nashville did.
And really what Texas as a state did was they kind of leaned into the caricature that historically had been used as a pejorative and turned it into a positive.
It's almost like, uh, you see too many places trying to like almost give themselves their own nickname. It's like when you're, when you're coming up through high school and you're like, yeah, call me Flash.
And everyone's like, no, I'm gonna call you Sparky. Like, come on, what do you do? And you can't give your, like your own nickname's never gonna stick. Yeah. But if you find out what the identity and then it's your job as the government, I feel like, to help craft that narrative. And, uh, but I do think, and this would be my, my curiosity to you, do you think that it is a top down approach when it comes to this local marketing where like the state says Nashville is the country music capital of the world and everyone just agrees to that?
Or is it more of a bottoms-up approach? Of like, everyone around here was already saying this, that we were already Yeah. Talking about it.
Yeah. No, I don't, I don't think it's top down. And I, you'd be hard pressed to find an example of a municipal rebranding project that worked.
Yeah.
Has, it's never worked in Indy.
Um, and, and there's, there's, things have worked around the edges. Like I, I love what, you know, Visit Indy has done with just Indy, we're very fortunate in that our city's name, its natural nickname, the Truncation of Indianapolis. Indy is just a killer name. Yeah. I mean, as you know, I have six children, only one son; I named him Indy.
Right. That's great. So, so I, I, I think that's great. So we're, we're ahead of the curve there, but again, if you look at. Let's look at Austin with Keep Austin Weird. That was not, that was not the, uh, Austin chamber of commerce that came up with that. Yeah. All right. Uh, much less the state of Texas. No, they're organic, they're bottoms-up.
It's always individuals that drive this, this. Now I do think there are like convening bodies that can get the right people in the room to have a vigorous debate and, and settle on, Hey, where do we wanna put resources?
Yeah.
So I think that's important.
You wanna know what, I think Indiana and Indianapolis biggest problem is when it comes to landing on a name or like this brand or this identity, A large part of it is the entire state of Indiana.
If I were to say, Kristian, that's a really nice hat, what would, what would the average Hoosier say?
Thank you.
I got it on sale.
Oh, I God,
it was 95% off. Yeah. Yeah. I picked it up the, the cheapest shelf at Goodwill. Yeah. And it's almost like wrong for us to have nice things like, like I feel like the average Hoosiers identity is built in getting the best discount and talking about it in a way that's like, versus like in LA or Miami or New York.
It's like, yeah, it was, the chain was 10 grand and the hat was Gucci and like Prada and all of these things that are just like, it's almost like you're flexing, but in Indiana it's like, no. So like when I ask, oh yeah, what's your opinion of Brown County or what, maybe Brown County is a bad example, but what's your opinion of.
Anderson and the average person would say, oh, it's not bad. No one ever drove an hour up north of Indianapolis for Not bad. Yeah. No one ever got in the car and did a South Bend road trip or an Evansville Road trip for a place. That's okay. But that's just the way we talk about our things.
Yeah, I, well, I think that's, that's probably true.
I think that's not unique to Indiana. That's probably a middle American kind of Protestant work ethic kind of kind of thing. But I thought you were gonna go somewhere else.
Oh, where'd
you think I was gonna go? Uh, I'll just say movement. And that movement could be a product that movement could be a brand product, could be a new religion or non-consensus.
If I was going to be critical of how Indianapolis, the city, and Indiana the state, have handled attempts to rally around a collective identity, my critique would be. Uh, consensus. Trying to drive to consensus. And this is also why I don't really like to talk about cities in the context of the state. And again, not unique to Indiana.
I mean, I grew up in Arkansas, Northwest Arkansas, Bentonville, Fayetteville Rogers, which is kind of the new economic engine of growth in the state, or Little Rock, which is the capital and the historic economic engine of the state. And then you've got all these rural communities that are like, well, what about us?
What about us? I don't, I don't wanna forget about them, but, but what I do think is very important is if the heart stops beating, there's no point in trying to save the left arm or the eyeball or the ear. Okay? You gotta, the heart needs to. The rest of the body needs the healthiest possible heart or it's game over for every other system and subsystem in the body.
And that's how I think about the relationship between Indy and, and the balance of the state. Of course, we need to shine a light on other amazing things happening in the state. Of course, we need to do really everything in our power to bolster the economic vitality of South Bend and Franklin and Bloomington and so on and so forth.
But all that change happens at the community level. So the folks in Indy can't go fix South Bend's problems. South Bend needs to do that, and they've done it to some extent. And you see the same thing in Fort Wayne. The folks in Fort Wayne aren't sitting around waiting for us to. Fix whatever is ailing them.
Okay. But we live, you and I live in Indy.
Yeah.
