One summer day in Jacksonville, Florida, Karen got the surprise of her life.
She was with her friend Sheryl. They were pulled over on the interstate, I-95, and Karen was holding a blanket to her face. She was bleeding, and she didn’t even know what had happened. In short time, she learned from a police officer that she had been shot.
And she wasn’t the only one. Nine cars that afternoon, on that section of I-95, had been hit by bullets from an unknown source. Six people were injured.
And the manhunt was on for the shooter, a 16 year old boy, who was eventually caught and arrested. This was his first serious crime, and since then he has spent much of his life in prison for other offenses.
Karen and I talked about what happened that day, what it feels like to be shot in the face, and the lucky break she caught when she was taken to the ER. And at the end of our conversation, Karen gives the scoop on her area of expertise, angel investing and the Compassionate Capitalist Movement.
Links:
Julius Steve Davis – arrest history to date
Compassionate Capitalist website
The Compassionate Capitalist Podcast
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF)
One summer day in Jacksonville, Florida, Karen got the surprise of her life. She was with her friend Sheryl. They were pulled over on the interstate, I-95, and Karen was holding a blanket to her face. She was bleeding, and she didn’t even know what had happened. In a short time, she learned from a police officer that she had been shot.
And she wasn’t the only one. Nine cars that afternoon, on that section of I-95, had been hit by bullets from an unknown source. Six people were injured. And the manhunt was on for the shooter, a 16-year-old boy, who was eventually caught and arrested.
Karen and I talked about what happened that day, what it feels like to be shot in the face, and the lucky break she caught when she was taken to the ER. And at the end of our conversation, Karen gives the scoop on her area of expertise, angel investing, and the Compassionate Capitalist Movement.
As always, I’ll have links to everything we talked about in the show notes for this episode, which is at WhatWasThatLike.com/33.
And if you’d like to join the others who support this podcast for as little as one dollar a month, you can do that at WhatWasThatLike.com/support.
And, can I just say this. I mean, it’s just you and me here, right? You’re probably driving, or maybe out for a walk. And what are you doing right now? You’re listening to me. Of course, the real attraction here are the guests I have on, and hearing their unbelievable stories. I don’t have any stories like that. Well, maybe one that comes to mind. But what I want to tell you is this – I appreciate that you’re listening to my podcast. Out of all the 700,000 podcasts that are out there right now, you’re here listening to this one. That means a lot to me and I thank you.
And now, here’s my conversation with Karen.
Scott
On a scale of 1 to 10, how surprised were you to get shot that day?
Karen
Well, I would say probably 10. You think you’re going to work. You’re coming back from a weekend and all of a sudden, your life is completely different.
Scott
Yeah, I can’t imagine. Wow. It’s just an instantaneous turnaround of things. Now, it’s just amazing how that happened. Give us a little background on what led up to this. You were in Jacksonville, Florida, right?
Karen
Right. It was the summer between my college graduation and grad school. I was working and having a lot of fun. I had gone away for the weekend. It was in June. So, when I was in college, there had been a group of friends that I hung out with and had been part of. It was a group of rugby guys who were my neighbors in my dorm. We ended up doing a lot of road trips. They were like a bunch of big brothers to me. It also turned out that, on that particular weekend, a friend from the group – who had already graduated the year before – was getting married. It was John and Cindy. John was one of my neighbors and Cindy was his long-term girlfriend. So, we were going up to New Jersey for their wedding. All of us were convening, almost, like, a small reunion because I hadn’t seen a lot of them for a year since I graduated. So, we were up there having a good old time that weekend and there were some updates in my personal life. A good friend of mine during that whole time had become a romantic interest. There were all kinds of new news when I got back to Jacksonville.
Scott
You lived in Jacksonville, right?
Karen
Yeah, Jacksonville Beach. I stayed with my mom down there during the summer.
Scott
Okay, and how old were you then?
Karen
I was 21.
Scott
Okay. You said you had just graduated college.
