What are the strategic advantages to investing in early growth, patent-protected technology companies located in Opportunity Zones?

Matt Van Dyke and David Kunz are managing partners at Hall Labs, a Provo, UT-based family office and tech accelerator located in an Opportunity Zone.

Click the play button below to listen to the condensed audio recording of the webinar with Matt and David, sponsored by OZ Pros and Crowdcreate.

Or, for the full video recording, click here.

Episode Highlights

• Family office strategies for Opportunity Zone investing.
• The diversification and ROI benefits of venture investing within Opportunity Zones.
• The social impact potential of tech firms located in Opportunity Zones.
• The case for investing in early growth, patent-protected technology companies.
• Hall Venture Partners’ systematic approach to executing an exit strategy for all of their investments.

Featured on This Episode

• Hall Venture Partners
• Hall Labs
• Matt Van Dyke on LinkedIn
• David Kunz on LinkedIn
• OZ Pros
• Crowdcreate
• Tracy Hall, inventor of the synthetic diamond
• David Hall, founder of Hall Labs
• Current Investments: Vanderhall | Medic | Smarterhome | Bacon | Sure-Fi

Video Recording

Sponsor a Future Webinar

Would you like to sponsor a future webinar like this one, so you can promote your Opportunity Zone fund or deal to the OpportunityDb network? Email [email protected] to request more information.

Industry Spotlight: Hall Venture Partners

Hall Venture Partners provides capital to grow patent-protected technology companies in the Utah region. With a 60-year track record, Hall Venture Partners is located at a state-of-the-art campus in Provo, Utah alongside Hall Labs and its team of innovators. Hall Venture Partners was established to address the growing demand by investors for curated opportunities in early growth technology companies.

Learn more about Hall Venture Partners

• Visit HallVP.com
• Visit HallLabs.com

About the Opportunity Zones Podcast

Hosted by OpportunityDb.com founder Jimmy Atkinson, the Opportunity Zones Podcast features guest interviews from fund managers, advisors, policymakers, tax professionals, and other foremost experts in opportunity zones.

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Webinar Transcript

Jimmy: Welcome to the Opportunity Zones Podcast. I’m your host, Jimmy Atkinson. Today’s episode is a condensed audio recording of a live Impact Investing Webinar series event presented by OZ Pros’ Crowdcreate and Hall Labs on August 18th, titled “Family Office Investment in an Opportunity Zone Tech Accelerator Campus.”

For the complete version of this webinar in video format, and to learn more about how you can present your OZ fund ordeal to the Opportunity DB network in a future webinar like this one, head on over to opportunitydb.com/webinars.

Enjoy.

Welcome to the Impact Investing Webinar Series presented by OZ Pros and Crowdcreate. I’m Jimmy Atkinson, host of today’s program. I’m the founder of Opportunity Zones Database, at OpportunityDb.com, host of the Opportunity Zones Podcast, and co-founder of OZ Pros. And I’m joined today by Will Walker of Crowdcreate, my partner, Ashley Tison at OZ Pros and two gentlemen from Hall Venture Partners.

I’m here with Matt Van Dyke and David Kunz, and we’re gonna get to them very shortly, but without further ado, I wanna bring Will in one more time here and introduce himself. And then, Will, maybe you can say a few words about our experts here today and then introduce them as well. So, please tell us a little bit more about Crowdcreate and Hall Venture Partners and Hall Labs.

Will: Okay, great, Jimmy. Thank you. Well I just wanna say Crowdcreate’s really proud to work with Hall Ventures and Hall Labs, Hall fund that type of thing, you know, as a sponsor of this series. And Crowdcreate, you know, we have a database of over 45,000 accredited investors in our arsenal and many in the institutional arena as well as the high net worth accredited arena.

We can literally customize and frame, you know, put in the custom framework for any project or opportunity or company to reach what I call the right qualified eyeballs and with the right strategic content. Targeted content, targeted PR, that type of thing, so that we really create a very speedy targeted introduction to capital as well as other growth strategies. So we’ve been doing this for six years.

I know OZ Pros has been a great partner of ours on the framing side and some of the legal side as well. And we really do pack a great one-two punch together, so to speak. But I just wanna say, personally, you know, my 24 years, my background is private equity. I’ve been fortunate to raise a lot of capital, see a lot of deals, structure a lot of things. In my 24 years experience, this is the top of the heap talking about Hall Family Fund and the Hall Family Labs and what they’ve created.