Okay. This is our, this is our hometown. This is our city. And for Indy to move out of the top of the middle of the bell curve, which is where I would argue we are, where now, like slightly better than average across all of the most meaningful statistics, bankruptcy rates, net migration, GDP, et cetera, et cetera.
It's going to require some non-consensus ideas. And if we're trying to make everybody happy, if we're trying to make everybody in the city happy, much less everybody in the state, happy, you're gonna end up with my, one of my favorite analogies is, have you ever ridden a, a hybrid mountain bike? You ever heard of this like
electric assist?
Not electric, no.
Oh no.
A hybrid mountain bike is a bike that's kind of a blend of a traditional mountain bike and a road bike,
okay?
And the pitch is, hey, you can take it on the trails, but you can drive it to work and it's good for a Sunday cruise on the Monon, it does it all. Well, guess what? It's a very crappy mountain bike and it's a very crappy road bike, right?
So you really just sucks at both of them.
It sucks at both of them. It's below average at both of them, okay? And so when you try to hybridize and make everyone happy and drive to some form of uniform consensus, you end up with mashed potatoes.
Yeah,
that's a problem.
And cool. Or like trendsetting, any of that is largely not loved by everyone.
What is, like, I'm sure there are people in Nashville that fricking hated country music and were like,
well, think about this. Think about when, and I, and I don't know all the inner workings and machinations of who is in charge and how Music City got emblazoned on everything, but I guarantee you when dollars were being put toward that, the people in the healthcare sector were like, what about us?
And the people in the manufacturing sector were like, well, hold on a second. We're not just a music city. We're also a, whatever, a restaurant city or, you know, have to put all of your wood behind one arrow to cut through the noise. Yeah. Okay. And that's why I, I find it problematic when we wanna lead with Hoosier hospitality.
I looked at a, a lot of potential campaigns to reframe the city around hospitality. I'm like, that's great. It's true. We, I do believe like genetically. We are a hospitable people in central Indiana. I think it's a statement of fact. I think that's also true in Iowa and they, I mean, heck, Iowa claims the pork tenderloin too.
Right? It's why I also don't like Indy's food being the pork tenderloin, because there's six other states that claim that the pork tenderloin, it's gotta be singular, it's gotta be differentiated. It's gotta be something that's defensible that nobody else can lay claim to. And, and that's what Austin did with weirdness.
It's what Vegas did with sin.
Yeah. Yeah. You think the government officials were like, yeah,
Sin City it's what la did with glamor and entertainment. It's what New York did with finance. That's what D.C. did with power. Like there's a singular idea. I mean, I, I say great cities have a soul, and that soul can be summed up in one word.
And if you can't get to that one word or if you get to that one word, but it's undifferentiated like hospitality. Okay. Yeah, because I promise you the good people of Kansas City think they're very hospitable too. Okay. Yeah. Then it's, it's not defensible. It's not differentiated. You're not gonna win in the marketplace.
Wow. Yeah. I, I mean, I would totally agree, and I think that is the piece where there are so many people are so nice in Indiana, so nice in Indianapolis, where it's like, oh yeah, we are the healthcare sports racing blank, blank, blank. Insert your little slice of the pie here. Like, we do all these things.
Absolutely. They do all those things in Music City, and they do all those things in Sin City, and they do like, there's all this, it's good,
it's the price of entry.
Yeah.
You know what I mean? It's the price of entry. No, you need, you, you've gotta lock onto something that is true and differentiated and it doesn't need to tell the whole story of everything happening in the city.
That's not the point. Right. Any product you need to have, you know. The, the word, the word priority had no, um, plural instantiation a century ago. Do you understand?
Priorities?
Priorities? That word is a new word.
Ah. So it was, it was a, is it a priority or is it not? It was yes or no.
So when you bring one of your staff people in on Monday and you're like, what are your priorities for the week?
What they should say to you is, I can only have one priority. 'cause that means number one. Now there's, there may be, so, so Nate, here's my priority.
Yeah.
And here are the other five things I know I need to get done as well. Wow. But the priority is the thing. So when we think about the identity of Indianapolis, there needs to be a singular identity from which all the other virtuous ideas can flow.
And so you guys, uh, did a whole exercise on this of thinking about if, if Indianapolis was to go through a rebrand, I would encourage people to go back and listen to Matt Mindrum's episode of the podcast where we talk about is it time for Indy to maybe refresh the brand a little bit or to not have priorities have a priority?
Yeah.
And I believe there is a large push for that priority to be on speed.
Yeah.
If you're watching at home, you can see the shirt that Kristian's wearing. Speed City, Indianapolis.
Yeah.
This is a campaign that you are, that, I mean, that you're a, a big voice behind of claiming and proclaiming that Indianapolis is Speed City.
Yeah.
