Getting in the Room to Raise Money | Fund Launch Live Pre-Event Party

How do you actually get around wealthy investors? How do you get in the room? How do you talk? Like, not even talk to them. How do you just get in the room in the first place? We can talk about that more later, like talking to them, converting the room, and then warming up a room to then eventually close the room. When we talk about this, it's— we talk this around the 3 stages of raising capital. So, there's 3 distinct stages of raising capital. Um, and actually, if you want to go to my iPad for me, I'll give you a little sense of just today what we're going to talk about. So, on the Funnel Launch Forum, by the way, we're going to be presenting at Funnel Launch Live brand new material you guys have never seen before. This is a little behind the scenes of my kind of You know, chicken scratch putting this together. But at FunnelHacks Live, we're going to be sharing brand new material that nobody's seen before. It should be pretty fun. Okay. On the FunnelHacks Formula though, scrolling down, if you guys have seen our content before, step 3 into raising capital, there are 3 distinct stages of raising capital. Okay. And this will give a preface for what we're talking about today. So stage number 1 is, and this is, this is, again, I love frameworks. Frameworks are beautiful because they can fit into hopefully every business model. Out there. So, there's 3 distinct stages of raising capital. Number 1, how do you get in the room? How do you actually get around people that are wealthy? Okay, that's step 1. Are you just even in the room? Okay. Step number 2 is once you're in the room, can you connect? Meaning, can you warm a person up to the idea that by step 3, you can actually go out and close that person? It's funny, we have now hundreds and getting over 1,000 members that have gone through Black Card. And I've been able to talk to a lot of people in our groups, communities that are launching investment funds. And it's funny, always the question comes up, Bridger, how do I raise capital? How do I get more investors? And, you know, I'm struggling so much and I always pause them and say, well, what are you struggling with? Raising capital is a big bubble. It's huge. And I always get down and I ask them, okay, are you struggling with step number 1? Like, are you even getting around enough people that are wealthy? Or is it, okay, I know a lot of people that are wealthy. I just don't know how to Warm them up to the idea that I could be someone that they could invest with. That's stage number 2. Or maybe, hey, you're getting around a ton of great people. They're actually liking you. They want to hear your pitch, but at your pitch, maybe they're not investing. Those are 3 distinct different problems within your funnel. Does that make sense? So today I want to talk through these 3 stages of raising capital, specifically do step number 1, work, you know, getting in the room, getting around people that have money. Does that sound like a good plan? Give me a yes in the chat if that's good. We are live today, by the way, so welcome in, y'all. I'm calling in from Salt Lake City, Utah, in our studio. It's good to see everybody. What's up? Give me a yes in the chat. We might do some giveaways today. We'll have a little bit of fun. We are live, by the way, on Zoom. We've got TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. We're across the board. So we'll have different chats from different places. So just in case I'm answering a question on one chat, you might not see another chat. I love the yeses though. Welcome on, you guys. We got a few hundred people live with us already, which is awesome. Okay. Real quick, actually, I want to, in the chat, if you can type in what type of industry you would like to launch a fund in or you're already running a fund in. So, either way, whether maybe you're in the beginning stages, that's totally fine, or you're already launched. Maybe it's real estate, private equity, hedge funds, debt funds, venture capital funds. Type in the chat and maybe give me specific. Hey, I'm doing a hedge fund in forex trading, or I'm doing private equity for Baby boomer businesses. I'm doing venture capital for seed-stage startups. Give me a little— just give me one sentence on what you're doing. And that's— I think it's pretty cool to hear what you guys are— what you're all doing. So type that in the chat for me. Okay. Really cool. Wow. I love these. These are coming in. Um, these are awesome. I gotta look through my cameras here to read the chat though. I got a screen right behind my cameras. Hedge fund doing AI. Cool. Multifamily real estate. Awesome. Doing a security fund. Wow. Really cool. Medical fund, building medical facilities, real estate, single-family homes, short-term rentals, sports, gambling. Wow. This is awesome. Crypto. Really cool. So just so— keep typing them in the chat, by the way, just so you're aware of who you're talking to if you guys haven't seen me before. So I currently run a crypto hedge fund. We can talk about crypto if you want to today. Today's specifically around raising capital, but our fund just hit $25 million in assets. Um, that's all equity, by the way. We don't have any debt in our fund. That's just equity. $25 million assets. Um, this morning, I think, or last night we hit it. Um, the market just took off all-time highs yesterday with crypto. Uh, we are raising right now on average about $1 million per month, um, is our current kind of raise. Uh, this month though, we've already got around $1.4, $1.5 million commitments. Um, we're hoping to be over $2 million this month. Our fund, the way our fund runs, just so you're aware, is it's open-ended. So we can raise money at the end of every month. We do a closing. We have investors come at the end of the month. So that's how we track it is how much we're raising per month. A lot of you are going to go out and raise different types of funds, etc. So by the way, this is my 3rd fund I've ran. I ran 2 debt funds prior. I currently run this fund. We just launched Fund Launch Partners as well, which is a GP stakes fund. We're raising money for that as well. So I'm currently in the game. I am currently talking to investors every single day. I run through pitches, I'm running through this stuff. So give you a sense of I'm doing this every single day. Now, what's fun is if you go to my iPad again, so we're going to— let's dive in actually and talk today about this right here. Step 1, how do I actually get in the room? Now, I'll zoom back a little bit. At Funnel Launch Live, we're going to be going in depth into all of these different frameworks. This is brand new material that you guys have never heard before. It should be very fun. We're going to design this. This is kind of the chicken scratch version. Actually, over here is the chicken scratch version. We made it a little bit more formal. We're going to make it really pretty and nice for Funnel Launch Live. By the way, we are 38 days out from Fun Launch Live, which is pretty fun. Um, so if you guys want to grab tickets, funlaunchlive.com or 37, excuse me, 37 days. This is our 3rd event. It's going to be in Orlando, Florida. If you go to funlaunchlive.com, you can grab tickets. We got, we had Ed Mylett last year, which was really fun. We got an incredible lineup this year of speakers and everything. It should be a really fun time. So I'll scroll down here, but we got Steve Eisman coming, myself, Oren Klaff talking all about one of the best capital raisers on earth, my dad, John Paynton. Talking about macroeconomics, the US dollar, international trade, petrodollar. Todd Buchholz, um, he's managing editor for Tiger Fund, formerly a Harvard professor. We got Cody Sanchez, which is coming, which is so cool. We got Cody, Peter Zeihan, one of my favorite authors of all time on macroeconomics. Ben Hardy wrote 10x Is Easier Than 2x, incredible author. Neil Bawa. I mean, go down this, uh, Andrew Smith, Ben Reinberg, Bryce Sutton, Bob Frazier, Jeremiah Butcher. I mean, it's cool that you guys can go through and read all these bios. We got a pretty fun lineup. Um, and this is a different event than all of our events. Um, this is an event where we go deep on like launching a fund. It's not just a conference, it's like an actual like experience of walking through the process of building and launching a fund. So 37 days away, it should be pretty fun. Um, good to see you guys. So if you guys want to grab tickets, fundlaunchlive.com, we are live right now for tickets. You have to apply for VIP, but general admission tickets are live. We have sold out the last 2 events. We're looking to sell out this event as well, 3rd event. So should be pretty fun. All right, so you guys ready to dive in? Now in the chat for me, type in how much capital have you raised to date? Just in any business, anything you've ever done. I'm curious how much capital have you raised in the chat? And I'm going to pull up my iPad here and we're going to go quick. So type in the chat how much capital you've raised in the past. Give me a sense of who's on the call today. Um, there we go. So $250 million, $175,000, zero. No, hey, if you've raised zero, no problem with that either. That's totally fine. We all, everyone starts somewhere. And by the way, raising your first dollar is the hardest dollar to raise. By the way, raising your first dollar is the hardest dollar to raise. Some people are $10 million, $20 million, $5 million, $100,000, $50,000, $200,000. Okay. It gives me a good sense. So, all across the board, the stuff I'm going to talk about today works regardless of what we're talking about. I want to share frameworks that work regardless of everything. So, I'll tell you a quick story. So, and go back to my iPad for a second. So, today, what I've seen a lot of people struggle with is, Bridger, how do I actually get in the room? How do I get around people that are wealthy? Where are these people that are wealthy? Do I have to come up with a new funnel, a new strategy? Do I need to have a cool CRM or some ads? Like, what do I do to get in the room? We're not— and later we'll talk about warming up the room, connecting, and then hopefully closing. And at Funnel Hacks Live, we've got Oren Klaff. He's going to talk all about closing. It's going to be really fun to have him there. But today, let's talk all about getting in the room. So, first thing I'm going to say, wealthy people already hang out together. Wealthy people are already put together. