It has been God's plan for my salvation that's made me successful. And I know that not everyone has the privilege of having those interlocked. God knew that my head was too hard for me to see him in all the splendor without sort of the ups and downs of the high highs and the low lows of billion-dollar business. And so he brought me through this to see him. And that is what I attribute my success to.
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Anchoring Hope podcast, where we are shining the light during these last days by bringing people that are willing to testify about the Lord Jesus Christ, the business they are running and how everything is getting to be good for those who love Christ and are called according to his purpose. Today we have with us Brandon Daniels. Brandon, welcome to the show.
David, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be with you today, and I'm excited to have this conversation.
I really was looking for this opportunity to speak with you in a deeper way, you know. So, praise the Lord for that.
Brandon, for the audience, can you give me your full name? Where do you live and what do you do for a living?
So, my name is Brandon Daniels. I live in Richmond, Virginia. And my headquarter offices for my company are in Tysons, Virginia, just right outside of DC. And I run a large AI company that specifically helps the Fortune 500, large government organizations manage supply chains more effectively. And so that's everything from helping them to add security to those supply chains, to optimizing those supply chains to make sure that they can get things better, faster, cheaper, and adding resilience to those supply chains. As we all know, since COVID it's been what's been called a polycrisis where we're constantly seeing our supply chains disrupted and creating issues in how we deliver goods to consumers, to citizens, to companies, and we're helping to solve those problems of resilience.
That's beautiful. Brandon, you know, I run a software consulting firm and back during the pandemic, one of our clients asked us to see if we could use AI to do more predictive analysis on shipping. They were shipping rubber to the US, as you know, as a prime material, and we were able to build that for them. Little did I know that there was already a company specialized on that.
Right. That's right. And we've grown substantially. You know, our compound annual growth rate over the last six, seven years is well over 50%. We grow—you know, the first half of the year we grew at a bombastic level. I think this year we'll see growth well over 50% in our core supply chain software business. So, you know, we're excited to be in the market because we're getting to solve real problems and real challenges, and especially in this climate of geopolitical conflict, we're getting to do some good, which is great.
Yeah, now with the price of oil and with the Strait of Hormuz closed down, that affects the entire supply chain, right? Like we haven't seen the effects yet, but everything comes from China, from other countries, and those vessels need fuel to operate.
It's not just that. You know, what's—so yesterday I spoke at the Semafor World Economy Forum. I had one of the main stages on what's shaping the future growth of the economy, right? And obviously because we're a large AI company, we talked about how AI and supply chains are going to define how countries and companies grow over the next decade. And you know, the Strait of Hormuz and the conflict with Iran isn't just revealing, you know, dependencies that companies and countries have on that region. They're identifying these sort of what I would say are reverberating, right? It's kind of like there's an epicenter and then they span out and they spread these reverberating bottlenecks in the supply chain. Like you take helium as an example: the Ras Laffan facility in Qatar, run by the Qatari energy company or organization, that facility has been under attack. It produces 30% of the world's helium. And helium is necessary to produce semiconductors. Helium is necessary to cool rocketry parts, like the parts that were in the Artemis space flight. Helium is necessary for lots of types of welding. And so what we know is that these very specific bottlenecks can create really big problems as you look across the interconnected supply chain.
And that's exactly where your company gets the most benefit, right?
That's right. That's right. And so customers with complex supply chains, customers in heavily regulated spaces, customers that are trying to manage and optimize their supply chains—you know, really the Fortune 2000, Fortune 5000 top companies—and then global governments, you know, they utilize us to basically plan five weeks out, five months out, five years out, a decade out, how they're going to manage supply chains more effectively and how they're going to manage these problems that we have in global trade.
That is incredible. Brandon, how old is the company?
The company is 13 years old.
So it's fairly new. I mean, like I've been in business for 25 years.
