Visionaries

Today we're joined by Cam Doody and Matt Patterson, co-founders and general partners at Brickyard. Before launching a pre PMF venture firm in residency, they co-founded Bellhop, a tech driven relocation company that moved over 350,000 households and raised 90. 80 million in venture capital through Brickyard. They provide early stage founders, not just with capital, but operational support, accountability, and a community of builders.

They discuss their entrepreneurial journey from founding Bellhop, a tech-driven relocation company, to establishing a new kind of venture firm focused on early-stage founders. Brickyard offers a unique approach by providing not just capital, but operational support, accountability, and a community.

They reflect on their experiences, the challenges of the venture capital landscape, and the innovative model that demands radical focus and dedication from startup founders. Success stories and key insights from their efforts to create a founder-driven startup ecosystem in Chattanooga, Tennessee, are also highlighted.

Key Moments and Chapters
  • 00:00 Introduction to Visionaries Shaping the Future
  • 00:55 Meet Cam Doody and Matt Patterson of Brickyard
  • 01:53 The Entrepreneurial Journey: From Bellhops to Brickyard
  • 05:24 The Brickyard Vision and Mission
  • 06:27 Challenges and Critiques of Venture Capital
  • 08:36 Brickyard's Approach
  • 14:27 Success Stories and Notable Founders
  • 18:54 Personal Reflections & Principles
  • 22:03 Lessons Learned & Future Plans

Whiteboard is the leading creative and technology partner to visionary leaders and brands, helping them navigate the future with wisdom and imagination.

Visionaries is a Whiteboard and Toldwell production.

Creators and Guests

Host
Eric Brown
Co-founder of Whiteboard
Producer
Nick Blackmon
VP @ Whiteboard

What is Visionaries?

On Visionaries, we dive deep with today’s boldest thinkers—leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs—who are crafting the next chapter of our world. How do they see what’s coming? How do they make the impossible, inevitable? And how can we learn to think like them?

2025.03.23_Visionaries_001_Compiled
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[00:00:00] We are all familiar with the visionaries that have shaped our past, but what about the ones who are shaping our future? The ones who see what others don't, who challenge the status quo. Who imagine a future, not just as it is, but as it ought to be on visionaries. We'll dive deep with today's boldest thinkers, leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs who are crafting the next chapter of our world.

[00:00:37] How do they see what's coming? How do they make the impossible, inevitable, and how can we learn to think like them? Because the future belongs to those bold enough to imagine it.

[00:00:55] Today we're joined by Cam Duty and Matt Patterson, co-founders and general [00:01:00] partners at Brickyard. Before launching a pre PMF venture firm in residency, they co-founded Bellhop, a tech driven relocation company that moved over 350,000 households and raised 90. 80 million in venture capital through Brickyard.

[00:01:18] They provide early stage founders, not just with capital, but operational support, accountability, and a community of builders. Let's stop in.

[00:01:33] Eric Brown: I mean, this entire conversation is really oriented around your vision for this space. This space is beautiful. It's inspiring. But there's a lot of really hard work. First, though, I would love for y'all to just sort of tell us the entrepreneurial journey thus far, and then we will segue into the dawn brick.

[00:01:52] Why don't you kick

[00:01:52] Matt Patterson: it off? We founded our company bellhops, with our third co-founder, Steven Vlahos. I mean, it kind of plays into what the Brickyard story [00:02:00] is, which is, you know, we were raising our first round of funding and we met these guys up here, Ted Allen and Barry, and they had this crazy idea of like, Hey, move here and work out of our space with other VC backed founders.

[00:02:12] And you know, just do this here for now. And we kind of jumped at the opportunity overnight to, to move. This was like October, 2012. All three of us were newlyweds. You know, like my wife like had a, a great job. Like Cameron's wife had literally just started her own business like two weeks before. Yeah.

[00:02:28] Steven's wife had just started a two year grad program, so it was kind of a wild idea, but we ended up doing it and moving here pretty much overnight to start bellhops. That's kinda how. You know, Brickyard formulated many years later, which is that we operated in this venture incubator for about three years before kind of scaling out and getting our own space.

