Slava Rubin

Alternative investments are growing very rapidly. Alternative investments are anything that are not public equities or bonds, so you could think about it like collectibles, real estate, venture, crypto assets, art. All these things are growing rapidly and there's not really a central place where the individual investor can try to look across all of their options. So that is Vincent

one place to start thinking about how to invest into alternatives. Okay, needless just say, we had a Robin hood and his result of that we had volatility in a MC, we had volatility in game stop. Is this an arena where

the average persian should be playing? Absolutely so um. For the longest time, people felt that only the rich, the accredited investors, the family offices, the institutions were able to have access to these alternative investments and they've known that being able to have a small portion of your portfolio across some of these riskier assets gave them higher returns overall. So today you see about five percent of portfolios across investors in these alternatives, and too many people don't have

anything in alternatives. And I really do believe that the average person should have somewhere between five to fiftent in alternatives. You shouldn't at the farm on it. You should him put all of your savings in it, but a small portion of higher risk, prior return assets could give you a much better return overall. Okay, most people are financially unsophisticated.

Those with some assets might have a financial advisor who would balance their portfolio, as you're saying, But well, you find certainly on robin Hood that it's a lot of people who are relatively young with some extra cash and this might be their only investment. They might have an eye row. What do you say to those people? So it's really just a function of a percentage of how much you have. So if you have ten million, you should put you know, let's call it a million dollars

ten percent into alternatives. If you have a thousand dollars you should think about putting a hundred dollars into alternatives. It's really about putting that five to ten percent into alternatives. Now, the question that asks, how do I only put you know, fifty dollars five five thousand dollars into alternatives. That's the beauty of what's happening in the last decade. Since about you've seen the dawn of all these alternative investment platforms

across these individual asset classes. You have real estate platforms, you have venture platforms, you have art platforms, you have collectible platform and when I say collectibles, i'm talking about whine, I'm talking about cars, I'm talking about trading cards. You have crypto platforms, and they're all offering these fractional ownership where you can get a piece of the asset. You don't have to spend the entire seven million dollars on a mon a. Maybe you can spend two thousand five

dollars to get a piece. You don't need to spend the entire four thousand dollars for some Will Chamberling card. You can buy a ten dollar piece. And that's the beauty of what's happening across all of these alternative investments, and it's becoming much more approachable for the everyday investor. Whether you have ten thousand dollars of extra uh income to uh sorry, ten thousand dollars of worth that you

can deploy, or if you have uh, you know, five million. Really, you just can prioritize it accordingly as to how you would diversify. Okay, let's assume I am interested. How do I decide what to invest in? Am I purely you know, flying blind doing my own research? Are there any primmers, anything that could help me out? Yeah? So? Um right now.

The two places where you can really start as the investor to think about your alternative investment options is either you ask your buddy, you know, Sally or Sam that you talk to at work or on zoom or at the golf course, and you know that person is gonna be limited by what they know and what they have

access to. Or you go onto Google and you try to do your research, which the research is complicated because most of the research and most of the information is coming often from the people trying to sell you the

actual product. So it's hard to find objective information to try to research and diligence across all of your options, and that's exactly what Vincent the platform which we launched five months ago with Vincent dot Com is to be able to start your journey on alternatives with Vincent, which is this is where you discover your options. This is where you do your diligence. This is where you can compare and contrast, and then you click through to the

deals that you like and move forward. Okay, if one examines the site, there's certainly hundreds of alternatives available. How much information is there is? How does someone uh digested information to help them make a choice. Yeah, so, uh, there are dozens of different types of alternatives. We've grouped it into a simple taxonomy of six different options. High level, So, do you want a debt alternative? Do you want a real estate alternative? Do you want to venture which is

like you know, equity or venture fund, et cetera. Do you want art, do you want crypto or do you want collectibles? Everything will fall into the one of those six categories. Inside of that, you can then refine your filter in terms of how much you're trying to spend, what kind of returns you're looking for, and then we help you to try to navigate compare and contrast. Now, a real estate investment will have some similarities to a trading card investment, but there will also be differences, which

is part of the challenges of navigating across assets. But it's also the beauty of the product that we've tried to create that simplicity for the comparison. Just to give you a really interesting stat like I mentioned, we've been around now for five months. Um, we have over sixty platforms already signed up on the supply sidelight light. Wait wait, wait, just define what those platforms are pleased. So a platform

is one of those originators. An originator is an organization that is SEC approved and they are approved to be able to source deals. Uh in that vertical on behalf of the potential investors that would invest into that. So let's be specific. Uh, there's a platform called Collectible which focuses on trading cards. Their SEC approved to be able to get let's call it a Will Chamberlain card or yesterday I invested in the Sandy Kofax card. They were

able to get that card. They originated, they sourced that deal, They originated that offering, and Sandy Ko Fox what I think was selling. It's a p s A nine. P S A is a grading in the in the card industry, it's p S A nine. I think there's like thirty six of them in the world that are known. I think there's three p s A tens. So this was a p s A nine selling for about four fifty thousand dollars. So if somebody is rich enough on the car, you know, listening, they could just try to go buy

the whole thing. But um, what this platform is doing is making it more accessible by selling the shares at ten dollars apiece. And that is an originator. So Collectible is just one example of an originator. So the originator establishes the price of four hundred and fifty thousand, Theoretically, could I invest my ten dollars And since there's so much to mend, the originator might say, well, now the value was six. No, it's just like an I P O. So when the I p O happens, that's it. It's happened,

and then it goes into a secondary market. So when the IPO happens, that's the primary issuance. So the primary issuance is the first price that it goes to market with, and it's kind of like the I p O of this offering. Um so, Uh, Sandy ko Fax went for about four thousand dollars. I bought my shares. You know, I put in a thousand dollars. And you know, next week or next month, somebody might want to buy my shares for twelve dollars or they might only be worth

eight dollars. And so I'll probably hold because I believe Sandy Kofax can be worth a lot in the future. Um So I'll get to decide if I want to sell for twelve dollars for and get a profit on my ten dollar shares or fall hold. And that's just in the collectible space. You you you mentioned a couple of things and we have Let's say I'm investing. Does Vincent charge me to invest? So? Vincent does not charge the investor anything. We are on the side of the investor.

We're helping them to discover in diligence. Uh, and we're just leading you to all of your options. We do not charge the investor anything, totally free. Okay, So then how does Vincent get paid? So Vincent is working with the originators to help them to be able to get more investors. So We're really like Google, which is a search engine trying to you know, get more qualified leads, uh to our originators. Okay, so let's say sorry, you could just think of us as just a very vertical

specific search engine like Google, but specifically for alternative investments. Okay, now Google, Uh, they with ad Sense, depending on what you're at, isn't bidding, you might pay more or less. So with Vincent, is every originated product a different deal or is there a straight deal or it's different every uh company has a certain percentage that you charge them. Yeah, so all the um right now on Vincent, we don't

actually have a paid promotion product like ad Sense. So when you search on Google for you know, hotels in Camcoon, there's a few people that are paying for those positions, and there's a few people, a few companies that are getting those positions organically because they deserve those top positions. Right now, we only have organic results. No one is able to pay to get better results. In front of the investor on Vincent, we're only five months old. Would

you anticipate you might charge for that visibility? Uh? That very well might happen. Um, you know already our originators are asking us to get more visibility and more exposure and trying to pay us for that opportunity. But we're also trying to make sure we're serving the investor as well as possible in terms of having a trusted experience while trying to have, you know, a business that can be anniable into the future. Okay, so the Sandy kofax card,

the originator. How much do you are you charging the originator when someone buys on your platform? Well, they don't buy on my platform, right, We hand off the investor to their platform, so we don't charge anybody anything, meeting any investor anything. What the platforms charge is their different fee schedules. And one of the beautiful things that Vincent is able to do is transparently compare and contrast those

fee schedules. Because sometimes it's a little opaque because not all companies charge the exact same way, so it's a little hard to compare. We try to surface that to the front so the investor can understand what they're getting into a little bit better. Okay, what might be the options of charging the ultimate investor? Um? I mean it gets a little complicated. I mean the originators decide their

own way. Sometimes they'll just mark up the asset. So the asset might be worth let's call it a hundred thousand dollars, but they'll sell it for a hundred and ten thousand dollars, So they automatically made a ten percent big without you really knowing it, even though you know it's built into the price. Sometimes they'll tell you, hey, we're only charging a hundred thousand dollars, but we're going to charge you five percent to do the transaction. Uh.

Sometimes it's all just baked in. UM. They might offer for free, meaning at price at market for the hundred thousand dollars, because then they want to make money on the secondary trades where you're trading from ten dollars to eight dollars or from ten dollars to twelve dollars in that secondary market. Maybe they want to be able to charge you uh some money on each of those secondary trades. So there's a lot of different ways. Uh. Maybe they

want to get you into subscription product. Maybe they want to get you into an a u M product a U M A little bit tower. What is a subscription and what is an a UM Well subscription would mean Maybe they want to get you into a more premier UM access of the way you work with their platform.