Give us the pitch. Why, why Speed City? Why not the amateur sports capital of the world? Why not the women's sports capital of the world? Why not the healthcare capital of the world or the hospitality capital of the world,
great cities have a soul. And those souls, uh, tend to be rooted, not tend to be, they are exclusively rooted in something true typically from.
From the past, right? It might have been the group of people that moved there and founded it and whatever, uh, ideas or values they held dear it might be because there was an industry that kind of emerged outta the ether in over a hundred years, became the kind of soul or the heartbeat of the city. And, and you said, why not X, Y, and Z?
None of this is exclusionary right now. I think we are the amateur sports capital of the world, and that's awesome. And I think the push of us being kind of the epicenter of women's sports is amazing. Um, and we need to keep doing that because I, I do believe that there are many people around the country who identify Indianapolis as a great sports town, great place to host a sporting event.
But you know what's interesting? I was in, in the last couple years I've been, I've been to Iceland, I've been to South Africa, I've been to Peru. When people say, where are you from? It was in France a few months ago, had this interaction with an Uber driver. Where are you from? Indy? I'm from, uh, I'm from a city in the Midwest called Indianapolis.
Assuming no one's gonna, it's close to Chicago, you know? Yeah. It's kind of how you pitch it and they're like, oh, vroom, vroom.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay. They don't say, oh, you're the amateur sports capital of the world, or You're the epicenter of women's sports. So those are, those are certainly not bolt-ons. They are critically important, I think, to the future of the city.
But when you think about identity as distinct from a marketing campaign or a rebrand of a city, which as I've already shared, I don't believe rebrands of cities work. It just is. And what are you gonna uncover and highlight? And for Indianapolis, I think this, I think the soul of this city is speed, and yes, it is rooted.
In motorsports, in the very long tradition we have in Indianapolis of burning dead dinosaurs at 235 miles an hour on an oval track. So it did in fact start with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but speed as an identity for the city transcends motorsports, right? I mean, I would argue this is the fastest city in America to launch your career.
That was certainly true for me. I moved to Indy. I had no family, no friends, didn't know anybody, did not go to an elite university or have any kind of, uh, you know, p professional pedigree. The roadblocks, the speed bumps. If we wanna stick with the kind of ambulatory metaphor, were almost non-existent.
And the ability for me to move quickly. Build my network quickly, get into rooms that I had no business being in quickly I think is unparalleled. And I'm not saying there's no other city in the country that has that, but I, I think the air is very, very thin up there. And I think, I think our city has a legacy of doing things quickly.
If you look at the NCAA tournament, the 64-game tournament
mm-hmm.
Executed in a bubble in one city every game, first time it's ever been done, the speed at which that plan was developed and the speed at which was executed. No other city in the country could have done it. Other cities wanted to do it.
They couldn't do it because of speed.
Yeah.
Okay. And the, I think the critique of Speed City is, well, it's one dimensional. It's kind of this like, um, it's this like unfashionable. Association with, with motorsports, which is kind of a hillbilly thing and it's simply not true. What is racing? It is glamor, excitement, danger, innovation.
It's cosmopolitan. I mean, what is F1 is F1. Provincial is F1 hillbilly. No, no, and what's so funny to me is that any other kind of mid-market city on the planet, if their natural, if the natural association the rest of the world had with that city was racing. They would be thrilled. Right? Like it is,
yeah.
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The most wealthy elite people are up in the boxes with the suites and the this, and then the common folk are out in turn three. How? And it's everyone has a place there.
Yeah. And it's, and it's, but I guess my point too is like it's rooted in motorsports historically, but it transcends it in a big way.
Like buying a house like speed, like you can get to homeownership quickly. You can get even making friends. I would say that's a great one of.
That is a great, that is a great example.
Like you could move to Indiana, you could go to a coffee shop and if you just had a little bit of courage, like talk to somebody, you will make a friend quickly.
Uh,
and that's where hospitality,
yeah,
as one of the kind of core values that undergirds speed comes into play. You know, I, I think what is also kind of interesting and, and probably merit spending a couple minutes on, is identity. So how do we as citizens think about ourselves and think about our city and ultimately our state?
It's not brand. It's something that you kind of feel and own and take pride in, which is why I don't think these things are top down initiatives. They're very much bottoms-up and a great identity at the individual level and at the municipal level is both. An imperative and an indicative, you know, the indicative pieces, it's just true.
We are Speed City. We move quickly, we solve problems quickly. Um, we bust through roadblocks quickly. But it is, it is also an imperative, which is like, and, and as such, because you are Speed City. This is how you should behave. This is how the city should operate. This is how you should think about your identity as a, as a citizen.
So a city is a business, right? We talked about that. And so the city has to create a product that its citizens who are customers want to purchase. And they, the way a citizen purchases from a city is by living there, okay, I'm gonna make my home here. Yeah, yeah. I pay taxes here, I'm gonna send my kids to the public schools, et cetera.