Karen
Right. I had just graduated from Emory University and was going to an MBA school down at the University of Florida, which was due to start in August. So, this happened right smack in the middle. It was also a month before my birthday – my birthday is on July 2.
Scott
So, you flew back to Jacksonville. What happened that day?
Karen
So, my best friend used to go on road trips up to FSU and hung around the rugby team. We would get together at these tournaments together. So, she knew all these guys, and David – the guy that I had started seeing. The three of us had hung out at my graduation, so we had a whole history and things like that, of course. When she picked me up from the airport, I had all this new news to tell her. This was all kind of breaking news, so to speak. We ran into a friend of ours. You have to think about what it was like back in 1985 – there weren’t any cell phones and social media at that time. So, this guy that I had met over spring break had done this excursion in a sailboat. In my senior year, we bumped into him while he was coming down from Atlanta to catch a plane from Jacksonville to Newark. It was cheaper at that time to fly from Jacksonville to Newark than from Atlanta to Newark. So, I was surprised. We came out of the gate. Back then, you could go up to the gates because we didn’t have the security that we do now. So, he said, “This guy, Mike was there.” Cheryl and I hung out with him and just kind of caught up. Then, when we got in the car to head home, I headed back down to the beach from the airport. It was about a 30 to 40-minute drive. We were out on I-95, which is one of the roads that took us from the airport to our main drag and then to the beach. We were driving and I got thirsty. So, these are all, kind of, the weird things that led up to the moment where things could have changed. Like, what would’ve happened if we had stopped and hung out with Mike? Had I not leaned forward to get– she had an old soda in her cup holder and she said, “No, it’s hot”. I said, “Okay” and leaned back. Then, all of a sudden the glass shatters. It was really hot outside. It was probably 100 degrees out. I played basketball in high school. I played intramurals in basketball at Emory. So, it felt like I had gotten hit in the face with a basketball. I’ve missed plenty of passes in my day and have gotten hit in the face with a basketball. However, this time, I was suddenly pouring out blood from my face. From where I was seeing it, it almost seemed like a spigot coming down from my nose. “Why do I have blood coming out of my face?!” I yelled to Cheryl because she heard the glass shatter.
Scott
Cheryl was driving, right? You were in the passenger seat.
Karen
Yeah, that’s right. She’s taller than me. So, she was further back and I was probably a few inches ahead of her and the seat. So, I said, “Cheryl, pull over. I’m bleeding”. She was like, “Oh my God!”. She pulled over to the side of the road. Her parents were in the police force, which is involved in public safety. Her mom was a dispatcher. Her dad was a sheriff and her stepdad was a detective – one or the other. So, she was well-equipped with the knowledge of what to do in an emergency situation. She got me out of the car and laid me down on the side of the road. I saw other cars pulling over, up ahead.
Scott
This was on the interstate, right?
Karen
We were on the I-95, between downtown Jacksonville, the airport, and the beaches. She pulled a blanket out of the car. It was a blanket that she used for her German Shepherd. He was a good old police dog that had been put to retirement. So, this was his blanket and it was all she had. We were in an emergency so we didn’t care if there was dog hair on it or anything like that. So, she gave it to me and said, “Hold your nose”. So, I held my nose thinking I had gotten cut with glass or something like that.
Scott
At that point, you really had no idea what had happened, right?
Karen
No, I wasn’t in any pain and we weren’t looking around to see what had happened on the other side. So, we had no idea what had happened on her side of the car. We just saw that the window was shattered and I was bleeding. I was on the side of the road and I had this blanket over so I couldn’t see anything. She came back and she was hyperventilating and crying. I can hardly hear her. She couldn’t make the words out and I was like, “Cheryl. Cheryl. Stop! You’re freaking me out. I don’t think it’s that bad”. She kept trying to get her words out. Then, the next thing I heard was a police officer’s voice saying, “We have a child with lacerations from glass and a woman who’s been shot through the nose”. I’m like, “Oh my God. I’ve been shot through the nose. That’s me. I couldn’t believe I had been shot through the nose!” All these thoughts were going through my head. I had a dream on Sunday that I was going to be on Johnny Carson. Now, I could never be on Johnny Carson because I have this mangled face unless it was because of the mangled face. I kept thinking, “Oh my god. I have no nose”. I was not in pain. So, the next thing I knew, I was just babbling whatever for I don’t know how long. It had been 15 minutes, maybe – I don’t really recall the timeframe. It didn’t seem that long.
