How to Start an Investment Fund in 2026

Watch what they're doing, not what they say they are doing. If you don't do this, your competition will, and you might not have a spot. There's tons of dry powder. Retail investors can do extremely well, and I believe we need more people to launch funds to understand how this game is played because it's the most lucrative game on earth. Okay, how many people have raised money before? On a— okay, keep your hands raised if it was like a single deal, like you bought a business, you did a single deal. Then how many people did a fund, full-out fund? A couple people here, 2. What'd you guys do for a fund? What was it? Just shout it out. An opportunity fund in real estate? Opportunity zones? Or just opportunistic? Opportunistic. Okay, very cool. You guys did it together, partners? Cool. How much you guys manage? How much you guys raise? $90 million? That's awesome. Both you guys together? What kind of deals are you buying? Deals in El Salvador, a lot of land deals. Oh, okay. Is this like wink wink El Salvador or is this like— No, it's the country El Salvador. Like actual El Salvador? Yeah. Yeah, very cool. A lot of funds have been in other businesses, all real estate related though. All real estate? Very cool. Clapper for these 2, $90 million under management. I love it. Clap it up, you guys. Clap it up. All right, so the question, and I guess I'm already alluding to this, I'm not going to use very many slides, but here we are. We live in interesting times. I just wrote a full op-ed that got picked up in Tech News Crunch about the tariffs right now, what's going on with tariffs. This last few weeks has been very— we run a— me and Dan Young in the back. Dan Young, stand up real quick. Me and Dan run about a $25 million crypto hedge fund right now, and then I run a GP stakes fund as well. We've been watching this very closely. Dan runs a computer business, did a few hundred million in sales. They had— we had ships— they had ships parked off the coast last week. I believe there's 3 economic wars that Trump is waging. Number 1 is with the other countries. Number 2 is internally with Jerome Powell, and then obviously number 3 is with China. And we have Scott Bessanet. Do you guys know Scott Besant? Besant, excuse me, I said it wrong. Scott Besant. He's the Treasury Secretary currently. He worked with Soros and Druckenmiller in the '90s to break the Bank of England. You guys have heard this story? Famous story on Wall Street. In the '90s, they found the British pound was pegged against— it was before the euro. It was pegged to the German mark and they believed it was overvalued the way they were doing it. So they as a hedge fund, as one hedge fund in New York, Put this huge bet against the British pound and essentially brought the British government to their knees. They made, I think, about eight and a half billion dollars on one trade. They they call it they broke the Bank of England. They broke their entire essentially the British pound. It then they broke it so bad they had to reinvent and go to the euro. That's where the euro was created. This is the guy who's the Treasury Secretary. Is there a chance? They're trying to do the same thing to China right now. Think about the bigger game here of what's going on. How much leverage they've created with negotiations. China's got huge demographic issues. They've had a baby boomer population and a one-child policy. Their stock market's getting decimated right now. Could it be Scott Bessenet is on the job to break China's economy so that they can join and fully work with us? Now, you guys are mostly in real estate, correct? This group. I've been told this is a very sharp group. This is like a high-end group. So I'm gonna go deep with you guys. Does that sound cool? Yeah. You guys good if I go deep? Yeah. Okay, this last week oil prices dropped drastically if you didn't notice. Lumber, a lot of materials, steel prices dropped a ton which is good for construction, good for real estate. We will see how this plays out but if you believe— so love him or hate him, I'm not— this is not a political conversation but if love him or hate him, Trump, he's doing what he says he's going to do. I mean everything he said he's going to do, he's doing, right? Whether you like it or not, he's— I'm going to close the border, I'm going to do the tariff. He is following what he's saying he's going to do Interesting plan. I don't have enough time to talk about this, but if you somewhat believe that this is going to unlock United States production, United States manufacturing, United States energy, and overall the United States economy, we are poised, I think, to be in a pretty cool economic situation in the next couple years. And the fact that you're here today with Chris and this group, and you get to talk about some pretty high-level stuff, I think we're poised in a very interesting moment in time. I don't think there's ever been a better time in history to be an entrepreneur than 2025. People look back like 1980s, I'm like, dude, 2025 is a phenomenal time to be an entrepreneur, to be in this game. We have so much power to do cool stuff. Anybody with me? Yeah. Yeah? Now, I was like, I could spend 30, 40 minutes talking about tariffs. I wrote a whole op-ed, you guys can look it up. What I wanna talk about next though is how we capitalise on that. I think we could be very near to a boom in the United States, an absolute economic boom. And/or if you don't believe that, maybe it's going to go south, we can make money when it goes down too. Guess what? Fund managers make money