That's the, that's the transaction. So a great identity is one that is both indicative. It is true. But it is also an imperative, meaning it is a call to be something and to be more of that thing as time goes on. So, you know, our BMV at Indianapolis, it should be the fastest BMV in America. So whoever's running the BMV, which I I assume is appointed by the governor, like they need to internalize Speed City, okay.
And say, we're going to have the fastest, most seamless, frictionless license or renewal process in the country.
Kevin Garvey, commissioner of the BMV.
There you go. And I think the BMV does a pretty good job, but, but why? Why, why do we not have the fastest pothole repair
Yeah.
Squad in the country? We can, and we should.
Yeah.
You know, Indianapolis International Airport at one point had the fastest wifi of any airport in America that's living into the value. Yeah. Living into the identity. So it's both a, a, a personal individual thing, and it goes all the way up to the state level. This internalization of this is something we value.
Mm-hmm. And because we value this, we're going to demote. Uh, because you can't have 10 values that you hold equally.
Priorities versus priority. You
got
it. The priority is speed. Like you're, you're gonna move here and you're gonna find a friend quickly. You're gonna find, uh, I dunno, maybe it's a job quickly.
Maybe it's investment into your company quickly, whatever it is. Yep. There is momentum and velocity. Come on. I
love it.
I, I really like that. And I think that, uh,
and we, and we own it.
Yeah.
Nobody else owns it. Nobody else can
mm-hmm.
Own it.
It does have to be. Sexy. If you think in the terms of like, like something that's gonna fire people up and get them excited because again, back to my original point, no one ever drove two hours for, that's not bad.
Yeah.
No one ever traveled across the country to visit.
You have to make it sexy though, because back, back to Nashville, just as an example, nobody thought country music was sexy in 1974. I mean, there was a small group of people that I grew up with who did, that's clearly, but hey, can, but as a, as a general rule, you know, until I, I, I always mark it as when Garth Brooks came out with friends in low places, that was like the pivotal moment, you know, um, where countrys started to become cool.
But, but it doesn't need to be because if it's, if sexiness is the priority, you'll look around and look at what is currently considered sexy. Let's go replicate that. Yeah. We should build our own Silicon Valley or, you know, cool. If you're chasing Cool. You're always on the wrong side of Cool.
Yeah. Versus making cool.
Okay. You're always on the wrong side if you're chasing it. Even if the notion, the core identity of speed doesn't feel sexy to you today, let's make it sexy. You know? And that's, that's the key.
Yeah. Like I put this out there and I know that F1, uh, won't come, probably won't come back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but like, that should be like at the top.
How do we get some sort of Indianapolis Grand Prix? Or like, like if we wanna like, like. If we would've been building towards this,
we would call it the Speed City Grand Prix.
The Speed City Grand Prix.
Yeah.
And
the headline writes itself.
Yeah. And if we would've been building this, we would've caught the wave of Drive to Survive and like, been all the way in it.
Like, just like country music is hot right now. You know, Post Malone and Beyoncé are doing their country albums and it's, it's crazy. It's awesome. I love country music. I, I've thought it's been sexy since Kenny Chesney said it She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy back in 1999. Um, but if we owned that and leaned into that, and it's like right as Drive to Survive was peaking.
Yeah.
Then F1 was coming to Indy. This whole it would've been, it could be, yeah. And, and it's still, there's still motion and work to be put in there
for sure. I mean, I, I mean, getting a North American F1 Grand Prix in Indy would be very cool. I just, I wanna be clear that the, the moniker in the identity Speed City, it transcend motorsports.
Yes. So getting F1, that'd be great. I, I think. Today, it's kind of a fool's bargain for cities to pay for that. It's a, it's an extortionist racket. Um, you know, and, and maybe the economics of that get recalibrated or maybe at some point it makes sense for us to Yeah. To pay for that. And it's been here before, you know?
Yeah. Um, but I think that as a, as a city, um, there are a lot of ways that we need to activate that idea. And it starts with, it starts with like the individual internalization of the citizens of the city embracing that they live, they live in Speed City, the fastest, the fastest city in the world
here.
Here's an idea. This, I just, the, the wheels are turning. Let's
go.
Matt team at Indy Chamber, Leonard team at Visit Indy. What if once a month we went out and found something, whether it's the BMV or pothole filling or whatever, found something that across the country, Indianapolis was the fastest at. Yeah.
And documented that process. Yeah. Like, Hey, Indianapolis, fastest. Chick-fil-A drive through fastest. It's a great idea. Fastest, fast. And you document like I did the, the time I showed up for a flight and timed the whole thing. I showed up 45 minutes before my boarding, not before the boarding started. Before the gate closed.
