How We Raised Beyond Our Own Network For A $32M First Close

All right, I'm Bridger Pennington. Let's dive in. Today, you know, I'm the co-founder of Fund Launch. We're gonna talk about launching funds, et cetera, but specifically we're gonna talk about how we raised beyond our own network for a $32 million first close, okay? We're gonna get into this right now. So now why am I qualified to speak on this topic? What makes me somewhat qualified? Okay, so far to date, me and my team have raised $84 million of equity into our funds. Specifically our funds. We have our portfolio of over $640 million of aggregate portfolio AUM through Fund Launch Partners primarily. I have launched 5 different funds under 3 different platforms or names, okay? We have 17 portfolio funds. And by the way, one of these 3 funds I actually sold and exited. The other 2 of these platforms we're still running today and we have multiple funds under each platform. We have hundreds of limited partners or investors is what they're called. We've done over $47 million of revenue in our businesses and specifically through Fund Launch. That put us on the Inc. 5000 of fastest growing companies in America. It also put us on the Utah Businesses Fast 50, put Mason on Utah Businesses 20 in Their 20s. And so yes, we've had some decent success in business at a relatively young age. We are on quite a quite a rocket ship right now with Funnel Launch and Funnel Launch Partners and all of our companies together. It's been cool what we've built. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. But I wanted to share this because I have a sense of I know what I'm talking about in these topics. Now additionally though, I dropped out of college. We'll tell that story in a minute, but I ended up dropping out of school. I did not attend an Ivy League college. I did not work on Wall Street. I live in Utah, for crying out loud. I live in a flyover state for most people. You're like, man, how did a kid that dropped out of college, didn't go to an Ivy League school, didn't work on Wall Street, and that lives in Utah? This is my beautiful family, by the way. This is my wife, Lauren, our 2 kids. We've got 9 chickens. We live on an acre and a half in Utah. Utah's amazing, by the way. If you wanna raise kids, I'd highly recommend Utah. It's pretty awesome. But how did I, how did we do this, right? And the reason I'm saying this is because many of you might feel that way. Maybe you didn't go to an Ivy League school, maybe you didn't work on Wall Street. I am living proof that you can do this, that I can do this, that we've made it in this. space. Now through Fund Launch, we have launched over 400 funds and syndications. Our clients manage over $7.1 billion, billion with a B, billion dollars reported client AUM. So yes, we know a thing or two about building funds. We have built every single type of fund. For example, this is one of the groups that came through us. This is All In Ventures. They built a venture capital firm. They paid us roughly $30 grand to help them build and structure their fund. They built a— they launched a $20 million fund. Where they're standing, by the way, this is a pretty cool building. So this is an incubator. This building partners with the local universities and students who are entrepreneurial, if they get qualified, can come to this building and they get free internet and office space. They get access to accounting and tax services, things like that. And it's an incubator to help them build their startups. I believe in this building that at any given time, there's 100 to 200 startups being built in in this incubator building, which is kind of cool. So anyways, isn't that awesome? This is All In Ventures. Now they, and you might be asking, Bridger, why do you do this? What's your secret? Like what's in it for you? People pay us to build their funds. Just, I'm saying it right here. People, they paid us $30,000 to help build their fund. We bring in the attorneys, we bring in the software, the structure, and we help put together their fund, which we did for All In Ventures. Like Bridger, why do you do these webinars and stuff? I'm just, I'll tell you straight up. We do pretty much everything for free. I teach for free. I teach all of our stuff for free. I have a YouTube channel. We have just under 350,000 followers on social media. I teach for free. Implementation is paid. So if you want my dirty little secret, why do you do these webinars? Because at the end of this call, I'll say, hey, for a few of you guys that want help implementing this into your business, you can hire our team and we can help you. Does that make sense? That's just me being transparent. This is also Percy. Him and his group paid us roughly $25,000. We helped them build a real estate fund. They now have over $100 million of AUM. I love this picture of him with his cigar and his medal. Anyways, he looks pretty cool here. But he just posted this a little bit long ago. Closed on a 229-unit apartment complex in Oklahoma last week. So they're doing pretty large real estate deals. They're well over $100 