There was an emergency vehicle there. I was put into the back of the emergency vehicle. They said, “What hospital do you want to go to?” Even right now, I can’t really remember what I answered but it was whatever I could think of at the time – it was Memorial Hospital or something like that. So, we went to the Memorial Hospital. I don’t even know how we got there so fast. I had no idea what was happening. So, I reached the hospital and went to the emergency room. I think Cheryl managed to call my mom. I was really fortunate that day because the doctor on call was a plastic surgeon. So, they had a plastic surgeon on call in their emergency room when I got it in. This happened during daylight hours. It was probably 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon. So, my mom got there. I was blessed in so many ways. 1) When I went forward at that time in the car – not seconds later – it would have gone through my head. 2) I was blessed that this doctor was on call. Bullet holes would usually leave an indentation in your shoulder or something like that. I got shot in a part of my nose that didn’t really do any damage. I didn’t have a deviated septum. I have a little bit of an ongoing allergy thing all the time but I don’t have major damage to my nose. He basically took the flap of skin, put it back over, and sewed it together. He connected some of the membranes that were up inside of it to restore it. So, I’ve got a little bit of shrapnel on the edge of my mouth that stays there and a little bit of glass up in the bridge of my nose that shows up on X-rays. For the most part, that’s it. I didn’t have my head all bandaged up. I just had a basic little bandage across my nose.
Scoot
Do you ever have to explain the shrapnel when you’re going through an X-ray at an airport?
Karen
No, they don’t even notice it. I used to have to explain it a lot to doctors or dentists when they were doing any kind of X-rays. The glass is, kind of, diminished over time, so it’s not as prevalent as it was before.
Scott
I’m really curious about when you first found out that you were shot. It sounds like one of your initial reactions was, “Now I can’t go on Johnny Carson”. Why would you have gone on Johnny Carson? Were you a performer or an entertainer of some type?
Karen
No. I had a dream of what I was going to be doing in the world and I wanted to be a person that was considered an expert at that time. I was an economics major in college. I wanted to get my MBA. I was, kind of, looking at doing a JD-MBA and I wanted to be a person that advises companies. I would be able to travel the world, be exotic, and be this sort of expert. You’d always want to be famous for something that could feature you on Johnny Carson or something. I mean, that’s like a 21-year-old with her entire future ahead of her. I don’t know. It was just a crazy thought.
Scott
It seems like it messed that up a little bit.
Karen
Yeah. Well, who knows? I’m a best-selling author now. So, who knows where the future may go?
Scott
So, what actually happened? Where did this bullet come from?
Karen
The bullet came through the right passenger window. It went through my nose and underneath Cheryl’s chin because she was taller and sat up higher from the other windows. There was a bullet hole in her window. At that time, they didn’t know what was going on. It became this giant manhunt because, if you think about it, in 1985, it was very rare to have people getting shot like we do today. It was an unusual thing.
Scott
Your car wasn’t the only one that was targeted either, right?
Karen
So, there were 6 people who got injured by glass or shrapnel. I was the only one that actually got hit by a bullet. I think there were about 9 to 12 vehicles that got hit. Some of them showed up and stopped to get gas. They noticed that there was a bullet hole at the side of the car. So, reports were, kind of, coming in. The governor had been scheduled to come from the airport to someplace. So, they weren’t sure if that was, kind of, part of it. There were helicopters flying and trying to figure out what was going on. They had detained a couple of guys that were out doing military games and playing war games out in the woods. They decided it wasn’t them, so they really had no idea. It was in the paper the next day. There was this big article in the paper with pictures that said that there were people who had not been injured, but their cars had been hit. They were talking about what it was like. So, we came to find out that it was a 16-year-old kid that was turned in by a friend he confessed to because he didn’t know that he was hitting cars. Apparently, he had been tired of shooting at squirrels. He had borrowed some kid’s gun and it was a .22 rifle. He was shooting at the cars going by like an arcade game and didn’t know that he was hitting the cars. He wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. When he was out of bullets, he left.
