How To Launch Your Fund During the 2026 AI Infrastructure Shift

Good morning, good morning. Welcome in today. My name is Bridger Pennington. We are live, uh, with today's webinar. Today we're gonna be talking about— let's just dive right in. Can you show my slides? We're gonna be talking all about the AI infrastructure buildout of 2026, and is this going to be a boom or a bust? That's the topic for today. We're gonna talk about the 5 layers to the AI infrastructure cake. This came from Nvidia. They just dropped this article last week. I thought it was pretty interesting, and this is— will frame today's discussion. Discussion of what we're going to be talking about in different layers of AI of the stack. And I thought it was a pretty good, I guess, position they took of all the layers. Just, they framed it really well. So I wanted to share this with you to just start today's call off. So the bottom layer of the AI cake is energy. We're going to talk about this immensely in just a few minutes, but energy. Above energy is the chip layer. So this is what Nvidia is good at, TSMC, Intel. On top of the chip layer is infrastructure. This is data centers, This is the actual, uh, now they're terming AI factories that produce tokens. On top of those AI factories are models. This is your base layer models like a Gemini, a Claude, a ChatGPT. That's the model layer. And then finally is the application layer when you take those models and put those into useful things. So welcome on today's call. We're gonna talk about all 5 of these layers today. I have a guest coming on. We have another recording. We, we got a lot of stuff planned. This is gonna be a really good call. This is live, by the way. So if you can, I don't know, type in the chat hello, type in where you're calling in from. I actually— I'll prove that it's live. I have my chat live right here, and there's a little delay, so I'll let you guys chat for a second and come back. But type in the chat, like, literally I'm watching the chat behind the scenes, and, uh, you know, we'll pull people on. I'll have it here. We'll have a Q&A going live as well. I can go here and actually create Q&A questions and start polls and stuff. So we are live for today's call. So type in the chat where you're calling in from, and we'll, uh, we'll have some fun today. All right, so when I go into these, you know, each one of these layers, again, energy is the foundation. Every token produced as a result of electrons moving. This is a huge shortage in the United States right now. We are way behind China in production of electrons. This is a major, almost alarming point that— now, I'm not the first person to bring this up. They've been talking about this immensely across the country, but it's hard to update an outdated grid, bring nuclear, solar, wind power onto the grid, especially when local municipalities are vetoing or blocking some of this infrastructure buildout in the United States. We'll come back just a little bit with these charts, but it's pretty interesting the growth of where China is going in total output per year. You can see their trend line and where we're going. If we don't fix this, this is the base layer of AI, at least according to experts, a lot of this other stuff does not work well. And we are behind in this category as far as a country goes, the United States. Now the chip layer, we are ahead compared to others. So Nvidia is by far the category king of this space. We have TSMC though, Taiwan Semiconductor, Intel, Apple's producing their own chips now, but currently Nvidia seems to be the top, the top grower. We'll talk about in a minute. Infrastructure. This is land, power delivery, cooling, construction, network of systems to orchestrate tens of thousands of processors. The models, I already mentioned this. This is, you know, what's happening on actually the model layer. of Gemini or, or ChatGPT. And then on top of that, these models like Gemini, they also have applications. Gemini has Nano Banana as an application layer of AI. Now we've been doing a lot internally at Funnel Launch of working with these AI systems. We're building out Funnel Launch AI. I have a team of 7 developers on my team building out Funnel Launch AI. We should be out pretty soon with it, which should be fun. Uh, also internally, we've, we've launched a number of Claude bots inside of our business. I think we have 5 right now, 5 or 6 Mac Minis that are running internally that we're running applications on. We're actually gonna bring on Christian from my team in a few minutes to talk about how we've deployed at the application layer into our company right now. If you're not thinking about this, I mean, it is, it is all new. It is interesting, but it is happening very fast right now as well. Now furthermore, today's call, we're going to do Q&A on the iPad. Um, VIP members, you guys can ask questions directly. We'll do that in a few minutes. So queue up questions you have in the chat. Again, I have my chat right here. I can come over. Hey, what's up? There were some people, Puerto Rico, Buffalo. What's up? We'll see who gets the top chat here, but welcome on YouTube. Good to see y'all type in the chat. I'll be key. I'll keep checking this as we go. So keep pulling that up. Um, also on our agenda, we're gonna be talking about building investment funds, especially in the age of AI. You guys know I'm the investment fund person. Okay? So we're gonna talk about private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate funds, private credit funds, this whole world. So what we talk about on our YouTube channel, we're gonna talk about building funds though, number one, with AI, and number two, to invest into this massive AI wave that we are seeing. Now, we've— why do I have authority to talk on this? Well, we've done this extensively through our program called Black Card. As you guys know, at Fund Launch, we help people launch investment funds. We teach pretty much everything for free. We help people implement those things through usually Black Card, and then we actually can allocate those funds through Fund Launch partners. But one of my goals today is that you should consider launching an investment fund. Okay? Now, Bridger, what authority do you have in this topic to speak on this subject? I'll touch on this briefly and then we'll dive more into AI, bring our first guest on in just a couple minutes. He's queued up right now. I actively run 2 funds right now, 14 portfolio funds with a combined portfolio AUM of over $650 million. So yes, I know something about launching funds, running funds, investing in funds. We're doing this right now. I practice what I preach through Black Card. Uh, which we call the ultimate incubator to launch your fund. People have paid us over $47 million to help them launch their investment funds. You can see the Stripe data right there. Uh, stats of Fund Launch. We have $7.1 billion of reported client AUM through Fund Launch. We have 2,000 Black Card members out of Fund Launch. Again, we've done this— isn't some brand new startup. We've done this for 7 years, going on our 7th year right now. This has put us on the Inc. 5000 of fast-growing companies in America. To put this into perspective though, how much is a billion? When I use like big numbers, today we're going to use trillions, we're going to use billions. I think it's useful to understand how much is a billion. So in the chat, I'm actually, I'll ask you guys this question. If I gave you $1 a second, every second, how much money or how much time would it take to get to a billion seconds? So for example, if you made $60 a minute, $3,600 an hour, $86,000 a day, How many days, weeks, months, years would it take to be a billionaire? Or in other words, if you had $1 billion and you gave away $86,000 a day, every day, weekends, holidays, how long until you run out of money? The answer is 31.6 years to reach $1 billion. So today, we're going to use large numbers. Like I just flashed $7.1 billion. That is a large number.

Yeah.

Okay. Trillion. We're gonna put that into context in a minute, but these are large metrics that we're gonna talk about. When we talk about AI infrastructure build out of AI, it is in to the tune of almost $10 trillion, which is, we'll come back to this in a minute, but these are stats of our clients at Fund Launch. We've launched 390 funds through Black Card. We're launching about 1.5 funds per week. So yes, I know what I'm talking about when I speak on investment funds.

Okay.

And just so you guys are aware, Black Card's typical cost, about $35,000 to join Black Card. We come in, we have coaching, coaching staff. We have 5 different law firms, a pitch deck designer that all think tank someone's fund to go help them launch their own fund. Okay, that's my, my subtle plug for what we do at Fund Launch. Sound good? This has put us on the Inc. 5000 of fastest growing companies in America. We've helped people do multifamily real estate, sports gambling funds, commercial real estate funds, short-term rentals, long-short trading investing, African food supply chain funds, forex funds, crypto funds, real estate funds, almond funds, debt consolidation, seller finance. A lot of guys doing creative finance. We help a ton in Black Card. Startup investing, business acquisition, single-family real estate. And you can, you know, go through the rest here. We've helped a lot of people build investment funds. Now, some of you guys know my story. I'll share this in 1 minute or less. But I started 6 businesses my first 2 years of college. I tried all sorts of business types. I went on YouTube. I kept trying to find different businesses. And then I found investment funds. And my dad had ran a decabillion-dollar family of funds. My brother was an investment funds attorney. I launched my first fund at 22 years old out of college. I pitched my dad for money. My dad turned me down, said no, but he said, I will be a mentor, a coach to you, and help me, coach me through the process of building my own investment fund. I understand the uniqueness of that position. And I ran that for 3 years by my, pretty much by myself. And we did extremely well. I had a competitor come and buy our fund out. We sold and exited that fund, which was really cool. So I actually went full cycle on an investment fund. Our investors got really good returns. Which led us to build Fund Launch. I was like, more people need to understand this game. My dad, my brother, myself, like, can we help more people on YouTube, on podcasts? Can we really democratize Wall Street? And so that's why we built Fund Launch, to help more people like us that are kind of off-market. I built a fund in Utah. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, for crying out loud. I do not live in New York or Miami or some big hub. I live in a flyover state, an off-market state. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I'm actually a college dropout. Yet I learned how to build these funds. Okay? And I now currently, I run Ugly Unicorn and I run Fund Launch Partners with some incredible partners. Combined, we've raised over $54 million of equity, and you can see our portfolio AUM is over $650 million. I practice what I preach. Okay? I teach about funds and I actively run 2 investment funds right now. Okay? I'm always, I always am interested in what people do, not what they say they do, what they actually So yes, this works. And we're on a mission to democratize Wall Street. I want to help more people understand this game. I want to help people on YouTube like this for free on a Friday morning to help people figure out what this whole world of high finance funds, things that I'm learning from my world, and I want to democratize that to the world. Okay? And we do this. Most of our education is for free, by the way. We have AltStreet. Our incubator is paid, like I mentioned, which is Black Card. And then we allocate. So our favorite funds out of Black Card, we actually write checks into and invest into their funds. I'll share an example in a second, but we help people launch investments as we do at Fund Launch day in and day out.

Okay.

I also have a beautiful family. This is my wife and 2 kids. We have 9 chickens. We live in a little homestead in Utah. It's awesome. And I love my family. We've got an incredible thing going. So what is a fund? Okay. Today we're talking about AI and funds and how they're mixing what we're doing. But in the most basic sense, just so we can have The same vernacular. All a fund is, is a tool to aggregate capital, usually with the purpose to grow. It's a pool of money, and that money is used to invest in things. So, you'll hear things like hedge funds. Hedge funds is just a pool of money, and what they invest into is public assets like stocks or bonds or crypto. And whenever those investments make money, they just split the returns. So, what's a private equity fund? A private equity fund is just a pool of money. Instead of buying a stock, they buy private businesses, private equity, private equity in businesses. They buy laundromats. They buy a store. They buy sometimes bigger businesses and they conglomerate them together. That's private equity, anything private. Venture capital is a pool of money that invests into startups. Real estate funds is a pool of money that invests into real estate. Private credit is a pool of money that makes loans. These funds are all pretty much the same. We've helped every single one of these fund types launch, and I'm telling you from experience, they pretty much are structured and set up almost the same. I run 2 of these right now. I run a private equity firm and a hedge fund.

