In this America 250 special edition of Marks on the Market, Richard Cunningham and Luke Roush sit down with Donna Harris — founder and CEO of Builders and Backers, venture investor, and co-author of the redemptive investing playbook at Praxis — for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of American entrepreneurship, the limits and promise of venture capital, and how the AI revolution is democratizing who gets to build.

As the country approaches its 250th birthday, Donna brings a decade of venture investing experience and a conviction that America's greatest competitive advantage isn't its capital markets — it's its people. Builders and Backers has helped launch nearly 800 companies, backing nurses, bartenders, dog breeders, and disability attorneys who are using AI to bring ideas to life that would have required $35,000 MVPs just a year ago.

Key Topics:

• Why venture capital is a "solid tool for a specific use case" — and why it's the single most expensive capital a startup can take
• The real entrepreneurship data: startups are creating a third fewer jobs per company than 15 years ago, and 62% of Americans have an entrepreneurial dream but less than 2% act on it
• How AI is democratizing startup formation — from a $35K MVP to a $20 Claude Pro subscription
• Donna's investment thesis for the AI era: stop asking which AI model wins and start asking which people are uniquely positioned to create value with it
• The concept of "re-risking" from a faith perspective — and why prosperity itself can become the greatest obstacle to obedience
• Scripture at the close: Donna on God's broken heroes, and Luke on the woman with the alabaster jar and the boy with five loaves

Notable Quotes:

"There has never ever in history been a greater moment to become an entrepreneur." — Donna Harris

"The best investors aren't just investing in AI companies. They're investing in smart people who will use the tool well and solve meaningful problems in sustainable ways." — Donna Harris

"We need to aggressively re-risk, otherwise we get lulled into this stupor of prosperity and comfort and building bigger barns." — Luke Roush

Faith Driven Investor Podcast – Episode 224 Release Date: June 8, 2026

John Coleman sits down with Kristian Andersen — co-founder and partner at High Alpha, the Indianapolis-based venture studio and fund — live at the Main Street Summit in Columbia, Missouri. Kristian traces his unlikely path from freelance designer to venture capital pioneer, unpacking how High Alpha's hybrid studio-fund model is navigating the most disruptive era in software history, and why he believes faith calls investors and builders alike to an adventure mandate and a creation mandate.

Key Topics:

• How High Alpha's venture studio model differs from traditional VC — and what 10+ years of iteration taught them about company creation
• Why seat-based SaaS licensing is dying and what outcome-based, utility, and agentic business models are replacing it
• The AI disruption hiding in plain sight: companies going from zero to $50M revenue in a single year — and what that means for early-stage investors
• The enterprise SaaS recession of 2021–2024, the "buying barbell," and why legacy SaaS and AI-native companies are on completely different trajectories
• Why the biggest untold story in the entrepreneurial journey is what it costs the founder's family — and how High Alpha is addressing it
• ServiceNow's entry as a Fund 4 LP and what strategic corporate venture capital actually looks like when done right
• The theology of taste: why Kristian believes truth is beauty, and how the adventure and creation mandates of Scripture shape his work as an investor and builder

Notable Quotes:

"Operating companies makes us better investors. And conversely, investing makes us better operators because the half-life of experience in this industry is a lot shorter than people think it is." — Kristian Andersen

"The currency we trade in are founders and markets. And we want to engineer some radical advantage into those businesses." — Kristian Andersen

"I think we serve a God that calls us to adventure. Every good thing that's happened to me in my life has been a function of me saying yes, not saying no." — Kristian Andersen

About Kristian Andersen: Kristian Andersen is the co-founder and partner at High Alpha, an Indianapolis-based venture studio that both incubates net-new software companies and invests in high-growth founders. Before High Alpha, he founded StudioScience, a design and innovation consultancy he ran for 15 years before selling to private equity. An active angel investor, Kristian has co-founded multiple software companies and invested in over 40 startups. He is married to Brandy, has six children, and is part of the Praxis community. High Alpha's Fund 4 counts ServiceNow as a strategic LP.

About High Alpha: High Alpha is a venture studio and fund based in Indianapolis that combines company creation with venture investing. The firm partners with founders and corporations to ideate and launch enterprise SaaS businesses, then supports them with capital, operations, and shared resources. High Alpha's portfolio companies have included Angi (formerly Angie's List), ExactTarget, and others from the Indianapolis tech ecosystem.

Episode Title: Marks on the Market: What’s Really Going On in Private Credit? | Kyle Brown

Hosts: Richard Cunningham, John Coleman, Luke Roush Guest: Kyle Brown, CEO, Trinity Capital (TRIN)

Key Topics:

• The private credit market has grown 6X in the last decade — but headlines conflating software-sector turbulence with systemic credit risk are getting the story wrong
• How 90% of institutional allocations have flowed to just 12 companies and 50 funds, creating compressed spreads, race-to-the-bottom pricing, and concentrated risk in mega-cap private credit
• Why Trinity Capital's ~20% loan-to-value and ~1x ARR attachment rate on software leaves them well-positioned compared to over-leveraged competitors
• The AI infrastructure picks-and-shovels play: how Trinity is financing GPUs and power-generation equipment on 24–36 month fully amortizing loans to sidestep speculative overbuild risk
• Software incumbency in the age of AI — why enterprise systems of record are far more resilient than headlines suggest, and where the real vulnerability lies (point solutions)
• The US macro outlook: GDP at 2%, unemployment near long-term average, global capital flowing to America — and why all three hosts remain constructively bullish

Direct Quotes from Kyle Brown:

"Private credit over the last 10 years has grown 6X. It's projected to continue growing at a rapid pace. It's being confused as one big monolith and it's really not that at all. It's a massive and robust diversified marketplace now."

"The thing that we're missing out on and that we need to add to that balance sheet is our oodles... Because when you're on your deathbed, you're not talking about that great IRR you made on that stock investment or what you did in your IRA. You're telling stories."

"We're in the middle of a technological revolution and it's just a shame that culture wars and some of the stuff that is going on is getting in the way of what is really an amazing opportunity for anybody who wants to go and do something, who has an idea, who wants to build."

Episode Description:

Kyle Brown, CEO of publicly traded Trinity Capital (TRIN), joins Richard Cunningham, John Coleman, and Luke Roush for the May edition of Marks on the Market — and he brings a clear-eyed diagnosis of what's actually driving private credit volatility, what the headlines are getting wrong, and how Trinity has navigated one of the most turbulent environments in the asset class's short history.

The conversation opens with a deep dive into the structural forces reshaping private credit: a 6X decade of growth, 90% of institutional money concentrating in fewer than 50 funds, zero-interest-rate-era cost of capital that no longer exists, and a retail investor base encountering alternatives market gates for the first time. Brown explains why software-sector fears — while not entirely unfounded — are being misread as a system-wide credit crisis, and how Trinity's conservative underwriting (averaging ~20% LTV across the portfolio) positions them very differently from over-leveraged peers.

From there, the conversation pivots to AI infrastructure investing, the US macroeconomic outlook, the US-China summit, and — in a closing rapid-fire segment — what God has been teaching each host and guest in His Word. Brown closes with a meditation on "oodles," his invented economic unit of enjoyment, drawn from the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12 — a reminder that no balance sheet is complete without the investments we make in the people we love.