So they charge you, you know, ten dollars a month or a hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month to be able to get special privileges or deal flow or access or data UM, while others might be trying to get you into an a u M product means assets under management, so they're trying to offer you a professional fund UM where instead of you picking specific stocks and I say that as a metaphor meaning individual assets, you might just say I want to deploy

money into this UH platform and just let them put all of their various UH individual assets into that fund, and I just want to invest into the fund. So all these origination platforms which I mentioned we have well over fifty already. They all have their own business models, they have their own monetization models, They focus on their own verticals in terms of the assets they focus on.

This is all very confusing. UM. Often, if you're just trying to navigate from the perspective of I have an extra ten thousand dollars, what should I do with it? It's daunting if you're just thinking I have ten thousand dollars? What should I do with it? It's hard to know where to start because if you start in any one of those platforms, you right away go down the tunnel

with that specific asset, with that specific platform. While with Vincent, we're trying to give you a very top down view across the entire industry of all the assets, UH, and try to give you a compare and contrast across all the platforms within an asset, or compare across assets. Um So, yeah, the idea is to start your alternative journey with Vincent. Okay, so you provide the lead so to speak. How does

Vincent get paid presently? Um? So, we haven't been focusing very much on monetization since we're so young, but presently what's happening is platforms are partnering with us UH and then UH paying us on a per lead per lead. Okay, So let's just assume I buy my piece of the sandy Ko fax card. Let's just say the value is a hundred thousand dollars to make and numbers easier to comprehend.

What happens if they only sell fifty thousand dollars to investors? So? Um, the originator each originator has their own approach to that. But usually what they're doing is they're underwriting the card, so they've already kind of bought the entire card, so they already owned the entire card. So anybody who's buying a piece doesn't have to worry about whether or not the entire card is sold, because as long as they

have their piece, that's fine. Often they are trying to sell a specific amount for simplicity sake, let's say fifty. So let's say they're trying to sell fifty of sandy kofax. Uh. If they're only selling so far, that doesn't mean that they have to wait for the other ten percent to be sold, because the card is already in their ownership. They already custody the card, right, So it's not as if you have to try to get that full number to try to own the card, because the originator is

often already owning it, so they're underrated that. But often you are getting to the full amount met, sometimes within minutes, sometimes within hours, sometimes within days or weeks. Okay, let's use the continuing example of Sandy ko fax. You have x amount of sandy co fax. To what degree is that liquid and who's to be supervises the sales, what would be the exchange so um, right now, the way

it works is there's a number of different originators. UM. The examples that we're talking about with Sandy co Fax would be a collectibles originator. In the collectible space, There's a company called Otis. There's a company called Rally, There's a company called Collectible. UM. There's others which you can get into n f t s which are like digital collectibles. UM. And what will happen is often where you are originating the deal, where you're purchasing originally, is where you will

be doing your secondary trading. So uh, they will allow for the matching process between supply and demand. Let's talk about Sandy Kofax again. So often there's a lock up period where let's say the deal closed today. UH, and let's say you want to sell tomorrow your shares. Usually that's not allowed. Usually they will lock up for thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, maybe a year, uh to allow for things to settle in and then the secondary trading

will be allowed. So let's say, for example, let's say ninety days, so after nine d days I will be able to uh, you know, enter the markets of secondary trading, and I can set my price and say, you know, I'm willing to sell my ten dollar shares that I bought UH for twenty and I can list that on a secondary market, the one often that I bought it on. Now, it's not as fluid as robin Hood because robin Hood

is massively liquid. There's so many people that are buying and so many people that are selling on both sides, and the public markets have huge infrastructure that's been built out by things called market makers and others that really make the the trades happen so fast because they're able to match what people want versus what people are trying to sell for. The bid in the ASP are the terms. But in these new spaces, in these alternative markets, it's

not quite as liquid yet. So sometimes you don't match immediately or within even an hour or even a day. Sometimes it might take days or weeks to find that match, or it can be instantaneous, depending on how the market works out. So if I'm looking for twenty dollars, but the other folks are coming in saying, you know what, you just bought this for ten dollars three months ago, but I will buy for twelve right now, or I will buy for fourteen, but you know I'm sticking out

for for twenty. Uh, you're just gonna I'm just gonna have to wait because my match didn't come through. Now somebody else, uh living in you know, for the fun of it. Let's say in Alabama they are ready to sell quicker, their Sandy kofax, and they're just looking for thirteen dollars. So if they were saying I want to sell for thirteen and somebody came in saying I want to buy up the fourteen, that match will happen. But because I was waiting for a twenty, my match didn't happen.

Does that make sense? Yes? Of course. Is it a transparent Let's just assume your example blooded at ten want to sell it at twenty. Is there an exchange so that while I'm asleep, the transaction will happen if someone bids twenty. Yes. Um, I wouldn't use the word exchange. That's a little bit of a technical word. Usually exchange

does mean a more sophisticated, um quick transaction. Really what these are called our billboards billboard secondary because it's almost like you're posting something on like in the old old style newspapers classified, where you know, some people will say I'm looking to sell my Sandy ko fax for twenty, and somebody else is saying I'm looking to buy Sandy kofax is for four. Team. It's almost like somebody will manually be reading the classified and say, oh, I think

these two people should talk to each other. And that's actually just happening a little bit more fluidly on these on these platforms right now. Uh It's not as sophisticated as robin Hood or as exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange or or the NAZDAC, but it's way more efficient and way more fluid than the newspaper classified example I gave. Okay, so let's say, using your example BOARDED ten want to sell it twenty. I'm on the bulletin board.

Can someone say I want to buy a twenty and the trans hack transaction happen without your interactions since they met the price. Well, yes, to be clear, the only way that uh me being willing to sell its point he could be on the Bolton board is if I already confirmed and approved that. So I can't have that beyond the Bolton board unless I already proved it once I approved of it. If that other side of the

transaction comes through, it will happen automatically. So you don't have to ask me again, do you really want to sell at twenty because I already said I want to sell at twenty. So no, there's not like a double confirm. Uh, you have to confirm the first time before you can even put that. Okay, let's just assume you bought it at ten, you're watching the market closely, and you're emotional. You don't know what you want to sell it at.

How does that work? I mean, these are not um to be clear, these markets are not changing on these bulletin boards by the minute. Often these bulletin boards for the sake of getting liquidity, and what I mean by liquidity getting as many people on both sides of the market, uh to be at the same place at the same time.

They often don't do it NonStop. They'll create like almost like trading hours or a trading day where where they will say, okay, get your thoughts in what do you want to buy out or what do you want to sell at? Here are all the things you can buy or sell. Get your thoughts in because you know on April a month from now or a week from now or tomorrow is when all the trades are gonna happen.

And then those trades happen and then uh, you know, sometimes they'll wait another week or another month before they

do trading again. Now, the reason it's taking so much time, as opposed to on robin Hood things that happened within a millisecond or you know, so many it's because the lack of liquid These are smaller markets that are historically very private and they're not as large, so it's gonna take time for it to become as transactional as liquid as you know robin Hood in New York Stock Exchange,

et cetera. But my personal opinion why we built Vincent is I do believe by the end of this decade, you are going to get that transparency, you are going to get that liquidity, and the alternative markets are gonna be very exciting. Uh they're exciting today, but it's gonna be that much closer to the infrastructure as how the public markets work. Okay, so theoretically I could invest ten thousand dollars and a month later I need the money for rent. I may not be able to raise that

money immediately. You might not be able to access that liquidity immediately. That's correct. So alternative investments um. One of the challenges with them historically is what makes them alternative usually is the lack of immediate liquidity. So, for example, you know, if you buy real estate, uh, you know, you try to get a nice home in a in Austin because Austin is really popping and you feel like being in the suburbs of Austin could be a nice investment.

You know, it's hard for you to just snap your fingers and get that money out. Now again, you know how much demand is there for Austin real estate, which, by the way, real estate is an asset class on Vincent right, it's not just trading cards. You can get real estate. You know. The more liquidity again liquidity is people. The more people that are circling around Austin looking to buy and sell, the more likelihood that you'll be able

to get in and out faster. Now, if you're trying to buy a second home in the suburbs of Anchorage, I'm guessing that you're gonna have a hard time selling in the mentor of the middle of winter in Anchorage. Nevertheless, any time, because I'm not sure how much liquidity. Look, you know, the suburbs of Anchourage have So that's another example of where is liquidity? Where are the people lining up? In terms of buying and selling um and alternative investments.

Historically you've had to be able to, you know, be willing to tie up your money for a little bit of time, whether it's a week, a month, a year, or longer, uh to be able to get some of that higher return. Often with the liquidity comes a lower return.