It's fairly new. It's fairly new. You know, this iteration of the company is a new one though. So in 2023 I had The Carlyle Group, Insight Partners and JMI, they invested $1.2 billion into the company. And so now, you know, they effectively bought, across the three of them, a majority holding. So, you know, effectively we're in a new horizon, a new chapter of our book. And, you know, we've doubled down and invested heavily in our AI capabilities. So, although the company has been around for 13 years, you know, we've had different chapters and this is a totally new chapter with a totally new horizon. That's exciting. It has its own, you know, challenges and opportunities that are brand new.
That is amazing. So when the company started, how did it—you know, how did it start? Did it have logistics in mind since the beginning or was that a pivot later on?
So the company was originally founded in a kind of a novel way. So, my former partners, Michael Chowsky and Michael Bieber—and really Mike Chowsky and Michael Bieber were my former bosses—founded the company originally as a services company, and it was a services company meant to help global organizations deal with governance, risk and compliance issues, and specifically governance, risk and compliance issues in the sanctions and money laundering and counterterrorism areas, right? Which a lot of the financial regulators have been coming down on the banks in those areas. And it was formed originally around what was called the HSBC monitorship.
So if you flash back to 2012, and there's a documentary on Netflix called Dirty Money that talks about this—if you flash back to 2012, HSBC was put under a deferred prosecution agreement. You know, in the deferred prosecution agreement, it was alleged that they had allowed or been subject to significant abuse by Mexican cartels, by, you know, countries like Iran trying to evade sanctions. And effectively they had become a conduit for the abuse of our regulated financial system by criminals and by adversaries.
And so the Department of Justice, the Department of Treasury, the Fed, and then a series of global regulators—Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Financial Conduct Authority—all said, 'Hey, in this deferred prosecution agreement, we need you to have someone come in and oversee and provide, you know, sort of a monitorship for the overhaul of your compliance program so that it meets the standards that we want you to meet because, you know, you're processing $3 trillion of the world's assets, right?'
And the other thing that they said is, we need someone that's going to be able to go to all of your 120 countries and use technology and use technology expertise to basically test and monitor your systems and look for this kind of abuse by criminals, criminal organizations, and by, you know, adversarial non-market economy nations, right? And so we basically built out a set of services and technology to do that across the globe. It was the largest one of its kind. We had 600 people, three law firms, two forensic accounting firms all working for us.
And so the company was founded to actually address this, you know, major issue that the US government and a bunch of other global governments had found in HSBC. Now, what we realized was the issue was not necessarily just expertise, right? It wasn't that they weren't policing or didn't have the policies, the procedures to manage this kind of risk. It was also that they didn't have the systems to catch it. And so what we realized is the problem wasn't just sufficient expertise and sufficient capacity within the compliance department. We realized it was the volume of data that they had to manage that was really creating a problem for them. And so we decided to build a technology company, a technology company that would help companies like HSBC to monitor these kinds of issues—these issues in their supply chains, these issues in their transactions, these issues in their customer groups, these issues in their export controls. Because the only way that you could really manage this volume of data, right, where you've got trillions of transactions happening each day, is to kind of fight fire with fire. You needed technology to manage technology. And so we built Exiger as effectively the company, the technology company that was building systems capable of monitoring these large-scale supply chains and financial environments.
And were you there from the beginning?
So I actually came a couple of years into the monitorship where Michael and Mike needed technology expertise. I've built—I've been a part of building—and built two companies before I came to Exiger. One was a company called CPA Global where we were in the intellectual property space. I was part of the management team. I left when we sold to Intermediate Capital Group for $1.1 billion and rolled into the next transaction, which was a $2.4 billion sale. I then went to a company called Clutch and grew that company by 100% year-on-year for several years, and then came to Exiger after that. Each of these businesses—what my specialty has been is taking what was, you know, sort of a services or a tech-enabled services business and really bringing out the consistent and systematic needs that those markets had and building AI-driven applications to help to solve some of those challenges. And I, you know, always dealing in the hardest, you know, regulated, most complicated, sophisticated spaces. My brother often says, like, I'm very good at finding the hardest way to make a living. And so, like, you know, I always look for those things that other people, you know, shy away from trying to apply technology and AI to, and put my effort there. So they hired me to basically build the technology business and then to eventually take the reins at Exiger, which I did.