When I was really interviewing them at first, working with Dave Kunz and Matt Van Dyke, who you’re gonna just meet in a minute. As soon as they told me about the numerous over a thousand patents, the scope of their engineering group that they work with, and also the diversity that they are working with between operating businesses and real estate in their portfolio and how long they’ve been doing it since 1950, all of these things from my end as a capital allocator and raiser myself for many years spoke volumes.

So this is really the top of the heap. I’m really excited to bring both Matt Van Dyke and Dave Kunz to everyone and hear their story and what they’re doing and why they’re moving the needle. Also, the magic wand is, you know, they invest in both the GP and LP side and all of their projects and companies and their exits are, I’ll let them talk about it, but they’ve had numerous pre-revenue exits that are very, very successful.

So, this, as far as I’m concerned, is the Holy Grail, and I can’t wait for everybody to meet them. So I’ll be quiet now and pass it back to you, Jimmy, and we can get started with Matt and David and go from there.

Jimmy: Sure. Why don’t we get an intro from Matt and David, maybe they could each say hi real quick and introduce themselves. Matt, I’ll let you go first. You’re on mute currently, but if you take yourself off mute, Matt, then you can say hello to everyone.

Matt: Great. So, hello everyone. My name is Matt Van Dyke, and I am the CFO for Hall Venture Partners, as well as the Hall Family office, which is referred to as Hall Labs. I’ve been with the company for around eight and a half years now and have a focus in my prior life in tax. And so really, the culmination of the innovation and tax is what’s become interesting, at least in this Opportunity Zone space. And so, that’s me. I’ll let Dave go from here.

Jimmy: Yeah, go ahead, Dave.

David: Great. Thanks, guys. I appreciate everyone having the opportunity to put this together and to bring us in to present. You know, my background is on, as an investor, as an operator in both early stage and growth stage companies. I’ve worked on both the public and the private side and was fortunate enough to get introduced to the Hall Family and Hall Labs almost two years ago now. And, you know, having that outside third party viewpoint when I had an opportunity to visit and subsequently meet the people behind Hall Labs itself, I was blown away. I’ve seen many incubators throughout the country, many accelerators throughout the country, and this is just something that is totally unique and different.

They’ve realized, you know, what they’re really good at, which is innovation, and innovation within technology and product that really has hard time getting growth within large companies. That innovation needs to happen where it does within the lab here. And the Hall Family has been the only LP up to date in these companies which has helped them grow. And those companies themselves, they pivot, they change, but they’re very, very strong in creating intellectual property with over 1,000 IP licenses and in building those companies. And when I came in, there were about 20 companies that needed growth capital. And we realized that, you know, there was an opportunity here to build the same formula of success that’s worked well over the last, you know, 50 plus years with that next stage and iteration of company growth which is that venture growth space.

So, alongside Matt and two other partners, we were able to identify criteria to select what we thought were some of those top companies within the Hall Labs Campus, and excited to talk to you about some of those today. And really, we’d like to say it was foresight, but the reality is we were a little lucky in the fact that our entire campus got included within an Opportunity Zone as well. So I think one of the benefits of what we have is we were building this fund anyway, and we ended up finding after the fact that we were able to offer the incentives that follow along with the OZ platform. So, we’re excited. Thanks.

Jimmy: Fantastic. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Matt. Matt, I’m gonna let you share your screen in just a minute, and we’re gonna learn a lot today from these two gentlemen. We’re gonna learn some family office strategies for Opportunity Zone investing, the diversification and ROI benefits of venture investing specifically within Opportunity Zone, this is not just another real estate play. Not that there’s anything wrong with real estate, but I always love hearing from people who are doing venture investing. And of course, we’ll also hear about the impact potential, social impact potential of tech firms located in Opportunity Zones and specifically the impact that Hall Labs is having on the Provo area. Without further ado, Matt, please take it away.