There's a premium for having your money locked up. The beauty of where alternam investments are headed is that there's all this infrastructure being built out, like exactly we just talked about with Sandy Kofas is over time, these things that were historically either you buy it for a hundred for half a million dollars and hopefully you find the buyer to buy it for six hundred dollars six dollars

a year later. You know that's really hard. But now you're chopping it up into those pieces ten dollars apiece. You add a lot more people that are able to trade in and out. You're starting to create more liquidity. You go from bolton board to exchange and now all of a sudden, you're taking things are historically super difficult and super locked up the things that can become highly

liquid and quick to access your money. So that's one of the beauties of where these alternative investments are getting are going. Okay, let's just as sue myself. How am I charged? And how much am I charged? Again? Every

one of these platforms has a different model. Obviously with robin Hood, you know, with um with day trading, you had child shwab or e trade used to charge you nine dollars of trade and then robin Hood told you it was free and then we learned their free head another business model, right, So they all have their own business models. So I don't want to come across as all knowing because they all have different business models. But typically they're either going to charge you for the trade

let's call it ten bucks. They're going to charge you a percentage of the transaction let's call it, you know, three five percent, or they'll charge you in some other fashion, whether again it's a subscription, or they'll add a little bit of a spread without you even knowing, which is you know, maybe the person is willing uh to uh. You're willing to sell your shares for uh for thirteen,

the person is willing to buy them for fourteen. Um, all you need to know is you were willing to sell them for thirteen, but the fact that they charge the other person fourteen, it took the dollar. You don't

know the better, you know what I mean? So all all these all these platforms have their own business models and it's not um, you know, a single, single approach, which is also the opportunity for a platform like Vincent to again try to surface those differences, try to create that compare and contrast, because you know, data and transparency is what's going to create more uh investors that trust alternatives, which is just going to create more liquidity. It's gonna

be better for everybody. Okay, let's assume I invest or, I go through Vincent. There's enough information there for me to know how I will be charged when I sell. Yeah, so we do surface as much information as we can. We're constantly improving and I never want to say that

our five month old product is perfect. So if any users on this podcast, you know, feel like there's anything that could be improved, we always want to hear it, okay, but also getting it straight that you could have the originator and you and they could supervise trade or theoretically it could also be the originator and other platforms simultaneously that you might be able to trade your product on correct. Okay, we were talking about the verticals. You talked about collectibles,

tell us about some of the others. Sure, so there's real estate, like we mentioned, so, um, you know, real estate is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, alternative investment. Uh. The idea of you know, you have your primary residence, that's not an alternative investment, that's your

primary residence. But outside of your primary residence, there's a lot of people that say, you know what, you know, if you have some money, you should put it in real estate because real estate is a limited asset that goes up in price over time. And instead of holding out to cash, because cash over time with inflation, will devalue itself. Uh, if you put it into real estate, real estate often will stay in touch in line with inflation.

So a minimum, you'll be able to get the appreciation of that in your asset, and depending on the market, you might get further appreciation because of demand for your home, for that home or for that market. Okay, just to stay with real estate practically, if I want to invest in real estate today, then I literally investing in one building or do is it tend to be a group of buildings both? So on Vincent you can look at specific buildings. It could be Uh, there's residential buildings, there's

commercial build things, there's commercial offices. Uh, there's all kinds of office, there's all types of building types. Um. And that that's where I would call stop picking. I mean, it's not a stock, but it's just a metaphor. It's

just you know, you're doing the picking. Uh. There's also fun products where again, instead of you having to do all the diligence and research yourself as to whether this one specific deal is the right deal, you just know that you want to get some exposure to some real estate. You want to be able to take ten grands or a thousand dollars or you know, two hundred fifty dollars, and you want to be able to get that real estate exposure. There are fund products, and different platforms offer

different fund products. Some platforms offer only one fund product, some will offer several fund products and some don't offer any and you can choose. You can choose that as a filter on vincent okay, in this nascent market, because there have been any stories of an originator either going dark without telling anybody or walking away with the asset

um the short answers, I don't think so. I think the slightly longer answer to your question, because the question you specifically asked would mean that the originator was being completely completely negligible and negative, uh, you know, trying to

defraud the investor. Now, has there been some defaults where the originator genuinely tried to, you know, find an asset that would be paying let's call it rent, or that would be able to you know, have a nice yield of eight or ten percent or fifteen pent and for some reason the underlying uh assumptions didn't work out because the tenants weren't able to pay, or because of some default of something of that sort. That definitely has happened

in the industry. I think it happened a little bit more during the COVID crisis, right when it all popped in you know, March, April, May June. But in general, the percentages of any of those types of defaults are very limited compared to the overall market. Okay, some other verticals, so art art is a vertical, so literally you know, uh, like I mentioned buying a Picasso, buying a Warhol. Um. You know, there's a cool platform called Masterworks, uh that

you could check out there. Another one is digital, so crypto and digital assets. Okay, let's say that, because that's a deeper thing. Before that, what about uh fun fun funds that are essentially startups. You're investing in a startup? Tell us about that? Sure, so we call that venture. So inside adventure, there's you can invest into companies, individual companies and get equity from these small companies. Um. You could also invest into funds that invest into companies. Um.

And there's other types of funds that are available. So um. You know. Equity crowdfunding is really kind of the origin of a lot of this, the jobs that got passed. I was a part of that with the Obama administration and in seen it all went live. You know, you actually just saw the increase for equity crowdfunding. There was

one million. Many people are not familiar with this. Explain on a ground level, you know how what this actually means yeah, so, I mean basically, as part of the Securities Act nineteen thirty three, you create the sec and as part of that, there's this concept of an accredited investor that was created, which means that uh an investor had to meet some threshold of of intelligence or sophistication, which was determined by your salary or your net worth.

Uh So, uh if if you didn't have so, if you didn't have simply about a quarter million dollar salary or a million dollars in net worth, you're considered unaccredited. And if you're unaccredited, and the only way that you were allowed to participate in these investments if they were publicly solicited. The only investments that you could publicly solicit are things that are listed on the stock market, so on the you know, on the Nazadac or on the

New York's Doctric chains, et cetera. Things that were private listings were left for just the accredited folks. Um that all changed as part of the Jobs Act, saying that you know what, these folks that don't make that much money or don't don't have that much network really should

be allowed to participate, but let's limit their exposure. So what they decided was on the company side they can only raise up to one million dollars and on the investors side they can only invest up to ten thousand dollars.

Those limits got raised a few weeks ago actually, from one million to five million, so that when when live in sten got increased five years later UH to a five million dollar cap, which is a huge game changer actually, So now companies can raise up to five million dollars from what I would call the crowd the masses, from

anybody accredited or unaccredited UM, which is super exciting. And we have many platforms including Republic or we funder or others that are originators again on these types of deals and the deals that they focus on, are these venture UH funded companies. UM. Yeah, okay, So if I'm not accredited, how much can I invest? UM? I believe it's up to H I believe it's ten grand or up to ten percent of your income, whichever is greater. And who's

checking this it's right now. It's a great question. Right now. It's self accreditation. UM. So it's kind of like when you go on the websites and say that you're UM old enough to look at cigarette ads or you know, cigarette companies or alcohol companies, so you have to be honest and you know it's self accreditation and self reporting. Okay, now going to the topic you mentioned, Let's start on the back end, and if I mean, start on the front end the n f T s and then get

into cryptocurrency. Please explain what an n f T is. So, n f T is a non fungible token. UM. I guess for those that just saw Saturay Night Live, they just try to take their hack at explaining it. So all that it means it's a unique asset and it's specifically been tokenized, which just means that it's been digitally stamped that you can prove that this is what it is, uh and without doubt. And that's all on the blockchain. Let's ignore what that means on the blockchain. It's kind

of like saying it's a website on the Internet. Let's just understand the blockchain is tech whatever, UM and n f T is just way of saying that this is unique and it is what it says it is and there is no doubt about that. You know, we have similar concepts without using fancy words like n f T S even when we talk about like our house or

our fingerprints. You know, your fingerprint is different than my fingerprint, um, and we could just call uh, you know, it is unique and it is truly yours and the technology that yours is on is on skin, so it is what it is, that's your fingerprint. If anybody wants to prove that was you, they would have to prove that that match the exact fingerprint of what you have. And uh. Similar for me, I have a unique fingerprint that's uniquely me.

Uh and you know ours are difference and you know they might look similar at some level, but there is at the fundamental level there's something that's different about it and it could be proven um and yeah, so n f t s are then created. So that's a non fundible token and it's just you know, applied against all these various things right now and people are using it

towards artum. But you can really just think about of anything that you can prove that it is uniquely what it says it is, and uh, usually it is scarce. That's what makes the the non fungible tokens. It can't be like replaced if you take one piece of gold and another piece of gold and you trade them where you put them in two different hands, and you you know, you mix them around, you say which one was which. It doesn't really matter, right because gold is gold is gold.

As long as it's the same caliber of gold, they would be fungible, exactly exactly. But if you take you know, my fingerprinting, your fingerprint or me or you, I mean, I know we looked similar, but somebody says, who's who? I mean, there's only one of me and only one of you. Um, And that's what makes it a non

fungible token. Okay, Now all the excitement, sorry, sorry, So it's non fungible, and the token portion just means it's it's a technical jargon that it's on the blockchain and it's tokenized, which and recently there has been a lot of the ink, a lot of excitement and also a lot of sales about tokenization of certain items which would be rapidly and endlessly reproduced in the marketplace. There are sports clips, there is digital art. So let's start from

the beginning. And n f T could represent something physical and something not physical, correct, I mean, officially, the fact that it's token ized UM means that it's on a digital blockchain. But it could represent something that's physical, yes, but it would be the digital token. Um really is digital, right, So let's just say in the case of you know, selling, let's start with a sports clip. People are buying sports clips.