Okay?

This is what like they're set up pretty much the same. Okay? So like for example, Ugly Unicorn is a Crypto hedge fund. We invest in long-term crypto investments. We have $24 million of equity. Fund Launch Partners is a GP stakes firm that we invest into all these different industries out of that firm. And when the money, when we make money, we split those returns usually 80/20 with investors. All right. We making sense? Set some groundwork for today of what funds are. Now again, my, this is one of my goals today is if you have a good strategy and money is the only thing stopping you, You should consider launching an investment fund. By the end of today's call, I hope if you're someone who is smart, has a good strategy, knows something like this, and money is stopping you, a fund can bridge that gap. Furthermore, as promised, I have a bonus for everyone on today's call. You guys cool if I give you a free gift and we're then we're going to dive in and bring our first guest on? This is a free gift. I wanted you guys to if you're ADHD like me, you always want to run numbers and like model stuff out. So this is the gift. I don't know if Christian or Adam, if you guys can cue this up in the chat. Uh, this is a full financial model that you can use to look through your fund. Uh, we're gonna drop a Google Drive link, and then this is a direct download for an Excel spreadsheet, but it's essentially a full model that you can map out how much money you would make. And actually, I'll even share my screen here. I think it's— oh, I reset my computer. Let's do this. I'll even show you what it looks like. So I'm gonna drop this in the chat. This is a free gift for today. I was like, yo, you guys are on. What you'll do is you'll open it up, you'll hit make a copy. You got to make sure you're logged into Google Drive. If you're not, you can do the other one, but you'll come in here and this is a real estate basic calculation. So you can zoom in, you can say, hey, we're going to raise $15 million of equity and $20 million of debt. And that's $35 million of purchasing power. You can see your growth multiple here. How much, you know, okay, we believe this will grow at a 1.2x over 5 years. We're going to charge a 2 and 20. Our interest rate on that debt is 6.5%. And we're gonna buy it at cap rate. By the way, if you don't know what a cap rate is, the definition is right here.

Okay?

And then you can run the numbers. On a fund like this, you and your partners would make $2.7 million. That's not bad. Now, if you add a zero here and did a $350 million fund, you and your partners would make $27 million. And then you can change some assumptions. Ah, maybe debt's more expensive. Maybe it's gonna be 7.5%.

Okay.

The numbers update and you can see how that affects your take-home earnings. Isn't that kind of cool? You do the same thing if you're doing private equity and buying businesses, a private credit breakdown. If you're doing a hedge fund, you can do it all right here on the bottom. You can all see that. Is that a cool gift?

Yeah.

Would that be useful?

Okay.

We'll drop it in the chat. You guys can hit the links and just use that. So there you go. There's the bonus for today's call. All right. Um, all right. You guys feeling good? Yeah. Should we keep going? All right. So we're just going to keep— we're going to dive into this. Um, Back to this, AI is a 5-layer cake, right? We got the application model, infrastructure, chips, and energy. We're gonna touch on most of these today. Um, I wanna talk about this. You guys cool if we just dive into some meat?

Yeah.

Type a yes in the chat if you're ready to dive in. This year we have seen an interesting rotation, especially in the stock market. We have seen the SaaS-pocalypse is what some have called it. Uh, since about January 28th, 29th, we have seen huge brand names like Adobe, Salesforce, HubSpot, get decimated in the markets. I mean, absolutely beat up. These are the drawdowns in the last month and a half. HubSpot is down 60 to 66%. Wix down over 50%. Salesforce, like a poster child of Silicon Valley, down over 40%. Zoom, which is, you know, we, I use Zoom all the time, down 50%. Okay, the market, the stock market is pricing in a massive AI disruption. They're calling it the SaaS-pocalypse. You can see even name brands like ServiceNow, CrowdStrike, Snowflake. These are multi-billion-dollar companies. Huge haircut in 30 days or less. Now, this was even before the war. The Iran war has kicked off with oil surges and this, we've seen a rotation as well, but this is even before the war, this was kicking off. Now, why did this happen? And why is it still happening? Like, what's going on? Why are people paying way less for it? Why is Intuit a less— this does QuickBooks and TurboTax. Why is that a way less, way, you know, less— what am I trying to say? Why is their market— why am I paying way less for that stock today than I was 2 months ago? This came out. This is OpenClaw. in conjunction with Anthropic and what they've done with Claude, which is different than OpenCLAW, ClaudeBot and OpenCLAW, they actually released a competitor today, has absolutely changed the game of AI and what you can do. And we're entering what I believe it's the age of personal software. This is actually dropped in Wall Street a few days ago. It was a lobster versus Wall Street. Essentially, this lobster OpenCLAW, which is an open-source model that runs on a Mac Mini. It takes over your entire computer and can run tasks for you. It's the first time we've really seen a full agentic experience happen from AI. And this is what happened just last month. And we're seeing this decimate Wall Street firms or the traditional stock market firms because you can take this and we actually have built out, I think, 3 already at Funnel Launch in the last couple of weeks, we've built out 3 internal softwares that we use to run internal metrics from people that were non-coders. My head of finance built with his Claude bot and other tools an entire financial dashboard modelling system on our own. It's proprietary to us. We have 5 people that log in or 6 people and it works extremely well. It plugs in all of our data. It closes our books at the end of the month. Now we still run a QuickBooks and other stuff in parallel, but there's a chance we don't need to use QuickBooks anymore, which is Intuit. Like that's a software that we— now would I suggest this today? No, but like it's trending towards that. Our other ones, and I'm gonna have Christian come on and talk in a second of other use cases in marketing with HubSpot or Salesforce that we have automated a number of the tasks that were previously we were paying thousands of dollars for from a HubSpot or a Salesforce, all of a sudden we don't need those things anymore. Jensen Huang just— this is as of 2 days ago— went on stage at his big conference and mentioned this is a major moment in AI. We had 2023, the ChatGPT moment, which was huge. I think everyone here remembers that. 2024, we saw a 10x increase in tokens and token output. 2025, we saw Claude code run across many teams and make productivity increase drastically. He says here about 100x. early 2026, we've seen ClaudeBot drop. And these guys just built Nemo Claw. They announced it 2 days ago on top of ClaudeBot to run and actually keep things protected and have a full agentic system in your company. This is, I mean, as of just a few days ago, this is brand new stuff. You're not behind the curve, but the curve is moving quickly. So with that, I actually wanted to bring on one of my guys internally that actually has built out, I think, 5 ClodBots now internally for us. And I want him to share like real brass tacks how we use this right now. So if you can in the chat, give a huge virtual round of applause, Mr. Christian Woodward. Christian, welcome on here. Here he is. We'll get this, uh, we'll get this mic. Hello, Christian.

How's it going? Good to see you.

You're much taller than me, so you're gonna make me look short. Um, we'll get this mic. I don't know, you can play with that, make sure it's good there. Um, so Christian, I want to have you on today. You have been experimenting. I mean, OpenClaw's only been out for a number of weeks. Walk me through some of the use cases you guys have seen internally and what— I mean, just, you can take it from there, but show— tell us a little, like, for someone on the call that's like, I'm a business owner, I want to use this, I don't really know how to use it, I'm scared of using it. First off, let's just talk use case, then we'll dive into the other topics, but use cases that you've seen so far.

Yeah, so just a little background what OpenClaw is. So OpenClaw launched in December. Um, and basically it's just a big application that takes over your AI, whatever you're using, whether that's ChatGPT, Anthropic, Gemini. And then it's this big brain that just sits on top and it has persistent memory. Um, it uses all the tools. And so Claude Code is very powerful. Um, something that we use, our dev team uses. But the issue is, is that it forgets things. It doesn't really work. Uh, it doesn't really schedule things. Now they've— Claude Code has started to build things. Um, and so that's where OpenCLAW has come in, is now it does things. And so I have it running things for my personal life, uh, for work. Um, and so even for example, this morning I wake up every morning and it sends me a daily brief, what happened overnight, um, how I slept. I have a watch that tracks my sleep. Um, at work, uh, we, I'm on the marketing team, so we run a lot of ads. Um, and it, we spend over 6 figures a month on ads. That's a lot of money to track and make sure it's spent effectively. And that's where OpenClock comes in, is we're able to build this big dashboard that takes in data from our ads manager of Meta Ads, Google Ads, HubSpot, Salesforce, Calendly. It takes our full cycle and then puts it all into one place and so we can optimize it. And it's been incredible, saved me hours.

So yeah, it was very cool. Well, walk me through on the marketing side. So you, and we'll get to setup in a minute, but you've set this up, it's running. Did you, you know, how did you get access? How did you not, People are scared it's going to take over and just, I don't know, the robots are going to kill us, number one. We'll get to that in a second. But you gave it access to these things, and what insights did it derive that maybe other systems couldn't have derived?

Yeah. So for example, take HubSpot. So we use Salesforce and HubSpot. Those are our main ones. I know this is a big one, especially with where everything's going in the market. And so HubSpot, the main issue that we ran into is that it would not really track that well. We use another software called Hyros that tracked very well. But the issue is we'd actually have a mismatch.

Tracking like ad attribution, who's clicking what ad, why did they buy because of this ad or didn't buy because of that?

Gotcha. Yep.

Yeah.

So straight tracking of seeing someone clicks this ad, reads this email and buys, and that's very valuable data for us to be able to improve our business. And so something that we were able to, to go and build was we were able to connect our Meta Ads platform which then connects to Hyros. Hyros is the ad tracking. So basically if you click on an ad, it says, okay, that ad performed very well. And then did that person submit the form? And then they submitted the form. Did they book a call? Yes. Okay. Well, how long did it take them to buy? That is multiple different times. And even with our tracking platform is it has multiple different clicks.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and in the tracking world, there's something called a last click and a first click. Last click is the first last thing you click before you converted into whatever the goal was. And the first click is the thing that was the first thing they clicked. Yeah, but there's multiple things in between there. And where this tool was able to look at every single data point that the user interface that we look at, we just don't see. And so that's where the real data came in, is we're able to see where every single data point and put it in something that us as humans can understand.