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Uh, for example, wealthy people, um, I, I didn't realize this for a long time, is like when you're going out to raise your first dollar, it's kind of intimidating. Where do I find these people? Where are they? What are they doing? And when I finally realized they're already together, it's like, um, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just need to put your hook in the right line of water and the fish are already swimming together. They're already there. We went fishing last year in Alaska and we did the flossing technique to get salmon. The fish are already swimming these lanes. They're already pooled together. You just have to put your line in the right place in the water and you can catch a ton. We actually caught a ton of salmon and we brought it home. We cooked it up. I put it in my Traeger. It was awesome. Okay, so that's what we're talking about. So for example, I'm going to give you a few pools where people are already hanging out. Number 1, if you go back to my iPad here, I'll draw some out for you. And I'll actually, I'll look them up for you. They're already hanging out in what are called angel groups. You can go to any city in the country, any relatively sized metropolitan area, there will be an angel group. I'm in Utah, for crying out loud. Utah is a pretty small market compared to other markets. We have, for example, the Salt Lake City Angels. We have the Park City Angels. We have the Tribe Angels. Yeah, we have at least, there's probably more, but at least 3 groups that I know of and, and I know the people in there. 3 angel groups. What are angel groups? Angel groups are similar to like a Shark Tank. It's like Shark Tank. They meet usually once a month or a quarter. There's, I don't know, most of these I've seen is 40 to 50 people that are all accredited investors that like investing into startups. They meet together and they invite A handful of companies every single month to come, and they are allowed to pitch their offering. And all of these 40 to 50 wealthy investors sit there; they take notes, they ask questions just like Shark Tank, and they will write checks into these groups. These are angel groups. Like we can go right now. I give me a city. Give me a city in the chat. I'll pull it up right now for you. Just one last time. Let's make a new tab. Let's go. What do you guys got? Angel. Groups, Dallas, Texas. Let's just see what pulls up. Okay, so pitchbook and ad, angel investors, North Texas Angel Network. Bam, right there. Texas investors, Dallas investors, top 10 angel investors in Dallas, list of Dallas angel investors. I mean, you can go— let's just go to this first one. North Texas Angel Network. We invest in people, providing bright future for early-stage companies. They get together and they allow people to come pitch. I mean, let's do another one. What else you guys got? Chicago. That's too easy. These big— all big cities are going to have them. Let's do angel groups of like— let's try Boise. Boise, Idaho. Let's just see if, uh, if Boise has angel groups. Boise Angel Alliance. Look at that. Angel investors in Idaho startups. Let's just go to Boise Angel Alliance. Let's try this one. If Boise, Idaho has an Angel Alliance investment fund, pretty much every city will have it. I promise you. Okay, go. And then what you— what I like to do at least, go meet the people that run these and maybe go to their blog or website, whatever it is. Um, do a little research, find the people that are running these startups and message them on LinkedIn. Hey, I'd love to come. Sometimes they have intake forms. Everyone's going to operate a little bit different, but say, hey, I'd love to come attend, provide value, you know, be involved with you guys. And also we got this great offering. I'd love to come in. Again, get in the room. Back to this. These rooms are already, a lot of times, already built. Okay? Does that make any ahas there? Is that helpful a little bit? So, let's keep going. So, I'll tell you a quick story. Um, this is actually from my dad. So, as you guys know my story, my dad started a, um— oh, let's put Matt to backstage, by the way. Um, uh, my dad started a number of incredible different funds, deca-billion-dollar family of funds. Um, And did an incredible job with those. On his very first fund, it's like 2004 or something, something like that. They launched a fund. They were trying to raise capital. They're doing a hard money lending fund. And now my dad, and as you guys know, my dad's going to be speaking at Fund Launch Live, founder of a deca-billion-dollar family fund, now retired, incredible dude. When I started my first fund, I went and pitched him for money. He said no, but he said, you need to go raise money on your own. My dad has still never invested a single dollar into a fund I've ever built. But my dad's been an incredible mentor. He's mentored me through launching and scaling multi-seven-figure funds. It's been incredible to have a great mentor like that, but never invested a dollar, but, you know, gave me a lot of value in other places. Also, my brother is an investment funds attorney, formerly at the largest law firm in the world for funds, um, has worked on numerous $100 million and multi-billion-dollar funds as an investment attorney. So I have my dad who ran a multi-billion-dollar fund. My brother's an investment attorney. Myself, I've ran— now I'm on my third fund currently, $25 million hedge fund that we currently run. Um, so we've seen a lot with raising capital and doing this. And by the way, none of us went to Ivy League schools. None of us went to Harvard. All of us are just regular entrepreneurs, but we figured out this incredible vehicle of funds. We figured out this beautiful model of what funds are, how to start one, how to build one. And now, um, uh, using, if you go scroll my, my iPad, this Fund Launch Formula, we've helped, uh, now over just out of Black Card, 210 funds. In the last two years, we've taken them through this process. We'll do this at Fun Launch Live with you guys. We've launched 210 funds have launched just out of our top group, which is called Black Card. That doesn't include all the other. We have over 70,000 students around our whole community. Black Card currently has something like 500 people in it. That's just out of Black Card, which is pretty cool. 210 funds we've actually filed like Form Ds for with the SEC. Like we've filed and launched 210 funds. So. I've seen a lot of funds. I've seen this happen a lot of places. So now scrolling back in again, getting in the room is what we're talking about today. Let me tell you a quick story about my dad. So my dad on their first fund, um, they're there and they're in the small little office and his partner comes to him and says, John, I just bought box seat tickets to the Utah Jazz. We've got 4 seats. And he spent, it was something around $35,000 for the season. Wow. And my dad is usually very conservative. He's like, what? Like, what are you talking about? We don't have $35,000. Like, and my partner, his partner's like, well, hold on. But before you get mad at me, he goes, John, we are having a really hard time getting in the room with wealthy investors. He goes, we call into this, you know, Mrs. Johnson, she's a wealthy CEO in the area. We call into her office. Hey, Mrs. Johnson. Hey, this, you know, my name's Bridger. I'd love to meet with you. And they have a gatekeeper. There's a receptionist or whoever that says, oh, sorry, Mrs. Johnson's busy. She can't meet with you, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, John, if we call that same executive assistant and say, hey, my name's Bridger. I'm calling in. I just wanted to invite Mrs. Johnson and her husband tonight. We've got 2 tickets. The Jazz are playing the Lakers. We got a dinner beforehand, box seats, private parking. We'd love to invite you guys to