Tell me the thinking you're thinking about that. I mean, I'm a fan of NBA Top Shot, that's one of the things you're referring to. I'm a buyer. Um, you know, I love sports, I love trading cards. I've been buying trading cards. We even talked about Sandy Kofax, you know before, since I was a kid. So I really do see the the n f T version of sports cards with these videos and these moments as kind of a V two of sports cards. I see it as kind of

the next evolution. Uh, kind of like where you see Vinyl moving to c D C D S moving t MP three is whatever, It's just the next evolution. At the same At the end of the day, good music is good music. It doesn't matter what the tech is, right, So that's just my perspective. That said, NBA Top Shot I think is awesome because, um, it's just a new version of of sports cards. The the thing that you said that I'm not sure if you said it on purpose. I have to disagree with you said that it can

easily be replicated. Uh, for these videos, they can't be replicated. The same video could be seen on YouTube, but having that specific n f T where it's uniquely identified as that is the one, just like my fingerprint, cannot be replicated. So the fact that maybe there's you know, a Lebron James dunk that's really famous, and there's a moment that NBA top shot created and there's only ten of those dunks and you happen to get the first one of the ten or it doesn't matter. There's one out of

one and you have it. A lot of people are gonna want it because that's interesting. Now, can somebody get the Samisa video of that dunk on their phone, on their computer, on YouTube, on snapchat, on whatever? They absolutely can? Okay, I can I take a photo of Mona Lisa and show it to you. Absolutely can. All these things are possible, But the thing that is unique is the one that is uniquely stamped to say that is one of one

and we all want it. Where a lot of people want it, Okay, but we know with collectibles, whether it be baseball cards or automobiles, etcetera. There's a limited market and the price can fluctuate wildly. That's on physical assets. Basically, if you if you buy a sports clip, if there's not a market for it of people who want to buy that clip, essentially it is worth nothing other than to make you feel good that you own it. It's that you would say that was correct, correct, absolutely correct,

But that was true with anything. You know, if you buy a Masdamiata because you think it's a cute car and you hope to make a million bucks and then you find out there's no market, you know, it makes you feel good that you bought it. If you buy this moment on NBA top shot of of you know, Lebron James and one wants to buy it, then you

know the market is the market. And if everybody wants to pay you a lot of money for you're silly you know, uhum garbage patch kid, and then they all want to pay for that, you know, and if not they don't. I mean that's supply and demand. That's okay. We have the beanie baby situation. Let's just go one step deeper, because what is you know, creating all this

ink is people selling digital assets for enormous prices. Yeah, most people would say that the people paying enormous prices or people in the crypt the world glory made a lot of money in the crypto world. Do you think that is accurate or in accurate? I mean, I don't have uh facts, but my opinion is yes, there is a lot of money that is moving around U trying to diversify their ownership, um beyond you know, a certain amount of assets. You saw this in seventeen eighteen as well.

Uh in the rise of bitcoin, you saw these you know, second tier coins really start to pop because people didn't want to rely solely on Bitcoin as to where all their crypto gains were going. So you are seeing a diversification. You know that uh let's call it that wave popped and uh came down significantly. That's where the term ship coins came from because a lot of these you know turned to ship but uh, you know, come back to today, a lot of these coins that people thought were garbage

have come back really strong. And Bitcoin, which you know capped out just under twenty thou fell all the way down to three or four whatever and now is covering around sixty. So yes, it took a few years. Yes, you have to be patient. Um. So, I mean I think these things evolved. I think n f t s

will see a similar ride. So the short answers your question is, do I think that some amount of money that's coming into this market is because it's crypto money, that's you know, diversifying and just moving around their money. I think the short answer is yes, Do I think

that's the only market? No? Do I think there's new entrants into digital because of these moments, because of these n f t s. Because people are attracted to sports, people are attracted to collectibles, they're attracted to art, and it's an interesting way to enter into digital. Absolutely, I think this is just a good um marketing. You know what? Um, You know, Chilean sea bass was not always called Chilean sea bass. You know what it used to be called.

I know this story, but I can't remember what it used to be called. Padigoing in toothfish, you know. And then like the group that was in charge of selling Patty going intooth fish is like, Hey, we're not selling a Patty going intooth fish. Let's rename it. Who wants to buy a paddogoing intoothfish. Let's call itch land sea bass off the shelf, fly and fly and flying. So, you know, people called the bitcoin, people called the you know, shipcoins.

People called it protocols, people called it blockchain, all this other stuff. People were like, way nerdy for me, I don't get it, whatever, whatever, whatever. All of a sudden, you put it under wrapper of a sports clips, some art, some culturally relevant things. It's still on the same blockchain, you know. I mean, it's still like the same const Okay, but let's use bitcoin, which is the big cahuna here. Bitcoin you can actually Bitcoin is fungible, yep. You can

buy bitcoin and sell it. Okay, it is inherent you can invest in it. But theoretically it's a currency. Let's start there. What are your thoughts about digital currency? Irrelevant of whether someone invested in the volatility, is digital currency the future or what? Um? I mean? I think that our own currency, the US dollar, is already massively digital. To be clear, I don't remember the last time I touched a paper dollar. I haven't written actual checks with

paper in literally twenty years. So to me, I use my credit card, I scan my phone against those different sensors at whole foods. So to me, I'm already using a digital currency. It just happens to have, you know, less appreciation these days, especially in the world of the central bank being able to print money, which is being done so I don't have control over the you know, devaluing or valuing of the currency. So I appreciate something like bitcoin that has a limited set that cannot be printed.

More of it can be divided further. But I like it from that perspective, like I would think of gold, you know, as like a store of value. In terms of digital currency, I think that, um, you know all, like I said, I already think the U s D is highly digital, So I think that concept is a little abstract for me. Well, let me use Mark and Reesen's thought. Okay, he talks about trade. Then you get the bank in between the buyer and the seller in

a foreign countries. He specifically used the example of Africa and he said there's a lot of fraud in the system that digital currency would get rid of by taking out all those middle people. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Um to me, again, that's having a transparent ledger where it's very clear what is authentic and what is true and what has actually happened. And from that perspective, I love the blockchain. And that's where I think people are appreciating n f T s on the blockchain because was

this really what somebody said it was? Well, you don't have to worry about that. You know a lot of people are selling their sneakers on eBay or on go or stock x. One of the biggest concerns is are these really the sneakers people say they are? So should I be paying a hundred hours for these sneakers or because if they're really what you say they are, they should be so. A lot of these marketplaces usually one of the most valuable things they nail is trust. Airbnb

people trust it, you know, uh? YouTube now people trust uh? And I think blockchain helps to create trust. Okay, what about all the blowback about the energy costs of blockchain. I'm gonna admit I am not sophisticated enough, uh to understand all the details there um on on the energy level, But I mean, yeah, I think it's not a topic.

I'm great. Okay, Okay, Now that, as you referenced earlier, there are different digital currencies and you talked about Vincent playing in the crypto field or making that stuff available. The big cahuna once again is bitcoin, but all the n f t s tend to be Ethereum. So if I am on your platform, how do I decide or what can you tell me about investing in cryptocurrent? Yeah, so we're gonna have that as one of the six major verticals that you can click on. And again we're

not going to the pro level detail. You know, if you are five years into crypto, chances are Vincent is not where you're gonna learn more about crypto. Chances are you're gonna learn a lot more about the other five verticals because you're so knee deep in crypto. Um. But if you're a knee deep in real estate, you're probably not gonna learn a ton more about real estate, but you'll get more variety, but you'll probably learn about those

other places. Again, I think it's a great entry point for a lot of folks, and as it relates to crypto or n f T s, we're gonna tell you what are the platforms you can enter with. You know, we'll let you know about coin based, will let you know about what the uh the preliminary coins are, We'll

tell you about what n f T s are. We'll tell you about where your options are to be able to navigate that UM and we'll present you with individual options like actual individual offerings, or will tell you the platforms where you can go. UM And as a matter of fact, UH, digital uh assets and the n f T s have been one of the fastest growing assets because we actually have proprietary data that's unique literally to the world, where we're able to aggregate the interest across

the verticals. So what percentage of people are interested in real estate versus what percentage of people are interested in UM digital assets, what percentage interesting collectibles? No one else has that, and we're able to show those pie charts. We put that out once a month. UM. And you know, digital assets and crypto is the fastest growing market for

the last few months. UM. You know, we're very young, so we don't have that much data yet, but it's no surprise considering since New Year's you've really seen this n f T craze and UH, you know bitcoin stays

very high. One thing one thing you did say just to counter UM is yes, a lot of these n f T s are on Ethereum, but they're not all on Ethereum, including NBA top Shot, which is on flow Um their own protocol, and they specifically created the own protocol flow because of the challenges that they had with Ethereum when they previously came out with crypto Kiddies back a couple of years ago, and the congestion and all

the challenges, so they developed their own protocol. And now there's more n f T s and other companies building on that protocol. I do think you're gonna see more competition at the protocol level, uh for you know, uh protocols trying to win the love of these n f T markets. Okay, now you said there are six verticals on Vincent, could you list those? Yes? So there is real estate, debt, venture, art, collectibles, and crypto. Okay, now you're talking about the ability of the average person to

get into this marketplace. You know, in the last year or so, if not longer, the hedge funds who have traditionally been in this space have not been doing well, which would anger that maybe the average person should be suspicious or reluctant since the pros are not doing that well. Um, is there a specific question yes, The question would be if you look at the landscape, the people who traditionally beat the market where hedge funds. Right now, the hedge

funds are not beating the market. They are professionals. This is what they do twenty four seven. As an amateur with much less information at my fingertips, is this really a place where I should be or should I say I should be aligned with someone much more sophisticated. So there's a few questions there. Um. You know, it's hard to paint massively broad strokes on hedge funds. Um. Some hedge funds are probably doing very well. There are doing poorly.