Yeah, because we— and if you guys follow us at FunnelHacker, you're— we have lots of emails, YouTube channel ads. There's just so many touchpoints. Then there's usually a sales rep or a call. Then there's a second call or a third call. And then they see content in between there. Putting all that together, Claude bot could do that.

Yep.

Could actually see every part of the point. Furthermore, I think our sales team also added this on, which is reviewing all calls. So all call reviews, like you— like for people that have big datasets like we do, we have a massive dataset of marketing and we have tools that kind of work. This is gluing all of them together. of, okay, sales team, every single sales call, every single ad, every single piece of content, every single email all in one to say what was actually effective at converting a lead to a close.

Mm-hmm.

Pretty darn cool.

That's incredible. I think even with going as like being a fund manager, this is actually something I wanted to see. Um, so I have a ClawBot running. Uh, as far as security goes, I guess talk about that first. There's a lot of issues on security, uh, with OpenClaw. We talked about, mm-hmm, Mac Minis are very recommended. As far as setting these up, what I'd recommend is something that is very effective. It's called reverse prompting. And basically you have a question, you just ask the question, and these AIs have gotten so smart, you just ask it and it figures it out. But as far as with being a fund manager and how to do that, I actually went and asked my OpenClaw, what would you tell Bridger? How would you actually help him? And the thing that I was able to figure out is I know you probably spend a lot of time talking to investors. Um, you have a lot of people that are putting a lot of money in. Crypto goes up and down. You have fund launch partners too. And what I was able to figure out was basically built out a way that you could automate sending messages to every single one of your partners, a very personalized one too, of, hey, I see you, you know, you invest, like you probably have certain investors that are a lot more valuable than others. And so you need a very personalized tailored message. They don't really care about X, Y, and Z, but they care about this certain thing. Your OpenClaw could do that. It could do all these things.

And so— Market research is huge. Pulling a lot of data points. We've seen some people give OpenClaw here's $1,000, go trade on Polymarket. That went viral last week. And some of them lost all the money. Some of them turned it into hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so it's more of a gamble, but it's the beginning. This is what they're calling a moment in time of kind of like the ChatGPT moment where agents are becoming very useful in businesses. And hence, you see, if you go show my slides again. So now a little context from Christian, you can see why market makers go, well, man, after that, I don't know how valuable Salesforce's long-term contracts are from their revenue. I don't know how valuable Snowflake or ServiceNow long-term contracts are from all these companies who pay them when they can— this emergence of an OpenClaw feature, and this is just the beginnings.

This is V1.

I'm very— and actually today Anthropic launched their own competitor to OpenClaw, actually this morning. And so, and then Jensen Huang has launched Nemo Claw, which is built on top as a— anyways, the largest tech companies in the world are saying this is the next phase of AI. We are within weeks of this, which is really cool. We're still at the beginnings of this, but we've already seen massive productivity gains internally. That's why it's such a moment because it's like, oh my gosh, in a couple weeks the productivity gains have been huge. Let's talk security and setting one up for a second.

Yep.

If someone's on the call, like, I'm not technical, you're not a background, you're not a coder, you're running our ad spend on the marketing team and had figured all this out. I guess, where would you point someone, direct someone to if they wanted to go set one of these up this weekend?

Yeah. So I think of course a Mac mini is what I'd recommend. As far as someone to go watch and listen to, uh, I'd recommend Alex Finn and also ClearMud. Those are 2 YouTubers that would just explain a lot better than I could in the next 5 minutes. Um, you're gonna see a lot of people talking about a virtual private server. Um, I personally do not recommend a personal or a, uh, like a VPN. or VPS. And the reason why is just because the security is way worse. A Mac mini is an actual local machine that's on your computer. It has all of Mac's already prebuilt security. If you go to Hostinger, for example, you have to spend more time getting that secure and your data can be leaked, which is the big issue with OpenClaw.

Yeah.

Is the data. And so that's why I recommend doing a Mac mini. Um, there's gonna be different options. Um, and this is the thing that's exciting about the personal software is People are actually running local models now, which is very exciting. We run local— I run a local model. It's a very small one, but I run one personally as well as on top of Claude. And so you can go talk to it. As far as setting this up, it'd be very simple. You go to openclaude.ai. There's gonna be a little command or code. You just put that in there into your terminal on the Mac mini. Very scary at first, I would say, as I'm not a coder at all. So being in the terminal is very scary. But AI's here. And so literally all you have to do is you just talk to your AI, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude, and say, hey, I'm trying to set this up. I have this code. You paste in terminal, it'll give you a return. You say, what do I do now? And now you just send that next and it goes back and forth. And so it's literally, I now have AI fixing itself. And so AI has a problem, my other AI fixes it, and we just compound drastically. Yeah.

Well, and so to summarize, Mac minis are cool because it's Confined just to that device. And you can run your own model if you want. So it's not even pinging an OpenAI or a Claude, like, big model. It's actually internally, you've downloaded an open source model onto the machine. It's actually all closed onto a machine. So if you have proprietary data, and that's what Nemo Claw here, they were trying to, they've put another data security layer on this to help for this exact thing. I haven't experimented. Have you experimented with Nemo Claw? That's the promise, at least, of Nemo Claw. clause this. But that's the cool part. It's like, oh, actually I could give this proprietary data because it's only going to be closed on my Mac mini right here. But it's an agent that can have full access to this whole computer and do tasks on my behalf. Very exciting time. Anything else you'd leave with the audience or want them to know?

No, I think this is very exciting. Where the world is going is everyone's going to have now their own really local machines and AIs they can go run things on. And so I think the most exciting thing you could do is, is get involved.

Mm-hmm.

Go do something like, this is the future. The same thing that happened with ChatGPT when it first launched. Like people that got on it sooner are the ones that scaled with it, made money, did things. And so that's why I've dealt with OpenClaw. I know it's the future, I know it's going. And so I wanted to learn it, I wanted to master it. Um, AI is only gonna help us. And so no better way to start, jump into OpenClaw, go buy it. Mac Mini, $600. Um, you can get it there. There's also other ones. There's like a Raspberry Pi, which is another smaller device. I just still recommend a Mac Mini, most secure, most beneficial, and also you'll get it set up as fast as you can.

Pretty cool. Christian, this is so awesome. And then you've been, it's funny, we dubbed Christian our head of AI agent security and setup. So you've actually gone and set up other ones for people in our company. I think it feels like every day you're setting up a new one. You set up one for me. And the use cases are so interesting. You just mentioned your sleep data. You mentioned other guys have it helping run their other stuff on their personal things as well. And then business-wise, it's an interesting, almost personal agent. It's the first time agents have become very useful, I would say. Everyone's been talking about AI agents, and I think now we're seeing like, okay, this is a real use case that it can actually do something on my behalf, which is cool.

And I got one more thing as far as the leaving note goes. As far as trying to figure out what you're going to do with this, I think the coolest thing is figure out what takes the most time out of your day to do, I know for you, that's research, right? It's going to research, staying up to date. For me, it was running my ads, looking at data. And so going and figuring out what is the thing that's causing the most manual time to do. And usually that is what automates you with AI. Because in reality, most people don't like doing that. I don't like looking at the— numbers are fun, but trying to pull them. Now I have all of my numbers in one place. Whether it's your life, people have done so many fun things, but go figure out what's the one thing Find your small win. What was the one thing that if you got that automated, it would drastically change your life and free you up for something that you really love to do? Yeah.

Well, and also the large dataset. I think it's so— it can listen to every sales call we do.

That's— yeah.

Derive problems or people that left the script or a weird call, flag things for you, and then come down and suggest a new sales script or a new process that's better. It's a pretty big use case when you have large datasets as well, like we do. Christian Woodward, well done. Well done.

Thank you.

Give him a round of applause, everybody in the chat. Thank you, Christian. Good to have you on, bro. Yeah. I know, I'm sure we'll do another update video. Let me push this mic over here. Another update video soon of what we're experiencing. This is like, we're a few weeks into this right now, which is anyways really fun. Okay, as we go on, so that's talking the— we're talking models and application layer of AI. And This is why we've seen a huge repricing in the market is really because of this, which is just massive. If I go back to my slides, if you can share those. So talking about the AI cake here, applications and models is kind of what we talked about briefly for a second there and how disruptive this is. I want to mention a few things going down to, we're going to talk about infrastructure, chips, and energy just briefly here. I saw this actually this morning. Data center construction is actually higher right now than general office for the first time in history. We are building more data centers than office buildings right now. To give you some numbers, so now, sorry, we're going to get down to the infrastructure, chips, and energy layer. And I just want to talk about how much capital is flowing into these 3 parts of the equation. Would that be useful for y'all? So according to the White House, we have $9.6 trillion committed to now a lot of different things, but mostly technology and AI, AI expansion, infrastructure, manufacturing, trading models. You can see the purposes here. A lot of this is going into the AI infrastructure build-out. To put big numbers into context, how much is $9.6 trillion?

Okay?

$9.6 trillion. If you bought every NFL team, NBA, and MLB team, okay, which I have the numbers here. NFL team, that's about $227 billion to buy every NFL franchise. NBA would be about $162 billion. MLB would be about $81 billion. You're at $470 billion. Okay? Again, large numbers. Remember how big a billion was? That would be, if we bought all those leagues, we would still be at $9.13 trillion. Mark Zuckerberg at Meta with $600 billion could buy every NFL, NBA, MLB team and still have money left over. And that would be only one line item.

Here.

Like that's— this is a weird— like $9.6 trillion is a weird number. It's a large number. It's hard to grasp your brain around how much money that is.

Okay?