when it goes up and when it goes down. So who cares? But I mean, I kind of care because I live here. And most of you guys are in real estate. And I actually, I'm more in favor and not in favor. And in the medium to long term, I think we might have a really cool situation. Furthermore, this morning, you guys see Trump's been putting a lot of pressure on Powell to cut rates. Yeah. He just asked the Supreme Court if he can fire Jerome Powell. We will see. I mean, he is putting a lot of pressure on Jerome Powell to cut rates for people like us, to unlock real estate. He— I'm looking at the Trump plan. Over 4 years, you have to have rates lower. You have to have new trade deals. You have to have a secure border, and you have to increase and get oil prices really low to unlock an economy. One of those steps is Jerome Powell and cutting rates. I think the second economic war is raging is with Jerome Powell. There could be a chance where he's like, I'll crash the stock market, Jerome Powell. You need to cut rates. I'm okay with the market crashing. They've said that. Last week, Scott Bestin was like, I don't— it's the Mag 7. These are the wealthy people that are losing money. I don't care. Middle America doesn't care if the stock market crashes. We care about rates being lower so we can buy houses and build and construct and do what this group wants to do. Does that make sense? It's very interesting. You guys should go watch Scott Bessenet and Howard Ludnick. Brilliant people, brilliant people. We'll see how it plays out. So, that frames the conversation today of investment funds, kind of what I talked about. So, you already know this, but what do people— sorry, I do what people do, not what they say they do. There's a lot of people online, there's a few of them here. There's Cody Sperber, there's me, there's Kris Krohn, and I like to go, I watch what they do, not what they say they do. What do these people all have in common? They're doing it. There's more. They all are running funds. All these online influencer people, a lot of them are going and launching funds. You guys notice this common trend? Look, so you have Grant Cardone's obviously their funds, Cody Sanchez has a private equity fund, Kris just talked about he's opening a new fund just barely 5 seconds ago, he just said it. Tai Lopez, they bought Pier 1 Imports, RadioShack, it kind of crashed and burned but anyways, he was moving in that direction. Furthermore, These guys bought our program a few years ago. Oh, they're— Before they blew up, Alex, we were hanging out and he actually put an offer on her business. They're doing private equity. Listen, watch what they do, not what they say they're doing. I was with Russell Brunson just a few weeks ago. He's buying a ton of businesses right now, doing all private equity transactions. Watch what they're doing, not what they say they are doing. Most successful people in this space right now are moving into the fund game. Why? Because it's the most lucrative game on earth. Kris has talked about this a few times on social media. You look at the Forbes 100 list, the number 1 category of billionaires is fund management. Number 2 is tech, number 3 is fashion. It is investment fund money management, this game that I'm about to talk about. Alright, my goal for today, why you should consider launching a fund. Does that sound good? Yeah. Okay, let's talk about funds and what they're doing. So, This is for business owners or investors who want to scale. Who's a business owner in here? Guessing most. Who's more of the investor side? Less? I mean, maybe a little bit of both. Somebody's like, I'm a business, I'm a little bit, anyways, either one, this is an ability for you to scale. Now, I think I've got some slides in here I'm gonna kinda skip through. We are seeing mass consolidation. This is why this is so important. We are seeing huge consolidation of brands. If you don't Start a fund. Because you're like, ah, Bridger, I'm good with what I'm doing. I just do my own deals. I'm good. Did you know in 2021, 1 in 7 homes were purchased by Wall Street? 2022, it was 1 in 5. 2023, it was 1 in 3 homes were purchased by big funds, big firms on Wall Street. Residential homes. These aren't mortgage pools. These are actual the homes. Who are all these cash buyers? If you don't do this, your competition will, and you might not have a spot. I think this is very prevalent, especially I have these slides for the world. We're seeing huge roll-ups of pretty much every industry on earth right now. We're seeing mass consolidation efforts. This is— I'm going really quick. This is like usually like an hour and a half, but I'm going fast today. So how do we play in this game? There's tons of dry powder. Retail investors can do extremely well, and I believe we need more people to launch funds to understand how this game is played. Now let me walk through this. We call ourselves the Wall Street Rebels. I'm gonna get the marker here and walk through the kind of path that most people are on. And again, I mentioned business owners, investors that want to scale, okay? Why would you set up a fund? Bridger, I'm already doing deals. Maybe you raise money from family and friends. Hey, we're doing deals. We— I had a guy in my group, he did 4 house flips a year. Every year he did 4. He's like, Bridger, I'm doing good. But he's like, I do want to scale. I want to see how this looks. We set up a fund with him. The next year he flipped 72 homes. The next year. Went from 4 to 72 in 1 year setting up a fund. So why does this happen this way? Let me get, well, let me just ask you. Let