By Rick R. Smith
Brian Hamilton, the Raleigh entrepreneur known for selling a financial technology firm to high-profile private equity firm Accel-KKR in 2018, is back in the daily grind.
Asked if he’s satisfied with being back in an executive role at a larger company after being successful as an entrepreneur, Hamilton chuckles. “Depends on which day,” he says. “It’s tough but rewarding.”
How tough? Hamilton, 61, won’t say if Raleigh-based video technology provider LiveSwitch is profitable. But he says it’s doing well and points out that he isn’t raising money. In 2021, he led a nearly $16 million round when acquiring the company, which was then called Frozen Mountain because it was based in sometimes chilly Vancouver, British Columbia. Hamilton changed the name because, “I like it better,” he says.
Hamilton is the board chair and chief financial officer. The company’s founders, brothers Jerod and Anton Venema, are still involved. Both are engineering graduates from NC State University, where they did initial research for their business.
“Jerod was one of the first people in video and an early leader in the space – a true innovator. I am very fortunate he has stayed on and is running all new product ventures,” Hamilton says. “Eventually, I will take a back seat. I do not think now is the time for this – we still have significant challenges to overcome.”
LiveSwitch’s CEO is Michael Adams, a 2016 graduate of UNC Chapel Hill who worked for Hamilton’s personal foundation before moving to LiveSwitch. He also had previously worked for a Washington, D.C., public relations company. “Michael Adams is an incredibly gifted guy,” Hamilton says. “He will drive the company in the future, not me.”
Hamilton says he wants his colleagues at LiveSwitch to learn from the “around 10,000 mistakes that I have made as an entrepreneur.”
Tech giant Adobe is among the companies that have started using LiveSwitch technology.
“We can do better and will. But building a company is incredibly hard. I forgot how hard it is. Some days, I wonder why I did it.”
His mission remains to deliver “Entrepreneurship for Everyone,” as he once proclaimed from billboards around the Triangle. Another priority is “Inmates into Entrepreneurs,” the nonprofit he started with the Rev. Robert Harris, a Baptist pastor in Oxford in Granville County, in 1992. He remains a director.
“I’m still involved with that. I do teaching as well. But, I guess,at root, I like creating stuff so I jumped in again. I decided to do something new around early 2021. I called a bunch of people from my last company and, miraculously, had takers. I guess I missed building something.”
Leader track
Hamilton, who is not married and has two sons, grew up in Milford, Connecticut. He says his desire to make money came after feeling ashamed about depending on food stamps early in his life. His first business, a landscaping company, helped pay for his education at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. His leadership qualities became apparent when he was chosen student government president there. He later earned an MBA at Duke.
While teaching continuing education classes at Duke, he met Sarah Tourville, then a student with software engineering expertise. Together they hatched Sageworks, he says, with Tourville serving as “tech guru.” They launched the company in 1998, early in the Internet age.
Hamilton spent 19 years building up Sageworks, which was a pioneer in using artificial intelligence to help investors better understand financial data.
He sold the business to Menlo Park, California-based Accel-KKR for an undisclosed price, then focused on the “Inmates to Entrepreneurs” program, which has helped hundreds of prison inmates develop small businesses.
In 2021, the Carlyle Group private equity firm invested in Austin, Texas-based Abrigo, which was then valued at more than $1 billion. Many corporate leaders, including CEO Jay Blandford, are based in Raleigh and work at the former Sageworks headquarters site. Hamilton hired Blandford as president in 2016, and he became Abrigo’s CEO in 2022.
Hamilton laughs about his CFO title. “My last company, Sageworks (now Abrigo), was started as a financial platform. I guess I know finance,” he says. “I am not a big believer in titles and don’t pay attention to that stuff at all. We all pitch in and do.”
Q&A with Brian Hamilton
Why did you decide to invest in LiveSwitch?
Despite the advancement of technology, I wonder how it has made our human experience better. On the whole, I would say it has not. Are people today happier than they were 100 years ago? If not, technology, as one major factor, has failed us. Why develop stuff if it does not make people more fulfilled? Specifically, technology like video can be used to bring people together if deployed the right way. I am excited by how to leverage video, in particular. We have an excellent platform.
What sets its technology apart from other streaming platforms?
I do not believe technology ever on its own is unique, even though I have held a few patents. Tech entrepreneurs like me like to think we are somehow special and the root of new ideas. This is basically B.S. There are no new ideas. It’s a company’s ability to listen to customers and pivot that makes it different. Basically, if you listen better and improve more rapidly, you win.
Will there be more entertainment/video/TV programs in your future?
Yes. I think technology and video specifically need to do more around mental health. Technology and the Internet may not be the single cause of the problem, but the rate of depression and mental illness in the western world has skyrocketed over the past 30 to 40 years even as technology has grown at the very same time.
Technology has done little if anything to stem this – I actually believe it is causal to harm. People are suffering. Technology can help.
I think more can also be done to help poor people. The single disadvantage poor folks have is not a lack of money – it is a lack of education and information. The disparity between the haves and have-nots grows almost every single year. That is an economic fact. The free enterprise system is absolutely the best vehicle we have, but the negative externality is it leaves some people behind. We at LiveSwitch will help with products designed around addressing those specific things. At the end of the day, it’s all about people – you are helping people or hurting them or, worse, just watching. ■