So now to bring back context about funds or what at least I'm doing about this. Okay? I'm a big believer in seasons. I was with Tony Robbins last year, about this time last year, in a small group, about 25 to 30 of us. We spent a few hours with Tony, and he just kept harping on seasons and how— what the seasons we are in. And he goes, you got to recognize the season right now of what we are in. He goes, about 100 years ago, there was the turn of the 1900s. We had the telephone, electricity, and combustion engine come out in the same about 20-year time period. This was a huge technology revolution. We saw GDP, real GDP growth, go from about 0.5% to about 2%. That's a fourfold increase. And GDP is held at about 2% per year annually for the next 100 years. So it did a 4x and then held for 100 years. We then saw the internet and personal computer come out, and we saw a huge increase in product productivity gains across the entire world because of this. As everyone knows here, right now, we are seeing the emergence of 5 major technology platforms, not 3, not 2, 5, all at the same time. And this is according to ARK Innovation and Cathie Wood. And I won't play her video, but she believes real GDP growth could grow to as high as 7% in the next 5 years. Which sounds crazy if you're an economist. But then, this was a year and a half ago, she says, and then Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of the Treasury, in his quote here, said this. He goes, I think we're going to see 5% GDP growth in 2026. We already printed a 4.3%, I believe, in December. He goes, we're at 5%, and if we get rate cuts, we'll probably see 6% GDP growth. in the United States. We are entering what I believe is a supercycle. We have artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, blockchain, and multi-atomic sequences are the 5 technology platforms that are emerging right now that are the major movers, with AI as the, you know, turbocharging or accelerating all of these other ones.

Okay?

And then on top of that, you have on those platforms quantum computing, global fast internet, 3D printing, space travel being built on top of those Platforms. What a time to be alive. We are going through a massive shift. Again, I said this earlier, I like watching what people do, not what they say they're going to do. When I look at what are the smartest, most capable, richest, wealthiest people on earth doing, people like the founders of Google, Sergey Brin, guess what? He is back working at Google full-time. Like, think about that. He's one of the wealthiest individuals on earth, can do anything he wants with his life, has stepped away from Google, and then came back in 2023 to say, I'm gonna work only on AI at Google because this is a supercycle that we're in. Jeff Bezos stepped down in 2021, has— is now back full-time. All he says he's working on is AI and AI strategy. Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce, stepped away, came back, works full-time on AI and AI buildout. These are some of the smartest, most capable people on earth, all coming back to work to make sure that they are a part of this wave, this technological revolution that is going on. Don't miss the boat. Don't miss this season that we are in. Right now, this is Moore's Law. If you followed Moore's Law, it says that every 18 months, compute power will double or be twice as small per nanometer. We are actually ahead of Moore's Law the last few years. We are actually, which is, people thought like Moore's Law would tail off. We are actually ahead of Moore's Law. This is from Nvidia a few days ago. They are seeing a 50x increase on their, this is their chip from last year. and a 35x lower cost than their previous generation of chips. I think it's from Blackwell. We are seeing something that hasn't happened in a long time. And my dad, you guys know my dad, you've seen him at our events, things like that. He taught me a great lesson. He's like, Bridger, when there's a tidal wave, you know, he goes, I used to fight these tidal waves. I used to put my hands up and say, hey, I don't like this. I don't want to advance. I don't want to I want to push back against this tidal wave. He goes, when there's a tidal wave, get your boogie board and go with the wave. Because millions and hundreds of millions and billions of dollars are made on the ripple effects of these waves. Make sure you position yourself, your company, your kids, your grandkids in front of these waves. And right now, we have a handful of waves hitting At an immense pace. This is an amazing time to be an entrepreneur. So then the question is like, Bridger, how do I participate? Like what? And I'll just tell you what I'm doing. You can do whatever you want. I'll just tell you what I'm doing. Okay? How do I participate? And what have I seen other people do this? Well, you might have, or I might have, and I'll share mine in a second, but you might have a great strategy around this. So for example, you say like, okay, I'm in real estate. I'm guessing a number of people on here are in real estate. How do I participate? I'm just a real estate guy. Well, infrastructure value-add is a huge thing going on. Okay, let me give you an example for real estate people. AWS is building a $10 billion facility in Mississippi.

Okay?

A little research here. Non-IT construction is about $8.8 billion. So, if you're an electrician, a welder, like these are all $8.8 billion. Remember how much a billion was? minutes ago, $8.8 billion to non-IT work, 7,500 full-time jobs, 9,000 indirect jobs. Think when something like this happens, a $10 billion plant in Mississippi, the ripple effects are massive. We have actually a guy in Black Card. He doesn't do anything on the data centre. He just builds warehouses nearby so that contractors can fix up their truck, have a place to sleep. Like they have these whole like little— They're industrial, real estate industrial little plants that do extremely well because AWS is overpaying. They're in a small rural town. To bring people here, they need infrastructure. And as a ripple effect, their entire fund goes and builds infrastructure around this $10 billion plant. And he's like, dude, we're kicking tail right now.

We are.

I mean, he's like, we have markups and we're already— and we're exiting these projects. And he's like, dude, it's amazing. That's one. Again, remember how much that is, 0.01 of the $9.59 trillion left that's going to be deployed into this build-out. That is a massive tidal wave. Okay? So when you come back here, your strategy could be, hey, I'm going to build real estate infrastructure, do value-add around these massive data centres that are going into place. Or maybe it's, I'm going to invest into the startups. I'm actually going to find early founders, that can leverage AI and robotics and all these great things to build great companies. Or it's you're going to actually go and buy your competitors by using all these tools as an advantage in this huge wave. You actually can roll competitors together and go buy them out and take market share much faster than before. Now, when I put these together, the next— and you can decide the strategy. The next step typically is there's this gap. You know, you're here and you're like, well, I want to scale, but I don't know how to raise money. If this is you, if I had money, I could scale. Okay? If money is the only thing stopping you from scaling, that's where a fund can really bridge this gap. And a fund, I think it was on the next slide. No. A fun thought experiment is this. If you had— actually think about this. If you had a big fund behind you right now that had a blank check for you to go invest, what would you actually invest or do with that money right now? Like imagine the fund is built. How much faster could you move? What would you invest into? What would you build? And again, if this is— man, I don't have the money. A fund can be that thing that bridges the gap. Now, you might— now, if you're with me, you're like, okay, that's cool, Bridger, but who's going to invest in this? Well, high net worths, family offices, and institutions actually really like investing into investment funds. They see this wave and they're like, I know where we need to invest this. I don't know how to do it. I will happily pay an expert. You guys are the experts over here that are really good at real estate infrastructure. value-add. They said, hey, you're building a fund. Great. We will allocate money to your fund to go in so that we can participate in this tidal wave. Now, if you don't believe me, this came out from Goldman Sachs just a few months ago. Nearly 40% of family offices plan to raise allocations to public and private equity. In their survey, only 5% said they would be underweight. They'd actually lower their allocation. So, 95% would either stay the same And 40% said they would raise. These groups are— they are waiting for someone like you who's an expert, who's smart, who has all this put together, and the only thing stopping them is money to put this together and then to scale. Does that make sense? And again, if we go to our definition, a fund is just a pool of money to go and invest into. A hedge fund would buy and sell public assets. A private equity firm would buy and sell private businesses. A venture capital would invest into startups. A real estate fund would buy and sell real estate or construct real estate, or private credit would lend money on these assets. Is that kind of making sense? Okay. Now, how this works for me. Again, I like watching what do people do. Bridger, what are you doing? Well, I love blockchain. I love crypto and blockchain. I have for years. I started buying crypto in 2017. My business partner, Dan, started buying in 2013 and built the largest crypto data mining facility in Utah.

Wow.

In 2014.

Okay?

We have an extensive experience in crypto. So we built an investment fund around blockchain and crypto long-term. And we split, most funds split 80/20 with investors. So we went out and raised about $25 million in crypto. And if that grows to $100 million, we split the gains 20%. So if you do the math on that, we would make $15 million if that happens in crypto. Not too bad, right? This is how we've positioned a fund in front of these tidal waves. I love this quote from Tony Robbins. He said, if you get in, if you help enough people get what they want, you'll eventually get what you want. That's exactly what investment funds are. You're helping other people get access to these things in these massive tidal waves that you have expertise in.

Okay.

So what I would tell you, how do I participate? Build a fund that invests into this tidal wave. Build a fund that is positioned well over a supercycle of capital that's flowing in this direction. Like what a time to be alive. Now, the downside, historically, the cost of funds is anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000, which kind of stinks. And it usually takes about 48 months to build one of these. And if you, you know, if you think I'm lying, this is right from Brightstar Law Group. They estimate between $40,000 and $70,000. I asked ChatGPT. Chat said $50,000 to $100,000 to set up a fund. That's what stopped most people from building funds. Like, man, it's a lot of cost and time and effort to build a fund, which is rightfully so. So most people never cross this bridge, even though they have a great strategy over here. And that's where Fund Launch came in and we introduced Black Card. And we said, hey, we could actually do this much cheaper and much faster with much more accuracy than others. Like our black card part covers the legal expense. We advise you through the process, builds you a pitch deck, has tools. We have networking and matchmaking. We have 5 different law firms that work with you inside, and we partner you with one that builds your legal docs. We have 15 advisors that work with you across the board to build this out with you. Okay? We've done this for 390 funds. We've launched out of Black Card. Um, so that's kind of what we're doing. Does that make sense? Now we're gonna, uh, bring on our next speaker in just a second here, but I wanted to share the methodology for a second of how we actually build funds. Because if you're sitting there and you're like, okay, Bridger, I followed you for a while, how do I actually do this? How do I think about this? And again, we've helped people do all of these types of funds. Yes, a sports gambling fund. Yeah, we actually have a couple guys doing this. They have some type of edge they see in sports gambling, which they do well. African Food Supply Chain Fund. We had a guy, um, he's like, the problem in Africa right now with food and getting food to rural communities is it's fractured. The logistics companies from the farmers, from the end grocery stores are all fractured, and it's just hard to work together. The only solution is to buy up the entire supply chain. And so they went out, built a fund, and to buy up farm all the way to table, every piece of the supply chain, so that they could have a sustainable process through all these countries in Africa to get food to local and rural communities. Isn't that pretty cool? Um, you have crypto investing, forex, almond debt farm, you know, seller finance, sub-to, a lot of guys doing creative finance on deals. Awesome. A fund bolted onto that which allows you bigger or more creative finance deals, which is Just amazing. We have a lot of people doing that. Anyways, I can go down the list here of incredible funds that we've helped build, Canadian funds, international funds. We've helped people all across the board do this. So I was actually going to go to my iPad here and share a little bit of our methodology around investment funds. Is that okay with you guys?