Yep. And I made it from parking in the economy lot into my chair on the flight in like 37 minutes. Wow. And I timed the whole thing and it was like, wow. And it, it crushed, it got like hundreds of thousands of views. People were like, the anxiety that gave people, like you only showed up 45 minutes before your flight left.
Like that's crazy. But I rolled the dice on it. Yeah. But of once a month, someone somewhere was going out and documenting something that was fast in Indiana. Yeah. Like did you know the average person moves here? And has their first invite to a social event within seven days. And it's not planted. It's not like Nate is specifically inviting this person.
It's just like, it happens,
or what are the things that should be fast that aren't, and let's go fix
it. Fix those.
Oh my gosh.
I love
it. Because that's really, that's really when you begin to internalize the product piece of identity, which is, uh, this is good. It should be great. It can be great.
Yeah. And in talking about ways to make things better, fix things, if every resident of Indianapolis could do one thing to make our city better, what would that be?
Embrace a shared sense of identity.
Embrace a shared
sense
of identity.
Yeah. And become an evangelist. You know, I, um, one of my favorite towns in America is Greenville, South Carolina. And, um, I have, I have a lot of good friends that live there. And, um, one thing that I'm always struck by when I visit is.
They're always trying to connect me with their realtor. They're like, dude, why don't you live here? You should move here. And, and by the way, this is not unique to me. I've, I've, I've had this Greenville conversation with lots of people. The citizens of Greenville, love it, are proud of it, and are relentless evangelists for it.
You know, so that, that comment I made at the kind of top of our conversation, which is it really frustrates me when people are like, hold on. Why? Why are you, why did you come to Indy for spring break? Like this, this shock? Yeah. That someone would elect to spend time here that needs to be stricken from our lexicon.
You know, I, if you walk down the street and you interviewed a hundred people and said, is Indy amazing? Or does Indy suck? You would probably get a, a 50 50 split. But here's something that's very interesting. Of the 50 that said, yeah, it's average. That sucks. Is too strong a word, but maybe unenthusiastic response to the question.
Yeah. A disproportionate percentage of those folks were like, were born and raised in Indianapolis. Of the 50 that were like, it's amazing. It disproportionate percentage of them came here from somewhere else. And so it's just kinda missing the forest for the trees. A lot. The, the biggest evangelist I know for this city aren't from here.
It's crazy. Leonard Hoops, he is running Visit Indy. He is not from Indianapolis.
No, no, because they've got, they've got the comparative context to understand this place is amazing and you know, it's, if, if you, if you grow up in wealth and affluence, you just don't appreciate it as much. The value of a
dollar doesn't matter as
much.
But if you grow up impoverished and then. Have a successful career or win the lottery. Maybe the lottery's not a good example, but, but going from having not to having makes having so much more special. And so my, my admonition or challenge to the citizens of Indianapolis would be to discover your sense of gratitude and attitude for what a remarkable community and how excellent this city is.
And to, to take up the mantle of evangelism. 'cause that's how you, that's not only how you change other people's minds, it's how you change your mind. You know what I mean? You have to, that's how, that's why gratitude exercises work literally changes your brain chemistry.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah. And I, and it, this is not saying like we just.
Act like everything, like everything is perfect in Indianapolis. Like we totally realize there's still more work to do, but it starts with coming from a place of gratitude of like, wow, there is so much good here. Yeah. And the people are great and if you just like change the, and this doesn't, this isn't just Indianapolis, this is any community across Indiana.
When we talk about this bottoms-up approach, if you just change the way you speak about your home. And yes, there are still more things to do. Yes, there's more work to do. But if you can lead with the gratitude and a lead Amen. Lead with the appreciation. Yes. You'll change your community. Yeah. Like you know a place that does this really well.
That is crazy. Uh, I've spent time down in Dubois County. I rave about them all the time. Jasper, that area, Jasper, Ferdinand, Huntingburg, anyone, even if they don't live there anymore, they just talk about home with such reverence. Yeah. The way they speak about home, if they're not from there, they can't wait to get back there.
If they move to Indianapolis for a job, they cannot wait to go back to the Schnitzelbank and have some salad bar at the German restaurant in town. Yeah. And it just like fires me up. So when I step foot in that community, I'm just like, yes, there are still problems. Yes, there are still challenges. Yes, there's still changes that need to be made, but they lead with like, yeah, this place is really cool.
Just wait till you try
this. You know? You know what might even be a better admonition than cultivating a sense of gratitude.
Yeah.
It's 'cause what you just reflected is they're expressing. Their affection.
Yeah.
For those places.
Love your city.
They're, they're expressing their affection and that's great.
Cities are populated by people who have a strong affection. Are they perfect? Of course. Not great cities, by the way, are not easy places to live. Tokyo, London, New York, those are not easy places to live. There's a lot of friction there, but the, the affection is so profound and so strong and so contagious.
Yeah,
that, that's what, that's what fuels their greatness.