He had no idea because the cars were pulling over on the side of the road. It wasn’t until he saw it on the news and realized that it was him. He was afraid. He told a friend, and then the friend turned him in. Then, he confessed and they arrested him about a week and a half later. Then, there were a whole bunch of decisions on what to charge him. There were 6 counts of aggravated assault. Then, because this was fairly unusual and he didn’t have any kind of real record of being a bad kid in school – maybe a tussle here and there, but there was no real record. His mom and dad had been divorced. The mom had recently remarried. She had a blended family, so there was a little bit of feeling like the odd kid out, I think, maybe. They started out trying to charge him as an adult. I think they eventually settled for him to be charged under a youthful offender program with 2 counts of shooting into a vehicle and 1 count of aggravated battery. He was sentenced to 8 years in prison with 5 years of probation. He had about $1,300 restitution to go to 13 people. Then, he was in a medium-security prison with 18 to 24 year-olds. He was 17 at the time when he finally got sentenced.
Scott
Yeah, because he was 16 when it happened. I mean, kids do stupid things, but this one stupid thing, kind of, set the tone for the rest of his life. He didn’t have a record prior to this. Now, I did some research. His name is Julius Steve Davis. For shooting into random cars, he was sentenced to 8 years and got out after two years.
Karen
Right, he was released because they had an overcrowding situation. So, good behavior ones got out. Then, unfortunately, he was caught doing a crime not that long after he got out, and it was kind of stupid.
Scott
I looked up his record. A few months after he got out, he shot up a jewelry store and stole about $60,000 worth of jewelry. So, he was sentenced to 20 years for that but, again, he got out early. Shortly after that, he held up 2 grocery stores at gunpoint in Jacksonville and he was put back in prison. For that one, he got a life sentence and is still in prison today.
Karen
Well, I didn’t know that. Yeah, I heard that he got picked up on the second one at nighttime. So, I don’t think there were actually people involved. He had made a shot through the glass to get in there but he was driving down the road without his lights on. So, he got pulled over because he didn’t have his lights on. They saw the jewels and the gun on the seat of the car, so it was just really, kind of, a stupid thing. It was really tragic because I don’t know what his life was like when he got out with his family. It’s such a hard time, sometimes – when people get out of prison these days – for them to actually get a job and be part of society. Sometimes, they feel like they don’t have any other choice but to commit some crime. It’s kind of a tragedy of our justice system. Unfortunately, he did make those even worse choices after he made the first bad choice when he was a kid.
Scott
Yep, those were some bad choices, for sure. It was really amazing that, although 6 different people were injured, no one was killed.
Karen
Yes, I know. It would have been a whole other story if anything really bad happened, right? I thank God that I’m here today to do the things that I do, to chart the course of the life that I’ve led so far, and not take it for granted.
Scott
Now, you have a story that you got shot – not many people can say that.
Karen
I’m still waiting to win the lottery. Everybody always says, “I’ve never heard of anybody that’s been shot through the nose” and I was like, “Wow. Yeah. How many people do you know who have won the lottery?” So, I’m still waiting for that or for Ed McMahon to knock on my door.
Scott
Yeah, I don’t think Ed McMahon is knocking on too many doors these days.
Karen
Not anymore.
Scott
Well, this was definitely a brush with death for you. How did that affect you? Did it affect your outlook on life at all?