come tonight. Are you, or is she available? Because 9 times out of 10, that executive assistant is going to pass that message on to this person. Because what's hap— what's going to happen is we're going to have them come to the Jazz game. We'll, me and you will go, 2 of us, and then we'll have the other 2. We have dinner beforehand. We have the game. We can talk to them for 2 to 3 hours. Talk, hang out, get to know them, and get in the room and hopefully warm up the room and have a chance to close them. But it'll allow us to raise a lot more capital. And my dad said, all right, well, fine. You already paid for the tickets, like whatever. And last I checked, I talked to both of them. They told me just from those box seats, they bought 4 box seats. They ended up doing it for like 3 seasons, I believe. They raised around $75 million just from that one strategy where before they couldn't raise a lot of money. They were raising okay, but that really propelled their capital raising. Okay. And so, again, getting in the room, people are already in box seats. People are already in the— well, actually, we'll dive into this in a second. So, is this helpful, by the way? Is this useful? Hopefully, this is good. We'll keep going. Share my iPad, Ken. Can you? Let's get into this. So, there are 2 distinct ways to get into any room. You can work your way in or you can buy your way in. And you're already kind of looking ahead right here. So, there's 2 distinct ways, and I think both are good, by the way. So, working your way in, let me go like this. I'll just— so you can definitely see that part of the screen. Actually, well, I'll just leave it all live. You can see it anyways. Okay. Working your way in, you can get on LinkedIn, go to networking groups, real estate media, social media, events. These are great ways to work your way into a room. You guys can probably give me more examples in the chat if you'd like. Well, actually, yeah, give me some examples of how you worked your way into good rooms. Maybe you've leveraged social media. Maybe you've thrown an event. Maybe you've attended events. Maybe you met somebody and then You had them introduce you to somebody, then you did a deal for them. You provided a lot of value for somebody. You worked your way into a relationship, whether it was an institution or a family office or somebody else. A lot of great ways to work your way in. Another way to get into rooms is you can buy your way into rooms. So I just mentioned box seats. Okay, that's one way you could buy your way into a room. That was kind of that story. You also can do pay to pitch. Okay, this is actually where you can actually pay. We had a group come to us. So quick story, they came and said, hey, we, we assemble all the consulates and family offices from South America. So we have all these family offices from Mexico. We have some from Argentina, Brazil. We'll bring them together. You pay us $12,000 and we allow you to pitch. It's like 100 different family offices from South America. We're like, huh, okay. I end up doing it. But a couple of guys in our Black Card community ended up doing that and they went and pitched some great groups and I believe raised some awesome money. So, there's pay to pitch. Another one I put on here was Ferrari club. Something me and Mason did a few years ago, we bought a supercar. We bought an Audi R8 and it was just for fun and stuff. But what I didn't even— this is by just chance. When you buy a supercar, you get in these supercar clubs. People with supercars like to meet other people with supercars. And most cities, I didn't realize this, have a, just like an angel group, they have a Ferrari club. Or a Lamborghini club or a Porsche club. So, there's a Ferrari club of Dallas. There's a Ferrari club of Chicago. There's a Ferrari club of Atlanta. And guess what you have to have to be in the Ferrari club? A Ferrari, okay? Or a supercar club. And actually, just by chance, we had this Audi R8. I started going on drives with guys. We meet up and do little car meets and stuff. We ended up raising just by chance a ton because we were in the room. With great people. Okay? So, back to my iPad, if you can. When raising capital and getting— this is again, getting in the room, you can work your way or buy your way in. I'm a big believer in doing a little bit of both. Okay? I'm a believer in work, you know, buy your way into a room, but then once you're in the room, work the room really hard. Do a really good job. I'll give you a few strategies that me and my partner Dan do to work rooms as well. But I think both these are really good. So again, hopefully I'm trying— what I'm trying to do in this call is give you ideas of ways that you can get into more rooms with wealthy people and create relationships. And this doesn't matter if you're raising for high net worths, family offices, or institutions. This all— this applies to all of them. Okay. Is this— is this helpful, by the way? Give me like a— give me a 1 in the chat if this is helpful. Is this— hopefully this is interesting. Give me a 1 in the chat. Make sure you're alive over there. Give me a 1. I got to make sure people are still here. We're live, so I got to make sure people are on here. Um, maybe we'll do a giveaway too. Should we do a giveaway? Let's do a giveaway. So type a 1 in the chat and we're gonna give away $100 to someone on the chat. So type a 1 in the chat for me. By the way, we are live on YouTube, Facebook, Zoom, TikTok. So I'm just gonna pick one of the chats. Um, so let's go 5, 4, 3, 2. Wow. Those 1s are coming in fast. Okay, here we go. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Can you pause one of those names? We're just gonna randomly pick one of those names on the screen right here. They're coming in pretty quick. I gotta, I gotta catch one here. Just like scroll up for me. There we go. Let me see if I can see that. Can you read that for me? Logan. Okay. Yeah, we got Logan. Logan on Zoom. It was on Zoom call. So Logan on Zoom, congrats. Logan, what you need to do right now is send Adam Smith, he's one of my co-hosts, send him your email and we'll send you $100 to Amazon for being on here live today. It was awesome. Okay, I love it. Now let me give you one or two more things that I have done to get in the room. And actually go back to my iPad for me. I'm gonna do this in blue here. I have seen a ton of success with events. Now events, sometimes you have to pay, so it's a little bit of a mix of both of these. I think events is like a perfect mix. Events allow you to buy your way, and sometimes there's like VIP or, you know, there's different types of things at events. I attend, by the way, a lot of events. I know we throw Funnel Launch Live, Which, by the way, is— what are we? I'll go back to here. We are 37 days away from Funnel Launch Live. You guys want to come? But again, you can buy your— you get a ticket to Funnel Launch Live, you come. I'm already spending— you know, we've spent last year over $1 million on Funnel Launch Live. I mean, we spend a lot of money. So we're already assembling an incredible room. We're paying all the money, all the speakers, everything to pull stuff together. And what happens is you guys can come And you pay a couple hundred bucks and you get a ticket and you get to leverage the room that we've already pulled together. I'll give you an example. Uh, on Thursday, I am going to the Greenwich— you can put up my iPad again— Greenwich Economic Forum. We had to pay, I think it was like something like, I don't know, I can't remember, $15,000 or whatever. We're members now. Me and Lincoln are members of the Greenwich Economic Forum. That's where I met Ray Dalio like 6 months ago. About 200 members. This is— we pay to go to their events, but we're in there with David Rubenstein, all these billionaires, all these huge family offices. Man, that's a good room to be in. And they've already spent the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to assemble this room. We pay a relatively small price, we join the room, and ta-da, we get to be around all these. We're going to, uh, Miami I think on Thursday to now do the one of our second events with the Grand Economic Forum, which is kind of cool. Uh, I'm just— so what I'm telling you, I'm in the game right now. I'm doing this. We are raising over $1 million a month right now doing this kind of stuff. Events are massive. I'm an event junkie. Last year we went to— I don't remember how many events. I speak at some events and then I go attend events just because it's a great way to leverage rooms that are already built. Another great one is, uh, pay-to-play networking. Um, 2— let's see, 3 years ago I joined a group. I'll put it in green here. It was $30,000. For one year, we got 3 events. That was it. Okay, 3 events. I think they did like a live call like once a week. That was it. And a Facebook group. Um, $10,000 per event. Now you might say, Bridger, that's a crazy amount of money. Like, why would you spend that on, you know, just 3 events? And I said, well, I look at things from an ROI perspective. If I go to this event, they had about 200 people there. Every single person had also paid $30,000. So, I'm in a room with some pretty qualified