That is amazing, Brandon. And what do you attribute this to? Because what I see is a chain of success stories, but I know there is a lot of failures there. So what do you attribute your success to? And like, I'm in technology, I know how hard it is. I mean, the concept of AI started in the 60s, right?
Yeah, we started doing data warehousing before data warehousing was a term, back in the late 90s, and I've seen the evolution of how to apply algorithms and really use AI from the early stage. I wrote a book about AI, and especially 10 years ago, even five years ago, it was not easy, right? You had to write everything by yourself because there was no ChatGPT, there was no cloud, there weren't any companies specializing in AI back then. So how did you become so successful in the primitive times of AI?
Yeah. Yeah. I think one, I was willing to tackle challenges that other people were not, and was willing to make bets, right? But I think, you know, this gets into the topic of our discussion. How I came to Christianity and my faith, about 15 years ago. And I grew up actually in a very, very well-educated—on a faith basis—a very well-educated family. My father has a degree in theology from Boston University.
We used to get mail at our house that said Reverend Dana Daniels. My grandfather taught comparative religion for 37 years at Boston University. It's how my mom and my dad met, because my dad was one of my grandfather's students, right? And so there was a lot of education about religion, but my dad has, you know, three master's degrees, a PhD, he's got, you know, just enough education to be broke, right? Politics. And so it's like, you know, we grew up in a very well-educated household, but there was always a pretty antagonistic view of religion. You know, my dad walked away from all of that time basically a very convinced atheist.
And so if you would ask me, you know, at different stages over the last 20 years or 18 years that I've been in senior management at least, what makes you successful? You would have gotten different answers. But the one thing that I would say is, it has been God's plan for my salvation that's made me successful, and I know that not everyone has the privilege of having those interlocked.
You know Mother Teresa, you know, it's her suffering that made her—that brought her to salvation. Padre Pio, it was austerity and belief and poverty that brought him to salvation. I think God knew that my head was too hard for me to see him in all this splendor without sort of the ups and downs of the high highs and the low, low lows of billion-dollar business. And so he brought me through this to see him. And I think that is what I attribute my success to. And I don't talk about this very often, but for me—
So I didn't really have a close relationship with my father growing up. My father, you know, worked quite a bit. We really didn't have financial success due to it, but he was very focused on work and eventually ended up leaving the family and moving to Singapore and not really being all that close to any of us. But you know, what happened 15 years ago was I was very successful coming off of CPA Global. You know, we had been through an exit. It was this monumental moment. You know, I took eight months off. I hung with my now 20-year-old son who was four at the time. Right. I thought I had accomplished so much, and I remember having this deeply empty feeling.
And you know, my exit at CPA Global was sort of a turbulent one after we had sold the business and recapitalized the business. And I was really kind of just trying to understand what my—why I was in the position that I was in. I mean, I was, you know, running a major part of a multi-billion-dollar business, very early in my career. How did I end up there? How did I get these skills? How did I sort of arrive at that place? And why did I feel so empty? You know, I was drinking. I had been through one divorce, you know, like I had, and I was just lost, to be honest, David.
And you know, when you grow up in an atheist household, and especially a very liberal atheist household—like my dad came out of the closet when I was in my teens—so I grew up in a liberal atheist household. You know, the first place you go is you go to Eastern religion, because that's more acceptable. Buddhism, Taoism, all of those, like everybody's like, 'Oh, okay, this makes more sense, right? This is about you. This is about, you know, God being inside of you.' And I felt like I didn't have the answers. So, why am I looking within? And then I went to other religions. I went to Islam and I met this figure that was all about victory, right? That was all about conquest. That was all about the glory of God being somewhat tied to an earthly success. And I said, I'm successful, but I don't feel fulfilled.