me ask y'all. You guys are all doing deals. You're all sharp real estate investors. If you had a fund, if you had a fund of, let's call it $10 million just sitting ready to go, could you do obviously more deals or less deals? Just yell it out. More, obviously. Could you do deals faster or slower? Faster. Faster. Okay. Those are the obvious ones. Do Do you think banks would give you better or worse interest rates? Probably better. Do you think insurance would give you better or worse rates? Better. Probably better. Interesting. So, you can close faster. You can do more or bigger deals. You get better debt and better insurance. Furthermore, if you guys are doing value-add, you've got crews that are helping you like, you know, fix— like for a house flip, for example. You have the paint guy, the carpet guy, the whatever guy. He had a volume discount. He did so many houses that the average cost per flip dropped. Interesting. Any of you ever looked at a deal? Anybody ever— I've done this before. Ever bid on a deal and someone outbids you? And you go, they overpaid. They're idiots. Anybody done this before? Yes. Someone beat you on a bid and like, they don't know what they're doing. These guys are idiots. They're going to lose their shorts. And because I know, I did my pro forma. My pro forma says we can pay $800,000. And they paid $950,000 and they're going to lose their shorts. Yes? Am I the only one? Yes. Maybe it does pencil because they're not playing the same game that me and you are playing. Maybe it does pencil because they have lower cost of capital than you do. They have lower debt. Their insurance costs are lower. Their average cost to do value-add is lower than yours. I'll give you a real-world example. One of my mentors, they were bidding on a $100 million property. Big property. $100 million, okay, that was the asking price. A syndicator, someone who puts a deal by deal together, came and bid $100 million roughly. I'm giving you rough numbers here, $100 million, the rough bid, okay. My mentor's fund, they bid $94 million. They won the deal at $94 million. Why? Exactly, they were more— the terms of the deal, they were more secure. If you're a seller and a fund can close in 3 weeks, And a syndicator is going to try to pull money together for the next 6 months and they might close, they might not. I might just take the night— which they did. They took the $94 million bid because it was certain and they had a reputation as a fund who closed. They got a $6 million discount on a property because they did this. Is this making sense? Yes. You guys seeing this path? This is why most successful people in business end up in this route, end up in this space. The kind of path that most people go that I would tell someone to go on. You have what they call— I would call this the test phase. This is your own money. A lot of you are in this deal right now. And then I would say the next phase, we call it a single asset fund or a syndication where you're doing one deal at a time and you're actually raising money for that deal. How many people have done that before? Like we said before, quite a few of you. The next tier of this would be to— I'm going to draw it down here. A full-out fund. Where you're doing multiple deals in one. What I'm saying here is, hey, we— I'm going to choose house flipping again. Hey, we flip on a deal-by-deal basis. So, every time I flip a house, I got to call my investors, call my hard money guy, call whatever, get the money together. We're closing on the 15th, right? A fund says, you're going to invest in my fund. We're going to— we plan to do 38 deals over the next 2 years. And as an investor, you get diversification on all 32. And it's going to be a blended average return. And of the 32 deals, yeah, 4 are going to go bad, 4 are going to do amazing, and the blended mix is going to be a blended return of 18.5%. Does that make sense? And then we can get all those great things that we have being a fund. Does that make sense? It's kind of how most people evolve into this game. Now, I'm going to go to the next piece here. So, what does this look like? Okay. Actually, how do we put this together? We help people do this all the time, the actual tactics of like putting it together. Many of the funds are using a GP-LP structure which is a general partner limited partnership structure. You guys have heard of these before, I'm sure. You have limited partners that come in as investors into the limited partnership. General partners manage this firm and then you go and make investments out of this. Let me tell you a little bit, a little story though of why this is so cool and awesome. Anybody seen the movie The Big Short? The Big Short is a phenomenal movie, okay? This There's a great scene in there because I know some of you right now, well, I don't want to raise outside capital. It's scary, which it is, by the way. Whenever you take outside money, you got to be very committed and serious what you're doing. It's a very serious endeavor when you take someone else's money to invest. So just know that blanket. But in a syndication, okay, I'll draw out a syndication here. If I did a single asset or a syndication, maybe, maybe some of you guys have done this. You set up an LLC. Anybody done this before? Yeah. An LLC. And people put money into the LLC and they buy shares out of your LLC. Anybody done this? Some head nods, yeah? That's how a lot of syndicators do it. Let me just give you an example of this. So, The Big Short. In a syndication, in an LLC syndication, some of your friends or partners, they can kind of elbow you