Well, and think about all of the things within your life, like when things are easy, you don't take an appreciation for 'em. You don't have that love. But when there is that little bit of friction and that little bit of it just like creates, it's like the girl at school, you know?
Like the one that loved you. You didn't love her to start, you like wanted to chase after a little bit and run it down. Um, okay, so that's what the local, that's what local, each resident of Indianapolis or of any community. If you want to help improve your local home, have more love for your city,
cultivate,
yeah, cultivate
your affection.
Now, from like a overarching, higher, higher level, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the city or the state, what would that be?
I would, if I could wave a magic wand and recalibrate people's expectations, ambition and affection. for the city, recognizing what they have, um, and being a champion and evangelist for what they have.
Yeah. That's what I would do. Because again, I'm tempted to talk about some state level mandate or some shift in local politics, but that, that won't get you anywhere.
Mm-hmm.
That won't get you anywhere. The, the people who choose to live here, that is the beginning and the end of what will continue to transform the city and their, their, their affection for the city.
Yeah. And their shared sense of identity. So that's probably an unsatisfying answer, but
That's good.
It's the same answer.
Yeah. Well, I, I wanna wrap up, we have a few more like rapid fire questions left, but I have one more question that kind of like ties a point of expressing this. So are there ways throughout your time in Indy that's been what, almost 30 years?
Yeah.
1997 to now 2025.
Yeah. I mean there, there was some, I, there was some detours in the middle of that. I moved my family back to Arkansas for, for eight years. Oh wow. In the middle of that and would commute. I lived in Conway, Arkansas, and I would commute from Conway to Indianapolis every other week, and I did that for eight years.
Oh wow.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I came home one night after being delayed, like six hours in Atlanta. It's like three in the morning. I'm driving home on the interstate. My home was about 45 minutes from the airport in Little Rock, and I'm listening to this Texas country singer named Pat Green. He's got a song called While I Was Away.
Real sappy song about while he's on the road, missing his children growing up.
Yeah.
And I just, uh, my daughter would say I had a minty bee. Um, A little minty bee. Yeah. A minty bee. And was just like crying. Like, what am I doing? And I came home that night and I woke my wife Brandi up and I was like, we need to move back to Indianapolis.
Like this, this me being gone half the time
Yeah.
Is not working. And she was like, I agree. And she sold her home two weeks later and we And you came back home. We, we came back home. That's a good way of putting it,
I guess. Yeah. Not your home, it's left your home to come back home. Right.
It's a good I left home to come back home.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so over 20 years then in Indianapolis.
Yeah. But 30 in aggregate.
Is there a specific way that this state or this city showed up big for you, for your companies, for the investments that you've made that just really ties a bow on everything that you're talking about and that inspires you with so much gratitude.
You're not from here, you weren't born here, you don't owe this city anything. Or maybe you, they feel like you do, but like, why do you have so much affection and gratitude for Indianapolis?
You know, I, got interviewed a couple years ago. And, and one of the questions was, why do you love Indianapolis so much?
And I said, because Indy loved me first.
Oh.
And that, I'm gonna stick with that response. Just meaning before I, no one owed me anything. I, again, little to no pedigree connections. Nobody was doing my, my daddy a favor 'cause they didn't know who he was. Um, there was something, and I, and you said this, Indy, we have plenty of flaws, plenty of things we need to work out on because this city is comprised of humans who are fundamentally imperfect.
Yeah.
In light of those many flaws, I would say this is an incredibly, uh, this is an incredible meritocracy. This city, they're less concerned with where you went to college and what your last name is, and more about what are you capable of and what are, what are you willing to give for the city? And you know, in the context of high Alpha, what did the city do for us?
I would just say. We felt cheered on every step of the way. We felt, um, very few people out there trying to kind of tear you down or shoot holes in what you're doing for the most part, like at a shockingly high level, the the, the support we've gotten from individuals, sometimes competitors has just been remarkable.
People want to see people win. In this city
legitimately. That's so true. I do, I will resonate Or, and I will like second the fact that you can move here. Your dad didn't have to play golf with the mayor. Yeah. You don't have to be a fifth generation legacy. But if you are even be like, that's cool. We like that.
Yeah. But you could be a first generation Hoosier and come here and get plugged in if you are driven by impact. Yeah. Like that's like I'm, I, I was a 2019 college graduate, moved here from a small town in northern Indiana, went to DePauw, ended up here, part of the, Orr Fellowship program. And it's been off to the races.
Hmm. And I've just like gotten deeper and deeper ingrained at every step. And now like, I get to host a podcast that helps promote the city and the state and it's like,
it's amazing.
Yeah. And it's like six years ago I was just figuring it out. I had no idea what, I just knew that I wanted to make an impact in our local community.