million and have done very well through this process. So that makes sense? Me being transparent. Now at the end of today's call, we'll also do a Q&A on the iPad. You guys can ask questions live. But to give you a sense of our agenda for today, I want to talk about capital raising, how we raise capital. But I also want to talk about building investment funds. So one of the greatest vehicles to build wealth, it's the number one category for billionaires is investment funds. These types of things, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate funds, and private credit funds. This is what I would call investment funds. Now each one of these, by the way, they all run, they're almost the same structure to build and put them together. We've launched hundreds of these types of funds. The reason I put all of these here, because we've helped build all of them. I've actually helped manage a— my first fund was a private credit fund. My current fund is a hedge fund. And then my other fund right now with Founders Partners is more of a private equity kind of venture capital fund. So I've done multiple types of funds. here myself. I've helped other people build these funds and we've done this together. And by the way, I'll tell you from experience, all of these funds are almost exactly the same, the way they're put together. What's the difference? Just for our phrase of the day, just, and we'll kick it off. What's the difference between a private equity fund or a venture capital fund or hedge fund? The difference is what they invest into. These are essentially a pool of money Capital comes into that pool, and a real estate fund uses that pool of money to buy real estate. Ta-da! And whenever the real estate makes money, you split the returns. So what's a— that's simple. A real estate fund buys real estate. Okay, what's a venture capital fund? A venture capital fund is a pool of money. Instead of buying real estate, they invest into early-stage startups. Okay, not too crazy, right? What's a Private equity fund. Same exact thing. It's a pool of money. But instead of buying real estate or early-stage companies, they buy established companies or private equity. Not public equity, but private. Private ownership in privately held businesses. That's what private equity is. They just buy ownership. What's a hedge fund? A hedge fund is a pool of money. Instead of buying real estate or venture or private equity, they buy public stocks or bonds, anything public securities. So stocks, bonds, options, crypto, that would be a hedge fund. What's a private credit fund? It's the same exact thing. It's a pool of money. Instead of doing these other things, they lend money. They make loans. They make credit. It's a cool name, private credit, but it's essentially they're just making loans. And that's one of the big things I'm frustrated about in finance, the world of high finance. They make simple things very complex. These are pretty simple things. Okay? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. This is the world of what I'm talking about. I asked a guy what he did for a living recently. I met this guy, what do you do for a living? He's like, I flip real estate. And I'm like, oh, you like flip houses, right? And he's like, well, not quite. We flip skyscrapers. And I was like, oh, that's a little different. And he goes, it's actually pretty similar. You know, you think about flipping a house, you know, you have, Paint it and you make it look better, you renovate it and stuff. He goes, we do the same thing. We just buy a $60 million skyscraper. We renovate it, we make it better, we get new tenants in, then we sell it for $90 million or $100 million. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool, right? So it's what funds are. Funds allow you to scale. If you have a good investment process, a good idea, a fund just bolts on and allows you to scale, okay? This is what we do through Fund Launch. I'm skipping around here. I want to just show you, give you some ideas, and then we're going to go to the iPad and just get working. Does that sound fair? Yeah? Can I get a yeehaw in the chat? Actually, I don't even know how you'd write yeehaw. You can write yeehaw if you want, but we'll dive in. We've helped people do multifamily real estate funds, sports gambling funds, commercial real estate funds, short-term rental funds, long-short trading funds, African food supply chain funds, forex trading funds, crypto funds, Real estate funds, almond nut farm acquisition funds, debt consolidation loan funds, seller finance sub-2 funds, startup investing funds, business acquisition funds, single-family real estate funds, software roll-up funds, farming funds, shipping container arbitrage, Canadian funds, venture studio funds, competitor roll-up funds, hard money lending funds, and many, many more. Yes, we've helped do a lot of funds. Again, good job on the, on the yeehaws in the chat. Well done. We've helped people do all these types of funds. Okay? So yes, we know a thing or two about building funds. Now I'm just going to dive. Let's get into it. We're talking