[00:02:48] Cam Doody: So Matt and I actually worked at our first company out of college together, which is a big bank. It's a big multinational bank. You know, we say that [00:03:00] and everyone's like, oh, yeah, yeah, with Goldman. He's like, no. We rate repinned people's debit cards in a bank branch, in a mall parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama.

[00:03:09] Yeah, we graduated in right in the middle of the financial crisis, so like no one was hiring and we just, you know, we just took the first job that we could get. Anyway, the first time we act, actually got to talk. I was like, okay, this, I can hang with this guy. Like we could, we could do some cool stuff. And the bank was what you might think, you know, working in a bank.

[00:03:31] Right outta college. You know, you, you put the, the real world on a, on a pedestal and you're like, oh, we're about to go to the moon. We're gonna make all this money and we're gonna, you know, be su super successful. And you kind of get hit in the face with, you're at the bottom of a 40 year totem pole and you're just the bottom of the stack.

[00:03:48] Right? And so we, I think both of us were kind of quickly trying to figure out, you know, how can we move up in this thing and kind of separate from the pack and. So I ended up taking a job [00:04:00] at a medical equipment company and then almost immediately bringing Matt over to run it with me. It was a startup and we opened up the state of Alabama together, and it was just Matt and me building this company.

[00:04:12] And we were there for, I guess, two and a half years or so before we started bellhops.

[00:04:18] Matt Patterson: And that was a startup, right? So that was our first real experience, like getting our hands dirty and in a high, fast growing company.

[00:04:26] Cam Doody: Yeah, and we, we were just working super closely together there and, and then we came up with the idea for bellhops, which at the time was called Dorm Movers.

[00:04:34] We were just moving college kids into the dorms, and so we, Matt and I actually quit on the same day. They've made us think that we were just crazy for jumping and in and doing this, and almost immediately after we moved to Chattanooga.

[00:04:49] Eric Brown: Yeah.

[00:04:49] Cam Doody: And that's when we really put the pedal down on, on bellhops.

[00:04:52] And then we built that through the 20 teens and took the venture path and really started understanding the, the venture [00:05:00] side of of things. And then we, in 2019, late 2019, right before COVID, we sold part of the company, we stepped outta the day to day. Matt had actually stepped out about two years prior, had started another company, sold that company.

[00:05:15] And so we were both kind of free agents. I think at first assumed that we were just gonna start another company. Uh, and I was like begging Matt. I was like, come on. Like what can we do? I was like throwing out all kinds of ideas and ultimately we came back to this thing that we'd experienced at Lamppost back in 2012 to 2015, which was very similar to what we're doing at Brickyard, A group of.

[00:05:39] You know, really early stage companies that all build in the same place. And so that was bellhops and Ambition and Steam Logistics and Reliance Partners and Chattanooga Whiskey and American Exchange and at carriers. And then two or three other companies that they funded, well, seven of those 10 companies are really big companies now, and there was just some [00:06:00] magic that we knew that we wanted to replicate.

[00:06:03] And so we partnered up, we, we ended up. Partnering up with Ted Allen and Barry that started Lamppost and with the mandate of let's take the, what the real core of what made lamppost really magic and just do it with more resources. And so that's when we bought this building and, and started sort of the, the early building blocks of what Brickyard is today.

[00:06:26] Eric Brown: I love it. Did you start Brickyard out of a desire to critique anything about your own experience with venture capital?

[00:06:35] Cam Doody: I would say yes. I have a pretty pointed perspective on this. Matt and I both do. Zer really crippled venture in a lot of ways. Mm-hmm. But particularly early stage venture. And so when all this money was being crammed into venture capital, chasing yield during, you know, the zero interest rate years.

[00:06:58] Yeah, there was too [00:07:00] much money, not enough deals. And so the industry had to make startups cool. And that's when the movies and the awards and the parties and celebrities and, um, it was really good for later stage investors series A, B, C, and, and so on, because they didn't have to deal with the, the huge top of funnel increase of, you know, just founders coming to market.

