Rachelle Morris’s mother pulled her off the reduced-lunch program the summer before sixth grade. Her father brought home a box of Wrigley’s gum from a trade show. She sold it at school, made seven dollars, and paid for her own lunch from then on.

She ran that operation out of her backpack and locker through middle school and high school. Everyone knew where to get their gum.

Second of seven kids in Houston, money tight, and she describes the specific moment of looking around at classmates’ families and deciding she wanted to figure out money the way they seemed to have. Lifeguard at fifteen. Call center at sixteen, doing outbound political polling, getting a seventy-year-old woman in Austin to stay on the phone for forty-five minutes — chasing the gift cards for top performer. She says she didn’t know then that she’d spend the rest of her life calling strangers to make things happen.

She was the first woman on her mother’s side to get a college degree. Information Systems at BYU, where she learned she wasn’t the person who could code for six hours straight — and learned instead to be the person everyone wanted in their group, because she could take what the team built and explain why it mattered.

Then Goldman Sachs, right before the financial crisis, starting in mutual fund operations and talking her way into the Dallas private wealth office. Twelve years. Then a call from JP Morgan in 2018 asking her to move to Utah and open their office. She says she thought that was the entrepreneurial leap. Looking back, it wasn’t.

The actual leap came from a panel. Asked about women founders receiving only around 2% of venture capital nationally, she reframed the question — the gap she saw wasn’t in who gets funded but in who sits on investment committees. Six months later she got a cold call from Darren Hill at RevRoad asking why investors weren’t committing to his fund. She gave him the honest answer. He paused, then asked her to come run it. Her response: I’m not a VC. His: not yet.

She’s now a partner at Stalwart Ventures, fourteen investments in, hundreds evaluated. Thirty percent of the fund’s limited partners are women, which happened because they dropped the minimum to $100,000 regardless of net worth — she’d found that most of these women had never been pitched by a VC firm before.

There’s a lot in here for anyone early in a career. Her warning to high achievers that she’s more concerned about their mental health three years after graduation than she is right now, because results are a different game than grades and people you thought were less sharp will navigate it better. Her advice on walking into a room where you know nobody, and why “I’m new” has a short shelf life. And the 401(k) advice from her Goldman bosses in Dallas that she credits for the financial freedom to take risk now.

Plus a plain-language explanation of what venture capital actually is, why founders should be interviewing VCs rather than the other way around, and what a fund owes the investors who hand over money for a decade.

Chris Bond started as the janitor in his family's scrap metal yard, scrubbing floors on his hands and knees and polishing bathroom faucets until he could see his reflection. Twenty-two years later he was a partner and VP of Sales in a company doing several hundred million a year across ten facilities in three states. Then he sold his stake and left.

What changed was COVID. The job had been ten to twelve hour days, five and sometimes six days a week, with travel on top. Being home showed him what he'd been trading away. His words: he was sacrificing the most important asset he had. Everyone thought he was crazy to walk away from that kind of comfort, and he says there were moments he agreed with them.

His conclusion was that it wasn't actually a choice. He could still make a lot of money, still make an impact, and be there for his kids.

This one covers the full arc. Growing up in a blue-collar scrap yard and working alongside men two and three times his age doing hard physical labor for the same money a sixteen-year-old was making — which taught him respect for that work and a clear sense that he wanted something different in twenty years. Taking a sales job at 23 because he was nervous, and deciding that nervousness was a yes. Going from one location to ten, and being the one sent into every newly acquired yard to win over employees who'd just been bought and were bracing for what came next.

That last job produced what he names as his superpower: building trust with people fast, authentically. The second one is the reason he coaches — he can see potential in someone who can't see it themselves, and hold the mirror up until they do.

He's clear-eyed about why coaching works. Most of his clients already have it together. They started a business for freedom or passion and somewhere along the way it became a headache with employees to manage and a scaling problem. His job is helping them remember why they started. And he reframes accountability as something done with love, not someone busting your chops.

Also in this one: why the top is lonely and what to do about it, the line from his friend Brian that the things that are most private are the most universal, where mortgage rates actually sit right now, and his answer for what he credits his success to — optimism and mindset, trained deliberately, no matter what happens.

Tom Moore bought a six-plex overrun with drug deals and prostitution. He says if he'd seen it for what it actually was, he'd have run.

Instead he'd already built something else in his head. He calls it spiritually designing — deciding what a thing could be before you look at what it is, then chasing that. That restoration became the catalyst for a whole neighborhood turning over.

Tom was born in downtown Ogden and went to Ogden High. His father, an East LA transplant teaching at Weber High, thought his students were sheltered and started taking them on summer trips through Europe — and was among the first Americans allowed to bring a group into China. Somewhere in there he did the math on hotel bills and started buying property in London instead. He was an Anglophile with family portraits of the royals on the wall.

Tom served an LDS mission in Scotland, which gave him UK residency, which meant he could invest in London without being treated as a foreigner. He spent 25 years doing it. The portfolio crossed $100 million, built one property a year to start.

He also sat on Ogden's Historic Landmarks Commission for fifteen years, and he has a useful answer for investors scared off by historic designation: it depends entirely on the attitude you bring. Strip the character out and you'll be scrutinized. Work with what's there and the commission becomes wind at your back.

These days his focus is Plot AV, six years old, doing AV integration and home networks. His diagnosis: technology in our homes has become noisy. Not audibly — we just spend too much time troubleshooting things that should already work. His argument is that Wi-Fi is now closer to heat and electricity than to a gadget, and that we'd never build a house without plumbing but routinely ignore what he calls the nervous system of the home until it's too late. Three goals, and only three: invisible, reliable, intuitive.

Also in this one: why his oldest properties date to the 1890s, the block where he and his father restored five houses alongside Ogden City, and the Rick Rubin idea that if you don't make the thing, it goes and finds someone else to make it.