Karen
Well, I had this saying that I had adopted, when I was 16, called “Live. Love. Laugh.” It’s very common nowadays. So, it was, sort of, like, “Live fully, love freely, laugh spontaneously.” So, it had been part of the makeup of my approach and viewpoint on life. Then, after this happened – June 2 became my life day – I always tried to plan something special with friends. Sometimes, I’m just feeling quiet and I’ll celebrate my life day alone. So, June 2 is an important day for me. At that time, I sort of had big dreams and didn’t know what that meant, where it would go, or where my life would go. I always felt, like, I had to find my purpose in life. I never really felt afraid of driving after that, worrying if that kind of random thing would happen again. So, I never brought any of that with me because I felt spared. If something bad was gonna happen, that was time for something bad to happen. So, I felt, like, I’m not gonna be foolish and go jump off cliffs. Although I have done plenty of foolish things, I felt like this is gonna be something. So, by the time I started a family, I was just, kind of, living a normal life and working the corporate gig, happily married. We’d been married for about 10 years when our daughter came along. When I left IBM, I was kind of starting my business and my life took a turn. I remember telling my friend, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe my special purpose is to be the mother of this child.” I didn’t have any other children. I wanted other children but it just didn’t happen. Being the mother to my child, maybe she’ll go on to do something great.
One of my favorite Christmas movies is “It’s a Wonderful Life.” There’s a part of this story where he thinks that he had no value in his life when his business all fell apart. He thinks everybody would have been better off without me. The angel comes down and tries to teach him what life would have been like without him. There are all of these changes, right? Then, he says, “I did have a wonderful life”. So, you wonder about those thin threads of the people that you’ve touched in your life. Maybe that’s the reason why I’m still here because I have an influence over somebody else like my daughter.
Then, as I went forward in life, the recession hit my business hard. I had this big expectation of what was going to happen. I had taken over this Angel group. I built it up really big, running these Angel investor events and helping companies learn how to raise capital. I thought we were going to make it a whole national deal. We were going to have chapters all over the country and I was going to do this thing called “Our Funding Planet” that was going to be all over the place. However, at that time, LinkedIn was the only social media that was out there. It was going to be a way for entrepreneurs and investors to connect up. Now, you see all these crowdfunding platforms. This was going to be a kind of funding platform. Our Funding Planet was this vision for it but we didn’t have a template for doing this stuff, so it was heavy lifting to get this thing done.
Then, the recession hit, and everything just fell apart. I learned a lot of lessons about the direction of my business at the time and things that I should have done differently. It was a life lesson. The people that worked for me got laid off and I became a solopreneur. So, again, I was dealing with a lot of discouragement about setting these big dreams, this big expectation of where my life was going to go, and the impact I was going to have. I was coming up on my 50th birthday and my dad had passed. We had a hospice situation at his house. So, I was able to be there during that process and I started going through all of his memorabilia to create what we were going to use for the funeral. My dad had not been a big part of my life during my teens. I really only got to know him as an adult. So, I discovered all these things that I had not known about him. He was an inventor. He invented the first screen printer to be able to do 5 colors on a T-shirt. He had been part of the aeronautical engineering team at Hughes Aircraft when they built the first satellite that went around the earth. He had been an engineer and an inventor. He always had these big entrepreneur aspirations and his screen-printing business had become a manufacturing business. He was manufacturing the screen-printing equipment.
So, I had looked at all of what he had done. I realized that he hadn’t even started that business until he was 50 years old. So, I was like, “Wow. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in my life because now I’m turning 50.” I had this business that didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I was like, “Wait a second. I’m turning 50. My dad just started his business when he was 50. So, what am I doing?” I needed to get rid of that stinking thinking, so I dug back into thinking to grow rich. I started to re-evaluate how to turn things around and what to do next. My mom had been a huge encourager and supporter during all of those years. When I was in school, she supported me. So, between her steadfastness and his inspiration of where he had gone, I had a good basis to build upon when I decided to dust myself off, pick myself up, and fit myself around to get on the road again.
Scott
That’s interesting that, at the end of his life, he inspired you to open the next chapter in yours.
Karen
Absolutely.
Scott
That’s pretty cool. Tell us about your business. What do you do today? I know it’s Compassionate Capitalism but what does that mean?
Karen
Yeah. So, I read this book by Rich DeVos called Compassionate Capitalism.
