Redefining How To Track Your Investment Portfolio | Ft. Litan Yahav of Vyzer

Hello, future billionaires. Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. We've got a really cool episode for you today. I interviewed Latanya Hoff, who is the co-founder of Vizer, and really cool story. So Latanya is actually a tech entrepreneur who sold a company and had a liquidity event and had to learn how to turn that liquidity into investments and create an investment portfolio. And he really did a lot in real estate in the kind of private alternative space. And we talk about that journey of kind of how he went from, you know, buying some rentals to investing more passively in syndications, kind of how he views, you know, risk working with other operators versus doing things actively and kind of the trade-off of the return on your time in doing that. And then he actually ended up, as he's building his own portfolio, seeing some of the challenges of creating more work as he's doing more investments, trying to consolidate all the information, tracking performance. And he ended up building another software platform called Vizer, which we talk about. And it's really cool. It's designed for high net worth investors that are investing in syndications and to kind of be a one-stop shop to be able to have a a simple consolidated view of all the investments you're making in the private alternative space and actually creating some really cool transparency in the, in the space. So you definitely want to check out this episode if you're just getting into investing in syndications or you have been for a long time. A lot of invaluable insights that he shares and a really cool platform you're going to want to check out. So we've got some links down in the show notes so you can check it out. Hope you enjoy this episode. This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors. Looking for passive investments done for you? With Aspen Funds, we help accredited investors that are looking for higher yields and diversification from the stock market. As a passive investor, we do all the work for you, making sure your money is working hard for you in alternative investments. In fact, our team invests alongside you in every deal, so our interests are aligned. We focus on macro-driven alternative investments, so your portfolio is best positioned for this economic environment. Get started and download your free economic report today. Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. I am your host, Ben Fraser, and very excited to bring our guest on today, Natan Yahav, who is the co-founder of Vizer, which I'm super excited to talk about, which is an automation and a platform for passive investing. And their whole motto is keeping passive investing passive, which is awesome and excited to dive into what that means. But Lathan, thanks for coming on to the show.

Thanks, Ben. I'm super excited to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

Yeah. So we actually connected just a few months ago at another conference, and I heard you present, tell about your story and share about this really cool platform that you're building. Yeah, I was like, man, I got to get him on our podcast because this is so interesting. I think it'd be really valuable. So before we kind of get into all that stuff, let's— I want to hear your background and kind of how did you get to where you are now? It's a fascinating story. So share a little bit of that.

Where to start? So personal background, I'm 41, married, I have 3 kids, born in the States. When I was 9 years old, my parents took us on a trip around the world. First stop was Israel. Then they said, we're staying here. And we've basically been in Israel ever since. Not the best time to talk about what's happening. Just bad all over the place. But I mean, that's a whole different podcast, whole different conversation. So anyway, grew up in Israel, served in the Navy for 6 years, then went to school and founded a startup my last year of college. And I was, you know, in Israel at 24. I went to college and I founded this, and I was 28, in a very weird industry. We built a machine and technology for photographing diamonds in 3D, and that went well, scaled it, and sold the company in 2015. Where we, we had our first like windfall and, and had some money, didn't make tens of millions but made enough. And me and my co-founder just decided to deploy capital on our own into a lot of, you know, small syndications, private equity deals in the US and Europe. And doing that, you know, over the years it was good, but then it became a whole mess. And our own motto was like, I want to invest passively, focus on building products, spending time with my family, traveling, and at the same time, for the money we made, for it to continue to grow and not deal with it too much. But then, you know, when you deploy capital into multiple investment products, multiple private equity funds, it's like, all right, you have these emails coming in and documents and cash coming in and out, like good problems to have, can't complain. But at some point it was like, I was, we were losing our minds and our money was all over the place and spreadsheets were breaking. We decided to build the software for us to manage our own stuff, and that just turned into something a lot of people around us wanted it, and even more into broader audience would turn into this startup, which is called Vizer. So that's the quick, quick rundown of my background.