Matt: Great. Well, thank you. So, just as a quick overview, great intros, I think that you guys probably did a better job than what I can as far as explaining what we do, but the way that we’re organized is that we have kind of three different segments. So the first segment is Hall Family, and we often refer to that as Hall Labs. We have a 60-year plus track record as far as creating technology and have had quite a few exits over the past, even 20 years. Been able to return quite a bit of capital off to investors and typically those investments and those technology creations have happened at an earlier stage. And so we’ve had various pre-revenue companies that have sold at $100 million dollar plus value, and we’ve also had some operating companies that have sold off.

So after various years of doing early stage development, we realized that there was quite a bit of value that happens to the company as once they reached commercialization and get pushed off into more of a growth trajectory. And we’ve explored different ways. Typically, our methodology was just to either sell it to a strategic partner that could scale the technology or we would partner with that strategic for a period of time and then they would typically end up buying it. Also did individual deals with private equity companies in the past. And since we had large companies that were growing, we decided to create a venture fund that would be managed by a group of individuals that had growth on…Had a group of individuals that had quite a bit of experience in growing companies.

And so we created Hall Venture Partners, and Dave, my partner here on Hall Venture Partners is part of that alongside two other partners. The first investment vehicle that we have as part of that Hall Venture Partners is the Opportunity Fund 1. And David mentioned this in the past, we were already creating the fund. I ended up getting a notification from the city of Provo saying that we fell within an Opportunity Zone, and I had a background in tax and we had a problem that we needed to solve. We had some capital gains that are rolling off from some of our past exits, and it made a lot of sense for us to be able to create the fund as an Opportunity Zone fund.

So, a quick look at our background, again, we have a 60-year track record and it really started back in the ’50s. The dad, his name is Tracy Hall, he invented man-made diamond and he did that while at General Electric. And he left General Electric, came down to Provo, Utah, and was professor at BYU. And BYU couldn’t pay him very much at the time. And so he ended up creating a couple of side hustles. They had allowed him to be able to take his IP and created different companies while he was a professor. And he did that with his son, David Hall, who’s one of our partners here. And our first exit or our first commercial exit happened in the mid-’80s with Mega Diamond, and then from then it just cascaded into different companies that we had created, and then we had sold.

And one important thing to note, as far as Tracy goes, Tracy was a big studier of Thomas Edison. And the reason why he went to Edison Labs or General Electric at the time was because he wanted to work there at some point. And so everything that we do within the lab itself is patterned after the concepts of Thomas Edison. And we often refer to Hall Labs as a modern day Edison lab. We spent quite a bit of time in the industrial space when it comes to diamond, as well as downhole tools for oil and gas. But we expanded beyond that really in the 2000s and really determined that our core competency was being able to take multi-disciplines from an engineering and science perspective and attacking big problems not only just in energy or industrials, but really big worldwide problems.

This is a quick look at our historical return of capital. To be honest with you, before creating the fund itself, we didn’t look too much at what our historical returns have been because the methodology that we followed was, once we sell a technology, let’s take that money back and deploy it back into new things that we can create. And that’s really the internal driver here is really to be able to create things and companies that can have an impact, you know, throughout the globe from a technology standpoint. But as I looked back historically and really saw how we did, we did end up returning quite a bit of capital back to investors and also into Hall Labs and where they can redeploy that capital. So that gives you a high level view of our historical returns. So I’ll let Dave chime in to explain where we’re at today.

David: So, thanks, Matt. I think, you know, some of the key factors that have led to the success of and the process that’s been created with Hall is, you know, you can see on that sheet and if you can’t see, I apologize, but you’ll be able to look at it at a later point, that the overall portfolio has averaged about a 5.4X return on invested capital, and that’s just within Hall Labs. And then as we brought in a co-investor at that point of needing growth capital and having that commercialized product, that co-investment average and rate of return average goes up to 7.9X.

So, although, you know, we’re thrilled to have the Opportunity Zones incentives, I think we’re very happy to show people that, you know, the success, the track record, the process has worked throughout history, and I think puts Hall Labs in the top quartile for any growth venture fund. But, thankfully, we have the opportunity and the vehicle to offer the incentive alongside of this as well.

So, in terms of Hall Labs, where we stand today, the fund itself, we’ve been able to make five investments within companies and have another three targeted for Fund 1 and plan on closing that out here by the end of the year. So, I think the timing is great for all of us to be able to answer any questions that you might have, talk about venture itself and how it fits into your portfolio. And more specifically, I think most people that I’ve spoken with had realized and seen the Opportunity Zone investment opportunities within real estate, and were many times not aware that the venture qualified. And being that we’re a family office that has done this, you know, we’re doing it as much for ourselves as we are for our LPs, and that’s why it was so important for us to invest as an LP within this fund.