people. That's a good room to be in. We end up raising a bunch of money, doing a bunch of deals. Like, I made back well, well, uh, on my investment of $30 grand. I joined another one the next year for $24,000. They did 4 events, and I can't remember, they had something else with it. Still, I feel like I got a very positive ROI in that group. The last year, me and Mason joined one. It was $150,000. For one year to join. This is with Russell Brunson's group. It was Category Kings group with him. But guess what's cool? You might say, wow, Bridger, that's just stupid amounts of money. You guys are idiots. Again, I'm an investor by trade. I look at things from an ROI perspective. If I can learn something or meet somebody that increases my business revenue by $150,000 or net income by $150,000, then it was worth it. It was a positive ROI. And so last year we went— and first off, the people in the room also paid $150 grand. It's a good room to be in. First off. Second off, we feel like for over the last year, we got a positive ROI. I can't remember. I don't want to give you earning claims or anything, but we feel like we got a very multi-figure increase on that investment. This is, again, buying your way in, pay-to-play networking, buying your way into rooms, into better, better rooms. The only difference between, you know, a lot of times, if you— well, maybe I'll zoom out for a second. Like, I'll go over here. For example, like, have you ever seen these people on TV or whatever? Like maybe like, I don't know, you can look at Elon Musk or people like that and they, they will lose millions of dollars, right? And you're like, oh my gosh, they crash. And then all of a sudden they're like, they're back, they're a millionaire. Or these are even people that are billionaires. They lose, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and then within a couple months or years they're back to multi-billionaire status. Like, how does that happen? You ever wondered that? Ever met somebody like this? They, oh, they lost everything in 2008. They were a millionaire and 2008 hit. They lost everything, but now again, they're multimillionaires again. Huh? How does that happen? And, um, what I've considered at least is one of the biggest debts or biggest expenses we have in life, me and you have, is What I like to call ignorance debt. We pay a lot of money for what we don't know, and oftentimes it's not what we don't know. It's not even that; it's the unknowns of the unknown. You guys know what I'm talking about? Give me like a yes in the chat if you know what I'm talking about. The unknown of the unknown. Like I don't even know the questions to ask, right? Like. I don't even know the, like, the question, you know what I mean? Have you ever felt that? Maybe you feel that way in funds, by the way. It's like, hey, I'd love to do a fund, but I don't even know the questions to start to ask to begin with, to even— it's like the unknowns of the unknown. And actually, oftentimes is very scary. The unknowns of the unknown can be super scary because you might, you know, join— like, for example, I've never been in this space, but let's just say, like, if I was going to go start a pharmaceutical company, I don't even know. I don't even know how to spell pharmaceutical. First off, that's a problem. Second off, I don't even like the unknown. It'd be so scary to develop a pill and work with the FDA and like, what if I get sued and like, count? Like, it just seems so scary. You know what? I'm not even gonna work with it. But, but again, if I was really bent on joining a, starting a pharmaceutical company, the, the quickest thing I would do is how do I pay down my ignorance debt? How do I pay down that debt as quickly as possible? Do I need to write a check? Do I need to hire a lawyer? Do I need to pay someone that's been in the industry for 20 years? I'll pay them a $500,000 salary just to pay down my ignorance debt because every year that goes by, last year, for example, This is one way to look at ignorance debt. If if if our goal is to make a million dollars a year, by the way, I've done that now a couple times. It's been pretty fun. But before that, you know, I made like two hundred thirty-five thousand dollars in a year one time. I was like, oh, that's pretty good. That's a good year. And then some mentor came to me. He's like, well, Bridger, yeah, that's cool and all. But like, did you know that you know because of your ignorance, because you don't know how to make a million dollars a year? Because you don't know how to do that, you left on the table $765,000 this year that you lost because you don't know how to make $1 million a year. And I was like, huh? He's like, you, every year that you don't know, don't make $1 million a year, you don't learn the lessons to make $1 million a year, you have ignorance debt. He goes, there are people That have been in business 20 years, but they've really been in business 1 year, 20 times. You know somebody like that? They've done— they've, oh yeah, I've been in business for 20 years, but they've repeated the same year, 1 year for 20 years versus someone who's been in business for 5 years. But every year for the 5 years, they've grown, they've learned new things, they've developed, they've had different years of learning years over 5 years. Do you know what I'm talking about? Is that making sense? Give me like a, like a uh-huh in the chat. That's interesting. And so think about your last year or the year before that. Did you just repeat the same year? Yeah, I've been in business 23 years, but it's been the same year every year. Or have you been in business 5 years, but every year has been a full new learning curve and you've developed and grown? That's why, you know, you see these people that are— they started in college. I, I, you know, I've met people that are 28 years old and they have more experience in an industry than someone who is 45 years old because the 45-year-old has done this for 20 years and the 28-year-old has done this for 5 years. And this 28-year-old literally has more experience than the 45-year-old because they have paid down their ignorance debt. One of the things I actively do, just, I'm just saying personal Bridger, and I think that's led to some success that I've had. We now run, you know, Fund Launch is down to over $25 million in revenue. We have a $25 million hedge fund I currently run. I've had multiple years where I've, you know, we've made millions of dollars. It's been really cool to be a part of. And I will— hopefully it keeps going. It could all crash and burn, I guess. But we've been very blessed, and God has helped us a ton. It's just been amazing. But something that I've actively done to go out and forget, you know, some of you guys know my story, but I started 6 businesses my first 2 years of college, and they did okay. And I— but I learned a ton. I feel like I paid down a lot of ignorance debt. And I also joined a lot of groups. I paid for courses and communities and coaching and whatever it was. I paid one-on-one mentors, whether it was with time or money or value, to try to pay down ignorance debt as quickly as possible. That's why I love going to events. That's why I love getting in rooms where people are smarter than me. It sounds cliché, but they've learned lessons of business that I have not learned. They can— maybe they can help me pay down my ignorance debt faster. And I believe what happened was the first 6 businesses did okay. We made like $5,000, $10,000 per business. And then the 7th business, we made— I think it was like $450,000. That was pretty good. Like, I netted like 30% of that. I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. So, I made like $150,000. I was like, dang. And I was in college at the time. I was like, shoot, that's awesome. And then the 8th business we started was like, was actually Funnel Launch. And now we've done over $25 million in sales out of Funnel Launch. Like, holy crap. You know? But I believe if I hadn't done the 6 businesses prior, done the paid down the ignorance, I would've never launched Funnel Launch to the degree it's at today. And then we launched our hedge fund. We raised $10 million in our initial launch. And now we're up to $25 million. I don't think that ever would've happened unless I had paid down the ignorance debt prior. And maybe, hopefully, the next business we launch will be even 10 times bigger than that. I'm hopefully going to stay in the game and keep learning. Okay? So, back to, let me go to my iPad here. These, where am I at here? Getting in the room, joining these events, going to these things, paying. You might think, man, it's just the runaround. Why am I doing this? is to develop us. The most valuable real estate me and you own is between our ears. We can pay down this ignorance debt. That's why actually, I know I keep talking about Funnel Launch Live, but one of the biggest reasons that I wanted to throw Funnel Launch Live, this is our 3rd event, was because I was such a beneficiary of other people who threw great events that allowed me to come. And I feel like I got a decade in a day. You've heard that from Tony Robbins. To turn decades into days, to compress things down. That's