The paths an entrepreneur takes after selling or exiting his or her company can look different depending on the individual – some head into a long-awaited retirement while others choose to develop a new startup venture.
Local entrepreneurs David Hudson, Shaler Houser and Scott Millwood each decided to take an alternate route: mentor the next generation of founders of new business startups in the Upstate.
The Journal recently talked with the three businessmen about the mentorship work they do today, both individually and through the NEXT Founders Fund, a fund used to help new Greenville-based startups develop and succeed.
The following responses have been edited slightly for clarity and brevity.
David Hudson
David Hudson previously founded two telecommunications and data companies: NewSouth Communications and Performance HCM.
After semi-retiring in 2021, Hudson became a minority owner and partner of Payfluence HCM founded by Penn Gaines, who previously was a minority partner for Performance HCM. Hudson is also a founding member and mentor for the NEXT Founders Fund.
How was the transition from working as a CEO/founder to being an investor/mentor?
Hudson: It was a little bit of an adjustment for me at first to not be a day-to-day guy. I wouldn’t want to be involved in decision-making, but I thoroughly enjoy being able to now sit back more on the bench sideline and when Penn needs some advice or need some feedback or just needs to talk to somebody, I feel like I’m there. I’m listening more than being proactive. I’m being more reactive now. I’m enjoying being able to provide feedback, to mentor people.
What are the benefits of having a mentor when you are a start-up founder?
Hudson: First of all, you’re not on an island by yourself. You’ve got somebody that you can talk to. I think it’s important to know you’ve got somebody that you can lean on, you can talk to, you can get advice from somebody who’s not going to judge you in any way. They’re going to try to tell you the truth. So I think a mentor is just a wonderful thing for everybody to have.
Shaler Houser
Shaler Houser has co-founded seven companies: Seruus Ventures; Nuvox Communications; UCI Communications; YouTurn Health; Green Cloud Defense; Deal Strategies; and the NEXT Founders Fund.
Houser currently works with Scott Millwood to run the NEXT Founders Fund and help mentor new startups located in the Upstate.
How did you start working with and mentoring new startup companies in the Upstate?
Houser: Initially, I set up (Deal Strategies) as just a consulting company to help founders that didn’t really understand how to raise capital or how to scale the business — to help founders work through that stage of the process. But like any of my previous businesses, as I got into it, (the company) evolved and turned into other things.
This last fall, I ended up partnering with Scott Millwood to launch a venture capital fund, the NEXT Founders Fund. So what that means is we are investing both our own money and 48 other local investors’ money into the next crop of software startups in Greenville and in the Upstate. That’s what we want to do more than anything else — use our experience to help founders build their companies more efficiently. We see things that founders who haven’t done it before are not going to see. We can help them not step in the same potholes that we stepped in, simply because we see the pothole coming. So it’s using that experience to guide them.
Did you ever think you would become a business consultant and mentor for other start-up founders?
Houser: I don’t know, probably not — but I also knew there would come a point in which I probably wouldn’t do additional technology companies and I would do something different. I’ve always been enthralled with venture capital and the very first company I started, Seruus Ventures, was venture capital. So I’m kind of going back to my roots. I’m 53 years old and I feel like I can get my entrepreneurial need — the burn that I have to take risks to live on the edge — by investing in startups and then spending time around the startups. That way I don’t have to go do another startup. I love it and I’m having so much fun meeting with founders and spending time with them.
Scott Millwood
Scott Millwood co-founded four companies: Customer Effective; Yesflow; Deal Strategies; and the NEXT Founders Fund.
Millwood currently serves as board chairman of NEXT, a local nonprofit organization that supports entrepreneurs in the Upstate.
What made you decide to start mentoring other startup entrepreneurs?
Millwood: I had a lot of the scars — or battle scars if you will — from starting companies, growing companies, leading companies and exiting successfully. I had something to share, and so I naturally got a lot of questions from the community about how did you do that. What were the challenges? How did you overcome those challenges? And really where that led is involvement with NEXT as board chair to really help take NEXT to the next level. Then as we were doing that, we saw an opportunity to create a fund to help, essentially, invest in early-stage startups that had great potential. And so we created the NEXT Founders Fund along with Shay Houser. That fund is really our vehicle to not only mentor but really to do some coaching around specific startup founders that we feel have a high potential for high scale.
What lessons have you learned throughout your time as an entrepreneur that you’ve shared with other startup founders?
Millwood: The plan that you have in mind is never the plan that actually works out. You always have this vision that it’s going to be a straight line up and to the right and the truth is that it’s a very squiggly line that has its ups and downs and really challenges you along the way — both personally and professionally — to continue, to keep fighting, to stay true to your vision and to be persistent in the pursuit along the way. I sometimes think about that squiggly line as going through the valley of despair; there are a lot of dark times in there when you want to give up. I think part of the lesson is to just be very persistent and to continue to do the hard work every single day in solving problems for customers and building your team.