Matt: Great. Thank you. So, really briefly, if you look at the methodology, the way that we think about the investments, there’s early stage investments and there’s later stage investments and on the Hall Labs end, we typically have not partnered with others from an equity standpoint until the company has proven itself, or the technology has proven itself in the market. And usually, when that has happened in the past, we ended up selling that company outright. And you’ll see on this chart all of these different exits that we’ve had, and this is essentially showing what stage of commercialization that they were at exit.

And on the left hand side of this chart, you’ll see that Hall Labs’ focus is really on the early stage items that are kind of entering into beta testing, or even early sales. And the fund’s focus is really on the companies that have kind of risen to the top. And that’s when you can apply, I would say, traditional business thinking to the businesses, to the technology that isn’t innovation, I would say. There’s, I call it block and tackling professional type of services that you’d apply to these companies in order to exhibit growth and partnerships with others that can fill out your distribution sales channels.

So, Dave, do you wanna touch a little bit about the campus where we’re at in Provo? And I live here, it’s a little bit, it’s not that exciting for me just because I’ve seen it all, but maybe, Dave, you can give an outside perspective on it.

David: Yes. So they’re about 45 minutes away from Salt Lake. And the interesting part about the campus itself is also the property. The property is an area where it used to be the largest employer of anyone within the area, and it’s a former steel mill. So, one of the important things to the Hall Family itself was not only to create this incubator and this campus where they’re building innovative companies, but on top of that, tackle the, you know, the brown field that was created and be able to bring that back to usable property. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. So, today, it’s about 130 acre contiguous campus and a testament to, you know, the companies that were created even back in the ’50s. They’re still there today.

So, there’s almost 700 people on campus, about 200 plus engineers in every vertical. And, you know, that’s, to me, was really what was impressive is going in and seeing exited companies to the likes of Schlumberger, and Caterpillar, and NOV for some of those early-stage diamond companies. And that technology that had been built then is still relevant today. So, being heavy on the patent side and building that patented mode allows them to be very open with prospective LPs and investors. And so, you know, we’ve encouraged as many people as possible to come to campus to take a look at what we’ve been able to build, but understand today that that’s not as possible as it has been in the past. So we’ve tried to create some assets to help show people, which I think Jimmy can share afterwards, really what’s happening on a local level there at Hall Labs.

Will: And, Dave, I just wanna jump in there too. We’re putting together some incredible arrow shots. They also have a lot of very impressive footage from drone footage and on to really give you the in-campus experience that’s really extraordinary. And we’re helping them put that together or leveraging what they already have here at Crowdcreate, which is some of the things that we do. So wanna make sure everybody gets to see it, whether through Jimmy or through OZ Pros or through, as a Crowdcreate, we’d love to have you guys take a virtual tour of what we’re putting together, what’s been put together. It’s incredible.

Jimmy: Hey, question for Matt and Dave for me here, is this entire campus located within an Opportunity Zone? Is there any part of it that’s not, or is it all OZ land?

David: The entire campus is located within an OZ.

Jimmy: Yeah. Fantastic. And how close are you to BYU here and do you have any relationship with them?

Matt: Yeah, so we typically will do work with BYU on a company by company basis. But BYU is about 10 minutes away.

Jimmy: Oh, that’s great.

Matt: Another major university, UVU, that’s within about 15 minutes. So all, a lot of young students, we have a lot of internships that come through here and they provide a tremendous amount of value.

David: I think if you look at the backdrop of actually what’s happening within the Provo or greater Salt Lake City area, it’s been a hub for innovation and growth. A lot of M&A has been happening there within the last couple of years, whether it’s Qualtrax, or Purple, and there’s a reason for that. And the reason is access to great talent out of those two universities that Matt just mentioned, whether it’s on the, you know, the technical side, in engineering, or whether it’s on the sales side. And it’s actually been coined Silicon slopes. So we’ve even found companies moving out of Silicon Valley to come to the Salt Lake City area, because it is so business-friendly. And then, on top of that, when you add the OZ benefits, it really has been highlighted as one of the top areas to build a business.