why. And for— and then what I saw was this helped me in marketing and business strategy and self-development. I felt like I moved in 3 days. I moved my entire life forward like 6 months or 8 months. I started to compress time. But then what we saw was there was nothing like this for people that wanted to launch funds. There was nothing out there that helped people go out and launch funds. And so we said, hey, what if we threw an event that allowed thousands of fund managers to come together And, uh, and launch funds. And that's what we threw Funnel Hacks Live number 1 in Las Vegas. We had 1,200 people show up live. We sold out the entire event. It was incredible. We then threw Funnel Hacks Live 2 in Miami, Florida, had 2,000 people. Some of the pictures you see here was from last year. It was incredible. And then now we're throwing Funnel Hacks Live number 3, and this one's gonna actually be, I think, above and beyond the previous events. We are restructuring this event to get tons of nuggets and value to just move the audience to truly make it a decade in a day. Or a decade in 3 days. Um, I think it's a massive way to condense time, to immerse yourself, to be all in on something. I'll actually share another story. Um, is this helpful, by the way? Sorry, I'm like, you guys got me on a tangent here, like squirrel. Is this good? Give me a, give me like a booyah in the chat. Give me a booyah in the chat if you, if that, this is kind of making sense why I, I care so much about this. I'll share different stories. So Um, let me go back to my— can you pull up my iPad for me? So here we are. Okay, I want to share a story about a guy named Stephen Schwarzman. So Stephen, how do you spell Schwarzman? Schwarzman. Okay, I just scribbled through there. As you can tell, I'm— my team always makes fun of me for spelling. Um, I would challenge you to spell correctly in front of, you know, 500 people live at any given time. All right. That's my challenge. Stephen— I'm a little dyslexic as well, but maybe that— I don't know. Anyways, Stephen Schwarzman. Anybody know who Stephen Schwarzman is in the chat? Who is Stephen Schwarzman? Hopefully you would know. Yeah, Schwarzman. Thank you for spelling that correctly. But Schwarzman, we'll just leave it like this. Stephen Schwarzman is the co-founder of Blackstone. Now, if you don't know who Blackstone is, Blackstone pretty much runs the world, okay? Blackstone is one of the largest private equity Family of funds in the world. I think the last I checked, they managed something like $600 billion between all their portfolios. I mean, Blackstone owns—we can go on their portfolio. We won't right now, but they own like half of the Las Vegas Strip. They own a lot of the apartment complexes that people live in. They own—they own ancestry.com. They own—I mean, you could go across the board. Companies that are backed by Blackstone is insane. I mean, they—they—if you look at the true ownership structure of of who owns the world, Blackstone is one of the top groups ever. So anyways, Stephen Schwartzman's one. the founders of Blackstone. His book is fascinating. Really cool. Their first fund ever, they raised $1 billion on their first fund. How cool is that? I think it was in his, in his early 30s. It was just really cool to, to hear that. So he's got a story he was telling and he, and so he's done a lot of work in China and Asia and he wanted to speak, um, Mandarin Chinese. Okay. So he wanted to speak a little Mandarin. Um, I speak, I, I served a, a church mission in Taiwan, by the way, for 2 years. Loved it to death. It was amazing. Um, so I speak some Mandarin. I'm pretty decent at it. So he wanted to learn Mandarin Chinese. So what he did, he's like, okay, I'm gonna hire a tutor. This is what most people would do, right? I'm gonna hire a tutor. I'm gonna do once a week lessons. I'm gonna have a tutor come to my house. We're gonna spend an hour, hour and a half, you know, doing this. Okay, so he does this for a year, right? For one year he does this, 12 months. That's a lot of time to dedicate to learning a language. He has a school that he sponsored in China, so he flies out to China. Okay. He goes out there to his school, he gets there and he wants to practice his Mandarin. So he gets out there, he starts talking to people, and what he realizes, the students— there was international students that came from America, just barely. The students that had been there for 2 weeks already had way better Mandarin than he had. And he was pretty depressed. He was like, what? Like, what is this? Am I just old? Right? Am I, am I dumb? Can I not learn quickly? Like, why is my Mandarin so terrible? He's a billionaire. This guy spent— got the best tutor, spent a year doing this. Like, man, is Chinese just really hard? Like, what is going on? And then he realized something interesting. He goes, huh, well, okay, for the last year, I've spent about an hour a week. So that's about 52 hours I've spent learning Mandarin. These students that have been here for 2 weeks, they've already spent 80 to 100 hours studying management and being immersed in the culture. He was like, huh, in 2 weeks they progressed further than I progressed in a year. And he goes, well, no wonder they have better management than me. Huh. Now I think this is very true for our businesses. I have a, I have a couple friends that have wanted to launch a business for 2 years. Anybody else have somebody like this in their life? A family member, a brother-in-law? 3 years they've been talking about doing a business. Oh yeah, we're going to build this restaurant. We're going to do this cool thing. We're going to build a barbershop. Anybody? Am I the only one? Type a yes in the chat if that's you. If you know somebody, maybe it's you. I've done this before. What I like to call this type of personality is a wantrepreneur. They want to be entrepreneurs. They like talking about it. They like reading the books. They like wanting to be an entrepreneur. But they're not an actual entrepreneur. I would venture to guess, take any of your friends that have worked on, you know, I have a friend, he's worked on a business for 2 years. If me and you sat down this weekend, today's what's today? Tuesday. If we spent Tuesday to Saturday and all we did was work on the exact same business, I bet me and you would get further. In 4 days than they've gotten in 2 years. Because we're going to go all out. We're going to spend 15 hours a day. All we're going to do is eat, sleep, and drink is just do this. We're going to dive all in. In 4 days, I'd venture to guess we might, we might get further than somebody's gotten in 2 years. Because what these 2-year people do is they have a Zoom call with their business partners. Okay, let's get some assignments. And then 2 weeks later, they meet back up. Hey, how'd everyone do? Oh, I forgot to do— I got busy. My daughter had a birthday party. It's the holidays. Okay. Yeah. Let's get back together. Let's do it again. Okay, another 2 weeks goes by. Okay, how are we doing on— okay, do we get the logos done? How's the website built? Okay, yeah. Okay, can we get that done? Okay, great. Another 2 weeks goes by and they dabble and dabble and dabble and never— nothing ever gets done. If we go all in and are immersed, it's crazy what you can do in a short condensed period of time. I had a professor in university tell me this exact story right here. He said, Bridger, any business you're doing, you can vet out in 3 weeks with $500. If you go all in for 3 weeks on something, you can fully vet this business, see if it's a good business or bad business, and you'll know if you need to do it with 3 weeks and $500. And prior to this, this is during those 6 businesses, I was kind of dabbling through stuff. I was kind of doing this. I was, I was kind of doing the wantrepreneur stuff. I'd work on stuff on the side on the weekends, you know, kind of working on stuff. And finally I said, screw it. Like, I'm all in. So I grabbed Mason, my business partner. I'm like, dude, I've got this idea. We could launch a business where we could help people like learn about investment funds. Like, what do you think? He's like, yeah, it's a cool idea. And we didn't build a logo. We didn't even come up with a name. All we did, we went out and launched a bunch of ads on social media. We spent $500 on ads. We sent them to a landing page. And we had a little checkout page just to see if people would purchase. Like, we were going to sell this, a course on funds for $47 was our idea. Like, let's just see if people would buy. Let's just see if people will click on the advertisements. Let's see what our click-through rate is. Let's see what our opt-in rate is. See if we can get some emails, right? Our first weekend. So we spent, we just went all in. We're like, okay, we're just going to do this. All we're going to think about for the next like week is just do this. We went all in. We spent $500 on ads the first weekend. Get this, we made back around $1,800 off of about $500 in ad spend. We're like, shoot, people like this. But guess what? We didn't even build a product. What we did, by the way, we just said, hey, if you bought it, bought it, you know what? We're just