Yeah, no, very, very cool. And, uh, so helps being a, uh, someone with a tech background, right? You can create different softwares that suit your own needs, but it sounds like it kind of was born out of your own desire and need for just simplifying some of what you've been doing. So talk a little bit about, because it's interesting to me, you kind of jumped right into, yeah, we made a lot of money and we started investing in private equity and real estate. That's, there's usually a pretty big gap there for most people where, you know, that's a newer thing to where it's more accessible over the past decade. But what was like, was that just kind of second nature to you? Did you like have it, period of time where you were learning more about alternative investments and, you know, did you try and be an active, you know, real estate investor for a while? What was that kind of journey? Because I think it's really important to hear for people that are maybe in a similar spot that are maybe newer to alternatives and kind of getting familiar with it.

Yeah, 100%. Great, great point. So, so we made, we had this windfall and it's like, all right, what do we do now? We got approached by a lot, you know, a lot of wealth managers and financial advisors that wanted us to, giving them our money for them to manage it for us. But the thing in Israel is that retirement is mandatory. So when you work as an employee, you and your employer by law need to allocate money into a retirement account, the equivalent of a 401 or an IRA.

Sure.

And, and so every excess cash you have, usually you think about, all right, Where am I to deploy this elsewhere? So this will be, this will grow exponentially. And that created a whole mix of, you know, people in Israel that actually do investing, active investing in the US and Europe and raise capital from Israelis. And so everyone knows a guy. It's like such common practice that anyone and everyone's going to, you know, everyone's, it's the, we joke about it that if you have $50,000 free, you're going to go and buy an apartment in Berlin you've never seen before through a guy, you know, who does it. And so, so, all right, so we met with a lot of people, a lot of people that do this and, and did different aspects of real estate investing. And our first actually investments were two single-family homes bought directly by me and my co-founder Tomer in Ohio, in Ohio through a guy we know. But these were like direct investments, long-term rentals managed by a property manager in Ohio, suburb of Cleveland. And at the same time we deployed, you know, $100,000 into this multifamily syndication. You know, just to test the waters for both these types of investing strategies. And those single-family homes just became a whole mess, you know, evictions and damage and municipalities coming at us to fix this and fix that. And at the same time, this multifamily passive deal is like generating more cash without doing anything. And we're like, why would we want to do this anymore? Let's just do more of those. And it took us like 4 years to get rid of these single-family homes because they were really bad. And we just kept on pushing more capital into passive deals, into syndications, GPs that do these more passive stuff and raise capital from investors like us. We did it at the beginning with just Israelis who did that in the US because for us it's really important, it was and still is, to invest with people we trust. We can look them in the eye and know these people will not lie to us, these people will not cheat us, will not scam us. Because it's really hard to do that remotely for us and easier because you have these low-hanging fruit of Israelis that are doing that anyway. But at some point, you know, your friends and friends of friends, you know, you, you're out of those people who do those types of deals and you only get one or two deals a year max. And we started— I started personally to go and look more into the market in the US and how do I connect with people that I can trust and invest with. And so that's just like I went further to the point you asked, but we can dive into that as well if you like. But that's how we got into passive real estate investing.

Yeah, no, very, very cool. And so you kind of started with some of your own rentals, which I feel like is a lot of the common path for a lot of people where they get to long-term rentals. But even if it's sold as being passive, it's not always as passive as you expect it or want it to be. And investing in the syndications where you truly are an LP, a limited partner, and you're working with general partners that are, this is their full-time thing. In that scenario, it was less involved from a time standpoint and just headache standpoint, right?

So one of the things you find when you dive into this rabbit hole, which is called, rabbit hole, which is called real estate investing, is that each person thinks as a real estate investor differently. Like, what's a real estate investor? What does that even mean? Is it a flipper? Is it a short-term rental guy? Is it someone who actively does GP, does LP? If I buy a REIT, a traded REIT, am I a real estate investor? Like, essentially I am because the underlying asset is real. So like, all these are this whole spectrum of passiveness that we, you know, we learned our own way. But it's like, it's such a mind-blowing aspect once you dive into it. It just doesn't mean the same to everyone. The passiveness levels, the risk levels, the so many things intertwined within that phrase real estate investor.