out a little bit. If they don't like what you're doing, if they've got a tax bill that just hit, they call me, Bridger, hey, can you get— can you sell the property faster? I got a tax bill that just hit. I need my liquidity now. I Like, can you get me out? And if you're in an LLC syndication, you might do that. They're your investor. You got to get them out and work. Anybody feeling this? Anybody done this before? A lot of head nods, yeah. In a fund, the beauty of a fund, you don't have to do that. Your fiduciary responsibility is to do what's best for the fund, not individual investors. Back to The Big Short. Anybody remember the scene? So, this is The Big Short is about 4 fund managers all shorting the housing market in 2007-2008. One of them is Michael Burry. You guys remember this scene? His white-haired investor comes in the office and is yelling at him. He's like, give me my money back. Because to hold the short position that he had, this is kind of just a little nuance in the movie if you go look it up. He was spending about $6 to $8 million per month to hold the position. And he was spending this. He did this for like 18, 19 months in a row. He was spending six million a month to just hold his short, and the market hadn't fallen yet. The market hadn't fallen, hadn't fallen, hadn't fallen. He's wasting six million dollars a month, and his fund is now tanking, tanking, tanking, tanking, tanking. And his investors come in and go, "Give me my money back! You're you don't know what you're doing." And he goes, "It's gonna fall. It's gonna fall. I know it's gonna fall." And because he had a fund, he just said sorry. You invest in the fund. If you want to pull your money out, you can put a withdrawal request in. It's a 50% penalty if you want to pull your money out. That's the rules of the fund. I don't serve individual investors. I do what's best for the fund. You've hired me as a fund manager. What's best for the fund is to hold this short position. And if we hold this short position, like what happened in the movie, they made hundreds of millions or a billion dollars, whatever it was, and everyone made tons of money. That's paints so beautifully one of the great reasons of having a fund. That's why most people end up in a blind pool type of fund. Is this making sense? Yeah. Dry powder just spiked to $13.1 trillion waiting on the sidelines at private equity firms trying to get deployed. You have a baby boomer wealth transfer, $84 trillion in assets trying to get passed down because people are going to die or age out, okay? Pretty interesting. There's a lot of money on the sidelines right now. But we walk people through this thing. It's called the Fund Launch Formula. It looks very complex. We can dive deeper if you want. But we walk through a 4-step formula to help people launch and raise money for their funds. Everyone always like, hey, Bridger, how do I raise capital? How do I do this? How do I put this together? So, I think about capital raising 3 different ways. Number 1, am I even in the room with money? Am I even in the vicinity of people that have money? And I'm talking more high net worth individuals. We can talk family offices, institutions, but are you even in the universe of them? Are you in the room theoretically or actually physically? Where are you? Are you even around these people? Number 2, you're in the room, but can you actually connect with that person? I have a rich friend. He grew up, his family's super rich. He gets in a lot of fancy rooms, but no one sees him as a person that could actually raise money or deploy capital, right? So there's a difference of being in the room and then connecting and showing yourself as someone in the room that actually has value, and I wanna hear more about your deal, can you tell me more? To get me to the third phase, which is the close phase. This is where you actually have maybe like a pitch deck, you're actually pitching them the deal, and they're actually closing. Does that make sense? You could call it almost like a funnel of investors here. So I ask the question to people, where do you feel like you, if you're trying to raise money, where do you fall short? Are you in enough rooms with enough people? Maybe you're in the rooms, but you're, maybe you're just, I don't know how to connect with people. Or maybe I'm in the rooms, I'm connecting, but man, I try to close 'em and just no one's closing. And I'll tell you, with me, I switch sometimes. Sometimes I'm in a lot of great rooms, I got a lot of great connections, and I can't close. And other times I close. Me and Dan, recently with where crypto's at, crypto's so low, it's so easy. Everyone's like, we see the vision, we have such a clear path of where things are going, we believe. We close like everybody, you know? And then it's like the middle funnel part, I mean, that just ebbs and flows as you go. And we can talk, give more details on that. So if I think about the 3 stages of raising capital, now that's more like, How do I raise money from investors? But the bigger question is this: What's your offer? What do you— what's your actual value prop? A lot of people, myself in the past included, think just because you are doing a real estate deal, people just love you. Like, oh, you're doing real estate? Like, oh yeah, they should love to invest in me. In reality, they don't think about the actual marketplace they are entering with their deal. And there's a fun framework here. We talk about building out your edge. Your competition when raising capital are fund managers that have already done this for 30 years, that charge