It's crazy there. It is a place that is driven if you, if you wanna make an impact, you can come here and make an
impact. Yeah. And here's the thing you, and I know we gotta wrap, but that's true for other communities. Uh, you know, you can. Uh, go to Topeka, Kansas and make an impact. But the distinction is Indianapolis is operating.
I, I usually think of it, we don't have a whiteboard here, but I think of it as two orbs. One is opportunity and the other is access. Yeah. And if you think about the Bay Area, there's all the opportunity in the world, capital, talent, infrastructure, research, universities, oceans and airports and operas. And it's got all the, it's got all the inputs, but your ability to access that is really quite limited.
So huge opportunity orbs, small access orb, and they barely overlap. Conversely, you could go to some small town in Mississippi and you could have all the access you want. You could have lunch with the mayor every Tuesday. Okay. But the raw inputs are de minimis, right? There's just not that much opportunity.
What is, what is, if not wholly unique? Um, quite rare that Indianapolis possesses is we're a city that's operating at scale. Depending on if you want to use metros and MSAs, you know, couple million people running around here. Okay. With in big city infrastructure. Mm-hmm. Big City Corp, corporations. Um, and your ability to tap into that, to access that is extraordinary.
Like you, you, if you wanted to get an audience with the mayor of Indianapolis or the governor of our state in a week, you could do it
if your ask is right and it made sense and all that stuff. Absolutely. Like, you know, someone who has the person's ear, like someone would make that introduction.
You, you, everyone will work with you Yeah.
To get you access.
Where like in, I feel like in some places it's laughable, right? Yeah,
of course. Yeah.
Like, no one would laugh you outta the room if you said, if I said, Hey, I want to have the mayor on. Mm-hmm. And I like really put some work in to like getting,
there's no
question like, yeah.
There's no question.
So that's, to me, that's the, the Venn diagram of what makes Indy really special is these. A city operating at scale. Yeah. That you can still interact with, like it's a much smaller city.
Wow. I love that. We're gonna tie a bow on the Indy love. All right. So this question is brought to you by our friends at J.C. Hart.
They're a leader in creating enjoyable living experiences at apartment communities all across Indiana and beyond. Check them out at homeisjchart.com. My question for you, Kristian, could be back in Arkansas. Could be in the Bay Area, could be all over. We've talked a lot about Indianapolis. We've talked about what we need to do to make it better, but why do you call Indiana home?
I'm obsessed with impact, and I'm obsessed with the idea of arbitrage. You know, if you think about that in like a financial sense. You know, it's basically when the gap between the buy and the sell is pretty wide.
Yeah.
And I think Indianapolis offers the largest arbitrage opportunity of any mid-size or large city in the country in terms of what you can accomplish.
Um, you know, I mentioned earlier why Indy because Indy loved me, you know, because Indy loved me first. You know, the, the maybe second part of that is relative to the scale the city's operating at. If you are a ambitious. Hardworking person. You can put a bigger dent in the universe, in Indy than almost any other city in the country.
Absolutely. In, in at, at a fast speed. Very quickly.
Very
quickly, very quickly. I love it. Okay. We've come to the end of the show. We have a few questions left for you. First off, I have to ask, have you thought about running for public office?
No.
No, not in the cards.
I'm unelectable.
Unelectable. Yeah. What makes you unelectable?
I just, uh, probably 'cause I just wouldn't want the job.
Yeah, that's fair. Alright. Uh, 'cause I feel like that's an interesting place where, um, Indianapolis has a lot of very, uh, people leading the charge that, uh, from like the private side, they're like, Hey, I don't want to be in Yeah. The government office, but I wanna help in any way I can.
Like, 'cause it'd be so easy for you to just do High Alpha things and you know, like continue making investments and being in tech. But the fact that you have taken this vested interest in the community is like the most Indianapolis. I
think I, I can have a much. Larger impact, um, shaping the perception and the identity of the city than I could at a, from
the
inside city council meeting.
Yeah. Okay. Who's an Indiana entrepreneur that you admire and why?
Matt Mindrum.
Oh,
yeah. So Matt, who's had a very storied career at who? Lilly and Butler and IMS, who's now leading the Indy Chamber. I have been, he's the right man for the job. Yeah. And I've been so, it's been so fun getting to know him and uncovering his deep and abiding love for this city and his ability to herd cats, which is not a superpower that I possess.
I think what he's doing, uh, on behalf of the city of Indianapolis is pure entrepreneurship, and I have a great deal of admiration for him.
I love that. Yeah. If, go back and let's do his episode on the show, it's, he's spectacular and does bring a very. Privatized marketing brain to Yeah. Uh, a chamber of Commerce, which is like, I don't think largely regarded as the most entrepreneurial or fun and creative,
no industry.
He's, he's re he's reinventing how those organizations have
impact. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. These are the same three questions that we ask everyone who comes on the show. The first one, you've kind of hit on it, this whole episode has kind of been a lot about Indianapolis, but you've traveled around, been to different places.