about capital raising today. How many of you are trying to raise capital right now? Type a 1 in the chat if you're trying to raise capital right now. Type a 1. Okay, a lot of 1s. Well, okay, perfect. This will be perfect for you guys. Now type a number 2 if you've tried to raise money in the past or wish you had money in the past. But you couldn't quite get the money together. It didn't quite work or it wasn't quite the right fit. Type a 2 in the chat. And you could be both. You could say I'm trying to raise now and in the past it was kind of hard or difficult. Okay, awesome, man. Okay, perfect. Let's do this. I'm going to switch my screen for a second and get this set up. And I'm going to try one more time on my Zoom account, making sure I'm in here. Let me try one more time. Give me a second. Okay, is my screen sharing? Still not working on my end, FYI. Okay, here we go. The iPad of truth and justice. We're gonna talk about all different types of capital raising. Give you a sense, I've done a lot with funds. I've mapped what we call the Fund Launch Formula. You can see on your screen here. This is how entrepreneurs build and launch funds. Okay, we're gonna dive into this in a minute. To give you a sense, this is a more built-out version of the Fund Launch Formula, so you can see I have sub-frameworks down below that we can zoom into. If you're worried about framing and structuring your fund, we can go down and look at this, right? If we're looking at types of investors we're gonna raise from, here's the capital raising matrix of different types of investors. You have high net worth individuals, family offices, and then you have institutions, okay? This gives you a sense of, I mean, we have a lot of detail here, But let's just start here for a second. Let's start. I'm going to go to the simplified version of the Faunce Formula. How do we create a great fund? You know, when we talk about capital raising, capital raising is a, you know, raising lots of capital or raising no capital is an output. Output of a lot of— let's put arrows here— different inputs. You know what I'm saying? Like, people don't just wake up and raise capital. It seems that way sometimes online. You go on Twitter and you're like, oh my gosh, people just open the windows and money just falls inside. I mean, if you really dig into it, it's not that way at all. It is the output of a lot of great inputs. What are some of those inputs? Well, and maybe type in the chat what your guys' thoughts are. Having an excellent strategy, having a great team, having a great track record, having a great, you know, you could put thesis up here with strategy, the right timing, the right network to take this to, right? The right, You know, materials, materials that are organized well and put together well, right? These are all the inputs. And then all of a sudden, the outputs start to be a little easier. Does that kind of make sense? Obviously, you guys know this already. So let's go a little more granular than this, but I want to make sure we don't lose the inputs. I meet with a lot of people and they're like, I need help with capital raising. And I'm like, let me, let's look at your inputs. I go look at their inputs over here and their inputs are horrible. They don't have really a strategy. Their team is lackluster. They're hitting it at the wrong timing. They have no track record. They have no network and they have no materials. It's like, well, yeah, you're not gonna raise capital, right? So, how do we fix or help some of these inputs starting at the core of the problem? And then let's start here and then I'm gonna share a little bit of the actual capital raising side, like the network, the process, 'cause I think there is still a lot of back to this like, You could have all these good inputs. So I'm going to redraw it up here. Capital raising. You could have a lot, all these good inputs and still not raise money. And that's the frustrating part. And what I would add here, we're going to get back to this in a second, but I'll put a pin in it so I don't forget, is the process. The process of how we raise capital, the process you lead an investor through. Is massive. You have the inputs and then you lead through the process. And I had to learn this kind of the hard way because, man, we struggled to raise capital for a long time. To give you a little background story, you know, some of you guys know my story. I started 6 different businesses my first 2 years of college. So, I maybe, actually, sorry, I'm gonna flip back to the screen just so you can see. It'll be faster if I share my screen. I started 6 businesses my first 2 years of college. So, I got home from a church mission. I was just hungry to get started. I started a bunch of stuff. So, I was very entrepreneurial. I started all these different types of businesses. I started Chinese tutoring and funnel building and online marketing and real estate wholesaling business, a chip and a snowboard business, a sell your junk on eBay business. Okay, I started all these businesses. I finally, my dad grabs me. We grew up in kind of a normal