Talk about that a little bit. I mean, what obviously you've been doing this for a while, you've invested, I'm assuming, in a lot of different types of syndications, right? A lot, probably different asset classes even. You know what, where do you kind of see the spectrum? How do you kind of fit it all together? Right? Because you're saying, hey, if I go and buy a REIT, You know, am I a real estate investor? Maybe, because the underlying asset is real estate. But you're also buying a lot of other fluff, right? You're buying, you know, what we call the liquidity premium, which is you got to pay up a little bit, you know, on the book value of the assets to get the premium of being able to trade it on a public market and have access to liquidity. Then you can go buy rentals and, you know, be a landlord. But that's creating more work. And so within kind of the more syndication area, where do you kind of fit all the kind of framework for the different types of investments out there?

So I think it's sort of like, what is the added marginal cost or risk to the added marginal work, right? So, and what's the expected return on that? So if you just take a short-term actively managed rental property, that or, you know, that's just a flip. If I want to buy a flip, I buy a real estate property, I can hold whatever and I flip it. And so that's probably the highest potential return, the highest risk, the highest activeness. Like everything's really high there, right? And so if I— and then if you go like next, let's just say a short-term rental, it's, you know, there's work there and there's risk there. There's not as much risk and there's not as much work as there is in flipping. And the, the potential profit is exponentially lower, right? And then you go to whatever, long-term rentals, which is lower and lower and lower syndications, which I'd argue might even be the same as, you know, long-term rentals to some extent with a lot less work. And then REITs, REITs or tradable REITs where I see it. Yeah, there's liquidity. But by the way, I personally think liquidity is a a term that needs to be used very specifically, right? Because everything's liquid at a price. Everything I can— if I own a house and I want to sell it today, there's a price I can sell it today. It'll probably be 30% below the market, but I'm sure someone's going to buy it today, right? Yeah. I have a stock portfolio and it's liquid, but if the stock just— the market just fell by 30%, am I going to sell it? I mean, it's liquid, right? Well, So it's like, yeah, liquidity is a whole different ballgame. We can dive into that. But so it needs to be, you know, the differences need to be exponentially better or worse across all those three aspects in order for that decision to make sense for me. I don't know if— does that make sense?

That makes sense. You said something else interesting there that I think is a really helpful tool for people to think about because naturally, especially entrepreneurs like yourself that are really good in one area and have made a lot of money in one area and generally like to be in control, right? It's natural to kind of go into the more active role of real estate, right? Well, I can just— I can go buy some rentals. I can be a landlord. It can't be that hard. But you're basically creating a new job for yourself, right? And to your point, what's the— what's the marginal risk that I'm taking by giving the control to someone else that's a professional managing the investment versus, you know, the, the time that I'm getting back and the lower brain damage, right, that I'm doing from having to deal with these headaches that I'm not doing at a professional level. Right. So how do you kind of— where do you kind of find that sweet spot? Right. Because there is an element of you are giving up control. I think it's a hard thing for some people that are newer to investing in syndications where you're not the lead decision maker on this investment. Where do you kind of find that sweet spot, right? Where you can kind of give up some of that control, but you get a better return on your time and maybe even a better general return anyways.

You know, it's hard to say, call this like a numbers game, but essentially it is sort of a numbers game, right? So if I'm an active real estate investor and I go buy properties that I rent out, and I spend X amount of time managing that at, you know, a Y amount of profit, expected profit, and then I compare that to a real, like an LP in a real estate syndication, I think it's probably, you know, a tenth of the X of time to be put in or even a fifth. And, you know, the potential profit is maybe, you know, 70%. Of the why that I expected from an active, right? Or even, it doesn't matter, even if it's 50%, it's all matters like how much time they put in. I can spend that time doing something else versus how much potential profit I can make from this. That's sort of the way I look at it, right? It's the same thing also for deals, you know, syndications that you do. It's not even comparing active versus passive or the different types of involvement. It's also different types of asset classes within syndications, right? Because you invest with an operator who does value-add multifamily stuff, another operator that's going to do development deals. Well, development deals has substantially more risk than the value-add because this has ongoing income and this doesn't have anything. So the potential return should be exponentially larger than the value-add. So if someone's pitching me a deal saying, hey, yeah, this development deal is 12% IRR, I'm like, Hell, it is. Go find someone else that's going to give you the money for 12%. So it's like, that's what I mean in terms of like comparing the different types of opportunities.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like from the math you were saying, if you're getting, if you're saving 10, no, yeah, 80 to 90% of the time that you would get actively managing a deal, but you're getting pretty close to the same or better returns. I mean, it's a pretty good trade-off. So in your mind, there's not a big marginal trade-off between giving up the control and getting a return on time and return on—

