How To Establish Credibility as a Fund Manager

All right, welcome back. Let's talk about establishing some credibility with you and your fund. Now, you might already have some great credibility. You might not. This is something you're going to probably constantly be working on for the rest of your life in the fund world. You're going to be always building credibility for what you are doing. Now, there's a few ways, especially an emerging fund, to build credibility. If you go down to my screen, we talk about this, the 3 roles in every fund. So we have the expert investor, the fund manager, and the money raiser. These are your 3 distinct roles. Now again, 1 person can do all of these, 20 people can do these roles, but all 3 roles need to be taken care of. If you feel like you have a weak spot on your team, meaning, you know, none of our team members have— and we really feel like we need some Ivy League or Wall Street experience, go find somebody that went to Dartmouth or find someone that went to Harvard or Stanford or Kellogg. And bring them on your team. People love— I mean, they graduate thousands of graduates a year that are all looking, and a lot of them want to get into the world of funds, private equity, hedge funds. Go bring them on your team. Okay? Bring them on as an equity partner. That could build that credibility. If you feel like you're weak on something, go borrow credibility from others. I'll give you a real-world example here right now. All right. So you can see my screen. This is our team for Ugly Unicorn. Now, Bridger, I think I'm pretty cool. Like, oh, Bridger Pennington, man, I'm so cool. I think I'm awesome, which I've got some good things going for me. I've ran 3 funds prior. I've, you know, founder of Fund Launch. We've helped hundreds of millions of, you know, or billions of dollars of people in our group of communities. My 3 funds that I've ran prior have done incredible. So, I have a good track record as a fund manager. But I have no track record in crypto. So, what did I do? I went and found Dan Young. So, Dan, Guess what he has right here? He's done $600 million in sales in Xidax PC laptops. He's on the Intel board of advisors for 16 years. He's on AMD's gaming advisory member for the last 4 or 5 years. Multiple Inc. 500 winner, okay? Started mining Bitcoin in 2014, had the largest crypto mining facility in the state of Utah in 2014. I mean, absolutely just crushed, okay? He's never ran a fund before. So, he wanted to partner with me and I wanted to partner with him for all those reasons. We then brought on some few other advisors. Kirk Ohman, Sold his company to Snapchat for $54 million, bought his first Bitcoin at $1. And then we brought Michelle on. She's very good at CPA. She's a very good CPA, tax, all things crypto tax, by the way. Very, very good. And Tyler is a very great analyst for us as well. So we decided to make a mix of a team. By the way, this team is probably going to keep growing as we want to establish more credibility. How our roles work. I do— I'm the fund manager. Dan is all things investments. And then we both help raise capital together. That's kind of how the roles work amongst us 2. Tyler works on that and these guys work on different pieces of those teams. But those are the main roles between us 2 as founders. So again, if you don't have this, go find it. There are people on LinkedIn, people graduating all the time that want to come work with you. Just there are people in Black Card. If you do not feel like you have whatever it takes, maybe you go join someone else's team and you gain the experience, you gain the credibility from them. Okay, so that's how you can work on your team members. The cool thing that we have going for us, people love to work on funds. The idea of working on a hedge fund or a private equity fund is awesome. It's the reason you're here. It's the reason I'm here. It's freaking cool to go work on a fund. You'd be surprised how many good people you can go headhunt from other places to come in here. One more note on this. If you need someone good here, you can sometimes get, you know, former investment attorneys, things like that to come help. Money raisers. If you go look at currently people that are currently raising money, registered investment advisors, wealth managers, people that run, you know, maybe they run family offices currently. Those people, a lot of, a lot of them have the dream one day to go run their own fund. Great place to look for money raisers. They're already a wealth manager at JPMorgan. They're already a wealth manager at Charles Schwab. They're already running an RIA. They're already an investment advisor. And they, in the back of their brain, they all think, one day I should just go launch my own fund. That'd be awesome. Great place to go find some money raisers. Fund managers, these people, you know, Black Card has a number of these people. I'm one of these people. Expert