And then I opened up the first few pages of John and I read about a Lord who understands and empathizes with a humanity that has fallen. And I'm a theoretical physics buff, and I went back to Genesis and I read the first few lines of Genesis. And I don't know if you've ever listened to Hugh Ross, but I had the same revelation that he did reading it. He's a Caltech professor, one of the best scientists in the world. You read those first few pages of Genesis and you realize there's no way a human could have written this, right? And so I fell in love with the gospel. I fell in love with God. And we can talk about this more, but what has made me successful, David,
When I walk with God, things go well. When I listen to his will and not my own, things go well. When I use the skills and the gifts that he's given me, when I choose to apply the perseverance that he's given me, things go well. When I don't—when I try to take it on myself, when I don't walk in the lessons he's taught me, you know, whether they're moral, ethical, or financial, if I don't walk in those lessons he's taught me, things don't go well.
And so for me, God is a real father. God teaches me with life. He teaches me with experience. He allows me to see this perfect symmetry between when I'm walking the path that he has chosen or that is his will versus when I am not, because he gives us free will and agency—not just as a humanity but as a universe. I can see the stark difference. And so what's made me successful? Dang. It's belief in God. It's being at the right place at the right time, and it's using those gifts of perseverance and the skills that God has given me to their fullest extent when he makes clear what I'm supposed to do.
That's beautiful, Brandon. You know, I praise the Lord for your experience and for your testimony. For me, it happened a bit different, but it was different and similar at the same time. I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior when I was 16 years old, and the next 10 years were, you know, college years, getting married and having kids and becoming an IT professional, a software engineer. And they were 10 beautiful years, to be honest with you. I mean, with struggles and everything else, buying my first house and all that. Then I decided to start my own business, and the pressures of that, the struggles of trying to hit a home run, started putting me away from the Lord.
And trying to focus on myself, on how I could learn the skills to become someone that is successful. And I think the spirit of scarcity and anxiety just came into me and prevented me from seeing the Lord for what he was willing to teach me. But it took 20 years for me to go away from my faith—20 years from not going to church anymore, from just focusing so much on growing the business, working, you know, 12, 13 hours a day, even more sometimes, until I finally needed to find an answer.
And I looked for the Eastern religions to find that answer, because—I remember exactly the day when I was with my wife and my kids. I used to get my wife and my kids—we would get them out of school and we would just go for these vacations, like I call them retirements, and we would go for three months to another country, work remotely. I didn't stop working, but I would work from like Argentina or Southeast Asia or Europe. I modeled my business to be able to do that. But then, you know, my kids grew up, they went to university, we did it one more year with my wife and it felt so empty. And I remember thinking, okay, is this all there is? Because even though I never stopped believing in Christ and of his salvation, I was so deep into the rest of my life that I forgot that he was supposed to be the center of my life. So that emptiness that you talk about, I have felt it.
And why don't we go into Eastern religions? Exactly. That's exactly what I did. I started reading Buddhism and the Tao and Hinduism and transcendental meditation, like I was trying to fill my hole from within, but my hole was within.
I think the thing is, there are three levels to the Christian religion for me. From an evolution—for anyone that's an intellectual, anyone that's like, you know, an educated intellectual operating in intellectual circles, big city circles, you know, typically agnostic or atheist circles, right? And, you know, the first level that you usually go through, at least in people that I've spoken to, is first you have faith, right? And faith—you know, maybe you have it as a child, maybe you were born and you were brought up into it, or maybe you arrive into the religion later in life, but you gain some appreciation for Jesus and for the faith that he has inspired in so many people. And then you have what I call that sort of middle level of understanding.