Well, hold on. So I agree, except for I don't believe that overall being passive can generate, has the potential to generate better returns than being active. I just don't think it's worth that marginal. The single-family, like a long-term rental, for example, the potential, if it's a good deal, right? The potential on profit will always be better than the potential on a similar type deal that I'm doing passive, right? I'm not talking about compared to oil and compare this, like single-family deals passive versus single-family deals active. It can never be on paper better from a return perspective. Right.

Because you got to have another partner involved if you're passive in it and they got to take fees, they've got to, you know, get their profit on the back end. So there's the net returns. Apples to apples will be less by sheer function of having another partner. Right. But what you're saying is that that margin of what you're giving up, you know, if you value time, might be worth doing it.

Is that kind of what you say? Exactly. So let's say it's 90% less time but only 10% less profit. That's what I meant. Yeah.

Talk a little bit about the liquidity piece. So you gave some interesting tidbits there on, you know, yes, real estate is more illiquid than, you know, buying or selling a stock on the New York Stock Exchange. But there's a price that I could sell my house for today. You know, how do you view liquidity at a portfolio level as an investor? Where do you kind of see liquidity being an advantage and how do you think about it when you're constructing and kind of building your own portfolio of investments?

So I think there's cash and there's liquidity for investments because cash is immediate, right? Cash, I go and I do an ACH transfer. So there's cash and then there's all my investments and their liquidity parameter for that investment. And every, every investment has a liquidity parameter, which is based on what is that price worth if I need to liquidate, if I need to liquidate today, right? So, you know, for stocks it's easy because you know what the price is if you have to liquidate it today. And for real estate, yeah, you can essentially, you know, you don't— this is— I don't go into like defining this on a daily basis. It's more an overall general approach to the way I view liquidity is that every asset in my bucket of net worth and assets has a price for to be liquid, you know, today or tomorrow.

Right, right.

And I mean, obviously each, this is like an endless, each one, it's each, each one of those has a different leading metric for that. But, but overall they, they all can be liquid immediately or today based on the right price. But I'm sure that if I, again, if I have a single-family home and I want to sell, I need it and I want to sell today. If I, if I, you know, put it online and Zillow even for 40% below the market, 50% below, whatever it is, it'll like I'm going to get bombarded by phone calls of people and I'm going to just do it by cash. I can sell it. So is that illiquid or is it liquid? So it's just the price. Like you look at your brokerage portfolio, it might be $1 million today. Which is essentially liquid, but tomorrow it might be 700. Like, it could happen. Is it liquid? So I'm sure a lot of people won't agree with me, by the way. So this is like my approach. I'm not sure it's like the common approach to it, but that's the way I see liquidity.

So does that, does that impact how you are making investments? Does it allow you or get more comfortable taking more, say, liquidity risk where a larger portion of your personal portfolio is invested in longer-term investments because you're not as worried about having to generate liquidity if you need to, right? How does that impact your— what you're investing in, if at all? It might not. I'm just curious if it does.

You know, so again, when I look at, all right, how much dry powder do I want to have in order for opportunities to come up and for me to be able to seize those opportunities? That's like the cash equivalents. Like a money market account is a cash equivalent in my mind. And so when I look at liquidity the way you're explaining, how would I need a liquid in order to deploy capital when things come up? That's what I look at. I'm not going to do it because anything else, again, is a stock, is a brokerage account. Like people look at a brokerage account as liquidity. Yeah. When a part two opportunity comes, I'll just liquidate part of my portfolio. But that's stupid. What if it's down 50%? Like you're still going to liquidate them. So it's not liquid in the sense as cash is liquid. So there's two different— I separate those two.