investor, this is going to vary vastly depending on which category industry you're in. So that'll depend up to you to find those people. But again, great people here. So second piece of credibility, I'm going to go back to my fund here. I've got our team. Obviously credibility hopefully is decent. We show credibility, though, a lot in how we present our funds. I'm going to scroll down here for a second. How we talk about the market, the macro, the micro cycles shows people our expertise in this field, right? It's even if they've never met us before, they don't care about our accolades, whatever, showing just expertise in the field, talking about— and I think previous section we talked about the tectonic plates, showing that there's a tidal wave of capital moving in this direction and talking through How we view a Fed rate cycle, an election cycle, how the tectonic war is happening, how all these pieces are moving in our direction. And whether they agree or not, if you can just intelligently talk through these things and answer questions, show charts and graphs and just essentially show your thesis in a very adequate, great way, you can do extremely well. Now, the last thing I'll share, you also can borrow credibility from how you just set up and structure your fund. So I'm going to zoom in on this one. For our fund, I bring up as we present, I go, hey, security and fraud mitigation is a big deal for us. We make sure this is buttoned up the best way possible. I have experience with funds. I work with a lot of fund managers. So we do a few things. Number one, we use a third-party administrator, NAV Consulting out of Chicago. They help manage over 2,000 different funds. Incredible group. They check every single dollar that comes in and out of our fund. They check and make sure it's done appropriately. Me and Dan, even if we wanted to, if we had a gun to our head, we could not move money out of our fund because of— we have a third-party administrator on our fund. And then I always say, hey, I'm an investor in funds. I always make sure that the fund I invest in has a third-party administrator. If they don't have it, I don't invest because it's too easy to commit fraud. Number 2, if that wasn't enough, we hire a third-party auditor out of New Jersey called Berkower. Once a year, they come and do an annual audit. They check on the checkers. They check on NAV Consulting. They check on us. They make sure everything is done correctly and buttoned up as another layer to secure and make sure that you have correct, accurate reports, that we are doing things the right way. That's how committed we are to clear compliance. On top of that, we hire ACA Compliance Global. They are the top firm in the world at keeping groups compliant. So we run all of our stuff through them. We, we, if you can't tell, We are committed to making sure this is buttoned up. It is done the right way. We know the world of crypto, especially, is kind of a scammy world. We take a risk-mitigated institutional approach to crypto and blockchain because we still— we believe this is a great asset class. We believe there's a tidal wave of money coming, money, capital coming, and we do things in a buttoned-up, fantastic way. See how I— Sorry, I got into pitch mode there, but I borrow the credibility of those 3 firms that I've hired into our fund. I really— I kind of pitch them or present them and they go, oh wow. If they've never even met Bridger before, they go, okay, well obviously this person is committed to— yeah, I think the risk of fraud goes way down. And actually that helps you kind of put a moat around other competitors. Hey, if they— if you're just— by the way, I invest in lots of funds. If they don't have an audit, they don't have a third-party administrator, I never— I don't even talk to them because it's too easy to commit fraud. They go, oh shoot, okay. If they've maybe talked to a competitor of yours, they go, oh, I don't want to work with them. I'm going to work with you guys. Borrowing credibility is massive. Build it on your team. You can go— there's a lot of great ways. Obviously LinkedIn, inBlackCard, other great members you can bring to your team, attract them from— if you need an Ivy Leaguer, go get an Ivy Leaguer. Get whatever you need. If you need to borrow credibility from firms like ACA or NAV or Berkower, we have a full backend where you guys can actually go and all these firms are in there. You can use them. I work with them actively in my fund as well. So I love working with these firms. They've been great to me. And you can go find more firms yourself, but you can borrow credibility that way. And bring it together. Ultimately, the credibility will then grow as your fund performs well. So good performance will be the ultimate test of good tracker, good performance, and will give you a lot more credibility, and it compounds on itself as you grow. Hope that's helpful. See you guys in the next video. Bye.