Scott
He’s one of the guys who started Amway, right?
Karen
Right.
Scott
Okay.
Karen
You help other people learn how to run a business through his business, Amway. It was to give people a hand up, not a handout. If you help people become successful, then they can turn around and help other people be successful. When they make money and they spend money, it helps the economy. So, it was a bottoms-up, not a trickle-down. So, I kind of took that in and I modified it to be what I believed Angel investing was. My last job at IBM had been the complex opportunity business manager – my nickname was the dealmaker – and I would work with companies that had innovations that needed to be brought to the marketplace. They needed to get money. I was on a team that would put together their plan and endorses them so that they could go out and get venture capital money and, then, come back and spend it with IBM. So, I was around a lot of this innovation. Part of why I left was to go help this one company do all of that. Then, I discovered Angel investing. It was brand new to me. I thought it made sense but I had no idea there were individuals that were writing checks out of their checking accounts. So, the reason why they would invest in a startup company was that they believed in these innovations, in this inventor, in this founder, in this process, with this idea for a business, or in this entrepreneur.
Scott
Since it was such a new thing and a high risk, a bank is not going to loan money to someone like that.
Karen
Banks won’t lend them money. The startups get their money out of their credit cards. A lot of times – particularly if they’re a high-growth company – this group of Angels will give them the money that averages between $10,000 or $25,000. Somebody will stroke a check. That was my definition of Compassionate Capitalism – somebody that invested time, money, knowledge, and resources, into an entrepreneur’s endeavor to bring innovation to the market, to create jobs and wealth for all those involved. When the economy was tanking because of the recession, I had been doing these giant events with multiple companies and pitching with hundreds of investors attending. It was called the Southeast Private Equity Conference – we called it the SPEC. So, my radio show was called The SPEC Radio Show and I would interview people on the show – industry people and all those kinds of things. Later, I changed it to the Compassionate Capitalist show because a lot of Angel investors I knew had taken their money out of the banks, and had it sitting on the sidelines. I wanted them to put it to work on entrepreneurs because the best way to turn our economy around is to get these entrepreneurs going – where the new jobs were going to be and where the innovation was going to be.
The big companies that struggled with innovation – sometimes because they’re a bureaucracy – would buy these companies. That’s how they get the innovation. It’s a whole food chain of how that happens. Most companies get bought at some point when they get to a certain size. So, that was really what I wanted to compel people to do. So, when my dad passed, I was just at the start of that. I said to myself, “I keep talking about doing this Compassionate Capitalist movement.” But I kept thinking, “Oh, it’s too big for me. Oh. Who am I to think that I could do this? I couldn’t even do this other thing.” Then I said, “I was shot through the nose and here I am.” If I could be the person, maybe this is it. I have to start the Compassionate Capitalist Movement. If not me, then who? So that’s where it became my life’s mission. My podcast is now my megaphone for that.
When the Jobs Act came about in 2012, it was the biggest barrier for entrepreneurs to raise and get access to capital outside of these tightly-knit angel groups. So, this was to remove the barrier and upgrade the capital raising process and how we communicate to the 20th century because of the internet. I knew, on the other side of the coin, was them opening up this door to get access to other capital – crowdfunding would be all the rage. Some of the things that we totally take for granted now like 3D printers, drones, all the smartwatches that connect to our phones, virtual reality, and augmented reality headsets and goggles – even the little fidget widgets that people do, and all of that stuff – came to market because people did crowdfunding that was reward-based. They bought products in advance. So, when those companies became big multimillion-dollar companies, got bought or got big venture capital money and went on to do other things, all those people that put millions of dollars in didn’t reap any benefits from that. So, part of the changes of the Jobs Act was that both entrepreneurs and all the people that lost a lot of their retirement because of the collapse of the stock market and the real estate market – which now is only a decade later and just, kind of, getting back to zero – had an opportunity to participate in these younger companies. With the great economic democratization of the capital markets, they can participate at small levels in these companies. Maybe they would take a $500 investment and it would become a $1,000 investment. $20,000 from an Angel might become $200,000. A $500 investment might become $5,000. So, they can do lots or little bits of this and participate in the American dream. Even if they couldn’t run a business or start a business, they could participate in that way. That was the purpose of my book, to teach people how to be able to do that with confidence when they’re stroking checks out of their own checking accounts, and inside secrets to Angel Investing. It’s a way for people to become Compassionate Capitalists and share in the American dream. So, that’s my mission and that’s where I’m going. That’s what I do.