'I haven't really thought about the Bible, but you know, I have a view of what it is, right?' And a lot of times people think of the Bible as this very exclusive circle of heroes, right? You know, these stories of these people that are great saints. You know, one of the most important figures in our Bible, the foreshadowing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is David. And David was an adulterer. David was a murderer. David wasn't even allowed to build the temple because he was a man of blood. He had blood on his hands, and he was a messianic figure. And so if you paint a circle of Abraham, Jacob, who became Israel, Sarah, Rahab, you know, all of these characters—if you paint a circle of them and you said, let me see, based on their sins alone, how big that circle is of people God loves, right, you'd be hard-pressed to not find yourself in that circle. I haven't murdered anyone.
Couldn't I be one that God loves? So I think there's a level past faith where you start to dig into the Bible, and you know, you can misconstrue the fact that the Bible is inviting you into a very big potential circle as opposed to excluding you from a very exclusive circle, right? The one thing that's true about everyone in the Bible outside of our Lord is that they were human, and the vast majority of them were sinners.
Right. And so the religion is here to save us, not to save them. It's here to save us, right? And so I think there's this middle layer where you can lose track of the fact that you don't know what you don't know. And then there's another layer where you decide to study and learn, and you've read the Bible and you've read the verses and you've compared it with the archaeology, or you've compared it with your own day-to-day life, or you compare it with the truisms. You know, it doesn't matter your intellectual capacity and depth of understanding of lots of other things. It doesn't matter if you are the most skilled theoretical physicist and quantum specialist in the world, or you are a third-grade middle school teacher that doesn't really have a penchant for math—you can find something that speaks to you intellectually in scripture.
And I think that it's getting to that layer of depth, that layer of belief, that layer of understanding—like understanding that the Bible is speaking to you in an individual way. And that's one of the miracles of scripture. And however far you want to pull that string, it'll go. You know, I was thinking about it the other day: Abraham, when he walked Isaac to Mount Moriah, that was an 80-mile journey that he did to Mount Moriah.
Moriah, with Isaac. And Isaac, when he walked to Mount Moriah, went to the same mountain — the same hilltop that Jesus was crucified on. And everyone agrees that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is actually on the spot. I mean, archaeological digs agree that that was the spot that was called Golgotha and was the placement of the cross. The place that Isaac carried the wood on his back up the hilltop and onto the final place of sacrifice, where God said, 'Don't take Isaac, your only begotten son, your heir apparent. Don't take him. I'm going to give you another sacrifice.' That same place is where Jesus carried the wood on his back up to Golgotha. So that's intellectually inspiring. Across the eons, you know, literally there's no AI that could dig through and find all of these throughlines from Isaiah, from Jeremiah, from Genesis, from Exodus, and pull them all into the story of Christ in that way. I mean, you'd need — especially across all four gospels — you'd need someone of almost super intelligence to weave all those stories out. And then on top of it, there are aspects to what people call the multiple universe theory and what's called the wave collapse theory. There are parts of those theories and agency that are actually only solved by the God that we see in the Bible existing.
And so, you know, my view is that once you make it past your preconceived notions of what the Bible says and you actually dig in, you realize you don't need Eastern religion, you don't need intellectualism, you don't need any of those things. They're all there to actually reflect God's beauty. And if you understand the Bible first, the rest will just make sense. It'll present itself. And I think we often only get past that second layer of our preconceived notions of the Bible and what it has to offer. And only once we walk in God's path and we listen to God can we get to that later intellectual decision-making.
Like, you know, the parable of the talents, the parable of the vineyard owner — these have deep, deep meaning for me in business, right? Like the person that goes and hides away the one talent and doesn't return a profit is the one that gets scolded. The one that actually returns a profit from the market gets more. The one that has the most and returns the most profit gets more. That speaks to God's character and his belief in work, his belief in following his will, and his belief in you. If he gives you a talent, utilizing it to its fullest extent, right? Fairness — the person at the end of the day gets a dinar, the person at the beginning of the day gets a dinar, right? Fairness.