I think COVID was the sort of black swan events that a lot of the models weren't able to plan for. You couldn't kind of, you know, check your analysis of what would this look like? So I'm gonna build a fund strategy like this. So you know, a lot of this is algorithmic trading. Uh that again, the algorithms weren't ready for the dynamics of COVID. UM. So I think

it's it's hard to paint broad strokes. I think that in the more recent market, for the last year plus, it's really been a stock pickers market, meaning a little bit more active management, not passive management. Uh. Some hedge funds are set up that way. Some are more just like, you know, just set in and forget it. Um. And in terms of ship, am I sophisticated enough for should I leave it to the hedge funds? To be clear, most of these hedge funds are participating in the public markets,

and the alternatives are not the public markets. I do think you're gonna see more and more institutional money move into the alternative markets. But because of UM, the lack of control by the hedge funds and all these other institutional players of alternative markets is where there is opportunities, uh, to be able to just be smart and try to you know, put some money where you believe it should go.

And it's not one of these things, where as the game stop investors would say that the system has already rigged against you where you have no chance to win because the institutions control it. I think the alternative markets are much younger because of that, there's much more opportunity, and to be fair, because of that, there's more risk,

which is why it's a higher risk prior reward market. UM. You know, I don't consider a gambling uh you know, on one side of the spectrum, but it's going to be more risky than you know, investing in the Dow thirty where you get some I don't know, some Caterpillar and some Coca Cola. Okay, going to the other side of the equation, since you've also functioned on this end, let's assume I'm a startup. Certainly twenty fifteen years ago, my goal was to get VC money. I'd start with

maybe agel investing in VC money. Do you believe if you're a startup that this is going to grow people using uh these platforms to raise money as opposed to vcs, and what are the advantages and disadvantages? Absolutely? So already with the five million dollar cap, So twenty was a

huge year for equity crowdfunding. I believe like double the previous year, and this year is supposed to be something like three four x of last year, specifically because the one to five million dollar increase plus the increased demand on the on the entrepreneur side and the investors side. So, just a few weeks ago when the markets changed from one million dollar cap to a five million dollar cap for the entrepreneurs in terms of how much limit they

could raise. You actually had an entrepreneur, the founder of gum road Um was able to on day one, right away raised five million dollars from about eight thousand investors in twelve hours. I mean incredible. Now, to be clear, this company was not started overnight. It was already several years old, had already has a significant following, already makes millions of dollars of revenue. But it's part of the creator economy, and they wanted to get their creators involved

as investors. So they opened it up to their creators and to the public, and they got funded really fast. To me, equity is the ultimate loyalty, and I think you'll see more and more of that from startups um as they try to navigate the early days of dilution. Some will go to vcs. There's benefits of that. You know, a single investor. Sometimes the VC is massively connected. Maybe they're an operator, they have a ton of experience, they can help you with wisdom, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes

they're just money. And if they're just money, what's better the three million from the just money VC or the three million from the crowd which comes with ambassadors, it marketing, some tweets, promotion, some love. Now what's the counter to that. I mean, if you're going into try to solicit one million, three million, five million dollars through equity Craftland, you have

to be public about it. That's the whole premise public, right, So you have to go out hat in hand and say, you know, public here, here's here's my company, here's what's going on. You've got to open the kimono a little bit, talk about what your revenues are, talking about what's going well, what's not going well, and they might not turn out to be a great result. And if you get publicly turned down, that's tough. You know, that's a risk that could be a risk to your actual business because that's

marketing that didn't go well. Also, it could be challenging to have to interact with that many investors. Um And, you know, do you want to deal with the overhead related to the you know, the follow ups, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, I believe overall the pros that weighed the cons But I do think these are decisions that people will make more regularly. Um And I think this will be an exciting evolution of our capital markets, especially for

these early stage opportunities. Let's switch gears completely telling me about the generation or the start of indie go Go. So basically you're saying I'm old, so we're gonna talk about another company now. Uh So yeah, we started Indigo Go in two thousand and six. We came up. Uh, we launched in two thousand eight, We launched at Sundance.

We started with film only. Uh. The idea back then, before the word crowd funding existed, uh, and before any of the platforms existed, was really you know, Uh, it was about the gatekeeper, right, who was the VC, who was the banker, who was the grant maker at the institution, Who was that person that you need to kiss their ring and hopefully get their stamp of approval? And there was that man or woman that they got to decide everything, or those five people that get to decide any everything.

But in a world of YouTube was starting to become interesting, why was it that you couldn't ask the crowd, you know, to fund you or not. We wanted to do what is now known as equity crowdfunding right away in two thousand and eight. The rules did not allow it because of the various regulations, and so we came out with this workaround, which is, you know, a perks or a donation based model where you get maybe a robot in return, a music album in return, a poster in return, a

T shirt in return, or a donation attacks deduction. Um. And we did that, uh and off to the races. So it's been a wild ride. Uh in you know, we then were able to navigate the Jobs Act as I mentioned before, and things have evolved quickly. But I'm happy to add more color wherever you think is appropriate. Okay, So it's cold indiego go like indie films. It uh is called indie go go like independent is where the term comes from. It wasn't specifically because of indie films. Um.

It was more of the independent spirit that was the concept. Um. But we always knew like Amazon was going to be for everything. But started with books. We try to take a play out of Bezos playbook, which is starting one vertical to get product market fit. So we started with film. Uh. So we tried to get better product market fit first there and then we evolved into everything. Okay, from a layman's viewpoint, there were two entrants in the marketplace and

still two big ones today Indiego Go and Kickstarter. From your viewpoint, who came first? Who innovated first? Uh? Because there are similarities and differences. Well, it's not exactly from my viewpoint, we could just ask way back machine the facts we were first. That's not exactly an opinion. Uh. Kickstarter came about a year a little over a year later, about a year and a half. H Kickstarter did lots

of great things. They brought a lot of amazing design, did a lot of good curation in terms of good product projects. Um. I thought it was great historically to be able to both compete and both in prove for the backers the funders uh product that everybody likes, um and to be fair. Over time, there were more entrance that came in, right, you have go fund me, uh comes in and does a really great job in the

cause and nonprofit space. And then Patreon comes into and Patreon h comes in late focused much more on the creator. You know. I think they just raised was it today? I think that at four billion dollar valuations? God bless them. So um yeah, I mean the concept of crowdfunding has really been abstracted quite a bit. Um. But yeah, I guess you know, when I'm old, I get to at least appreciate that pretty much. You know, we helped start

the entire movement in January. Okay, so when you have Kickstarter. Just talking about those two companies, Kickstarter and indiego go, are they relatively the same size? Is one larger than another today today? Yeah? So there pretty similar? I think. Um, you know, indie goog focuses very much on the entrepreneur,

and I would say that Kickstarter focuses more on the creator. Uh. There are certain verticals that indie googo doesn't focus on that Kickstarter does very well in UM for example, like gaming, uh and some other verticals. But in the side the verticals that indigogo focuses on, UM, we're definitely very large and doing very well. Okay, And to what degree are you still involved? I mean I'm definitely involved. I'm on the board, a large shareholder to say the least, and

still very much care how my first child does. I actually have uh, two human children now, one is five and a half and one is almost three. But I know what it's like to raise them, and I know what it was like to raise indie go go s indi Gogo is definitely still the first child, so definitely involved. You know, we put in a great CEO, a senior executive from Reddit. Uh. Indie Googo is doing really well. We've been growing significantly. Covid was actually a major tailwind

kind of like Etsy uh and Amazon. You saw a lot of that um demand for digital as well as kind of unique things, and we saw that demand come to Indiegogo and we're actually profitable and we've been profitable for a while. Okay, but Kickstarter is basically going to limit I don't want to use the wrong technology, but they're not talking about ultimately selling it, etcetera. What is the indie go go viewpoint? I mean, I can't comment on what Kickstarter does. I'm not on the board there.

But Indiegogo, you know, uh, like I mentioned, we're profitable, we sustainable, get to you know, run our own future, and you know, we still want to figure out what we're gonna be when we grow up. As long as we have customers that like using us and we're improving the product, we'll keep on looking to serve the market. Where we're geriatric in the Internet time, we're like thirty, but you know, it's a game of musical chairs and

there are fewer chairs and they're ever reducing. So theoretically Indiego Go could go public and you could have a big pay day. Theoretically, anything is possible. Okay, well I've been Kickstarter. I'm pretty sure they said no for them. So let's talk about you. So where did you grow up? I was born in Belarus in Minsk, which is uh former Soviet Union. Um. And then I was born in seventy eight. Came over when I was six months old with my parents and my brother to Brooklyn. We lived there.

So I'm a Jew, so that's the wait. Wait, wait, just because I'm interested, how did your family get out of Belarus? Because it wasn't so easy then? Right, So we're Jewish and um, you know Belarus and the Soviet Union wasn't too excited about keeping their Jews, so they were open to letting the Jews go. Um. So we were part of that wave, and my dad put our name into the lottery, uh and we won the lottery. Um.