Sure. Yeah, I've talked about this a lot in past podcasts, but it's kind of a double-edged sword, liquidity, because it makes investors feel better, right? Because if, oh, if I have to get out, I can. But it's also the worst thing when the market's down, right? Because if you're selling when everything's down, it's not the best time to sell. And so what, I've had some research, you know, from some consulting companies that were, you know, showing that, you know, too much liquidity actually could hurt your portfolio performance because we're emotional investors, right? And so if we're, you know, buying and selling, you know, throughout the roller coaster, you know, you actually end up doing worse off. So there's an interesting trade-off with liquidity because you want to have enough liquidity, one, to have, you know, reserves for your operating expenses just personally. And opportunity, you know, that might come up, especially, you know, right now as we're kind of going into this unique part of the credit cycle. But too much liquidity or having access to your investments can actually hurt you a little bit, which is kind of an interesting way to think about it.

Yeah, I love that. I do. It's like, yeah, I feel like real estate investing sometimes is good for emotional— make it like people that make emotional decisions because it protects them from making the wrong decision. Right. Because it's not that easy to liquidate. So I agree with that.

Yeah. So as you were kind of building your personal portfolio, you're making these investments, you tried out single-family rentals, you started investing in syndications like, hey, I like doing this a little bit more, I want to do more of this. So you kind of started building, you know, a portfolio of passive investments. But then you said it became a mess. So, so talk about that. What was the— what were the headaches that were being created that ultimately drove you to now spend time and create a whole software platform, you know, that serves people like you, people like those in this podcast.

So I'm going to start like— and I'm going to say this multiple times throughout the podcast— these are good problems to have. All right. Right. But, but, but like, all right, so, so when you invest and deploy capital with multiple operators and remember, I put relatively— I don't know, I mean, small, whatever objective— I put checks into multiple operators. you know, $50,000, $100,000 checks with multiple operators because for me it was about the operator, not about the asset class. And so when, and then, and then so each operator, each general partner, each syndicator has their own investor portal, right? Has different, you know, definitions of when they, if there are distributions, if there aren't distributions, if there are distributions, how often are these distributions, what are they supposed to be like? So, I'd get emails from GPs I've invested with. I'm like, oh damn, when did I invest with this guy and how much did I invest? Or wait, is this distribution that's coming in what I expected? And even if I did remember, then like a week later my bank account will have like a ping of like, all right, there's money that you just received. I'm like, oh, what is this? And so these are good problems, right? But it's like I started to, you know, once a month go in, reconcile all these transactions from different bank accounts. All these emails, try to categorize this from that person, this from this person. And, you know, I could have gotten hired probably a personal assistant, but just didn't seem like enough. It didn't make sense for me to go pay someone that much money when, you know, this is— these are like, all right, it's a spreadsheet. I'll just spend a few hours a month updating it. But then tax season comes around and let's out— let's locate the K-1s and let's log into all these investor portals. And oh, I forgot the password. It became a mess, right? And so, I mean, we looked around, we just couldn't find anything. So we built, we, by the way, we are not like me and my co-founder are not tech people. We don't have a, we don't know how to code. Like both of us like business operations. I was 6 years in the Navy. He's 6 years in the Air Force. Like we're not, but we hired an engineer, we built this for us. And then that's when it spiraled out. So that's like the problems that we had. And another thing is, You know, you might be, you know, you might have money. And again, here's a liquidity or cash perspective. When it's all deployed, you then, oh damn, there's a capital call here, or there's like an expected capital call, or there's, you know, my cost of living. I didn't take that into account. I don't want to sit on too much cash. I want my cash to be deployed, but I also don't want to sit on too little. Oh, I need to start laying out what is the future going to look like from a cash flow perspective? And so we like, we just built this out for us to be able to, you know, all right, I see what my cash is going to look like in the future. We added in like this scenario planning aspect. So what happens if I invest in this deal? How would that look from a cash flow perspective combined with everything else I have, all other expectations from a cash flow perspective? And now for us, trickles down to this like graph so we can then plan accordingly and all that stuff.