All right.

A little transition here. Here we go. So we help people do this through what we call the Fund Launch I'll let it load up for a second. Here, this is the Fund Launch Formula. Let's see if it loads here. So, when people are building, if you're like, I'm thinking about building a fund, we broke it down to a science here. The first thing we look at is your deal and strategy. What is the deal? Like we talked about, what are you investing into? Is there a global macro market, a tidal wave that's flowing into this? How are you going to find asymmetrical risk? Great. We work with someone on that. Then how are you going to structure the fund? How are you going to pay investors? And if you saw the model I dropped earlier, you guys can still— it's a free gift. You can use it. But how are you going to structure your fund? What's the payback going to be, the target, et cetera? And then finally, we're going to go test the capital raising markets and see if People want to invest into this thing. This is, you're going to go ask for advice here. You're going to ask people for advice on your fund, and it's wealthy people, and see if they want to invest or what they would change about your fund. And you're going to tweak your fund, and you're going to keep doing this in a circle to validate and build a fund that investors want. Our goal is we want to build a fund that investors want. They are begging for you to open it. And you only, the only way you can figure this out is by doing this process, which we help people do in Black Card and other things. The goal is to get validation. We are validating that investors want this thing. They would invest in it. The structure is good and the strategy is good. And that takes some time.

Okay?

Then and only then, we go hire the lawyers. We have a number of law firms in Black Card. We go pay the lawyers for a fraction of the cost that normal people do. Then we launch, and I'll come back to that in a second. Then we launch, and then you— I'll zoom out so you can see the whole picture here. We go to do a first close and a final close in capital markets. We actually go Buy the assets, do asset management, and then we actually go build out the firm and team. And you're doing this forever. You're raising new capital, you're buying more assets, and you're building out your team, and you're building out a massive scaled investment fund. So, at a large picture, this is our methodology around investment funds. Now, the question always comes up, well, Bridger, why don't I just go hire a lawyer? Why don't I just, I can just go hire a lawyer, dude. I'll just go do that. Well, number one, we just shared a few minutes ago, it's usually, the cost is usually $50K to about $100K. And I'm not lying when I say this. We have 2 portfolio funds and Fund Launch partners that we work with. They both spent over $150,000 on legal docs to set up their fund. And by the way, their docs are no better than anyone else's docs. Then, so why did it cost this much money? Well, what happened was they just went and called some lawyers. Lawyers bill by the hour. And then they did all this stuff. And they had to think through their fund and tweak things and decide what they wanted. And the lawyer, they kept changing their docs and tweaking stuff with the lawyers. And the lawyer kept billing by the hour. The lawyer told them at the beginning it would be $30,000. Yeah, it's probably $30,000, maybe $50,000. It ended up being $150,000 for two funds that we have in Founders Partners. This process, for me, the legal part is the easiest part. It doesn't; it's not that hard to get legal talks done. The harder part is building a fund investors want. Does that make sense? It's kind of this analogy. I think I have a little slide here. It's like this. You know, hiring a lawyer, you know, is kind of like buying a container. Think of it, the analogy I'm going to use is food. Okay? So, if you're going to like, anybody can go to the store and buy a food container, which is like this.

Okay?

Anybody can do this. The difference though is what's inside of the container. You know, when you go serve the food, is it a stinky fish? In the container? It's like, oh, no one wants this fund, or I got to go tweak it and edit it and pay more money to make it better. Or is it a Gordon Ramsay beautiful meal? Our goal, we want to build a fund that investors want. We want to build this. Okay? Anybody can go just buy a container. The magic, that's just this, that's just this middle part. It's pretty easy. The magic is building a fund investors want. And then how do you market and run that fund that grows and does well? Does that make sense? It's kind of our methodology now. Um, if you're, if you're okay with it, and this is, by the way, this is a complex version of that methodology with all of our sub-frameworks and stuff. And so this is what we do inside of Black Card. If you're okay with it, I'll share for just 3 minutes here what we do at Fund Launch and how we help people do it. If you're someone that's like, I wanted to build a fund, this is what we help people do is incubate this. And I'll go over here. This is what we do inside of our program called Black Card. Like I mentioned earlier, people have paid us over $47 million at Fund Launch with that many customers in Stripe to help. We're, we're not brand new at this. Okay. We call ourselves the ultimate incubator to launch your fund. We've launched 390 funds out of Black Card. Okay. We do this much faster, much cheaper than the traditional fund launch model, the funding launch model, and our stats of, you know, speak for themselves. $7.1 billion of reported client AUM, over 2,000 Black Card members. Okay? Now inside of Black Card, I'll go briefly through this. Like what, so what do we do? How do we do this so much better and different? Like why does this work for us? Well, we've broke this up into 3 different pillars. You can see here. Number 1 is the incubator. Number 2 is the mastermind. Number 3 is the tools. And I'll go through each one briefly. So the incubator, we take you through a phased curriculum inside of Black Card. So when you join Black Card, You go through a step-by-step process to go through and actually launch your fund. It's actually, it is this process right here. We take you through this with the complex version of all these sub-frameworks of how we actually go and raise capital, who we're raising capital from, how we structure your business, what kind of legal regulatory things we're going to do inside your business, and then how we're going to launch and build and run your firm. Okay. I'm going a little fast here, but you get the idea. So that's what we do inside of the incubator here. under the FaZe curriculum. We break you up into asset class tracks. So whether you're doing private equity, venture, hedge, crypto, real estate, this is what we help people do. We also help you with pitch deck design. Okay? So we have an in-house pitch deck design that helps you make and build your pitch deck. We also have 30+ advisors. I'll skip down one. 30+ advisors that meet with you one-on-one to actively work with you and help you do this. For example, some of these advi— and most of our advisors actively run their own funds and deals right now. For example, this advisor, this is Adam Campbell. He currently runs a $30 million investment fund and then also advises Black Card members on the side. This is Jim Riggio right here. He runs an 8-figure hedge fund, Renovant Capital. It's his own firm. And he also coaches or helps inside of Black Card on the side. This is a public speaking coach. He actually teaches— he was on CBS for years and actually teaches you how to public speak. So in addition to one-on-one calls, these advisors also do 50+ office hours a month. So when you join Black Card, you can come join in a professional speaking session and listen into how they teach and ask questions. You can do a pitch deck session, a legal Q&A, a capital raising general Q&A. I mean, you can see we do 50+ office hours per month, 6 days a week. This is going on. Bridger, I do one every Wednesday. You can hop on with me and get answers to questions from me. Okay. Inside of here as well, you have a proprietary dashboard. This is what it looks like. This is all of your stuff is in here. You'll see your incubator, your consulting, all your calls are in here, performance events, everything is inside of here. Furthermore, we actually help you launch the fund in Black Card. The legal costs is included in Black Card. We negotiate with, we have 5 incredible legal partners. that charge lots of money for legal docs. We negotiate a group discount that's actually included in your Black Card price is actually the cost of the legal docs. So you're going to spend this money anyways building a fund. You might as well do it in Black Card and you get all these other bonuses with it. Okay? So that's the incubator. That alone is worth the cost of Black Card. Now, up next is the mastermind. I'll go fast through this. Your network is your net worth. You know, we know that. And running a fund, the people around you are very important. So we want to give you access to 1,000+ Black Card members that are on Slack, that are talking, sharing, doing cool stuff. You can talk, you can message them directly. I'm on Slack. You can message me. We have a private Slack community just for Black Card. We also do capital committee once a quarter. We invite family offices, high net worths. We do a private call and we invite Black Card members on live to pitch their investment funds. Now, no guarantee that capital will be raised, but it gives you an opportunity to pitch real-world investors that will place capital. We've placed hundreds of thousands of dollars into firms through Capital Committee. Additionally, like Bridger, how do I raise money through this? Well, we have Fund Launch Partners. We've raised $32 million to invest into 20 managers. We've already done 14. Of the 20, 7 of the 14 were into Black Card members' firms. We're also raising another $50 million this year to do another 20 managers. We're actively looking at investing into your funds. Now, no guarantee. No, uh, you know, we do funds inside and outside of Black Card, but this is a pretty cool way that we've seen capital get deployed in the Black Card community. Furthermore, We've seen a lot of help from events and in-person things. So we host 3 Black Card events a year. For example, in the fall, we're doing a 5-day cruise to Cabo, Mexico. It should be pretty darn fun. Everyone in Black Card's invited. And by the way, you can bring your families on this event. Kids, if you want to have them listen to sessions, you're welcome to bring them on this 5-day cruise to Cabo. We're also hosting an event in May at my offices here in just 2 months. You'll be able to come to my office. We have a full-court basketball center here in our office. We are also renting Real Salt Lake out to host— this is our huge stadium in Utah. We're going to be hosting a Cars and Coin event. We're inviting all of my network in Utah. We have a pretty good network here in Utah to come, and you guys can meet, mingle, and talk with them here. Isn't that kind of cool? And then finally, I'll go quick, is the— so in addition to the incubator, getting the FaZe curriculum, asset classes, 50 office hours, the software and the legal. And then additionally, the mastermind of getting the Slack community, capital committee, Fund Launch partners, the fall event. You also get the tools, okay? Which we've built a proprietary software called Fund Launch 360. You guys can come design your website, manage your fund, have a CRM. I use this for both of my funds. We also have 50+ partnerships in Black Card. When you launch your fund, you're going to need help with fund administration, tax partners, audit, legal, you name it here. You're gonna need help launching this. We have discounts with most of these groups that we pass on to you. It's kind of like having, you know, you're in the middle here, an advisor staff, networking events, audit, tax, legal, Fund Launch partners, Fund Launch 360 legal team, pitch deck, and account managers all helping you to be successful. Now, no, there's no guarantee of capital raise. There's no guarantee of success. That's on you. You got to do this, but we are here to help you and increase the probabilities of success drastically. And this is why we're on the Inc. 5000 of Fastest Growing Companies in America. This value prop has been amazing and we've helped people do all these different types of funds. Does that kind of make sense? So if I zoom out for a second, you can hear from real Black Card members here. This is from Robinson. He says, I've spoken to many Black Card members that have all felt this program is of tremendous value. I've not met a single Black Card member who regrets joining the program. This is from Russell. The price of Black Card is worth every penny. I spent $15 grand. I would've saved the $15 grand if I would've joined this earlier. He was already setting up his legal docs, was in the cost and was like, man, this was way better than doing that on my own. This is what Heather said. She says, Black Card works exactly as advertised. You took 3 extremely tenacious people who knew nothing about world of funds, We went through your conveyor belt, filled our minds with modules, office hours, one-on-one coaching. Within a quick and painless 6 months, we became confident managers of a $15 million private credit fund. Now, all these results, by the way, these people worked extremely hard. These are people that like, they're awesome. They were already great people, but Black Card was kind of like Mentos and Coke, right? It was, these people were, you know, they were doing extremely well, but this just helped them do it. This is Jignesh. Thanks to Fund Launch, we launched our Fund One. We successfully deployed capital and closed the investment period by buying seven hotels. That's what we want to have happen in Black Card. Now again, Jignesh is he's a smart dude. He's done very well. Black Card though helped him bridge that gap. I think this analogy bridge that gap and close that gap right here so that he could go scale. Does that kind of make sense? Now what's the cost of Black Card? How much does this cost? So, all this together, included with the legal, is approximately $35,000 total. So, you know, you pay it over a little bit of time and that's it. We don't take equity in your fund. It's, I mean, you're going to pay that anyway on lawyers to launch a fund. You might as well do it in Black Card with us. Get the lawyers and all these other perks. Come to the events, have a chance to raise capital, have office hours, have coaches, have advisors. All in here. I have all the partnerships in here. Funnel Launch 360, all in one.