You know, winning as a relative concept. To be able to leave without anything, and to be an immigrant with nothing except for the clothes are on your backs and come into Brooklyn, Brooklyn and seventy nine and then the eighties, the Giuliani eighties, which referring to get to the Giuliani eighties, What did your father do for work in Belarus and

then what did he do in Brooklyn? Yes, so I have really great parents, smart parents, which actually just shows how much Russia didn't care about Jews because they let go of a mechanical engineer. Uh. And my mom is a doctor. So two of the two main professions that the Soviet Union wanted, which was engineers and doctors, they let go of two of those folks. Um and Yes, so my dad became an engineer again. Um in Brooklyn. Uh. He actually didn't know English. He learned English by watching movies.

He learned German in Russia, so he didn't study English in Russia. My my mo, they're actually studies some English back in Russia. She had to retake her certification, so she was a certified doctor in Belarus, and then she had to be re certified in English, which I can't even fathom that concept. That's kind of like graduating college and then having to do it again in another language as bananas while she had two kids. Um, so we were in Brooklyn until I was seven. Then my mom

got her residency. Go ahead, No, so she did pass those boards, she sure did. Okay, so you're saying you were in Brooklyn til your seven. She had a residency. So she got her residency in northeast Pennsylvania in a scrant Wilkesburg area. So we all moved to Scranton as part of that. Um. And Uh, my dad then um got cancer and when I was in high school, and he died when I was in high school, and I then went to penn I went to Wharton Underground a

little bit slower. So you went to public school? Yeah, so I went to private school. I went to Hebrew Private School in Brooklyn, and then I went to Hebrew Private Day School, uh in Pennsylvania through eighth grade. Um, I was going to go to a private secular school for high school like my brother did. Um, But because my dad died of cancer, we were, uh, you know, struggling more with cash and trying to make sure that things were able to work out. So we decided I

would go to public school for for high school. Right. So what was it like? Because I certainly went to high school being the new kid in high school with the first name Slava. Uh. It was challenging. It was challenging. I mean when I was a new kid to the high school for my district was like, I don't know, Italian and literally a Catholic. Um. So um, yeah, it was challenging. I mean Slava was one thing. It was actually more challenging to be Jewish, to be perfectly frank,

uh no one. I mean, at least in my school, being a Jew was uh, I don't know. I might as well have been a dinosaur, uh, like something that they saw in the movies, like on Jurassic Park. And it was an interesting experience. Um. You know, I just navigated. I had to deal with uh, some anti Semitism, but overall, I mean I think it was fine. Um. And you know, I graduated Valuatorians, so that I had some pros and cons. Pros being like, you know, it's nice to finish top

of your class. Cons that you know, people kind of knew that I was smart, and it's not always the best thing to do to be like smart as part of your coolness factor in high school. You know, I did buffer that a little bit with being an athlete. I and call myself a jock, but I did play football, basketball, and tennis. Um so, uh, you know, I just rolled with the punches and sometimes that included punches, but uh, it's all good, Okay. So if you were the valedictorian.

I grew up in the Jewish family, but a couple of generations were moved from Russia. Uh, and there was a lot of parental pressure to do well in school. Did you have that same pressure, believe it or not. No. Um, I find it fascinating how the results came about. But you know, my parents were too busy surviving and being entrepreneurs themselves. And when I say the word entrepreneur, I don't mean in vocation. I mean in just navigating life.

So they had so many risks and had so many problems to navigate on their own to make it seem like life was okay for their kids that I don't think they had like enough capacity to like over focus on you need to get an A plus. That doesn't mean they were okay with like a D minus coming in on the report card, but it was kind of like, hey, hey, you know you're studying, you doing your work. You're doing

your work, you know. Um, so yeah, I don't really remember getting like, you know, uh really like helicoptered over me. I think my brother, who was four and a half years older, probably did have more than that. Um. And I'm the younger child. So you know, the more children you have, the later the child, the less you know, the parents care. Uh as I smile, but um yeah. And then by the time i'm um, you know, already in high school, sorry, in late grade school and then

high school, you know, my dad's already getting cancer. And you know, that's three really rough years. There's no focusing on my grades when that's happening. So, uh, you know, I was kind of like, I just thought it was important for me to be educated, try to have a good future. Okay, what is your brother do today? Uh? So my brother works for City Bank. Okay, so you have two kids, they're young. Let's say your kids said they didn't want to go to college. That be okay

with you. I mean generically, that's totally fine with me. Um. I think college, as you know, a structure is evolving. So yeah, I I don't really have an issue with that. I do have an issue with them not getting educated and being like responsible adults and of high integrity and

being able to be good decision makers. I think that UM, with information coming to our fingertips in every direction and having the simple facts or the calculus being figured out for us by computers, being able to navigate morality and ethics and decision making is me really important. Whether that requires college or not, I'm not sure, but I would want them to be, you know, well educated and ready for life as become grown ups. Okay, so you go to Penn, and you go to Wharton, So you go

in knowing that you want to study business. Yeah, I mean I started UM buying and selling trading cards. Going back to the early parts of our discussion, when I was a kid. I'm talking like, you know, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, Like I was already buying basketball cards and trying to buy them for four dollars and try to sell them for ten dollars at the malls or at the hotels or at these like shows. And I was like a little kid, and I loved getting these magazines. Um, you know,

Beckett and Tough Stuff. Beckett still exists, you know, thirty years later, but Beckett and Tough Stuff, and you know, you can only get these magazines once a month, and they would tell you the price went up or went down once a month, and the arrow was up or down or flat once a month. Can you imagine that we're asking if we could get liquidity within a millisecond, like Robin, I'm talking about once a month. So I mean, like, um, yeah,

I loved it. Back then, I went into this high school program where they asked you to create this kind of poster about yourself as part of the summer program and what you want your future to be, and as part of my future I I put in the poster. I was like, I want Wharton to be part of my future. This was already while I was in high school, and you know, I was lucky enough to get into Warden, which was great. But even back then, I thought I

wanted to be involved with business. You know, I thought I was gonna be more of a um Wall Street the movie, like a banker Gore and Get Go type, you know, try to take some of the negative out of that. But I thought that's what I wanted to do. But then what I slowly learned is that's that's not

actually who I want to be. I want to use the capabilities of business the capabilities of decision making a math and you know how you create value, uh, to navigate, Uh, you know, trying to create you know, positive things in the world, which you know turned out to be me being a strategy consultant for eight years. Um, so yeah, I never really became one of those like investment bankers

or that type of role. I mean, I have investment bankers that are nice people and friends of my but I decided, as part of you know, getting what I wanted, I decided that wasn't what I wanted, if that makes sense. Okay, so you're in Warden in retrospect. Uh did you learn something or was it more you got a diploma? Oh, Wharton was great. I mean it was super super difficult. I mean, I'm like fairly intelligent. There was way more

intelligent people have Warden. I mean I brought the S A T. I would scored down for sure, but the good and the bad about word. It's no fooling around. It's not like some liberal arts school where hopefully you get an A or not, like most of the classes

are on a curve massively competitive. You know, Uh, if the highest scores of sixty and you've got a fifty nine, and then you've got a great grade if if everybody's got a ninety eight and you got a ninety seven, and then you're left so like everything was competitive and you weren't competing. You know, you weren't six ft eight playing against five ft nine's. You're everybody's pretty solid. So um, I I loved it. Mean you have to always be sharp.

You're surrounded by really smart people, really creative people. I mean the you know my class, and I'm sure pretty much all the classes can say this, but you know my graduating class as incredible results, I mean founders of PayPal, etcetera, etcetera. I mean great stuff LinkedIn whatever, lots of cool stuff. Okay, So what's the difference between going to graduate school and Wharton and being an undergraduate? That's a great question. It's a great question only because I'll have fun with this.

See a lot of people say they went to Wharton and they actually went to the business school, which is the graduate school, which you know, I say this with a smile because we're on audio, which is way easier to get into than it is for the undergraduate degree. See an undergraduate degree. Wharton is the only IVY with an undergraduate degree in business. So you can't get an undergraduate degree in business from Princeton or from Harvard or

from whatever. So uh so, if you want a quote unquote Ivy League degree, but you want a business degree, Waren is the only game in town. So it's massively competitive to get into. I'm pretty confident there's no way I would get into it today if I applied today, because the caliber is just ridiculous. Um. But yeah, I really enjoyed it. Um. I thought it was a great experience. I personally love competition. I grew up with sports. My dad taught. You know, my dad was great at sports.