going to give you a refund. We just refunded. We said, hey, we'll give you a refund. Or if you want to stay, we can, you know, we're going to build this thing over the next like 3 months. Uh, you can stay and we'll give it to you in 3 months, but really we just wanna see if you'd buy. Get— take a full refund, no questions asked. Just have a refund. We actually on the next page gave people refunds, um, because we wanted to just see if people would buy, right? Instead of worrying about a logo and a name and all the stuff, we just started to launch and just to move. What happened was this thing took off like wildfire. We actually built this whole product in about 2 weeks. And what's, you know, what's fun is building a product when there's money coming in the door. It's really fun to build a product. Everyone's on board, everyone's motivated, everyone's there. Went out and built this thing. The next month we did about $80,000 in sales in one month. Isn't that crazy? Over the next, uh, about 8 months later, we'd already done $1 million in sales. Over the, the following, like, it was around 12 months, we did $2.5 million in sales. And this is actually what became Funnel Launch. We then, um, we grew the next year. I think we did like $4.5 million. The next year we did like $9.5 and we did $11-something million, something like that. Rough. I'm giving you rough numbers. Okay. All off of going all in. I think there's a lot of power in condensing time. Now, why? Again, this whole conversation we just had about condensing time, going all in comes back to paying down ignorance debt. Again, there's a lot of validity in being in the right rooms, being in the right spot, going all in, turning decades into days. It's one of the reasons I love You know, people always talk about, you gotta go read business books. What happens is like, uh, Stephen Schwarzman spends 15 years building Blackstone and learning all these lessons. And what he does, he puts it into a book for 230 pages for me and you to read. And we can read that in a week, you know, and we condense a full 15 years of knowledge into a week. And we get to stand on the shoulders of people that have gone before us. That's why it's so mad. You guys have heard all these concepts before, but in relation to business, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. People have already done business. They've already learned how to hire and fire employees. They've already learned strategical management. They've already learned how to make decision-making processes. They've already learned how to effectively scale in a brand new asset class. People have already done it before. Now you just need to take all those things and maybe apply it to your specific niche, but that's it. You just get to stand on the shoulders of thousands of incredible successful business people. Fund managers that have come before you that have already learned and gone through the process and gone through all the hardship of all this. You can just stand on their shoulders and just apply it to your little niche and you can be extremely successful. That's why the odds of success right now, the entrepreneurship is hitting all-time highs. People that have launched more businesses made more money than ever before in the history of the world. Why? Because they get to stand on the shoulders of infrastructure that's already been built for the internet, that's been structured for funds, for legal compliance, etc. You get to stand on their shoulders, which is so cool. That's why I'm such a geek about events and throwing events. So I'll give you guys another invite if you want to come to Funnel Launch Live. We're throwing this event, 37 days for you to come and be immersed, be all in one, be with us. We go in depth for 3 days, 18 keynotes, world-class speakers, world-class networking. You get a chance to be in the room, shake hands, meet people that are in the fun space doing this, and to move things forward Um, right now. So if you guys want to go, it's funlaunchlive.com. You can grab tickets. Um, by the way, tickets just keep going up in price. So we did the last 2 years, we're doing it again this year. So tickets just keep going up in price as we get closer to the event. So right now, tickets are the cheapest they will be from now until the event. I think every, it's every like week or so we keep raising prices. So, um, join there and you guys can be there. So funlaunchlive.com, you can go grab tickets. If you want VIP tickets, I, we're almost full. You have to apply to get VIP tickets. So if you'd like, buy a general admission ticket. And then apply for VIP tickets. We can, uh, we look through your application. We'll have you hop on a phone call. VIP, we try to make sure they're very qualified, good, amazing people in VIP to make sure we just curate the right room. So that's how that works, uh, for funlaunchlive.com. Share my screen one more time. So again, here's the website, funlaunchlive.com. Click here to reserve tickets. It'll open up a new page. Um, you can put your first name, last name, email, phone number, and then you just go through and it helps you, you know, check out and buy tickets. Um, if you have questions, you go right here to talk to Matt. He's live right now. Matt's a real person, by the way, not just some AI bot. Matt's Matt, you know, Matt Z, real dude. He's on— actually, he's live right now on here, so you can talk with Matt. Um, and we have our whole team in there that'll help you guys out with checking out those problems, etc. But it should be pretty fun. You can come watch this cool video, uh, on here. All right. Um, okay, as promised, I'd love to take some questions. So let's open up for Q&A. Um, we can talk more about what we talked about today, getting in the room, ignorance debt, all this kind of stuff. Um, let's go from here. So Yeah, yeah, put them on this side of the screen. That'd be great. On the other side. Yeah, on the left side. If you can pull that chat open so I can see a little bit better. Say what's up. What's up, people on TikTok and YouTube and Facebook, LinkedIn? What's going on, Instagram? How you guys doing? What's up? What's up? YouTube channel is just my name, Bridger Pennington, or Bridger Pennington Fun Launch. You can look up both. We've got a bunch of good videos there. All right. And by the way, for people on Zoom, put them in the Q&A if you can. So put the questions in the Q&A. people on the other platforms, if you comment, it actually brings it to my screen. We have this kind of cool platform software, so I will see your comments as well. So drop in there and we'll go there. What were the names of the groups that you bought into? More opportunities to meet with you and people like you. So I joined a group called Avengers. I think they're discontinued now. That was the $30,000 one. I joined Russell Brunson's Category Kings group. You have to have a business over $10 million. That's like, that's as a category king in your space, meaning You own and you're the biggest player in your space. Like, we are the biggest players in the fund creation space, bar none, online. Like, we are the biggest player of— in our space. So we're the category king of that space. So we're allowed to join. And that one was $150,000. That was with Russell Brunson's group. Yeah. By the way, and then so we throw Black Card. Black Card's kind of our top group here. If you can see, where's my thing here? Black Card. Um, we've got a few hundred members of Black Card. We actually partner with you and launch your fund with you. We have a legal team that comes in like it's a full mastermind plus service to launch your fund. So that's one of our, one of our products at Fund Launch is Black Card. We've had again 210 funds we've launched out of Black Card. It's been pretty cool. Okay. Is there any way to connect with people that have got tickets? Yeah. Yeah. So once you've bought tickets, it's the Facebook group, correct? Slack. Okay. Excuse me. We have a Slack channel. That's actually way better. Facebook group kind of sucked. We had— we have built a private Slack channel just for people that bought tickets pre-event. So when you buy tickets, it'll invite you, you should get an email and all the confirmation stuff. There'll be an offering to join the Slack channel. It's a private Slack channel just for ticket buyers. So you join Slack and you can actually talk to and share and connect with everyone that's bought tickets. You can set up appointments or meetings or whatever you wanna do. Um, hey, we're gonna be in Orlando together. Let's go to Disney World together on the day before the event or whatever. Um, that's where you can meet. Yep. Uh, what, you know, how do I talk about Black Card or join Black Card? So yeah, Black Card, um, if you want to learn more about Black Card, you can go and actually talk to my team. Um, Black Card is not cheap, by the way. It's a, you know, it's a full service to launch your fund with legal included, pitch deck designers, 11 coaches. It's not a cheap product. It is an expensive product to join. It's, you know, just so you're aware, it's, but it's expensive for a reason. It's, we go all out with you to build and launch your fund. If you go to