Scott
That’s what you’re doing. So what’s your website? What’s the name of your book and how can people get in touch with you if they want to?
Karen
So, my book is “Inside Secrets To Angel Investing”. The long title is “Inside Secrets To Angel Investing: Step By Step Strategies To Leverage Private Equity Investment For Passive Wealth Creation”. However, if you just look for “Inside Secrets To Angel Investing” or my name, Karen Rands on Amazon, you can get the book. At whatever bookstores you go to, if it’s not on the shelves, you have to order it. On my website, it’s really simple. Just go to karenrands.co. If you go insidesecretstoangelinvesting.com, it’ll take you straight to a tab on that page – you can go and check out chapters of it. There are 44 inside secrets in the book and I have an excerpt of 12 of them that I have available on that page that you can go and check out. So, that’s the best way to reach me on the contact page. If you’re an entrepreneur, an investor, or you want to get in, I do what I call “Compassionate Capitalist Coffee Break”. It’s an email series of snippets of videos, tips, and techniques for building successful companies that I talked about on my show. The Compassionate Capitalist Podcast Show is to make successful businesses and I try to pull into why an investor cares or why an entrepreneur cares. We cover topics where I interview a lot of Angel investors. These are people that have written other books, that are successful about building businesses, and are setting their business up to sell it. My next book is going to be on how to scale a business, and where to get it beyond startup to that next stage. So, you can set it up for selling and raising capital.
Scott
You’re on a mission.
Karen
I am.
Scott
I’m gonna have all the links to everything that we’ve talked about – your podcasts, your book, your website, everything. They’ll all be in the episode notes for this show. So, people can go there. I’m glad that you survived being shot and that you’re able to be here today for this conversation.
Karen
Oh. Thank you, Scott. I haven’t really gone public with this much. I remember the first time I was back up in Atlanta after I graduated from grad school was at a party. We were sitting around and somebody had an “Aha” moment. They went, “Wait a second. You were the girl that got shot through the nose”. They were like, “What was that like?” and I said, “I just kind of moved on with life. It was ‘Something I did with my life’ day”. I was like, “Oh. Wow. Yeah. Okay”. Even here, where I live now, in 10 years, it’ll come up. Sometimes, people that I’ve known for a while would be like, “Wait a second. You got shot!” Then, one thing I have to add to it is to say, “Oh, I have a purple heart.” They’re like, “How did you get a Purple Heart?” So, that summer, my job was at this bar that tended to the guys of the military base down the street, Jack’s Liquors. My clientele was mostly Navy guys. When I got shot, I missed work that day. My boss was like, “Yeah, right.” Then, she saw the news. So, when I came back in, I was at the door checking IDs for a while and I had my bandage across my nose. Some much older regular had two Purple Hearts and he gave me 1 of them. It was really extremely special. So, I still have it. I look at it and cherish this memento of the experience.
Scott
Yeah, that’s a pretty cool gift. Karen, thanks for sharing your story with us. It’s very interesting and we’ll look forward to seeing where your compassionate capitalist movement takes you.
Karen
Thank you very much, Scott. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share something personal that is important because everybody has a purpose in their life. Hopefully, they don’t have to get shot to find it.
Scott
Thanks for listening. My goal for each episode is to bring you people and stories that you just won’t find on other podcasts. If you’d like to discuss this episode or previous episodes with other listeners, you can do that at our private Facebook group at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook. I hope to see you in there! And if you’d like to support the show, you can do that at WhatWasThatLike.com/support. And I’ll see you in 2 weeks when we’ll once again be asking the question, What Was That Like?