[00:07:24] They could kind of sit back like top of funnel was big, but like by the time. Companies were coming to them. It was only the winners that were actually making it to them. And so it made pre-seed and seed stage investing really hard because you, you kind of felt like you were a Rolex dealer in the eighties where your first order of business was identifying fakes because there are so many people becoming founders that weren't sort of neurotically drawn to it out of.

[00:07:50] This is the only way that I can see my, you know, idea happen. And it just created a lot of noise in the space. And so by the time like [00:08:00] 20 20, 20 21 rolled around, there was a huge bubble that started in venture where venture investors, they just had so much money. There were so many deals out there, were just throwing money around.

[00:08:10] And, and so we were, we kind of knew this core issue. And so if, if we were going to go to the venture side of the table, we, we wanted to create something like really inconvenient and hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. We just wanted to talk to the dogs. Just the junkyard dogs that had a problem that they just absolutely had to solve no matter what, and they were only focused on execution.

[00:08:36] And so we're in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Yeah, and you know, this is by no means, you know, anything comparable to the Bay Area or New York. And it's perfect for us because we can go and find these top tier founders and bring them to effectively a black site, like an island in the middle of Pacific that you know, no one really pays any attention to.

[00:08:58] Yep. And [00:09:00] put them in an environment where they can just push super hard and they can be around a bunch of other founders that have come here to do the exact same thing. And we call that the trough of sorrow. And it's like. The stage where you're post raise, but you're pre-product market fit. And it is absolutely brutal.

[00:09:17] And the only thing that really helps teams in that stage, in our opinion, is being around other founders that are just pushing you. It's really lonely pursuit during that, you know, you're just chewing glass, it's a knife fight and it really helps when you're around other people that are in that exact same scenario.

[00:09:33] So that's,

[00:09:34] Matt Patterson: you know, there's tons of accelerators, there's tons of. Sort of VC firms and and programming that can get founders to their first fundraise and get them to a demo day. There's not really anything after that. There's not really anything for the pre-product market fit phase to get you to the series A.

[00:09:50] And so we wanted to build this like founder Mecca that's like purposely in the middle of nowhere that founders can kind of escape to, to get to product market fit. And all the while you're [00:10:00] just surrounded by 50 other founders who are in the same stage. You know, all fighting the same battle. They hold each other up.

[00:10:05] I mean, we are here every day. Like we're, we sit out here, just like they sit out here, they can come tap us on the shoulder anytime they want. We can jump in a room. But that's like 5% of the value of this place. Like the other 95% is like day in, day out, you know, nights, Saturdays, Sundays. This place is full with other founders and they're all just, you know, they're all here on an island together.

[00:10:25] So it's, this isn't some like glorified like coworking facility. Where the relationships are superficial. Like everyone's like stuck here for a long time until they figure it out. And so they're all down to hang and, and learn from each other.

[00:10:38] Cam Doody: You know, I think an important piece to this, there's no time obligation.

[00:10:42] Yep. Um, it took us a few iterations to really understand, you know, how to structure this, but. The teams are now coming here on, on a mission. And so right before we offer terms to a team that we've been diligencing for a while, we ask the question, what are you coming to Brickyard to [00:11:00] do in revenue? Like sales?

[00:11:02] And the minimum is a million. Like you shouldn't come, you shouldn't pick up and move somewhere. Yeah. To put your head down unless you're gonna get to a million in revenue, you know? But teams are coming in and they're saying, look. We need to get to 2 million in revenue because at 2 million in revenue, that's gonna indicate that we're pretty close to a series A product, market fit, et cetera, and right around the period where we're gonna need to be scaling up our headcount in a major way.

[00:11:29] And so it's a forcing function to move to functionally the middle of nowhere. To just hit a number. Right. And then, you know, we've got the numbers on the wall over there and every day teams are coming in and they're sort of competing with each other on, you know, how fast can they get to their number?

[00:11:46] And so it, in a lot of ways, it just simplifies things for teams at this stage.