fundlaunch.com, /call, you can actually book a call. So fundlaunch.com/call or just fundlaunch.com, you can find it there. But let's see if it pulls up here. fundlaunch.com/call. Hey, there's— who's that guy? Okay, you can see me. This runs you through what Black Card is, this little video here, and then you can book a call with one of our fund advisors. Um, and you can come schedule a call here. Should hopefully load. There you go. So there's some call spots for— we got some spots for tomorrow. There might even be some for today, so it should pull up some times here, etc. If my little iPad here will work, should pull up some times. There you go. So we got time slots for all, all day tomorrow. So you can click like 11 o'clock, it just puts it onto our, our team. The— my whole team, by the way, is trained by me. They work with me every day, etc. Um, can you pitch at Fun Launch Live, or is it more of a networking opportunity? Great question. So no, we don't allow speakers to come pitch. We don't allow anyone to pitch on stage. This is not a pitch fest. It's not meant to come and just pitch people. Some events do that and I hate it. Okay. Now we do have an opportunity if you wanted to come be a sponsor. We have booths outside so you can come do a booth sponsorship if you like to do that. So and on certain days and times, we again, we don't like— I don't like people pitching at events, but we have a time and a place where you can have a booth. Because there's lots of great services that help people launch funds. So if you're looking to launch a fund and need help with, I don't know, whatever XYZ thing that you provide, you can have a sponsorship opportunity at Fund Launch Live. Yeah, that connect with— should I just give them which your email? Okay, so message Andy, A-N-D-Y, andy@fundlaunch.com, andy@fundlaunch.com. You can message Andy and he'll help you with if you want to do a sponsorship or buy a booth at the event. They're, you know, a few thousand bucks. Okay, what would, what would your advice be to someone to find their niche? Great question. Um, can you share my screen? Yeah. So finding your niche is an awesome question. So first thing I would tell somebody, if you're brand new to this space, um, let me erase some of this stuff here. If you're brand new to the fund, you know, fund investment fund space, the first thing I tell everybody— actually was talking to a cousin over the weekend, he's like, Bridger, I would love to get into that. I get like funds are so So cool. I want to learn about funds. Like, what do I need to do? I say first thing you should do is learn. Educate yourself on this space. Like, go in depth. Learn the unknowns of the unknown we talked about earlier, right? The scary unknowns of the unknown. Like, come educate yourself. And by the way, at Fund Launch, we have, we have a free course. By the way, we have a full free course all the way up to a paid, like, 300+ video course. Called our Fund Academy. But I would join. We have YouTube. If you want to do free stuff, I'd go on YouTube and watch our videos. We're pretty much the only one online that makes content for funds. Just, I wish there was more, to be honest, but there's, it's really just us. We make pretty much the majority of the content online. So you can come watch our YouTube channel. Just look up Bridger Pennington or Fund Launch. You can find all of our stuff. We have a full free course just to educate on funds. If you want to go way in depth, you can join our Fund Academy program. But I would say just learn, get in the room and come to Fund Launch Live. Get around, taste it, touch it, feel it. Fund Launch Live, like come to the events, be in the room. Um, because what will happen is, so I'll tell you a quick story. If you can go back to me if you want. This is what happened for me. So I, um, my story, I, and I'll tell you my whole story, but I learned, I didn't realize my dad had any money that they were doing well. I learned from his business partner that they're doing extremely well. They're crushing in business. They're just, you know, they're doing incredibly well. My dad, then I said, Dad, you got to mentor me, coach me on funds. He says, great. So he starts to teach me about funds. My dad sat down with me, started to explain to me how funds are built, how they're put together, how the SEC works, how international funds work, parallel funds, feeder funds, Cayman Island funds. And what happened was I started to learn and absorb this information. It's kind of like if anybody ever bought a car in the chat, type in actually in the chat what car you've bought before. Like, what's your favorite car you've ever owned? Type in the chat, favorite car you've ever owned. So, I remember in college, I— type in the chat, I'm curious actually. Give me like the full name. I bought a Subaru WRX, okay? And if you like rally racing, it was like the car that's like really cool. In college, I got a Subaru WRX that was so cool. It was white. We put these cool headlights on it, mud flaps. We like put like cool rims on it. It was all decked out. It was a manual. Like, I love driving manual cars. It's like, damn, this car's amazing. What's funny is whenever you get a new car, What happens? You are you start seeing that car everywhere. Like currently, I drive a Tesla Model S Plaid. I currently drive a Plaid. It's really fun car. It's crazy fast. I see Plaid everywhere now, right? You guys seen that before? Like you just see Plaid wherever. Like I see that car everywhere, and it's not like there's magically more cars. It's just be you start to pay attention to that thing that you have in your life. The same thing is true with funds. So back to my screen here. Like if you start to learn about funds, I promise you. You will start to recognize opportunities for funds in your life. So, what happened to me? My dad taught me about funds. I started to learn about funds. And what happened was I, over the next 6 months, I was working at a job. So, I was in college. I'm in college. I'm working a job. At this job, I saw an opportunity where we could launch a fund to finance the clients that were coming through this company. I took the idea to the my boss at the job and said, "Hey, what do you guys think?" He's like, "Oh, this would be awesome. We love the idea. This is great." And we started to formulate this fund idea. Was it going to be a debt fund? We're going to do loans. And ta-da! Within a few months, I launched my very first fund. We raised a whopping get this. Okay. So I pitched my dad for money. My dad says no. I'm like, "Okay, I'll go. I'm gonna go pitch whoever." I went out and raised a whopping forty nine thousand five hundred dollars. From I think six investors. Okay, teeny amount of money. I mean so small. This is teeny. Okay, but it was enough to get started. I was 22 years old, and it was enough to get started. We we started doing these little micro loans. The loans were like one thousand to six thousand dollars per loan. They lasted two months. Our first group of investors, small amount of money, but we got them a sixty. 64% return on their money. Not bad, right? 64% of their return on their money. We then closed this down and restructured. We launched our next fund. That fund I ran for something like 3 and a half years. We raised and deployed millions of dollars. I think on our first raise, we raised— oh, what's happening here? We raised something like $850,000. I'm still in college. I was like 23 at the time. This is 23 years old. Just me, really. I was the only GP. Me and I put my brother on for 5% because he helped do the legal docs. I gave him 5% to do the legal docs. The rest was me. I own 95% of this company and we did $850,000. We'd roll— we were rolling millions of dollars in loans out this. We raised this at 23 years old. We ran that for about— I ran that for about 3 and a half years. We then had a competitor come and buy us out. Okay. So actually gave us an offer. We sold the company, made, you know, a good chunk, good exit on this company. We literally did millions of dollars of loans though. And we got that. I think the next year we got a 62 We did a 49 and then a 36% return, cash on cash return to investors in this fund. Then I launched Ugly Unicorn. Ugly Unicorn, we raised $10 million in that fund. We now manage over $25 million, currently still raising money. We're raising about, you know, $1 to $2 million a month right now, average about a month, $1 million a month currently. And we just launched our Fund Launch Partners, Fund Launch Partners Fund. We're raising $50 million for that fund. We just started raising money. So if you can see at least my journey, I started to learn about funds. I got in the right rooms. I talked to the right people, and I started to see opportunities for funds. And now today, through Fund Launch Partners, we've now partnered, I think, with eight. We have eight. Like I'm gonna I'm a strategic advisor on eight different funds, and there's I see fund opportunities every single day. There's an incredible amount of fund opportunities. It's insane. But I never would see those today unless I had paid dad my ignorance debt earlier. By learning this kind of stuff. Hopefully that answers that question. I'm