household. Nothing too fancy, kind of just a middle-class household. My dad grabs me and says, Bridger, I want you to go meet with my business partner. This guy can really help you out. And I said, OK. So, I drive to this guy's house. I pull up. He lives in this huge mansion. And again, my dad drives a kind of a crappy car with a dent in the door. He lives in this huge mansion. I start to— I go into this guy's house. I sit down with him. We start to talk. And I ask him like, how did you do all this? How did you make all this money? Like, I'm in school right now. I'm trying all these businesses. And he goes, Bridger, I was a lot like you. He goes, I used to start a— I was trying all these little businesses. But then he goes, then I figured out the secrets of the ultra wealthy, the ultra rich. And he goes, they were all doing investment funds. And they had figured out something that I hadn't figured out was how to raise big capital and pull that capital together to go build a fund. He goes, at the time, this is this mentor talking to me. He's like, I didn't even know what a fund was. And he goes, but I was going to figure it out. He's like, and it took me, he's like, 5 to 7 years. I talked to your dad and others and we built these investment funds. At the time, they're managing about $8 billion of real estate when I'm talking to this guy. And I was like, holy crap, this is crazy. And I was like, wow, you guys manage $8 billion? That's twice as big as Cardone Capital is today. I was like, holy crap, that's a lot of money. And I, you know, I'm leaving this guy's house. I'm like, hey, can you teach me? Can you be my mentor? And he says, Bridger, go talk to your dad. Your dad knows way more about this than I do. And I said, no, my dad's kind of broke. He drives a crappy car. He lives in, you know, a normal house. You live in a big house. You're rich. I want to learn from you. And he says, Bridger, sorry to break it to you, but me and your dad make about the same amount of money. And my chin dropped to the floor. I was like, huh? Come again? He's like, yeah, me and your dad are pretty much equal business partners. I left the dude's house. I drove straight to my dad's house. I was like, Dad, what the heck? Like, why haven't, you know, why can't we order a soda at Chipotle because it's too expensive? And yet you're managing billions of dollars of real estate in our businesses. Like what? Like, this is crazy. And he kind of laughs and he says, well, yeah, Bridger, I like to save and invest my money. My partner likes to spend his money, but yeah, I'll share with you about funds. And so, to make a long story short, I started to drive to my dad's house every Sunday night and he would teach me about investment funds. Okay? He'd teach me how funds were put together, how they're built. Can you put that chat away for me? Thank you. He started teaching me how funds are put together. And so, we started to build funds. I'm 22 years old and I put together my first fund. I pitch my dad for money. My dad says, no. He says, I will not invest in your fund. And he goes, I have the money to invest, but if I invest in your fund, it would ruin the experience of you raising money on your own. And I was like, dang. And he's like, but I will show you how we've raised money and how we've done it. So, I said, all right, let's try it out. And so, I'm going to come back to what he taught me in a second, but I ended up going out and— put me full screen for a second. I ended up going out and raising a whopping $50,000 roughly on my first fund from like 7 investors. I then raised about $800,000 to $1 million on my second little micro fund. I ran that for 3 and a half years. Our investors got great returns. We had a 64% cash-on-cash return, then a 47%, then a 36% cash-on-cash return. I then had a competitor come and buy that business and we exited all of our investors, everybody. We had great returns. And then from there, we built Ugly Unicorn. I raised about $24 million of equity for that fund. And then we raised Fund Launch Partners. We've raised over $64 million for that fund, okay? So I take you back to what my dad taught me right at the beginning. He's like, how do you actually, what do you actually need to raise capital? If you share my screen here, what do you actually need to raise capital? And he gave me this example. He called it the Lamborghini in Montana example. And I wanna give this to you guys today. So, the Lamborghini Montana example is this. He said, Bridger, imagine we got a call. This is a scenario here, okay? There's a Lamborghini for sale in Montana, okay? And there's— move that screen so they can read it well. There's a family in Montana. They had a, you know, a death in the family. They wanna get rid of this car. They're sick of this car. For whatever reason, they hate the car. We've had a mechanic look at it. It's a legit car. Okay? It does well. There's a death or trust sale. They're willing to sell the car to us for $100,000. And we have to show up Saturday at 2 o'clock with cash in hand. Okay? Does that make sense? And he goes, Bridger, this is