Matt: So, one thing just to note really quick on Opportunity Zones, and this is some of the difficulty I’m gonna put on my nerdy tax hat here for a sec. But, as we were looking at this, and we’re looking at the legislation that came across, there’s a reason why a lot of companies and a lot of funds are focused on real estate, right? The legislation says you need to deploy capital to benefit a specific tract of land. And the easy thing about real estate is it doesn’t move, right? So you’ll know that as you put money into that, that the expansion, the economic benefit is gonna be really secluded to that area. The cool thing, and the unique thing about businesses is that they grow and they move and they expand and they contract, and it made it a little bit more difficult to fit within the Opportunity Zone legislation and clarifications that they’ve given out.

And as we approached this, we really had to look at it 10 years from now. And as part of that looking out, we had to say, okay, do we have enough space, and is there enough room for expansion of these businesses to check the box on all the requirements of the IRS for qualified Opportunity Zone businesses? And the important thing about this, as was mentioned, is that we have around 130 acres of expansion land that’s currently under contract to be all developed. And so, as capital is deployed from the fund into these businesses, those businesses stay on campus, and that’s what helps keep those Opportunity Zone classifications or qualifications in line for the holding period of the fund. Sorry, I went on a tangent there.

Jimmy: That’s okay.

Matt: Dave, do you wanna talk about the management team a little bit here?

David: Yeah. So, as far as the partners that are included on the GP side, you know, David Hall is Tracy Hall’s son is currently the principal of Hall Labs and one of the general partners within Hall Venture 1. David’s love and passion is the lab. He’s there every day, he’s in the lab. He’s part of helping drive the innovation there. Myself and Derek Weber, have known each other for about six years dealing with each other on, you know, both the M&A front as well as investment banking. So, he and I have a long history together working on growing companies as well as helping those companies exit.

And, you know, as you’ve heard from Matt, he really ties it all together being that he’s the tax expert that sits on both sides of the fence and really helps drive the, you know, the business at Hall and at HPP. And, you know, we’ve been sure to put in place a number of parts of criteria to help ensure the fact that, you know, all these businesses, you know, meet specific investment criteria that we have. And we’ve worked with third parties to help develop that as well that we’re happy to share with you too.

Matt: Great. And just as a side note, if you look at, again, early-stage companies are gonna be hairy, meaning that they’re gonna pivot a lot, they’re gonna change directions. They’re gonna figure out who they are or who they wanna be when they grow up. And we really feel like that’s the place where they operate best and freely within the lab. Having too many shareholders at that stage of businesses is difficult because you have to create a board presentation or PowerPoint presentation every time you wanna change. Once those companies really have figured out a product and the direction and have received market feedback, and they’re ready for growth, that’s when the fund comes in. And so.

David: Yeah, so we’ve built a company called Vanderhall. Vanderhall was a project of Steven Hall. And, you know, all of a number of the children of David Hall are involved in Hall Labs. But one of the biggest things that’s important to him was that they all went out to industry first and they all had to go out to industry and prove their own and find their own way. And, you know, Steven was always interested in cars and was a owner of the dealership, but he essentially built this out of his garage. And he realized that there was an opportunity for a three-wheel car that, you know, fell underneath the criteria of a motorcycle, because it was a little easier to get that approved. And then on top of that, have something that really looked and felt like a throwback vehicle with all the benefits of modern technology.

And they’re incredible to drive. You know, it’s got this kind of, you know, almost look of a Roadster or Porsche, but at the same time the, you know, the acceleration and the feel of a motorcycle. So, the exciting part there is that, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of distribution through Harley and India dealers. And as some of the baby boomers have grown up, whether it’s balance, or they don’t feel comfortable behind the motorcycle anymore, they’ve been able to find the same excitement behind the wheel of the Vanderhall. And we, today, have about eight different options within that category, but are growing Vanderhall to be not only a three-wheel car vehicle, but a platform for power sports. So, new vehicles to come in a very short time. And that’s probably one of the companies that’s, you know, the farthest along on the growth cycle for us. And surprisingly, even through COVID here, has had year-over-year growth which has been really exciting.

Will: Hey, Dave, that was featured on Jay Leno’s garage once or twice, right? Tell us about that just quickly.