He taught the US sports. I love the idea of winning and losing. I think losing and failure is pinnacle to being educated. Um So yeah, I really enjoyed all the team projects at Wharton, as well as all the competitive energy and everything surrounding. So what did you actually

learn there other than the competition? I mean a majority of your degree is actually pretty similar to your neighbor, which is you're getting the accounting one on one and one or two, the finance one on one, the you know, the writing that this to that, and then you specialize with you know, your focus areas. So I did to focus areas. I did a finance focus area. I was a double major, so finance and entrepreneurial management, which basically

means I already knew I liked entrepreneurship. But most people, you know, what's happening, Warren, is you're getting like the exact same degree and then personalized, which I like to joke around. Some people go their vocation. They want to be a plumber, so they go to learn how to be a plumber. We go to learn how to be a business person. I mean they're just like spitting out business people. And I say that in the nicest way possible. And then so you graduate from Penn and then you

were talking about the UH. You had a different job before Indiego go. Yeah, I graduated two thousand. I was a strategy consultant for UM uh seven just under eight years for who And what was that experience? Like, yeah, it was great. Um it was for Diamonds. So now I diamond was bought by p WC, so it's a consulting firm. But I got to work at the UH, you know, at the most senior levels at huge companies as a consultant helping companies navigate their biggest decisions about

how to plan for the future. UM. More specifically, I worked with companies like FedEx, I worked with Goldman sachs Uh. I worked with others that are not able to name, like large telecom companies. But like a really fun exercise UM that I was a part of in the early two thousand's is we work for a telecom company, a

very large telecom company. And at the time, in the early two thousands, if the folks can remember, everybody was talking about the last mile Internet, and they were saying, D a seller cable is a D A seller cable, which one's gonna win? And everybody's trying to sign a D sell or cable. It's kind of like you know, Beta, VH at whatever. And UM. They asked us, They're like, well, we know we need to deploy a ton of money against one of these, so can you tell us is it,

you know, D sell or cable? And we did the analysis and I'll just fast forward word. But this is early two thousands, okay, so we don't even have the iPhone yet, okay, And we told them we actually think wireless internet is going to be an interesting way to deliver last mile internet. They said, no, no, the question was dsllor cable. It's not that hard. We're paying you millions of dollars. All you have to say is AIRB and we're good. And we said wireless internet is probably

where things are headed. And they said again, just DSL or cable or we're not paying you your fees. And we're like, well, we think it's be wireless internet. And they said, how can it be wireless inet? And we said, well, you know, some smart people were able to figure out how to take you know, the spectrum of the signal for um, your video and now they give you Internet through that cable. Well, those same smart people are going to figure out how to take the signal from your

cell phones and they're gonna put Internet on it. And that's that's gonna be really too difficult. And the amazing thing is, like about seven years later, I remember like that first commercial. I think it was like two eight

maybe two thousand nine. There's like that commercial where there's this guy who's walking through the swamp and he's holding his laptop above the water of the swamp and he has like a little dongle that's connected into the complete the laptop and he's like using the Internet with the dongle and I was like, oh my gosh, somebody's actually doing this wireless internet. Here you go. I mean obviously now you know, kids don't even understand what it means

to not have Internet on your phone wirelessly. That's just like water, right, It's it's more important than water. So yeah, I used to do that, so trying to predict five to seven years out where companies should be trying to aim their huge tankers because it's not always easy to be nimble. Um. So yeah, that's what I did for for a while and it was great learning because I got to learn corporate structure. I got to manage folks.

I got to see how to make big decisions and that was really helpful to building indiego Go and then now Vincent. So how did you decide to leave? What was the first thing you did as after you left? Well, I always wanted to be entrepreneurial. I just never had

the gut instinct on what to do. And then finally my two co founders, Eric din In I came up with the idea for indiego Go and then parallel processed building indiego Go while working at Diamond for all of two thousand seven and then January one, I officially went full time on on on indie goo go. Um. I was excited, you know, um, as much as being in

the services industry is great. And when I mean by that, you know, being a lawyer, a banker, a consultant, et cetera, being able to be an operator and actually making something and bringing you know, a turning air into reality and bringing something to the world is really like so fun, just so awesome. It's also like massively difficult, but it's so great. And when you started indigogo, would you do for money? Um? So we purposely planned, the two co founders and I to use our own savings up front,

so I purposely saved. Um. We actually got rejected by nine three vcs in a row because the market crashed at the end of two thou and the fall. We definitely didn't predict that, so we definitely ran out of money. You know, I was paying to work for three years pretty much, so that was not a good paying job about r o I. But in the long run, it all worked out because it got me to the results on that today and it's all good. I like to

think long term. Often their short term pain or short term obstacles, and usually the things that are the most valuable or will give you the most return will require a little bit more of that long term view, and some challenges you need to overcome. And in those three years, how many times did you save yourself? We should pack this in. I should go back to the other world just one time, just one time, very seriou. It was middle of two thousand nine. It was already very dark.

Crash of two thousand eight was rough. It was pretty clear we weren't going to get institutional funding. It was pretty clear that we now have run out of our savings of the three founders, and it was pretty clear that the only ones we have to rely on are the three of us. There's no hiring anybody, there's no asking anybody for some money. There's only just brute force. Do we want to not get paid and keep on working on this until it works? And I remember we

had this conversation where we all set to ourselves. Listen, you know, it's pretty rough. I like to joke around that I was thinner back then because I couldn't afford much food and um, we just said maybe we should get part time jobs so we could sustain ourselves a little bit better while we work on our actual gig and for better or worse. I was very adamant. I was like, listen, the second we step out part time, we're done. So if we want to do part time,

we might as well just close. And the argument was like, no, no no, no, we want to do part time so we could sustain doing what we want to do. And I was at him and it was like, listen, either we're in or we're out. And we're out, it's cool, we're done, but if we're in, it's only full. There is no part And how long how long after that conversation did it start to turn around? Um? Look, we made some kind of last stand sort of moves. We made some major product moves, we opened up the entire site.

There's really three things we did. Um, but yes, a few months after that things started turning around, and before you know it, we saw real growth. And we didn't have the opportunity to just fool around with monetization, like, oh, it's not necessary right now, we're just trying to grow. We were monetizing right away because we wanted money and I was really helpful, and um are It's funny. Our corporate council at indigogo is actually the same corporate council

that I originally hired back in two thousand seven. And he always jokes around. He's, you know, very senior lawyer now at a firm, and and he jokes around, he's like, you know, all my other clients that were of your size in the market crash of two eight, none survived past a few years. You were the only ones, the only ones. And he always ask me, I still don't understand how you guys survived, And I was like, it's easy. They all ran out of money. We had no money,

so we could not run out of it. Okay, so it becomes successful. How did you decide to walk away on a day by day basis? So you know, we're continued to build and grow. Um, we are continued to innovate. And then a few years ago, you know, I started about eight years ago Angel Investing, and I have really loved it. I really love entrepreneurs. I like working with entrepreneurs, even if I don't make a dollar, just because I feel like any one entrepreneur has an opportunity to change

the world. So why not stack the odds in our favor for for Earth and just like get as many entrepreneurs as successful as possible. And I've really enjoyed the experience. I've had some really good results. And my friend and I from Penn said to you know, he's been doing a great job angel investing as well, and we just said, wouldn't it be cool if we took all of our learnings and of our operator knowledge and our network and try to pay it forward onto like, you know, the

next wave of entrepreneurs. So we decided to build a venture fund, and so we launched that in eighteen and that was part of stepping away. Also, indie goog was really hitting more of a steady state, add more zeros type of business. And while adding more zeros is great and amazing and the world needs more zeros, and you know, people making more money needs more zeros. Um I like zero to one and innovation and taking air and turning

into reality. So I was just looking for a little bit of the next challenge and putting in the right leaders so that I can you know, start this fund with my friend Cyrus. Okay, so you started the vc fund with how much money. Our first fund is thirty million dollars three zero and we it's a vintage. So we're now seventeen portfolio companies in and it's going quite well. Okay, So if you have seventeen companies, so the big example here is soft Bank, their hit the ship ratio is bad.

They have these master failures, but they have these massive success successes for those who are unsophisticated. If you have seventeen companies, realistically, how many do you have your hopes on that are going to make the whole investment worth it? Well, I mean different vcs have different approaches how they navigate that.

There's more the spray and prey much smaller dollar amounts and have as a diverse portfolio as possible to really play that lottery and play those actual real sciences around the statistics. Others, you know, have more concentrated positions where they really are trying to have more hits, as you say, but maybe each of the hits doesn't have to be as big, but you want to have a higher hit ratio.

For us, uh, we're more consolidated. I mean only seventeen, which is not that many for an early stage and because our funded so small thirty million. I mean small as a relative concept. If one of these companies, if we have a decent amount of ownership decent again is all relative. If one of these companies is worth a few billion, I mean we could have massive returns. Okay.

So from the outside, living through this whole uh Internet explosion, you know, the middle of the nineties, everybody gets a O well and they start playing online. Then there's high speed and ultimately uh the internet wirelessly as you say, but there was a new company, Like every month, there was a new thing, okay, and then ultimately we hit a big level of consolidation that we have a handful of large companies obviously, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Has you seen a concombinant? Can commonant decrease in the number of entrepreneurs or the number of successes? I think, um, I think the actual fact is yes, I think the number of entrepreneurs is going down, um, But I think that includes a lot of these small businesses entrepreneurs. I think the number of tech entrepreneurs UH in total is growing. But and I think the number of UM positive results is growing. So it all depends on what lends you're

looking at. I do think that. You know, when we have that new wave of Internet innovation in the late nineties, it was just such a huge movement of so much technology and so much opportunity. I do think blockchain is offering directionally something like that. I don't think it's quite as big of a shift, but I do think you'll get there. I think, like, uh, the late nineties, there was a lot of garbage that we don't remember today.