a scenario, I'm going to give you guys the same scenario. Could you find $100,000 cash to come up with to close On Saturday at 2 o'clock with cash. And again, it's almost guaranteed if we buy this car for $100 grand, we could sell it next week easy for $300,000. No problem. And I'm like, Dad, this is a fictional example. He's like, just go with me. Let's say everything checks out. Bridger, could you— you can't use any of your own money. Could you find $100 grand by Saturday? I'll ask the chat the same thing. Could you find $100 grand by Saturday? Type in the chat. What do you guys think? Could you find $100 grand by Saturday? And I started thinking about it. I was like, man, a former boss. Could I talk to a college professor? Could I talk to, you know, somebody I went to high school with? Maybe a cousin, maybe an uncle, maybe a neighbor. And I was like, man, I don't know. But then I was like, dude, if we do this, we're going to make $200,000 net to us if we can figure this out. Right? Come on. And like maybe you split it 50/50 with your investor, $100 grand to them, $100 grand to me. And I'm like, dude, I'm in college. If I could do $100 grand over a weekend, would change my life. And I said, you know what? Yeah, if I stayed up late all night, I'd knock on doors. I'm like, you know what? I could do what it takes. I would figure it out. Yeah, I bet. I bet I would, by the skin of my teeth, maybe I could find $100 grand by Saturday morning. And it sounds like you guys in the chat could do it too, right? Most of you guys? And the more I thought about it, I was like, yeah, you know what? It would be really hard, but I bet I could come up with it. And he goes, well, why? And I said, well, it's a fictional example here. You have a car that we're buying for $100,000 that we could easily sell next week for $300,000. You know, it's like too good of a deal to— like any smart person would say, yeah, let's do this deal. And he goes, aha, there it is. And I'm like, what do you mean? Am I missing the point? He goes, 3 minutes ago, you were telling me you're too young, you're inexperienced, you don't have the right track record, you're not the right fit. And all of a sudden, you're telling me you could raise $100,000 by Saturday at 2 o'clock if you had a good enough deal. If you had a good enough deal. You could do this. And I was like, oh, interesting. And he goes, Bridger, you know, examples like this, a car example probably doesn't happen, but this type of deal happens a lot in real estate or in businesses or in foreclosures or when people are going through bankruptcy. Like, deals like this actually happen way more often than you think for similar numbers. And he's like, Capital raising, back to the inputs, isn't it about all the other things you were worried about? It's a lot of times, and I'm going to unplug my screen here for a second. It's a lot about a few core things that really matter. And let's share my iPad again. I talked about inputs a second ago, so I'm coming back to this here, okay? The inputs to cap raise and the process. When we look at the Fund Launch Formula, this is a formula we've used for hundreds of fund managers. What is your deal? How good is your deal? When I use the Lamborghini example, I was like, oh yeah, that was a pretty good deal. When you have a good deal, people start to look past other things. And how you sell the Lamborghini, for example, you say, hey, I know I'm inexperienced. I know I'm young. But look, like Mr. Investor or Mrs. Investor, look at this cool deal. You poke holes in it. You do the due diligence. I can't see any flaws in this deal. Do you see any flaws? And they go, well, let me look at it. And they start to get their glasses on. They start to look and they go, yeah, that's actually a pretty good deal. I don't see very many ways it goes wrong. Right? You focus on the deal less than the other things. Now, second piece of that is what we call the frame and structure. You can see it here. If you notice the Lamborghini example, I said, hey, we'll split the profits 50/50. That would be the structuring of the deal. That'd be a very simple structure. There's more complex structures, but it's like, hey, you could have the best deal in the world, but maybe you have a wonky, weird way you're going to go about it. People get uninvolved. So you want a good deal with a good structure for investors and then go float it around potential investors. Okay? And what we're doing here, and the reason it's a circle is because you'll go get a deal, you structure it out, and then you go test the market. You test with real investors. And there's an old saying that I absolutely love, which is this, if you ask for money, You'll generally get advice. But if you ask for advice, you'll generally get money. Go ask for advice. Hey, what do you think? We have this Lamborghini in Montana deal. Like, I'm thinking, maybe I'm crazy. Can you, can you spend 10 minutes with me and just, I know you're a big investor. Give me your advice on this deal. Is this something worth pursuing? Well, let me look at it. Let me see. And then they