gonna erase all this, kind of get a little muddle. That's kind of what my journey was to pay down that ignorance debt there. Sorry, I'll leave that up. Some people are like, "Please leave it up." There we go. I'll leave it up. That's kind of my journey. And now, you know, running an eight-figure fund, and hopefully we'll be running. I'm going to be running a nine-figure fund soon. And by the way, I don't claim to know everything of. That's why at FundLash Live we bring in experts from around the world that run billion-dollar funds or have done this for twenty years or in different niches and spaces. I try to give you a full breadth of people that are smarter than me in certain categories and certain places. I'm pretty good at launching funds. I've done an incredible— I think a really good job at helping other people launch funds. But still, there's a lot. I'm still in this game, just so you're aware. I'm still in the journey. I'm still in the process. I'm still learning. I'm still growing. That's why I love throwing events. That's why I love doing stuff like this. I get to be around you. I get to be around incredible people like you that come to the events, teach me stuff. I get to learn about Almond farm funds and, uh, manure funds and solar funds and forex funds and, you know, Canadian shipping container funds. I mean, we have the craziest, coolest funds in, in our Fund Launch community, and it teaches me and educates me a lot on funds. It gives me an incredible room to be in and, uh, to pay down ignorance debt. Um, other questions on, on the, you know, chats from the other groups? Let's see if I can see them here. What's the book you named? Yeah, it's called Whatever You Whatever Whatever It Takes by Stephen Schwartzman. That's the name of the book. Superb. Love you guys. Keep up the great work, bro. Awesome. Thank you for your inspiration. You guys. So a lot of people raising for. So what we're gonna do actually. Um, we're going to be going live, uh, every Tuesday and Friday from now until Fund Launch Live. We're gonna talk about different topics. So a lot of these questions are some great questions, like how do I now close the investor? How do I— we're gonna be doing this every single Tuesday and Friday. So on Friday we're actually going live. I got Dan Young, my partner, coming out. We're talking all things crypto on Friday. Should be pretty fun. Next week we're going to talk about, uh, more about raising capital, launching the fund, the structure. We're going to do a, a lot of stuff. We're gonna invite the speakers to come on that are coming to Fund Launch Live and kind of give you a teaser of What they're talking about, train, how they're building, etc., over the next few weeks. So every Tuesday and Friday, we're going to be going live. I believe at the similar times. I think Friday we're going to be a little off because I'm traveling on Friday, but we'll look out for email. So if you guys are not on our email list, go join. Go funlaunch.com. Put your email in somewhere and it will join you on our lists. Go to funlaunchlive.com. Put your email in. You'll be invited to all these live calls that we're doing, and we'll we'll have a lot of fun. So I'll answer a bunch of these questions there again. Funlaunchlive.com. If you want to share my screen one more time, that's what it looks like. If you guys want to grab tickets, it's pretty fun. Well, uh, I don't know if we can play this video. It probably won't work, but this video is pretty fun. If you guys want to see an inspirational video, it's, it's pretty awesome. But funlaunchlive.com, come right here. You can even just come in, reserve your tickets. Just put your name and email and phone number in here. They'll put you on our list and you'll be invited to all the live calls that we're doing. Um, should be pretty fun. You guys are amazing. I, again, I'll leave you with this. Um, We're in the game of funds, and I hope you recognize that I'm in this game for the long term. Funds are a long-term game. It is a reputation game. There's only one brand that you'll ever have forever. It's you. You are the greatest brand. I hope to have a brand of integrity, of a brand that we deliver on what we say we're going to do. And I believe people in the chat, some of you were— thank you for saying that in the chat. You guys are so nice of doing that already for you guys. We we try to overdeliver on everything we do because I recognize this is the long-term game that we're— that I am playing. I, uh, you know, you look at Warren Buffett, you look at Stephen, uh, or look at Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio started his first fund, I believe, at 26 years old. Ray Dalio— or excuse me, Warren Buffett started his first one at 28 years old. Both of them raised about $100,000. That was it. But what happened was they compounded a good reputation. They did well with investors' money for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And now today, you look at Warren Buffett or Ray Dalio, wow, these guys are billionaires. They're amazing. It took them 50 years in some cases to get to where they're at today. We're playing the long-term game. So, I want to let you guys know I care a lot about how you're treated in our community and group. And send— by the way, if you feel like one of my employees or someone in our group treated you wrongly, send me a message. Okay? Let me know. I care a lot about the brand, how we're developing returns, how we're Our crypto fund right now is crushing it. As you know, crypto is on fire right now. Inception date, we were just right around 100% return inception date. We've only been in business for about 2— let's see, 2 years, something like that. June of 2022. So, oh yeah, less than 2 years this year. It's really cool to give and send distribution checks, investor checks back out. Our first 2 funds crushed. We did amazing. So never lost investor money, which is really cool to say. And I want to keep doing that for the next decade or multiple decades as we are in this business. I hope you have the same. I hope you have the same long-term thinking. What we're doing today is massive. And by the way, it's not just massive for you. It's massive for your kids, your grandkids. If you have a— my— I benefited greatly from a father who taught me about funds. Think about your kids, your grandkids. If you can learn the information, go through the hardship of learning all this stuff, think about what you can pass on to your kids and your grandkids or great-grandkids in the future. Just getting them in this space earlier. Um, it's important what we are doing, what you're sharing, what you were doing, not just for you, but for your family members, your friends. There's, you know, Ed Mylett talks about this concept of the one, the power of the one. There's one person that comes through a lineage. If you look through any history of families, or let's say wealthy families today, if you take a wealthy family today, you look back far enough in their posterity and there was, they weren't wealthy, right? There was, they were poor. But then what happened was through this lineage, they came through this lineage, there came the one. It was the one that said, I'm not going to take this anymore. We're going to change things. The one took on the responsibility, the power, and created the family wealth for generations. And Ed, my last challenge on stage to us last year was become the one. Be the one for your family. Be the one that changes your posterity and the people that come after you. Because that's happened for every family that's come before us that are wealthy today. And so, be that one for your family. Think about it on a bigger picture. That's why I think coming to things like Fund Launch Live is so massive. You get to be in the room and compress time to be in the room with people that are going out and building funds. The thing that's created most billionaires in the world is investment funds, is money management. So, with that, grab your tickets at fundlaunchlive.com. Ticket prices are going up soon. And so, from now until Fund Launch Live, we just keep raising prices all the way until there. We have sold out the last 2 events. We plan to sell out this event as well. So, with that, go grab your tickets at FunnelHacks Live. We will be live again on Friday. So, look out for emails or notifications. We'll be live on Friday. It should be pretty fun. We'll do more questions. We're going to talk all things crypto. My partner, Dan, is an incredible crypto expert on security. If you're doing your own crypto at home, what we're seeing with price targets for Bitcoin, our current price target's around $175,000 to $200,000 Bitcoins over this next 18 months. And we're going to explain all the math behind that, why we believe that's going to happen. Alternative coins, other stuff that we're looking at buying. Again, we run a $25 million hedge fund in the cryptocurrency space. We're going to talk about all that on Friday. It should be very fun. You guys are amazing. Grab tickets at fundlastlive.com. Make sure you're opted into our stuff so you get notifications, and we'll go from there. Thank you all, and we'll see everybody later. Bye-bye. See y'all.