Okay?

Now, if that still seems high to you, we're gonna do something cool for this month and this month only. Okay? So instead of paying about, it's roughly, and I say roughly because every package is different. You talk to our team, we can build a custom package for you. It can be anywhere from like $30 grand to $55 grand, sometimes lower, sometimes more. That's a general sense. For anyone that joins before the end of the month, We're giving you $5K off your price in Black Card. Okay? And furthermore, so you just take $5,000 off the top. So really, instead of $35,000, you're really, you're down to like $30,000. And to make it more palpable, we're offering this. You can just start for $5,000 down. So the total contract is $30,000. But you just start today for $5,000 down and you can just do it on a zero— we'll finance you internally at 0% interest. You can't get much better than 0% interest. Okay? Furthermore, to put our money, to make this more palpable, we have a 14-day money-back guarantee. So if you don't like it, if it's not the right fit, just give us an email. We'll give you your money back to de-risk you. That's how confident I am that you will love Black Card.

Okay?

Does that make sense? So again, you get all the incubator, the phase curriculum. We break you into asset class tracks. We have a pitch deck designer. You have 50 office hours a month, one-on-one coaches. You have a private dashboard and software. You get legal included. This covers the legal costs to launch your fund. You also are included in the Slack channel. You're invited to the capital committee. You can come and apply to work with launch partners. You're get— you can come to the May 14th event with us in Salt Lake City, Utah, at my headquarters with about 150 Black Card members and get access to all of my investors that I'm inviting to our Cars and Coin event. And you get invited to the Cabo cruise. And then also have access to Funnel Launch 360, the partnerships, and the other tools inside of Black Card that have worked for hundreds of other people.

Okay?

I'll drop the link here in a second. How it works, okay? You're gonna come, you'll book a call with our team members. They can answer all of your questions. We gotta move on. We got another speaker queued up here. They can answer all of your questions. The deadline is end of month, which is next week, I believe. End of month is the deadline for the 5K, and the 5K off goes away. Everything goes away, and we got to get numbers for the May event. So this all goes away end of month. So book a call. I'm going to drop a link here in just a second. It's first come, first serve to come and book a call. So you guys ready? Uh, the link is funlaunch.com/5koff. Okay, you'll see it pop up on your screen and in the chat. So funlaunch.com /5Koff. So there you go. Hit that link right now. You can go book a call with our team members. You'll see at the bottom of your screen. And we'll queue you up for your next speaker group. It's kind of like, um, if I was making a decision for you, and we'll leave that live here. Yeah, right now, go click. You can go to Chrome, Safari. And again, 14-day money-back guarantee, $5K down. You can start for like, you could start today for $5,000, get access to everything with a 14-day money-back guarantee and 0% interest. It's kind of like the analogy I like to use is this. If you're here, you know, you got to make, you're making a decision. Here you are. And by the way, feel free right now, you can open up Chrome, Safari, go on over. Actually, I'll show you where it's at right now. And then we'll come back to this. This is funlaunch.com. Funlaunch.com.

/5Koff.

It'll open this up. You can see some call spots here. So some for today, actually, you can come click, you can say, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna book that call, put my name, email, book the call, and then come back. We're still gonna be answering questions and talking about AI. I have my next speaker queued up that we're gonna play here in a second from yesterday, from here. Okay. But I'll run through a little bit of logic here on— so this is you. You're like, you know what? I do see this AI wave. I want to launch a fund. Here are kind of your options. Well, we just talked about Black Card. So let's say you join Black Card. You take five grand off. It's about you know thirty grand. So you're spending thirty grand. Now it's kind of palpable. It's only five k five k down, and we give you some money off. Let's just call it thirty grand. That's how it feels, right? I'll put a little floor here. You're like, man, the 30 grand's a lot. I'm going to lose 30 grand, which is— so worst case scenario is you lose 30 grand.

Okay?

That's your scenario here. Now there's also a 14-day money-back guarantee. So you kind of hedge your bet a little bit and you're only putting $5K down. So really you're only losing 5 grand and then you can just refund the money and you're back to here. Okay, you wasted maybe wasted two weeks. You waste a little bit of time, but you learn some stuff. Okay, that's your worst case scenario. Best case is you spend thirty grand and you go launch a hundred million dollar fund. That would be like best case, right? That'd be awesome. And then maybe you know from here there's kind of like okay what are kind of in between? So maybe you launch a ten million dollar fund. $10 million fund, or you launch a $1 million fund, or heck, you just come in and you all, you know, maybe you don't even launch a fund, but you just learn about funds. You get to meet with people that run investment funds. You get to learn in their office hours, coaching calls, all the incubator The cost is education, which by the way, if you want to go learn this on your own, you can go to Wharton or Stanford or an Ivy League school or whatever. I mean, it's going to be $150,000. Or if you're going to pay a mentor to teach you one-on-one, they're going to bill you a lot of money to teach and learn all this, and probably it's going to take a long period of time. So, if all this did, what I'm getting at is all this did was just give you education on funds. I believe you would have a positive return on investment. Okay, let's say you got education and you also get a network. Your network is your net worth. It's cliché, but it's true, of 2,000 fund managers. Let's say you never launched a fund, but you just came in and learned about funds and you had a a group, an audience, a network of 2,000 fund managers. This is the cost of a mastermind. I've joined multiple masterminds. I think my first one I ever joined was $15,000. I then joined one for $24,000. I've joined one for $30,000. And I've also joined one for $150,000 just for masterminds because I wanted to hang out with other people that could afford this type of thing. We did about 3 events a year. And I wanted to be in those rooms. And it's drastically helped my career. Many of you have seen mastermind groups or others, just that cost. So, I'll come back to our thing here. You're here, you spend money, and you get education and a mastermind, and you didn't even launch a fund.

Okay.

Launching a fund is just, let's say this is called the launch, like you launch your fund. That's just icing on the cake. Now, I hope everybody launches a fund. In Black Card, And in Fund Launch, we've had 159 clients launch funds and get over $100— or sorry, excuse me, over $1 million. Isn't that cool? We've had 102 clients launch funds and get over $10 million. And we've had 25 clients launch funds and get over $100 million. Isn't that cool? So this is kind of your risk parameters. Yes, there's a chance you feel like you lost out. There's a chance you just get education, which I think is worth it, and mastermind, which is worth it. And then there's a chance you also launch your funds, which is pretty cool. Now, if you do the other side of the equation, you're here and you're like, well, okay, Bridger, I could do this on my own. I'm going to go spend money on my own lawyer. So I'm going to spend, let's say you found a lawyer that will do it for 30 grand. I'm telling you though, Many lawyers, they say $30 million and that ends up being $50 million. We have 2 funds right now we're working with that are $150 grand into LegalDox, but let's just say it's $30 million, okay? A couple things happen. Number one, you could spend that money and launch your fund, and maybe you go, you get up to $10 million or $100 million, right? You have your tiers here. Okay, that could totally happen. That happens, you know, that does happen. But the cost here is time. Because you have to work with lawyers and learn this stuff anyways. That's why the line is not like this. It's like this because the cost is time. Furthermore, your downside is you do it wrong. What's the cost of doing it wrong? It's not compliant. It's not set up right. Well, now you're in a lawsuit. You know, lawsuit minimum is $250 grand. And sometimes there's, I don't know, other problems as well, but we'll just say $250 grand is a lot. So if I look at a decision tree, I'm like, okay, you could do this with Black Card and this is your outcomes of distribution of outcomes, or you do it by yourself and this is the distribution of outcomes, or you don't do a fund at all. And you're like, well, Bridger, I can just, dude, I'm pretty good at investing. I could spend $30 grand, I could flip a house and I can make $30,000. So I'm up, you know, I could be up to $60,000. And I would, sorry, I'd be down $30,000, then up $30,000. So I could double my money. So I would be plus $30,000, which is true. I could buy Bitcoin. I could be up, I could double my money and be up to $30,000.

Okay.