You talked about France, Tokyo, London, all over. What's something that the world needs to know about Indiana?
A friend of mine, his name is Greg Enas
Yes.
And has he been on the pod?
He has not been on the pod.
Okay. And he and his best friend Don Palmer, runs Citizen 7.
Yeah.
Greg shared with me a few weeks ago that his goal for Indianapolis is to make it the joy capital of the world.
And I was like, Greg, where? We're almost there. We're almost there. This is a, this is, and the work they're doing at Citizen 7, just starting with helping people build friendships, helping young men, old men, um, uh, and it is, it is that organization is focused, I think predominantly on kind of men for whatever, for, for what it's worth.
Um, but their remit, their mandate to make Indy the joy capital of the world, I think is so beautiful, so winsome.
Yeah.
And I think it's important for people to know that that's one of the ambitions for our city.
There's someone out there who had a storied career at Lilly, has been doing a lot. Greg is a great dude and he's just out there like, he's not looking for the city to give him approval to make this the joy capital.
No. He is like, nah, we're just gonna spread joy.
Bottom bottoms-up.
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Okay. This is your opportunity to share a part of the state that more people need to know about. What is a hidden gem in Indiana?
Thought about this kind of deeply. There is an organization. In Indy, it's located in Rocky Ripple, if you've ever heard of that.
Oh yeah.
Two roads in, two roads out
called White Pine Wilderness Academy, and it was founded by a guy named Matt Shull. And it is, I believe, one of the most remarkable institutions in our state. And they work with young children, teenagers and adults to solve nature deficit disorder. So it's a primitive skills academy where you learn how to forage, identify edible plants, build your own bow, um, process, wild game.
And it's actually a national model. They've been studied by people from all over North America, and it is located on like a half acre plot of land in urban Indianapolis, in Rocky Ripple. And I, I think it is one of the most remarkable. Unknown institutions in our city.
That's incredible. The fact that Rocky Ripple has a wilderness academy just like checks out.
Yeah. Like as soon as you cross those, I think there's two bridges in and like, so we, one of our running loops, we go back the Rocky Ripple loop and we go through back there and there's like the Rocky Ripple town hall over there. Yeah. And I'm just like, this place just has something going on. Like there's just some grit to Rocky Ripple.
It's, it's, yeah. I'd, I'd, I would put White Pine. There's actually another organization I'm just now becoming familiar with called Camptown. Yeah. That is taking a lot of those other basic precepts and making it available to really kind of challenge some disadvantaged youth. But this idea that we have a handful of entrepreneurs in the city that are working really, really hard to make nature a classroom the way White Pine talks about it's, they say nature's our classroom and our curriculum's, uh, thousands of years old.
Right. Wow. And it's, it's really beautiful. And it, they're changing people's lives.
That's awesome. I love that. Right in the middle of Indianapolis. Final question for you as we wrap it out. You've talked about Matt Mindrum, you talked about Greg Enas. We're gonna give one more shout out to someone across the state that this is how we source new guests or learn about people who are just doing massive things across our state, who's a Hoosier?
We need to keep on our radar, someone who's doing big things.
Greg Enas.
Heck yeah. Full. Yep. We're gonna
double down on Greg. Greg Enas and Greg Enas and Don Palmer. You gotta have 'em both. Okay. 'cause these, these are, these are two guys, you know, older dudes who, um, could very well be spending time at their beach house in South Florida, or spending time on the links who get outta bed every day focused on making Indianapolis the joy capital of the world.
And I think it's just amazing.
Yeah. I love that. Kristian, this has been incredible. It was great to learn about your journey from New York to Arkansas, to Indianapolis, back to Arkansas, back to Indiana. Yeah. Uh, learning about what, you know, when you got here, the differences, the similarities between not only Indiana and Arkansas, as well as Nashville, Austin, some of these other big metros.
Hearing your passion for the state, your passion specifically for the city. Speed City is incredible. I'm fired up. I'm ready to go out there. Let's go. If all of us remember one thing from this podcast. One thing, the change starts if you love your home. Yeah. Whether it's Columbus, Indiana, whether it's Bloomington, Indianapolis, Evansville, south Bend, the way you talk, the way you speak and the way you love your city is what's gonna make the largest impact across our state.
IT branding, whether it's Speed City, whether it's women's sports, whether it's amateur sports, whether it could be anything, a top-down approach, that's not gonna, that's not gonna be the thing that helps take Indianapolis to the next level. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be every single Hoosier. Holding a love for our place in our hearts, and I could not say it better myself.
It was incredible. Thank you. Thank you for joining me. Um, it's incredible and, and I'm sure we'll talk soon as, uh, time keeps rolling on.
Can't wait. Thanks for having me.
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