[00:11:50] Eric Brown: Yep. Knowing that the yard factors into your mission and in a moment where everybody is, you know, is remote the future, y'all double [00:12:00] downed on place. Why?

[00:12:06] Cam Doody: The tactical reason that we did it is this wouldn't have worked in San Francisco, right.

[00:12:13] Or New York. You know, if, if, if we started Brickyard in the Bay, it'd be another coworking, you know, space with a bunch of founding teams that don't really know each other, that don't really have a shared mission, that are sort of just like needing space. There wouldn't be any sacrifice to it. There wouldn't be that mission, you know, the forcing function.

[00:12:31] And so in order to do this right. You. We had to do it in a place that was obscure in a way. And so that's sort of the tactical reason that we did it, where Chattanooga actually plays a very strategic role in our thesis. Right. You know, you're not casually joining Brickyard. Personally, we love this place.

[00:12:52] You know, we moved to Chattanooga with no expectation of how long we were gonna be here. You know, we came here for lampposts. [00:13:00] To, to execute on our company. It was a great place to do it. We weren't really thinking about where we were gonna be, you know? But you know, over time we started hiring people and you know, we kind of turned around one day and we had 30 employees in Chattanooga.

[00:13:13] And it was like, wow, okay, we're, you know, we have a Chattanooga presence and we really love this place, right? And. You know, for our company specifically, it, it made sense for us to, to build our company here. And a lot of our companies, it won't make sense to scale in Chattanooga and we know that there's no economic development purpose to Brickyard.

[00:13:36] We're, we're purely about making founders go faster through just radical focus. Some are gonna stay, some, some are gonna go back to the Bay, back to New York, Boston, wherever. And I would anticipate, similar to what we experienced at at Lamppost, you know, once some of these founders have some exits and they're in their thirties and they're wanna start families and they're looking for quality of life.

[00:13:56] Yep. Like they know Chatanooga, they've been here for multiple years. Yep. [00:14:00] But that's not the core intention of Brickyard.

[00:14:03] Eric Brown: And how many, how many companies, I mean, how many countries are represented, states represented from.

[00:14:10] Matt Patterson: Founders, probably four countries. There's 40 total companies that we've invested in in three and a half years.

[00:14:15] States, I don't know, maybe 20 or so. A lot of New York and California

[00:14:19] Eric Brown: though.

[00:14:19] Matt Patterson: And

[00:14:20] Eric Brown: y'all already in three years, two years of time, already have success stories, already have exits. Talk about your favorites.

[00:14:29] Cam Doody: Oh man, you can't, you can't play favorites in this game. Don't get in trouble. The common theme between Brickyard founders is they're just the dogs.

[00:14:38] You know, our favorite founders are the founders that just 100% are all in and completely obsessed and are willing to do whatever it takes to make it work. And I, I think most of our companies fall into that bucket.

[00:14:55] Matt Patterson: So. I'll say there's, we have a special place in our heart for Repower. That was the [00:15:00] first, those were the first founders that actually moved here.

[00:15:03] That was basically our first deal. Totally. They were also the first company to get to Series A. They have a local presence here, and we're very proud of them. And feel free to add in I

[00:15:11] Cam Doody: tried to give a political answer.

[00:15:13] Matt Patterson: Yeah. Yeah. I, I was, I'm glad we did, but let's, let's give 'em what the, let's give the people what they want.

[00:15:18] Yeah. Let's go. Yeah, let's go. We gotta, we gotta mention June. All right, so June is the, the third team that we invested in and they just like really bought into this place and they were really helpful for us building, you know, Brickyard because we had no pre, like no one knew what this was in the early days.

[00:15:38] Yep. We're still very much under the radar. But you know, when we were investing in our third company, like our deal flow just wasn't there. We weren't seeing a lot of companies. We come across this team June, we absolutely fall in love with the founders. And they sort of like helped establish this Bay Area pipeline.

[00:15:53] They sort of referred like the next fourth, fifth, sixth deal that we did. So got a shout out to June boys. [00:16:00] Yeah, no doubt. Um, and they're doing exceptionally well. They're back in the Bay Area, so they referred us Brev.