That's true too. So you could go invest your own money. Just don't ever do a fund. You could, and let's say you're really good. You double your money. That's still pretty good. Okay, awesome. You made $30,000. But, and that's what's called opportunity cost. So your opportunity cost is you make 30 grand, but you also miss out on the education, the mastermind, and the potential to do these higher tiers up here. If you do it by yourself, you kind of can see, I'll zoom out, you can see the distribution of outcomes here. Does that make sense? That's how I think about decisions. One story I'll tell you, and then we'll queue up Seth as our next speaker. Talking just about the education of funds and mastermind, I was invited when I was about 24 years old by 3 people. Well, sorry, I was invited by 1 person named Mike, and there's 2 other people. And so 3 total plus me would be 4 people in a room, right? They were starting, these 3 people right here, they were meeting to talk about a fund they were going to build. And it was pretty obvious. I showed up to this meeting in this nice boardroom. It was pretty obvious these 2 guys did not want me there. They were like, why'd you invite this Bridger kid? He's only 24. These guys are all twice my age, very successful. One of them had a private jet. They're driving fancy cars. They live in big houses. I mean, these are successful individuals. And they're going to go build a huge investment fund. And they're like, why is Bridger here? And so anyways, I just sit in the room. You can imagine like there's a board table here and we're all sitting and it's very obvious I am excluded from the conversation. Right? And so they're talking about their fund that they're going to build. And I'm just sitting there quietly. And finally I have a moment of courage and I raise my hand and I'm like, hey, as you guys are building this fund, What are you going to do? Like, you can put me full screen if you want. Are you going to like, are you going to run American waterfall or European waterfall? You guys going to run a 3 or a 3 or a 3 fund? How are you going to, you know, what are you going to do for audit reports and distributions and K-1s and admins? And they're like, what are you talking about? I was like, oh yeah, these are pretty basic things, you know, for funds. Like, what's your plan? And they said, go to the whiteboard and explain what you mean. They give me the marker and I go up to the whiteboard at 24 years old and I start to explain to them pretty basic stuff. If you guys are in Black Card, this is pretty basic. What's an American waterfall? What's a European waterfall? What's a 3, a 3, or a 3 fund? Can we be an ERA or an investment advisor, an RIA? How are we going to structure this fund? What's a pref, a catch-up, and a carried interest? These are basic things in Black Card. In about 7 minutes, I went to the whiteboard, explained these things. My clout in the room went from zero, nothing, dirt. They wanted me to be an equal business partner with them on this investment fund. We were going to be 25%, 25%, 25%, 25% owners in this new fund that we were going to build at 24 years old when all these guys were in their 40s and 50s. And very successful.

Why?

There's an old quote about preparation meeting opportunity. I had prepared. If you go back to my iPad here, I had educated myself immensely on funds. I knew what I was talking about. I was networked with great fund managers, and when I had the chance to go to a boardroom and be a part of this process, preparation met opportunity. So if you're here. That's also the opportunity cost of not doing this is ignorance. The cost of ignorance, I'll put it down here, of not doing this, okay? So again, that's what we do inside of Black Card. So you might not be ready today to like launch your fund. That's okay. That's why we have the education piece. That's why we have the advisor staff and events we do and the mastermind so that you can learn. And by the way, I would say that alone is worth the purchase price of, you know, $5,000 down. And, and where is it right here? 0%. Like, that's the— that's worth it to me with a 14-day money-back guarantee. That's worth it. Okay. Again, funlaunch.com/5koff. You guys can book a call.

Okay.

So hit that link down below. Um, we'll leave that live for the remainder of the call here. Now I wanted to, uh, to come back to Today's conversation around AI and AI infrastructure. Let me pull up the right slides here. And I wanted to play— so yesterday we did a call. There we go. Let's cue this up with an incredible fund manager. So if you guys were on yesterday, this guy's name is Seth Merrill. This is a private call, by the way. If we send emails out, it's private. We are, you know, we don't share recordings. It was done yesterday. It was on a private Zoom call. We had 1,000 people registered. It was awesome. Today's kind of the encore call. We talked about the 5-layer AI cake. So, and we've already talked about applications, models, infrastructure, chips, and energy. Um, I brought on Seth Merrill, is his name. So Seth, and I think I have his, uh, let's see where his, let me, sorry, go back. I'll introduce him briefly and I think I'll introduce him on the other call. But what I'm gonna do is, is share the recording of yesterday. Now I don't have him pulled up, but, uh, I'll share the recording of yesterday of him talking about this. Now Seth is a former manager of, uh, he's current manager of Melody Capital, Crew Advisors, and Enzyme Peak Advisors. Uh, he has ran their global equity strategy, has moved tens of billions of dollars in these global equity strategies. I mean, a very seasoned global macro equities trader. Uh, and he came on yesterday to talk about this SaaS-pocalypse that is going on and where he thinks he's at least— and I, I kept asking him, how are you positioning your portfolio into 2026? And he shared. So if we're ready to go, we're gonna leave the link live at the bottom of the screen. I'm gonna cue this video up. It's a few minutes and I'll, I'll come back on once it's done. You ready, Briggs, to roll? Let us know if the audio's weird, it's not working, but we're gonna cue this video up. I think it's pretty insightful, so we'll cue that video up and we'll, we'll roll from there. Seth is the Chief Investment Officer at Melody Global, former co-director of portfolio strategy at Enzyme Peak Advisors, and has an MBA from Stanford and, uh, an undergrad from BYU. Welcome on.

It's great to be here, Bridger. Yeah, thank you.

Good to have you here. Um, Seth came on in November to our call and I was like, we gotta have Seth back for this AI infrastructure discussion.

Well, it's good to be here with our friends at FundLaunch. It has been such an interesting start to the year. Usually there's some theme that investors are thinking about, is preoccupying their time, their portfolio work. Today we've got more than one that is top of mind for investors.

Well, and to frame today's conversation, I just pulled some simple stats. So if you can share my screen, You'll see, and we're going to talk more about the equities markets. That's where your background's immensely in, is running huge portfolios in global macro equities. We've seen this, which is the 2026 SAF sell-off, which is immense. This started essentially around January 28th, 29th. You've seen major brand names get just destroyed in the market at least so far. This is just briefly, we'll bring this closer for you. You can just peek right in there. Does that work? This is, if you can see on my screen here, HubSpot down about 60 to 66%. Wix, you can see the portfolio. Salesforce, Zoom. I mean, these are sticker brand names getting, I mean, in a month and a half to 2 months, absolutely, I mean, beat up. You can see ServiceNow, CrowdStrike, the amount of drawdown they've seen, even Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle. And I have your slides queued up if you want to get to them at all. Walk us through what's the mindset, what's going on, what's the shift happening? Is it— should it— is this correct? Is it mispriced? What's your take?

Sure. So the 3 themes that investors are really focused on today are what has been popularly termed the SaaSpocalypse and the military action in Iran, and also what is happening if you go to this first slide, in private credit. There's a tie between these two. And so if I were to ask you, thinking about what are you most concerned about, you've got the Nasdaq down almost 6% so far year to date, all major US equity indices negative. What are you worried about? And the news flow tends to be focused on what happened yesterday or the day before. The year started with the numbers you just showed with large SaaS names down 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, but market attention in terms of news flow has moved to Iran and private credit. These are different themes, but which is most important? Let's look at the next slide. If you look at Google and they talk about AI applications and where we are going to see technology transformation in coming years, most of the focus is in the technology sector. And the technology sector is very important. As you see here, this data shows a reclassification of the 4 members of the Mag 7 that do not get classified by GICS as part of the tech sector. So for various reasons, Meta, Google, and Tesla, and Amazon don't show up in tech. They're classified as tech here. The tech market cap in the US is almost $30 trillion, and it dwarfs the other ones. So on the next slide, we can see that as you're thinking about where should you be focusing as an investor today, the materiality of these different themes is remarkable. So if you look at Iran, let's say that you believe that oil prices are going to be higher this year. You could have, let's say in an extreme scenario, a couple percent taken off of US GDP this year, and it's a 40% probability that you have that hit. That's still only a $200 or $300 billion hit to GDP, and it could recover after oil prices go back down. Private credit, everyone talking about contagion. John Zito from Apollo saying some of these SaaS names, smaller cap SaaS names, could only have 20 to 40% cents on the dollar recovery in a really negative environment, possibly. But you're still only, you know, at a 20% impact write-off, 30%, 40% probability, you're still at, you know, a few hundred billion dollars. But the SaaSpocalypse is massive. And that chart, that table you showed at the very beginning shows why. Because if you go back and look at these, if you've got a $27 trillion market cap in US equity exposure, that is being viewed by some thinkers as being existentially threatened by AI, it really has an impact. And as those calculations show, that could be 20 times as large if any of those predictions are true compared to what's happening in Iran or private credit.

Very well. And I'll just give you an anecdotal point. So here at FundLaunch, we've got, I don't know, we're about 70 employees total. We're entering, this is the reason for this sell-off. is this age of personal software, meaning we've had, like my VP of finance built his, our own finance dashboard using a Claude bot. So we have about, I think, 6 Claude bots now in the office. We've hired, got Mac Minis running that runs our entire financial system that's essentially replaced the use of QuickBooks.

Hmm.

Now we still use QuickBooks because we don't want to, we want, we're running almost double system. We have our own dashboards, own things that we've built, and we're testing it out over the last few weeks. And Seemingly very good. Actually, in the back of the room right here is a guy named Christian. He's helped build multiple automations in our marketing materials with Claude Bot. And we're seeing this age of we are building softwares just for ourselves in a matter of— he built it in about 24 hours, which is interesting. And so a lot of investors are going, well, I don't know how to price now into it. I don't know how to price HubSpot. So I'm just going to go to safety and go risk off even with an Iran war. And, or do you think that's a valid concern, or do you think these companies are going to fill the gap and they're going to also develop agentic tools that fill that spot?

So no one knows the answer, but I'll tell you the things I think about in trying to position my portfolio to account for what you've just described. So when moments of rapid change happen, they happen for one of two reasons. First, that there is some kind of discovery, like a drug discovery or, you know, DNA and helix or genomic mapping. And when it happens, it transforms the technology inside an industry almost instantly. The second thing that can cause rapid and massive technology change is throwing a huge quantity of dollars at a problem. And that R&D will find solutions. So if you look at the next slide, you can see that there's been a lot of talk about silver and the supply constraints there. And we're looking at almost a triple in that silver price in the last 11 months, which is an incredible return for any asset or asset class. But look at what has happened on the next slide in memory prices. So it makes the silver chart look tame.

Mm-hmm.

