Host Richard Cunningham welcomes co-host John Coleman for July's Marks on the Market, joined by two veteran venture investors: Phil Jung, who helps lead the venture investing business at Sovereign's Capital, and Mark Phillips, co-founder and managing partner at Eleven Tribes Ventures. The panel digs into a historic first half of 2026 for venture capital, the "barbell" strategy reshaping early-stage investing, and why faith-driven investors need to understand both the opportunity and the constraints of the AI boom.

Phil and Mark bring an early-stage, seed-focused lens shaped by operator-led, vertically focused founders — from wire harnessing to waste management — while John Coleman zooms out to the macro picture: record public market concentration, a $725 billion capex commitment from the hyperscalers, and the possibility that this technological shift could be ten times bigger and ten times faster than the Industrial Revolution. The conversation closes, as always, with reflections on Scripture and what it means to build — and rest — under God's sovereignty in the middle of historic disruption.

Key Topics:

• A record-breaking first half of 2026: $412 billion invested in venture capital, more than all of 2025 combined
• The "barbell" approach to early-stage investing: mega AI valuations on one end, capital-efficient vertical AI solutions on the other
• Why physical products, deep tech, and hard tech are back in vogue after years out of favor
• Constraints on the AI boom investors should watch: capital expenditure limits, energy demands, and regulatory fragmentation
• Token costs, open-source models, and who ultimately controls the data
• Closing reflections from Psalm 127 and John 4 on surrender, weariness, and calling

Notable Quotes:

"It really is an unprecedented venture market in the moment that we have never seen before." - Phil Jung

"Increasingly your software platform, your product is no longer the moat... it's distribution... and then it's integration." - Mark Phillips

"We serve a God who's in control, who's unchanging, who created a universe far more complex than anything we're talking about here." - John Coleman

What if the most freeing financial decision you could make had nothing to do with your portfolio returns?

In this episode, host Justin Forman sits down with John Cortines, co-author of God and Money and True Riches and a generosity leader at the Maclellan Foundation, for a practical, spiritually grounding conversation about generosity, stewardship, and freedom.

John shares how his journey began at Harvard Business School with a banking password that read "retire@40!" and how God used a men's Bible study, serious biblical research, and interviews with radically generous Harvard MBA alumni to completely reframe his understanding of wealth. What emerged wasn't just a new giving percentage. It was a transformation of the heart.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The wrong question most Christian investors ask about money, and the right one
• Financial finish lines: how pre-defining your lifestyle and net worth guardrails creates freedom instead of limiting it
• The four heart conditions that keep investors from true generosity (pride, coveting, anxiety, and indifference) and the gospel transformation for each
• Why effective altruism produces joyless giving, and what makes Christian generosity categorically different
• The rise of professionally managed giving funds, and why John believes they'll become as normal as index funds
• Practical steps for faith-driven investors to move from obligation-based to joy-driven stewardship

Direct Quotes from John Cortines:

"The right question isn't how much do we need to give? It's how much do I really need to keep." — John Cortines

"Giving is actually a source of joy and freedom and purpose in the Christian walk. And it's God's invitation where I can step into playing on his team to accomplish his purposes in the world." — John Cortines

"What if 10, 20, 30 years from now, it was as normal to think about professionally managed giving funds as it is to think about an index fund for stocks today." — John Cortines

John Cortines started his career in oil and gas with a banking password that literally read "retire@40!", a saver's dream encoded into every login. Then Harvard Business School, a men's Bible study, and a deep dive into Scripture dismantled his framework entirely. What he and co-author Greg Baumer uncovered changed not just how much he gave, but why, and the freedom that came with it.

In this episode, John walks through the framework from his books God and Money and True Riches, including the concept of financial finish lines that set guardrails for lifestyle and net worth, and the four heart transformations every steward must navigate: pride to gratitude, coveting to contentment, anxiety to trust, and indifference to love. These aren't abstract theological ideas. They're the architecture behind how faith-driven investors actually hold and deploy capital with joy.

John also shares his vision for the future of generosity: professionally managed giving funds that work alongside traditional portfolio management, bringing the same rigor, governance, and reporting to Kingdom capital that investors already expect from their financial advisors. Recorded live at Kingdom Advisors, this conversation is a call to bring generosity out of the shadows and into the boardroom, and the family table.

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