Now it's so cool and I'm going to give a little plug for going to, to VIZOR and checking out the platform, see if you can get a demo because you did it in, you know, in person, had some screenshots and it was just so cool because some of the biggest challenges you have are what you just said. You have these different portals. You got to remember all your logins. You got to remember, you know, every, every portal is going to be a little bit different and how to navigate the different portals, how to pull the information. Every sponsor is going to be sending different information. It's not going to be homogeneous across every deal. And then to your point, so many investors think that the work stops once you send that first check. Okay, I've done the due diligence, which is very, very important. The front-end due diligence is very, very important. But you got to keep the pulse. You got to keep checking in on what's going on and is what I'm getting aligned with what they told me I was going to get or what the expectations were, or am I getting at least explanations for why it's different? Right. And most investors are not tracking the performance along the way. And so what your system can do is actually match up. I believe you can just put in pro formas, right? Or you can upload, you know, here's just some basic pro formas of what's expected from a cash flow standpoint. And then at the— on a full cycle deal, you can even measure IRR, right? And so you can measure your personal IRR of when cash hits— it leaves and hits your account versus, you know, at the fund level or syndication level, which might be slightly different. So talk about those kind of things a little bit. I think it's so interesting how you can, you know, kind of consolidate all this information but then create a really simplified, streamlined way to be able to track what's going on.

So like you mentioned at the beginning, we're all about keeping passive, passive, right? And so we add as much automation as you just want, as you can see possible into the tracking process. So for example, we'll link in your bank accounts and all the transactions that appear in those bank accounts will automatically be linked to the investments, right? I expect $3,000 a month for distribution from this fund. So we'll look, we'll find that distribution or we won't. And that means they missed it. And we'll raise a flag that arrived the performance versus plan, like you mentioned. And there's an interesting thing we noticed also, and I'm not saying this is wrong, I'm just saying we need to— people need to be minded to this. When you log into the investor portal and you see your performance, many times what they— the GP, you know, reports from a cash flow perspective is when they deploy the capital into the deal. Right. So let's just say I invested $100,000 into a deal. As an investor, all right, that cash left my bank account. I don't really care as an investor that took a month to deploy that capital, right? And so, so, and distribution, same thing. Like I look at the cash in, cash out, I calculate my cash on cash and my IRR based on the actual numbers. Many times you will see in investor portals it's different and there's going to be a discrepancy between both. And to be honest, what's right from an investor standpoint is what actually appeared in their bank account. I'm not saying the GP is wrong, I'm just saying you can't really compare those two 'cause it's hard for the GP to even take account for like, when I, I distributed cash like a week ago, the, the fact it took a week to reach you isn't really my problem, right? So it's not wrong or right, it's just like, as from an investor, that's the way I look at it. So that's an example for metrics.

Yeah. And as an investor, that's the number you care about anyway, right?

Right.

Because what am I getting? What am I seeing? Right. And, and you'd expect obviously there'd be discrepancies if you're calculating it based on actual cash hits your account because there's other things that can go into that. But it'd also be interesting, you know, if there is a big delta that might raise some yellow flags or at least some, some questions or concerns of like, yeah, I'm calculating 11% IRR, but you're saying I got a 16% IRR, right?

Yeah.

Well, you know, where is the math? You know, what am I missing here? You know, so it can, it can alert or kind of bring to the fore, you know, some things that you might need to, you know, get more information on and talk a little bit about, too, how you've integrated with some of these like platforms and, you know, how you're kind of consolidating to where, you know, instead of, you know, it's easy to log into Schwab or Fidelity and have all your stuff there. But, you know, it's hard to remember all these platforms and all the different ones that sponsors are using. So Yeah. How does the system work where it's kind of pulling information from, from all the different— Yeah.