You've had memory prices quintuple in the past 6 months because of the amount of spending that is going into data centers. And so when you think about what will the long-term impact of AI be, no one knows the answer to that. Everyone's speculating right now. But what you do know is that we're gonna have $500 billion to $1 trillion in CapEx this year. going into data centers and downstream spending. And so in the application layer, that $500 billion to a trillion is going to start standing up all kinds of applications, and we are gonna see an explosion in their count and scope like we've never seen in my lifetime.

This is funny. My business partner Dan actually runs computer companies and stuff, and he's talked about this immensely. He's like, I don't know what to do. Should we buy more inventory? It's gone up 5x in 6 months. I don't, this is such an interesting thing that's happening and it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. The constraint of just chips, and this is a great example right here, is immense across the board for more compute for data centers. And also, I mean, even just as an anecdotal, just our company, we have, we are essentially doubling the compute power for each person. We're almost adding a Mac mini or other similar things for that person because of the increased output we're seeing by things like ClaudeBot or Nemo Claw, things like that, that are these AI agents building on an individual device?

It's remarkable. I bought a custom computer. I use a lot of computing power about 3 years ago. I called the same vendor that sold it to me and had him give me a quote on a new one. He said, do you realize that we're selling the computer you bought 3 years ago, those specs, for the same price today as 3 years ago? And so when you're thinking about Moore's Law, It's almost like this surge in DRAM prices has counteracted the increases in engineering efficiency on the chip side. So what does that mean for applications? I think that, I think you've led us to the framing that I would use. And so with—

Next slide?

Yeah, with 2 more slides, when you think about what's gonna happen in the application layer, no one knows, but we do know that AI is gonna continue going from its current use cases to future use cases. The SaaS use cases are in that upper left circle of intangible. And so tech at its core, what we're calling AI today is a large language model. And it's important to remember that it's language, it's computer language, and it's functional code that transforms things that we say into a powerful expression in programs of our intent. And so that's happening today, and that's why you see the 20 to 40% down this year in SaaS names. But it's going to now start going to the financial sphere and to tangible applications like manufacturing. And when you see what's happening in robotics and vehicle automation, autonomous vehicles, it's happening fast, but it's not there yet. So When you're thinking about where to position your portfolio, I think it's a mistake to think that SaaS is an existential threat only for SaaS companies and not think about its impact in the finance and tangible sectors.

Mm-hmm.

So here's the checklist I would go through on this final slide in thinking about your portfolio. So AI's going to replace incumbents. Where is it gonna happen first? Where is it gonna happen last? Because you want to get out of the way of the early replacement. I think we can all agree that things like publishing a video game is really easy to do with AI. And so we're likely to see an explosion in the count of small mobile-based games here in the next couple of years, 'cause they're just easy to make now. Just like the authorship and creativity in the short video space is gonna make it—

Short videos, blog posts like this.

Blog posts.

These are low-hanging fruit for AI currently, yes.

Low-hanging fruit. But as you go down that list, where would you stop? So as you think about, would you let it file your taxes? Maybe. Intuit was down a lot earlier this year. Would it let you choose your relationships? How about design parts for SpaceX or other companies? Would you let it operate on you without human intervention? Would you let it operate nuclear power plants? When you're thinking about refuge, a lot of people say my drawdown protection is fixed income, but you can find areas inside of equities that are likely to be protected from large AI-driven incumbent replacement for many years to come.

Yeah, what an interesting time it is. And I love this last slide too of like, don't just think it's SaaS, it's also, it's coming for everything. And so be prepared. SaaS is seeing it in the market, in the last few months, especially with Anthropic just announcing essentially a new industry killer. It feels like every week right now.

Every time I see cloud in the news, you just want to push sell because it's going to eviscerate the share price of something that a new cloud module launch is going to compete with.

Well, and in turn, you see this as things become much more efficient. These are deflationary things. You may see an explosion of productivity, but in different places. Right? So you're selling off one place, but then maybe gaining productivity to the individual or to smaller companies, or you said incumbents are threatened, but new entrants may have a distinct advantage over the next few years.

We talked, I believe last time, about how total factor productivity is one of the driving forces in the economy. And it has been very high in the past century for the US, calculated by some economists about 1.7% a year. The big question still in the macro space is, is this an inflection point in total factor productivity? Because if you have technology to continue driving down costs of providing goods and services, as you just said, it does have a deflationary impact, which creates a lot of interesting, let's say, Issues. Wargaming with thinking about how the government is going to react in an environment in which they can benefit from the deflationary impact of technology and perhaps be a little bit more aggressive with borrowing and spending. So we would hope to not have that be fully offset by difference in government behavior, but it's a possibility.

Different question for you. We've seen, and then we'll get you out of here, but I want to ask you about the IPO market. We've seen companies staying private for not just longer, but much longer than previous generations. We have right now queued up a number of large IPOs, a SpaceX, an OpenAI, a Canva, maybe a few others. We've seen some traditional hedge funds buying into private markets or secondaries because they're like, we got to get access to these companies before an IPO. You've seen, and I have a slide later, I won't be able to find it right now, but I want to hear your thoughts on this IPO market. Do you think that'll actually happen? Do you think they're going to delay another year or 2 or just not IPO? I'd love to hear your whole take on IPOs, private-to-public mix. Where do you think that goes?

It's a great question. So when you look at the IPO market, it has been slower the last few years post-COVID than I would've expected a decade or 15 years ago. And I think that is in part because companies have found that they can raise so much capital while still private that they ask the question, do I really need to deal with the regulatory burden of going public? And yet we're seeing probably a SpaceX IPO this year, which will probably be in the trillion-plus range. And I think that one thing that it's important to remember about IPOs is that you do essentially democratize the ownership of the company. And so for companies that want to have a diversified shareholder base and have a large swath of the economy invested, pun intended, in their success, an IPO still allows you to be in the news and have your shareholder base be part of your success as a company. So I think that we'll have companies selectively say it's worth dealing with the regulatory burden in order to diversify that base.

Yeah, it's an interesting just time in the market for that. And we've even seen some of our portfolio companies getting access to some of these pre-IPO shares, and it's But it's at a $400, $500 billion valuation as a private company. And we're begging to get shares and we're trying to get in. And it's just an interesting world at that level. $500 billion private company is such a strange number.

There's a lot of regulation changing on this topic. I would not be surprised to see a lot of good work happen in the next 5 years on increasing access to private shares because For many investors, it's something highly demanded. So the market will, and maybe FundLaunch will be part of the solution to that issue.

Yeah, that's very cool. Well, Seth, thank you for coming on today. I know your new company is up and running, and I don't know if— what are ways people can find you or reach out to you or follow you online? What's a good way for people to, if they want to find you?

We are still pre-launch and building out the technology infrastructure as we speak. So check back with us in a few months. The website will be up and, uh, the Tempo Fund will be the first fund that we are launching at Melody Global. And that will be, uh, available. I've got docs, uh, in my inbox. Uh, so we're working on formation, fund formation right now.

That's awesome. Seth, give it up to Seth, everybody in the chat. Give him a virtual round of applause. Well done. Thank you for coming on today.

Good to be here today.

Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. All right. Pretty good from Seth yesterday. Uh, let's do this for the next few minutes. We're gonna answer a few questions, so drop them in the chat. To my to my people still on, man. We're on for a while here, so well done. And then that link is still live: fundlaunch.com/5koff. It's a to book a call. You can talk to my team members, and we can just answer questions for us. See if building the funds right for you. All right, let's hit a few questions here, and we'll share iPad. Type in the chat. I got the chat open here. This actually is a live call. Okay, so we're gonna we're gonna share a few things. You know, someone asked about private credit market, which I think Seth just touched on. A lot of cracks in the private credit market. You've seen markdowns from Blackstone and BlackRock, concerning to say the least. Some are calling this could ripple effect across, if there was a private credit meltdown, could ripple across the economy. It could be something that's— I mean, we've had the pending cracks in the bond market, in the private credit market. in the regional banking market for years now. It's been like 3 years. Remember the regional banking crisis? It's coming up on 3 years ago when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and the others. And then we had bond crises last year with the tariff war as countries rotated out of US Treasury bonds. We're now seeing that ripple effect into private credit. We should have a new Fed chair in May, which we think will lower rates and might give some more, I guess, softer, more dovish policy towards private credit markets. So interesting. Let me hit a few links here. What's going on, Eric? Good to see you. Jay, what's up? Jorgen. Hello. Hello. So question, does this work for international funds? And I'll use my little thing here. So yes, the answer is primarily stuff I teach is for US-based. And Black Card is US domestic funds. However, we have a number of clients from Canada. We actually have a Canadian advisor that works with us. We have people from Europe, people from the Middle East. What we've seen, I'll just talk about Canada funds for a second. Most Canadians, the provinces are so fractured on their securities laws, it's actually easier for them to launch a US fund and then invest back into Canada. Isn't that crazy? We've worked with a lot of Canadian people. That's, that's what we've seen. Now, not all of them, each person's a little different, but most we've seen actually do US-based funds that go back into Canada. Isn't that wild? Just because of how complex Canadian securities laws are. Um, yeah, good question. Uh, capital raising. Let's see here. These are kind of your 3 buckets that you're raising capital from: high net worths, family offices, and institutions. For most people launching their first fund, you're raising from this group and primarily this group, to be honest. Um, and so how do you attract and talk to those people? It's kind of, we have other videos on this actually. We can, some of our most recent YouTube videos have been on this, but how do you get in the room? How do you connect in the room? And then how do you close the room is kind of what we go through is this funnel approach to how to get these, uh, these people into your firm. So, all right, y'all. Well, good call today. Thanks for coming on again. fundlaunch.com/5koff. The deadline is end of the month. That's the deadline to join. before this whole promotion wraps up. You can come out to my office, be with us in May. We have a 2-day event happening. About 150 Blackcombers will fly out. We have a few huge networking events we're doing. We're renting out the Real Salt Lake Stadium. It should be pretty fun. So funlaunch.com/5koff. We'd love to see you guys here, meet you in person. It should be pretty fun. With that, thanks for coming on today. We'll do these in the future. Comment down below, like and share this if you can, so it hits more people in our ecosystem. And we'll see you on the next one.

Thanks, man.

Okay, thank you. Bye-bye.