[00:16:05] Cam Doody: So Brev was our, our fourth investment that we made. A Bay Area company. You know, one of these founders that you, you, you meet for the first time and, and they just.

[00:16:14] Have it. And so natter really, you know, believed in us. He's, he's very well served as a, you know, a networker and a connector and like, he's just kind of this large, larger than life personality. But he decided to take capital from Brickyard and then, you know, ultimately became our first exit. A breath sold to Nvidia earlier this year.

[00:16:35] And we're still super close. So the Brev team, you know, they come into Brickyard just about every quarter to, to do deep work, you know. Once you get into Brickyard, you're, you're a member for life. So these teams, you know, even after you roll out, you're, you're coming back, you know, anytime you want. So that's, that's really common.

[00:16:52] Matt Patterson: Alright. Then tell us about the, the co-founders.

[00:16:55] Cam Doody: Yeah. Okay. They're the,

[00:16:57] Matt Patterson: they're the embodiment of the Brickyard founder. [00:17:00]

[00:17:00] Cam Doody: So this building, it's on main and central, right across Main Street, about a hundred yards this way. We bought a house. Uh, that we call Brick House of course. And so it's 11 bedrooms fully furnished and it's just an easy way, it's kinda a landing pad for teams that are coming from outta state.

[00:17:16] They can stay there before they go somewhere else for, you know, sign a lease somewhere. So Spencer and Austin moved to Chattanooga just immediately. Like we, we had a, a first meeting and it was one of those things where, you know, Matt and I met the team and we just immediately bought him a plane ticket.

[00:17:35] And they came in effectively, never left. Spencer and Austin were in Brickyard. They lived at Brickhouse. They would arrive at Brickyard every morning at 9:00 AM and they would leave here at 3:00 AM every day, seven days a week for a full year before moving to New York. Yep. And you know, we have one of these old school, like analog time punchers, you know, time clocks, [00:18:00] and on Spencer's last week.

[00:18:02] He, he clocked like 118 hours in Brickyard. But the crazy thing was is that week was no different than every other week that he was here. I mean, just a complete maniac. Yes. And so that's, that's who we are building Brickyard on. Like this is not a game that you can do. Kind of passively like you. This is a full contact sport and you know, they are a total embodiment of that.

[00:18:29] And Coast is gonna be a huge company. They're doing super well scaling their team.

[00:18:34] Matt Patterson: That's amazing. Alright, lastly, I'll shout out Carla and CJ with shoppy International Logistics Company. They ended up like taking like a third of this building before we finally had to kick 'em out and get their own space.

[00:18:45] But just really exceptional founders and we're so proud of what they've done and they've positioned their company here in Chattanooga as well.

[00:18:51] Cam Doody: Yeah. Yeah, they're, they're unbelievable.

[00:18:53] Matt Patterson: I

[00:18:53] Eric Brown: love it. Well, last question, but a personal question for you both, just knowing the [00:19:00] startup scene, building a venture is brutal.

[00:19:04] It's heartbreaking. And this entire place is sort of oriented around the pain of it all. What's the first principle that has kept you going? 'cause 15 plus years in venture leading companies, building companies. Is a long time. Um,

[00:19:23] Cam Doody: I think it's, it is just, it's a drug. The, the early days of company building are, you know, I've never done heroin, but it's, it is a massively addictive thing.

[00:19:37] Yes. And it can be super brutal in the moment. The first few years of any company suck. If you categorize your days by like great days, good days, bad days, and terrible days. Like it's 90% terrible days. Right. And, but when you're out of them and you're looking back on that time somehow, and this is like a testament to the resiliency of humans, [00:20:00] you'd forget all the pain and you just remember those, you know, the good old days.

[00:20:06] Yeah. Yeah. And so once you experience that, and even when you scale out of it and your company starts to get better, bigger, you're, you know, you're always kind of, you know. Dr. Dreaming about those early days and when you could show up and change the direction of the company, you know, in an afternoon and, you know, you, you could actually make real impact.