So we— Yeah, it's an important question. So we took a family office approach and we're like, because not all of these platforms, these investor portals have integration that you can pull in data. Most of them don't. And so the family office approach we've taken is sort of our clients basically appoint us an interested party. So we are— our clients enter the argument, appointing us an interested party, we reach out to the fund and then we have access, read-only access to the, to that client's investor portal. And then we just retrieve everything for them, all the documents, all the data, you know, so it doesn't really— so and that creates a situation where it's endless. It's endless automation from an end, from a client standpoint because they don't have to log into portals anymore. We just do everything for them either via API or via interested party nomination or whatever it is.

Yeah. So you just log in into your— the Visor portal and then that's pulling all the other information from portals. You're pulling in like investor reports, PPMs, all those kind of things as well. Like it's— you can—

everything in your portal.

Yeah.

K-1s, like everything just appears in one place. Like again, essentially you do not need to log into any portal again. Yeah, there's, there's a, you know, there's always work to be done and improvement to be done on the connectivity aspects of it. That's like the Our objective is to become as automated as possible for an investor.

Right. I love to see like the scenario planning piece of this because, you know, what's— what I think is a challenge for some investors where you get— you're kind of starting to make investments, right? You're dipping your toe in, you're just seeing how these things are going and you start— you made a few investments, it's going well. But so many times investors are looking at, you know, what's the IRR, right? Or maybe what's the cash on cash or average cash on cash? And they're making investment decisions based on, you know, the return metrics. But are you adjusting that for risk? And then also, are you adjusting that for, for timing? Right. I could see a big IRR-heavy deal, you know, say 20% IRR, but it's a development deal and a majority of that, you know, cash coming back to me happens 2 or 3 years down the road. Well, it's very different than you know, a lower IRR deal that's getting cash flow right out the gate and I'm starting to get checks pretty quickly after. Right. And from an investor standpoint, and as you're building your portfolio, you need to be aware of maximizing total return and IRR, but you also need to be aware of cash flow and timing. And so your system can kind of forecast and create pro formas based on these projections that you're getting and investments you've made and can kind of create the cash flow planning it can show, hey, you might have some gaps here and you might need to reserve more cash. And those kind of things are so valuable because if you look at a snapshot over time, it's like, yes, this was— this is a profitable deal or I'm going to make money. But if you don't look at the ups and downs, you know, between the two time periods, then you're missing, you know, some of the kind of key parts of maybe need to reserve a little extra cash or maybe I should, I should be doing less development-heavy investment because I need more cash flow, or vice versa, right? I've got a lot of great cash flow coming in. I'm kind of set. Maybe I should go up the risk spectrum a little bit and try and get some higher total returns. So talk about that piece of it. Where's kind of the functionality of that piece of it as of now and where are you trying to take that to?

So I think the lowest level of investment management is on the specific investment, right? That, that, you know, that syndication that you're in, the expectations from a cash flow perspective of that specific syndication or deal, whatever it is, oil, it doesn't matter what it is. And then you go, you know, one level higher. It's like that holding entity that holds multiple investments under it or that asset class. You understand, all right, what's the cash flow that I expect from this? Because there are also tax implications for all this stuff. And, and, you know, that's also important. Then you look at the highest level, And that's your overall— my cash flow. And that's already— that, that becomes really hard to stay on top if you don't have— if you're not on top of it. Right. Because, because that's where, oh, this one requires capital, this one gets me capital, but overall I'm under or too over my, my goals. And so I think that's like a really important aspect of any type of investment management and cash flow management is understanding your high-level cash flow and what it's going to look like in the future.

Absolutely. I remember too, some of that, this is probably the wrong term, but you have a magic box or something, right? Where you can just drop information in and you have some AI that goes and tries to pull it out. What's the use for that again?