go, well, is this actually a real deal? You go, yeah, it's real. And they go, well, maybe I'll put some money into that. Right? Or maybe you gotta think about it differently. Did you think about shipping costs or whatever the thing is? Or did you think about your structure? And this is a circle for a reason. You refine the, if I go back to here, your inputs. You refine your inputs on the launch phase of the Funnel Launch Formula. And the whole goal of this phase is to get validation. You're validating that what you're doing is a correct way, excuse me, to go about doing it. Then and only then, if you get validation, we cross over and we do legal formation. That's when we call the lawyers and we get things going. We use Fund Launch AI and other tools to build out your fund, and then we launch the fund or the SPV or the product you're doing. And then you can go, you know, finish the raise, you go buy the asset, and you keep building your firm. That's the Fund Launch Formula. This is every phase of your fund, and you'll do this forever. In this business. You go, you'll continue to raise money, you'll continue to buy assets, you continue to build your firm. And then if you do a new fund, you'll go stress test that fund, see if it's the right structure, see if you can get verbal commitments, get validation, do legal formation, and then you ultimately go launch that business. Does that make sense? Capisce, capuche? You like that? So now let's go a little bit more granular. Does that sound fair? Let's get into the actual process of how we raised $32 million This year. I had to set that groundwork of the inputs though for the outputs. Now, I mentioned this earlier, the process is very significant. So let's— I'm actually going to tell the exact story of our firm, okay? And I'm going to give you the details, all right? So this is for— so back to my story, I started my funds, we were launching funds, we had this idea for a business, a fund launch to help other people build their funds, right? And so over time, Bridger, myself, we became the Fund Launch guys. We were helping launch all these funds. We threw big events. I was known on social media as the Fund Launch guy. So we said, hey, let's build a new firm called Fund Launch Partners. And what we'll do, we will invest into the best funds that come out of Fund Launch. And we'll do a thing called GP stakes. So what we'll do is we'll actually, if they want it, you know, we're launching hundreds of funds over here and through the Fund Launch Formula. The ones we like the most, we'll say, hey, we'll give you an offer. We'll invest $1 to $3 million into your firm. And we'll also buy anywhere from, I don't know, 7 to 15% of your firm. And we'll be partners with you. That's why it's called partners. We'll help run your fund, help with your back office, your firm management, etc. That's called a GP stake. And we thought, this is a cool idea. We have a cool pipeline for a GP stakes firm. You get the idea? We were like, that's pretty good, that's a pretty good concept. We're the Fund Launch people, we know how to build funds, we have such a good pipeline, let's do this. So we go and we start organizing our fund. We do the exact same, we do the Fund Launch Formula, we built our deal and strategy, we do frame and structure, and we start getting verbal commitments, okay? We made a big mistake here, and this is the mistake I'm gonna correct. We had, we thought like, I don't know, $20 million of verbal commitments. Verbal. Verbal. And I'll put it with a lowercase v, verbal commitments. And guess how many people came out of that $20 million? We launched this fund. This is a few years ago. It's like 3 years ago. I think roughly 3 years ago. We launched this fund. We have, we did our first close. We had like roughly $1.2 million. And we're trying to raise $30 million. And it's been, we've been on market for, it was like 8 months. We then pushed like, hey guys, we gotta push, let's get these verbals in. We got up to like 2, I think, don't quote me on this, I think it was like $2.8 million. And we are like, I think we're like 13 months in, something like that, maybe 14 months. And we're like, gosh. This is embarrassing. Like, we proclaim that we can help people build funds. I'm on social media talking about funds. My other funds, I had already raised. I had raised $20 million in a different, like a hedge fund, which we thought was way harder to raise for. And we're like, why can't we raise money for this? And we were like, we had all these verbal commitments and like none of them came through. They wanted to wait. They wanted to look. They're like, for some reason, they didn't sign. And my partner, Lincoln, I remember him like being like, dude, what are we gonna do here? And how are we gonna figure this out? And we've pushed for 4— imagine that, that's a year and 2 months. We've pushed and we're the fun guys and we've now like flopped. We've raised less than 10% of our target. Our target is $30 million. We've raised less than 10% after 14 months. And so, we were like, okay, we gotta rethink this whole thing. And a couple of major things happened for us that I'm gonna tell you right now. We first off looked at our team. So we had a team. I'm gonna draw it out. Actually, let's use a different colour here. I'm gonna use green, okay? Make it a little more distinctive. Okay, green. Here's our team, okay? We had 4 of us, I think. Is that right? 