[00:20:28] You're not trying to optimize some metric by like 1% month over month, you know, and so this is honestly in a big way, sort of a selfish pursuit for Matt and I. And Ted Allen and Barry. Yep. It, it's sort of our portal back to those days. Yep. It's actually interesting. So Lamppost Group was named after, lost the TV show, and you know, it's a show about a bunch of strangers, you know, marooned on an island together.

[00:20:52] I remember it's like, what? Like eight seasons, 20 episodes a season of trying to get off the island. And then when they finally get off the [00:21:00] island, all they wanna do is go back. Yep. And the portal in Lost that allowed you to go back was called the Lamppost. So Brickyard is very much, you know, spoiler alert.

[00:21:13] Yeah, yeah. Should, should have given that earlier. I don't think anybody's watching lost anymore.

[00:21:21] Matt Patterson: What about you, Matt? I think, uh, just getting something off the ground is so thrilling. Part of the allure of it, the most fun days are when you've got like. Early signs of product market fit, like something's clicking.

[00:21:35] I mean, growth cures all like when you're actually growing something, but then like building like the initial DNA of a team is, is so much fun. 'cause like, you know, there's this saying that like the first 20 people you hire like sets the DNA of a company, like for life like Amazon is basically the culture of Amazon set in place from the first 20 people that joined the company.

[00:21:54] And so like molding that in the first 20 people of your business. I [00:22:00] mean that's, that's just a fascinating experience.

[00:22:02] Eric Brown: A hundred percent. What are some of the things you've learned since the first round of ventures that you've applied to this current round, and what are you already planning to change for the next?

[00:22:11] Matt Patterson: Okay. Well, in the first part of the question, in our first fund, you know, we didn't have our building yet and we didn't quite know what our model was gonna be. And we were using our own capital for this reason. Like, we didn't wanna raise money from other people until we knew really what our model was gonna be.

[00:22:26] And you know, the first fund. I can definitively say that like the companies that like did pick up and move here and like, did exactly like what Bricky Yards ethos is, which is like putting your head down and executing for a long period of time, you know, in one room with, with a bunch of founders. I mean, those companies are definitively doing better than the ones that didn't do it.

[00:22:47] And that was our, so that was our big mistake in the early days in that we were very like, flexible with our model. Right. You know, we, we. You know, some companies, we sort of allowed to be here for like a month or maybe even like two weeks, [00:23:00] and going from fund one to fund two. And that's the big thing we got rid of immediately, which is like, we are not gonna bend on our principles.

[00:23:06] We're gonna, you know, we're gonna ask founders to commit to doing this, and if they're not into it, then that's good for us because they filtered themselves out of like what we believe in.

[00:23:15] Eric Brown: Last question. What about your experience scaling and exiting bellhops was formative to the experience of Brickyard?

[00:23:24] Cam Doody: You know, it is funny, I think any founder who's built a company, they ex, they think that it's gonna be easier the second time around. So I think every founder that starts a company and is successful in that, they assume their second pursuit is gonna be, you know, easier than it was the first time. And, you know, Brickyard is, we're a venture firm, we're not a company.

[00:23:48] But there, there is a Brickyard product that we have to build, and I think it's, it's more than anything, it's just been a reminder that anytime you set out to build something again, you're, you're always dealing with a totally [00:24:00] new problem set that you have to obsess over. If there's one thing that we have done with Brickyard is.

[00:24:07] Just trusting our instincts from the beginning. You know, we kind of really early on to Matt's point started bending on a little of our, you know, initial intuition on how this should be built, and we were just immediately smacked in the, in the hand on it. And, uh, and so, um, it was just a, a clean adjustment to be like all we were.

[00:24:27] Right. Um, and we need to stick with that, or maybe we're not right. You know? Right. But at least we're gonna, we're gonna see it out and. You wanna, we're gonna play out our vision as, as we originally saw it.

[00:24:40] Eric Brown: Well said. No, I don't have anything to add. Nothing to add? No. [00:25:00] Awesome.