Yeah, so again, this is also that family office approach. Like if I went out and today when I get an email from a GP, an update or whatever, a K-1 or anything, a statement, You know, Visor's already CC'd on that email, or I forward it to Visor and it reaches our magic box, which is basically this feature that analyzes all that information, translates it into data, and either sets up new assets or updates existing ones. And this can be within the platform itself. There's like a spreadsheet you currently use to track your stuff. You just throw it in and analyze it, and the AI does that. But we also have a team that supports part of that AI because it's not perfect yet. But the idea is to create the approach like, I just throw everything in here and then it takes for you, just like a family office would do for you, but just not like a family office. If we're already touching on features, there's another really interesting thing that what I think, which I think is personally from an investor standpoint, one of the most interesting ones, which is showing our clients where other people are investing anonymously.

Yeah, yeah.

Talk about that because, you know, you asked about challenges at the beginning. And, you know, yeah, there's the administrative part of it, which is the mess, but then there's a decision-making, like, who do I want to invest with? Right. It's all about, you know, and then where we were in Denver, like, yeah, these are people that get together to help share information between each other about their experience investing with specific operators, GPs, funds. And so what we've done is we show all of our clients where everyone else is investing anonymously and how they allocate their assets overall from an asset allocation perspective. But in each asset class, which funds, which products are people investing in, like anonymously, but how much money's been invested to each of these, how many investments have been done. And we have, we don't show this information yet, but we see behind the scenes which have stopped distributions, which had capital, like unexpected capital calls, which are performing above or below what they expect. Like there's all this information that LPs should be sharing with other LPs so that people can make better decisions. And that's just nonexistent online. Offline, all these groups and communities, but online there's no one really incentivized to do so, which I think is a really interesting approach to private, the privates, and bringing more transparency into this private world.

100%. I mean, it makes so much sense because you're already gathering all this data and now you can kind of create the consolidated view of, you know, what does the portfolio pie look like at a, at a at a higher level, you know, and then within those parts of the pie, you know, who are people investing with? And then you're seeing the real cash, you know, trading hands. So which ones have positive distributions, which one are performing above or below? So obviously that's very, very valuable data. And from an LP standpoint, you're right. One of the biggest challenges you're getting into the space is who to trust. And, you know, sometimes the best marketers aren't always the best operators. Yeah. You know, learning due diligence as a passive investor can be, can be challenging. So having some leg up, right, these investor communities are taking off. And likewise with this platform, you're getting the kind of inside look of people that have done things, you know, for years before you. You can learn from their, you know, potential mistakes or even good decisions. Right. And you can, you know, leverage that to shortcut your process. So.

Right.

That makes a lot of sense. Well, Tom, this is super cool. I mean, I love what you're doing. I think it makes so much sense. And, you know, what's the best way for folks to kind of learn more about the platform, maybe run, run through a demo or just kind of see if it fits in? How do you charge? I'm assuming this is like a software-as-a-service type model where it's a monthly or yearly fee. Is that, you know, kind of how it's broken down?

Yeah, we have, we have a really straightforward fee structure, so it's free to try. I mean, you can try it with up to like a limited amount of assets, I think 3 private investments and 3, you know, fiduciary accounts, you can sync it to the platform for free for as long as you want. And then it goes up to $350 a year or $950 a year. And, you know, unlimited for everything is $1,800 a year, just like the whole suite of services that we provide. So it's all about, you know, providing value to every step you're in on the investing process. And so that's the fee structure. And regarding demos and like— Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

I was going to say it's a lot cheaper than hiring your own family office for sure. All right.

Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, listen, without— I have a lot of respect for family offices. We are not— we're not there yet. We don't touch money. We don't actively manage any portfolio. Right.

Right.

So, but what we do do a lot, like the equivalent at the end of the day probably is a personal assistant and a spreadsheet. Yeah, we have, we have clients that their personal assistant just uses Visor instead of the spreadsheet, but But I mean, that's again, that's the main alternative. And we're always open to, you know, speak, you know, talking with other LPs or potential clients, potential investors, just like to communicate and show like what we have to offer. And the website is Vizer. It's a weird name, but it's Vizer.co. And you guys can reach out to me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm super happy to speak with anyone interested in talking about investments, LP investments or Vizer.

Awesome. We'll put all these links in the show notes. And yeah, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your, your journey and experience and what you're doing. Love it.

Thanks, man. Really fun talking with you.