You know, but fairness also for yourself. Like, you know, I've obviously had multiple exits. In every exit, I have someone that says, 'I didn't get enough.' If I had told them the day they started at that company, this is how much money you'd make — a million and a half dollars, $2 million, $10 million, $20 million. That's how much people that have been in transactions — I've been at hundreds of millions, David — in transactions I've made people that much money. And if I had told them three, five years prior that they would make that much money if they just stuck with me, do you think they would have signed on that dotted line?
But you know, human nature — we can't help but say, 'But what is somebody else making?'
You know, when a person comes, why are they getting as much as I am? You know, and so there are so many lessons for us in our religion, and in the words, and in the true relationship and intimacy with Jesus that really guide me from a business and intellectual perspective.
You couldn't have said it better, Brandon. You know, when the Lord rescued me literally from hell, I ended up believing in incarnation and all kinds of stupidity. I even got into psychedelics, believe it or not. It was horrible. But you know, my wife started praying for me. The Lord opened my eyes. He showed me what I was doing. And when I begged for forgiveness, asked for forgiveness, and I was cleansed with the blood of Jesus, I developed a passion for reading the Bible. And I realized that was the one book I never read. When I was just 10 years old, when I was in my faith, I was being fed by the pastor of the church and by people like they were, you know, very good theologians. But I never actually read it myself. And when I got out, I read many, many books of other religions when I was lost. But I never even wondered about the Bible. So the first thing that the Holy Spirit asked me to do was read the entire Bible. So I read it in 2023, and I cannot stop reading it since then. And every time I read it, you get a new revelation from the same scripture.
Right. It's incredible. They're so deep. They're so deep. You read it and you reveal something new about the nature of humanity. You reveal something new about the nature of reality. You reveal something new about yourself. I don't experience any other text like that.
Yeah. And so the only thing I can attribute to that is the divinity and the living nature of the word, right? And I believe God loves and enjoys that depth and spiritual alignment, enjoys that word being living and real. You know, Jesus was the word, right? And I think everything in my life makes sense now that I have faith. You know, even the existence of the universe, David — the universe, if it were slightly more dense, the entire thing would collapse into a black hole, or everything would be lead. Slightly less dense, and we'd be helium and nothing would bind, right? You know, people often think that there's a habitable zone around a star. Well, in fact, there are 13 zones that are required in order to have a planet support life like the Earth does. And without the universe being as large as it is, and without the volume of planets we have, and without the volume of stars we have, you actually could not have this probability of humanity existing. We wouldn't have enough opportunities.
Like, think about that. Hallelujah. Right. It's incredible. It's all for love, and I think God gives us this opportunity to create the one thing in the universe that binds us together. I mean, one of the laws of thermodynamics is entropy, and what does entropy do? It turns things from order to chaos, right? It tears down. It disintegrates. That's what entropy is. And the fact is, why is it that we continuously become more and more orderly? Why is it that the guiding force in the universe is not just chaos and spread and disruption and things detracting? Why is it that things come together? And at the end of the day, if you believe that it's survival of the fittest, why would we exist? It seems like a luxury. Why wouldn't we be a protozoa on the edge of a volcano? Because that can exist on Mars and it can exist deep in the depths of magma. So that's the fittest thing to survive. So why have humanity? Why have love? Why have color? Why have music? What's the point of all this superfluous stuff if it's survival of the fittest? It's because it allows us to be batteries — batteries that can create actual new energy, that can create love. When my wife and I meet, that's new. That's new energy. That's love bringing us together. When two planets form and end up in orbit, end up in a parallel gravitational pull... Honestly, I think what we're looking for at the end of the day is that God is love, and love brings order, and love brings clarity, and love brings stability. I think that's what God is. And I think we sometimes think we're smarter than that, and we get ourselves into trouble.
You're right, Brandon. Just by looking at math — just by the fact that we can describe everything with math.