There's a lot of companies that we probably can't even remember where they fit on the rolodex of index cards of whatever alphabet soup. But we also got Amazon and other amazing companies. So are there going to be game changing companies that we live with ten years from now that are fairly young right now? Absolutely are all the companies that are talking about n f T are crypto or blockchain or whatever fancy technology. I mean, we haven't

even talked about DNA sequencing. We haven't even talked about I mean, there's so many things right um, Innovation will continue, Companies will continue to improve the world, and they'll create you know, enterprise value and wealth as part of it. That is without a doubt. What often happens is people expect the things to have quicker than they do in the short term, and they're surprised how quickly they happen

in the long term. I understand that. Okay, in terms of consolidation, I mean, brad Stone wrote a whole book about Amazon with diapers dot Com. You know, they forced them to sell and then they ultimately go out of

the diaper business. You have them, You have Facebook buying what'sapp before people in Washington, d C. Even know what it is, and they certainly buy Instagram as a VC and as new companies that us be imposing that must say, hey, we got to find our direction otherwise one of these big companies will either put us out of business or force us to sell them to them. Yeah, it's imposing, for sure, But you know, you need to live out

of respect, not fear. So if you don't respect your competition, if you don't understand the landscape, don't understand the situation, then you're destined to just fail. If you live out of fear from even starting because of course Amazon will just crush me, or of course Google will just crush me, then what's the point. You might as well just not start. Um. You know a lot of the key to succeeding is just putting one ft in front of the next and

continue to make progress. And the truth of the matter is, while these huge companies are amazing and great, and I'm a shareholder of a lot of them because they're public, and I've been invested in them for a while because I think a lot of them are great companies. Um you know, they're also big, huge companies now that are slow and not nimble. So that's why there's all these opportunities for these nimble startups that continue to crush it. You know, we're about to see coin base go public.

I mean, what is gonna be that valuation? Honestly, it's gonna be absolutely obnoxious. I mean I'm quite confident it's gonna be over a hundred billion dollars. So where was Where was Google? Where was Amazon? Where was Facebook? They could have all built it right and it happened right underneath their noses. Okay, So what are the seventeen companies or what are they? What areas are they working in

that you've invested in? Um So, we love health tech because of my partners Cyrus who helped build SoC doc. We love marketplaces because again my experience with Indie Gergo, and we love Frontier Tech, which is kind of cutting edge technology companies run by technologists. Now we're generalists, so we have all kinds of different companies, but I'm happy to give you a few examples. So one is Galileo. So Galileo is from Tom Lee, who built One Medical

Group One Medical when public about a year ago. Um. And you know, Tom is a serial entrepreneur, massively successful, and he's really taking the best of telehealth and bringing AI to medicine and putting almost like a doctor in your pocket that you can have a subscription to telehealth for you know, a minimal cost and then helping to uh minimize costs as part of how he's sending folks to your home so to minimize referrals or emergency room

needs anyway. So we were lucky enough to get in super early with Tom's most recent company, Galileo, and they're doing incredible off to the races. So that's one example. Another one in that space would be like Peak get Peak today dot com. So they're doing direct to consumer for testosterone on health. So a lot of men have low testosterone, which is an issue on many levels. So

it's a chronic condition. They're able to get the blood tests writing your home, have the doctor consoles, and then provide the relevant medications, et cetera, all through your home, which is super interesting. Now in terms of a marketplace, obviously we talked about Vincent. Vincent, Uh, you know, is the alternative investments marketplace, an aggregator. Another interesting company is Shadow,

which is helping to end lost starting with lost Dogs. Uh. They started in New York City and now they're in many different zip codes all around the country. And they're really just taking another slice out of Craigslist, where Craigslist has been sliced and diced into incredible unicorn companies, whether it's you know, truly for real estate, whether it's um match dot com for dating, whether it's Airbnb. But one of those things that people still use Craigslist for is

lost and found. So Shadow is helping to end that. We have an interesting director consumer company in the furniture space called Burrow so Uh Burrow bu r r o W. You know they came out of pen as well. Uh. We got to invest in them when they were doing under three million dollars of revenue for the year and you know this past year they did way more than that, meaning like over fifty million dollars, which is absolutely incredible. UM. And then on the frontier tech side, you know, we

have some super geeky companies which I love. Uh. One is made bot, which is a commercial vacuum cleaner, but where robotics meets AI. I like to call it. If Tesla built a vacuum cleaner, this will be it for commercial cleaning, so for hotels, for malls, for airports, et cetera. They definitely had a dark day when covid started because all their customers were literally hit by COVID. But now that we're slowly getting on the other side, the demand

for their product is higher than ever. And then another is chef Robotics, so they're bringing AI and robotics to augment how food gets deployed, whether it's at a food manufacturing facility or potentially at a quick service restaurant like a Sweet Green or a Chipotle. So really trying to augment the human interaction there to make sure you're getting exactly what you wanted. Um, no extra germs uh and no extra you know, food that you didn't want in there.

So everything is super cleanly clean, and um, you know done a significant scale. So that's a few examples. If those are great, So let me ask you, do you ever want to get in on a deal and someone else they go with a different company? So do I ever lose out on an investment because somebody else gets it instead of me? Yes, that does happen. I would say, if that didn't happen, it means I'm not trying hard enough. Um, Luckily,

it doesn't happen that often. Actually, quite the opposite is happening, which is the deals are already closed or they're about to close, and then we're getting allocation at the very end. Because we're bringing something very unique between Cyrus, myself and our network of advisors. We're really bringing experience from inception of starting a company all the way to having significant

enterprise value and unicorns. There's not that many people that actually have that experience from all the way from inception to significant enterprise value. There's a lot of people that have started inception to seeing some value, and there's a lot of people that have joint companies at some value and seeing them become rocket ships to be worth tons of money. But to go from the very beginning all the way through is not that normal. A lot of

that is isolated in Silicon Valley. It's starting to spread out more. But we built out our fund in New York and a lot of people value are you know, operator experience. So we're very straight shooters with our New York approach. Um, so, yes, does it happen? It definitely has happened. Am I sad? Definitely sad? Do I ever like losing? I prefer not. I mean the sports you know player in me, uh doesn't like losing. But it just means that we got to keep on refining our

craft and keep getting better. Okay, so if you invested in seventeen, how many did you pass on? A lot? Okay, we'll leave it h that. So talking about Vincent to what did we are you personally hands on? Yeah? I'm very involved. I'm one of the four founders. Um I think you said I'm chairman, so I'm executive chairman. So

I'm definitely involved every day. I actually know what it's like to run a company, you know, like I mentioned, from from inception to large growth at CEO and I knew that, um, you know, having somebody there with me as the day to day CEO, having a great CEO. Having a great CTO is really important to me. Um, so I'm really excited about the team. It's a killer

team with you know. For example, our CTO was the lead engineer at Mirror that just sold a Lulu lemon for half a billion, so he was hand soldering the product together and pulling the software together with team. Um my CEO was the guy who wiped build my investing business at Indigogo, so has the perfect background to be building this business. And then my CEO is a serial

entrepreneurial multiple exits, so really first class team. Uh. The whole team is four founders, two engineers to additional engineers, and a designer. So only seven people right now, but um, you know there's lots of experience and lots of scale out of that team. Okay, are you doing any marketing? How are people finding out about Vincent or do you want to keep it on the down low while you work out the kinks. No, we're definitely marketing. We mostly just go on the bob left that's to show and

just try to do the podcast as often as possible. No, we're definitely doing marketing. I mean, for us, we're doing a lot of content Uh, and we're trying to educate folks. So we're putting out a newsletter that everybody should sign up at called the Pulse Newsletter. Once a week, you get the best information across the entire spectrum of alternam investing. It's usually about ten to twenty pieces of content all in one place, which people love. Uh. We're creating our

own blogs, at least one every two days. We're doing our own clubhouses. We're creating our own proprietary reports, which we're putting out once a month. We're putting out a new one tomorrow. Obviously I don't know when this is gonna go live, but on April eight we will have who knows the archive, we'll be having a new report drop as to how March by the numbers for all

the entire alternative investments market was. So yeah, we're definitely marketing and we're trying to use education and content as the number one approach for sure. Now, if you look at similar aggregators or the business model might not be the same. But we look at travel, we had you know, Kayak, we have Orbits. Never mind consolidation thereafter, do you have a competitor in this field? You believe that there will

be competitors. Is there a first mover advantage? Um? So, I mean there's not really, uh any competitors that have any scale. Um. You know, like I mentioned, only five months old, so I would say we're not even that relevant yet. But we're trying to become relevant quickly. We're growing quickly. The numbers are adding up fast, which is awesome,

and users are enjoying their experience. But like I tell any of my entrepreneurs when they say I have no competition or I expect no competition, if you have no competition and you expect no competition, it's because you're going after our market. That's irrelevant. So so for sure we will have competition. Just like with Indiegoga, we navigated competition, and when you have competition, it means there's something to compete for. So I look forward to that, and it

means that we're going after something that's awesome. Okay, Slava, this has been great. I could talk all day to you and go into all the nooks and creaties have a lot more questions, but I think we'll leave it in that for now. Thanks so much for doing this, Thanks for having me so fun. You bet until next time. This is Bob left sits h