David: Yeah. I’ll let Matt highlight that because he was involved with it, but, yeah, we’ve been on Jay Leno’s garage twice and he’s a big fan.

Matt: But , yeah. Vanderhall has seen significant growth. They have two episodes right now on Jay Leno’s garage, one on the gas model that I was trying to show, the other one, the all-electric that was just released, the Edison, which now you get the name behind the Edison, which is the new model that was released for all-electric. And some exciting news coming out, hopefully in the next 30 days for new offerings as well. So we’re really excited about Vanderhall as well as the other portfolio companies that we’ve invested in.

Jimmy: Yeah. That’s excellent. Matt.

David: And, Jimmy, I think the one thing that’s interesting is, you know, at the end of the day, you know, none of these things make sense unless it’s a sound investment. So, you know, what we had really focused on was ensuring the fact that, you know, it’s people and process and it’s execution, and, you know, you have a history of that here with Hall and, you know, the last piece being alignment. So, if you’re not investing in a good quality company, then the incentive structure doesn’t make sense at all.

Jimmy: Absolutely.

David: And that’s, you know, we’ve been heavy pushing the, you know, the process of around Hall because we want people to understand that that’s a systematic approach to exits that have worked.

Jimmy: Absolutely. Well…

Will: The exits you’ve had have been so successful and happened fairly quickly as well, compared to other private deals.

David: We typically look at a time horizon of about three to five years.

Will: That’s excellent.

David: And that fits well within the structure. It also allows us to redeploy capital as well.

Jimmy: Well, Matt, do you wanna continue with the presentation here and then let’s, I think we’ll probably have time for about 10 to 15 minutes of questions at the end, which would be great.

Matt: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, real quick, these are our current investments we’ve made. Vanderhall, we’ve already spoken about. Medic is a toilet that is collects medical information. So essentially go into the doctor’s office every time that you go to the bathroom. We can capture big data at that point and be able to determine whether or not you’re going to have a chronic disease. SmarterHome is motorization, intelligent motorization within the home. Bacon is a replacement for Temp agencies. It’s one of our only software-only plays. And Surefyre is innovating the building automation space by replacing all the wiring that needs to go within large commercial spaces. They’re able to do that wirelessly.

So those are the five investments that we’ve made. And since we’ve made an investment in each one of those, they’ve actually performed very well. Bacon was our first one that was done kind of midyear last year. And they’re seeing a standing growth and it’s been very encouraging and very exciting to see them grow. And the unique thing I guess about it is, again, if you look at this as an Opportunity Zone investment in our campus, we’re able to interact with these companies on a daily basis, and we’re able to get great visibility into how they’re actually doing rather than going to a typical board meeting once a quarter.

So, let’s see if we can get through here. These are the basic terms. We’ll send you off the deck. I don’t know that it’s necessary to go over that. And then, as Dave mentioned, there’s specific criteria conflicts measures that we put in place to make sure that we protect LPs within the fund. And I think that that’s, I wanna make sure that we leave enough time for Q&A, but I’ll go back to Dave to see if he had anything else that he felt was critical to discuss at this point.

David: No, I just, you know, thanks, Matt. And, you know, I wanna thank Jimmy and Ashley and Will for putting this together and, you know, we’d love to be able to open it up for questions for individuals as they, you know, whether it’s looking at individual portfolio companies. And I think that’s, you know, the last piece that I’ll leave people with. What makes us unique is, you know, typical investment within a venture fund, you’re investing in process. But we’re actually giving our LPs and investors visibility down to the individual company level. And I think that’s important because we want people to see where their money’s going to work, the sustainability around that job creation that’s there and a number of other criteria from climate and water that a lot of these investments are, you know, are making within kind of those 17 SDGs,

Will: Hey, David, real quick question. Just for me, I don’t wanna get to it, but you or Matt, you really concentrate on the social part too, as far as clean air and different initiatives, like you just touched on. So maybe you could just, you know, explain or just touch on that a little bit of what criteria really goes into all of the projects you choose, because they do have social impact, you know, is profitable and is great and early exits and all the money you guys put in is all great, but it’s also really what the theme of this whole webinar series is about. So.