a 2 and 20, that are in value-add multifamily, that already do this. Why should I invest with you than the guys who have done it for 30 years, are on fund 4, and managed $1.8 billion? And a lot of us launch me-too products into the investment space. Is that kind of making sense? Very few at the beginning sometimes think, how do I actually position my fund So that investors are dying to put money in? That's the bigger question. People always ask Bridger, like, what's the hack that I can, like, get an investor over the line? I go, have a great deal. Have an amazing— that's why we put this. If you see the 3 phases, back to deal 1, have an incredible deal. Can we find asymmetrical risk truly on this deal? Can we really find alpha on this? Do you guys know what asymmetrical risk and alpha is? No. The idea of relatively low risk for high return. So it's called asymmetrical risk. You guys have probably heard low risk, low reward, high risk, high reward. Have you guys heard this before? In finance, there's a term called asymmetrical risk where you can find things that have relatively low risk for high return. For example, let's say— what's your name right here? Milo. Milo, we're in business, okay? We're business partners, alright? We're business partners. We got a business. You guys are going to invest in me and Milo's business, alright? And there's— let's just call it medium risk, medium return. We're doing a cool business together. And you guys are looking at it, okay, there's probably medium risk and we're sharp guys, medium return, we could probably do pretty well, okay? And then we just announce, me and Milo say, hey, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are going to be our 2 other business partners. What happens to the return? The return go up or down? Up. Probably way up, right? Like, what's the chance of success? Like, way up. Now, what's the chance of failure, the risk? Maybe the same or goes down. They have so much resource, right? So, all this just by adding 2 business partners, We just created asymmetrical risk. Does that make sense? It's totally possible, especially public markets. A lot harder in private markets. Happens every day. House flippers have asymmetrical risk. I have a buddy who has, um, he's flipped 300 houses. Bridger, I have flipped zero houses. If I went and flipped a house, I'm just not— my family knows I'm just not that handy of a guy. My family always makes fun of me. They're just like, you suck at doing Handy things. You know, like how you're supposed to be a man and like go fix the thing at the staircase and like whatever. I'm just not that guy. I'm just not. This is what I've tried a bunch. I got all the tools. I try everything. It's just I'm not that guy. Guess what I do? I hire someone who is the guy. I'm like, I'll just hire somebody. I'll just pay them. Who cares? But my family loves to make fun of me because they're super handy. They are. They're building bookshelves and you know, like in the weekends they'll build a whole deck. And I'm like, what the freak? How did you build a deck? Oh, we just got some wood at the home. You know, anyways. If I went and flipped a house, high risk and probably low return. But if my buddy Mike who's flipped 300 houses or some of you guys in this room flipped a house, it's low risk, high return. A lot of you have asymmetric risk already. How do we paint that into an offering for investors? Is that kind of making sense? Yeah. That's how you raise big capital. How do you show that you're different than the competition? How do you show that you really have a deal? And I— some people when they've raised their first dollar, they're just like, hey, Can we? You'd love to put money in, right? Versus if you have the truly the confidence. I would mortgage my own house 7 times over and I'd take my grandma's money to put in this deal because it's so good. I've looked for deals for years. This deal is the best one. And I— Yes, there's always risk in everything. But man, this one's locked. You'll be surprised and really have that conviction. Run through different models to make sure I wouldn't just raise money on a flim. Oh, I'm just— Kris or Bridger told me to raise money. I'm going to try it out. The deals will help attract investors that find you. Does that sound fair? Okay, last thing I want to share and we'll get out of here. Let me go back a little bit. Business owners. My business owners in here? Another interesting category you guys could use. This is a true story. A guy calls me. He goes, I have a gun store. We do about $10 million a year. I want to buy out my competitors. Like, how could I do that? I said, well, we could set up a fund. And he goes, what do you mean? He goes, well, because he was like, do I have to give up equity? Do I have to give up debt? Do I go like to the Shark Tank style, give up 20% of my business? And I said, what about this? What if we set up an outside fund, raise money there with the investment strategy that we're going to go buy up all your competitor stores in the area? Those competitors are owned by the fund. Okay, they pay returns to the fund, but they license you to help run the store because you're good at running gun stores, and you can put your logos on there. You can put your, you know, branding on it. They can use your supply chain. Essentially, they're part of your empire. Brilliant. Isn't that interesting? You keep your gun store as is, doesn't move, equity's all the same. You set up an outside vehicle, it buys your competitors, licenses your company, and now you have a monopoly in an area. Isn't that interesting?