Jimmy: Yeah, I’m gonna add to that question. As Will just mentioned, this is the Impact Investing Webinar Series. You know, we like to highlight funds that are really doing it right in terms of impact. And Hall Labs, you guys are far too modest. I wanna hear more about not only the social impact that you’re having in Provo with the economic revitalization you’re doing in the Opportunity Zone areas of Provo, but also maybe you can speak a little bit more about the environmental impact that Will was hinting at there as well.

David: Matt, I’m happy to take that, or you can.

Matt: I’ll go ahead. I’ll do it. So, overall, if you look at different ways to impact things, there’s the environmental side of that, and you can look down into the land, right? That we sit on. It’s an old steel mill. It’s not the best piece of property in the world, and we’re doing quite a bit of reclamation here within the site itself to make it usable again. So there’s just on the ground that we sit on, there’s quite a bit of reclamation there. The jobs that we add within the Valley has been great. You’re adding very high value, high paid jobs within the area. On the technology side, we’re adding manufacturing jobs. So, it really goes from blue collar to white collar.

As we have, you know, the manufacturing of the Vanderhalls happen here on site. And then outside of that, the companies themselves all have, you know, independent direction, right? That they’re going toward. So if you look at Vanderhall, for example, power sports are very pollution heavy. They don’t follow the same restrictions that automobiles do. And we’re trying to make an impact on that for Vanderhall for I’ll pick another one, Medic. Medic is really trying to improve the lives of everyone. They’re looking at chronic diseases and they’re looking at ways to stop all the hospitalizations that happen within care centers. I think more than half of the hospitals.

David: 70% of chronic disease could be solved with predictive analytics. And the idea with that is to, you know, help use AI and machine learning and data sets that are out there to predict what’s happening within a human’s body.

Matt: Right. If you just kind of sit on that thought for a while, for a toilet, wire a toilet to gather that information, it’s something that everybody does. Everybody has to do it. You can’t avoid going to the bathroom. I have kids that try it and it doesn’t work.

Jimmy: Pun definitely intended there about sit on that, right?

Matt: I don’t even realize it. Yeah. But think about it, it’s an activity that happens every day. You don’t want it to be out of the ordinary, and because it happens multiple times a day and it’s a normal human occurrence, we can capture that information every time. And if you can use the analysis off of those data points, you’re really able to tell a person what direction they’re going. Rather than showing up to the doctor’s office once every year, if you’re good, once every four years, if you’re me, right? Or going in when things have just gotten too bad, and you’re really trying to figure out those trends so that they can change their behaviors to improve their lives.

So those are just a couple of quick examples on that. And some of the earlier stage things that we’re doing within the lab are focused in on the decentralization of utilities, whether that goes to wastewater, to clean water, as well as into energy, and the creation of energy and making that carbon footprint be zero. So, a lot of our, all of our businesses have had an impact jive to them. And the reason for that is because we’re trying to solve big problems. And you draw that back into, okay, how does this work financially? Big problems typically have a good rate of return, and big problems within the globe are going to be able to return dollars back to the individuals. You just have to be able to apply the right science and engineering into those problems and push them forward not necessarily in a university type of mindset.

Jimmy: Fantastic. Okay. Well, Will, Ashley, any other questions for our expert guests here today? Otherwise, we might cut them loose and let everybody get out of here.

David: Yeah, thanks guys.

Will: Yeah. I just wanna thank both Matt and Dave for their time. And, you know, here at Crowdcreate, they’ve been incredibly generous and transparent to work with. I can’t wait for everybody to see some of the material that they have and some of the video stuff we’re getting ready to put out and, you know, just thank them both. So, can’t wait for everybody to see what’s coming next from Hall Labs and also from OZ Pros and Crowdcreate.

David: There’s some early stage stuff too that’s really interesting. So, you know, you can follow it on halllabs.com, that’s three Ls, or hallvp.com and see some of the projects that we’re working on in more detail. But, you know, Jimmy, Ashley, Will, you know, thank you and thank everyone that attended today.

Will: Great.

Jimmy: Guys, thank you so much. Thank you to Will Walker for co-hosting with me, Ashley Tison for chiming in a couple of times here with some answers to some legal questions, and of course our guests from Hall Labs today, Matt Van Dyke and David Kunz. All right. Thank you again to all of our panelists and attendees. See you guys next time. Thank you.