4? Oh, I guess there was 5. 5 of us. We had one guy over here that was the main capital raiser guy. He was the one helping us raise money. And to be frank, he had raised not very much, like not very well. And so the other partners were like, okay, we're going to figure out capital raising. We're going to all help raise money, not just this one partner. All of us will help. And so we started to lean in a little bit. Now, what was interesting, my one partner, I'll give him tons of credit, Lincoln. Lincoln has never really raised capital before. He was, if I look at our team dynamic, Here's kind of how we think about a fund. He was more the expert investor. He was the one running the portfolio. Me and Adam were kind of more the fund— Adam, my other partner, is really the fund manager, and our other partner was really the money raiser, and the money raiser wasn't really getting it done. And so Lincoln, who's over here, is like, fine, I'll go help raise money. And Lincoln, like, isn't who you would think is— sorry, let me zoom out and get back to it— isn't like this naturally born salesperson. He's nothing like, you know, you wouldn't think of him as a cap raiser, but what was he? He was our essentially CIO, Chief Investment Officer. He knew the portfolio better than anyone. And so what happened was, and Link was like, I'll just figure this out. And so we collectively said, hey, we have got a circle of people collectively, of people that, you know, you guys have heard this before, people invest with others that they know, like, and trust, right? Especially on a Fund 1. People invest with people they know, like, and trust. And so let's say, hey, let's hit our circle of people that know, like, and trust us, right? And we put— it was funny, we started picking them up, but then Lincoln was the main guy that was closing. And what was cool about Lincoln, he's the CIO, and he knew the deals better than anybody else. And so he could talk game. Even though he wasn't this perfect extrovert, perfect whatever you would think a cap raiser, he actually turned out to be the best cap raiser because he knew the portfolio better than anybody else. There's a huge lesson in that. Then what happened? We started to get a little bit of traction here, okay? We then found one investor. I'll put a little line here, okay? And let's put him in green, okay? We had this investor right here and he was like, hey, I actually wanna invest. He was gonna put a decent amount of money in and he said, hey, are you guys looking for an advisor or like help with anything? And we said, actually, you know what? Let's bring you on as an advisor. We gave him a little bit of equity. But we said, hey, if you can help us with our fund, but also introduce us to people in your circle of people that know, like, and trust you, and maybe by relation, they'll know, like, and trust us, right? You get the idea. Now, this investor was very qualified. He had ran some huge businesses. I mean, massive, huge corporations. He was a really cool dude. So we're like, man, this guy, he has a good network. So what did he do? He sent us one person. We thought he's going to make intros to like 50 people. Guess what he did? He sent us one person. And Lincoln worked with that person. We didn't know it at the time, but it was kind of a test. Because this investor, now advisor, was like, I don't want to just give you all my contacts. I want to see if you guys are good. And guess what Lincoln did? He did his homework. He freaking knocked it out of the park, crushed. This person was like amazed. Oh, I can't use yellow, you can't see it. It was amazing. This person reports back to advisor, that was awesome, I'm gonna put money in. Guess what advisor says? Great, I'll send you more leads. Advisor starts sending us a few more leads. We start closing them, and so we start getting a little more capital raising. One of these people is a friend of this advisor. He's over here. He says, hey, I want the same deal as that other advisor, and I have even a bigger network of people. He's got a huge network. And he was a former fund manager, ran a big fund, and was like, I love what you're doing. Same exact thing. He brought in us a bunch of leads. And they, by the way, they weren't just cap raising. They helped us on our team. They really sat and helped us with a bunch of stuff, these advisors. But When we're talking about capital raising, we were at $2.8 million. In about 12 weeks, we oversubscribed our fund at $32 million. Fund 1. Ta-da! And we were like, wow, amazing. Off to the races, crushing it. Isn't that kind of cool? And now what we've done These advisors brought in their networks of people they know, like, and trust. And I'll tell you the story for Fund 2 right now in a second. But this, if I'm giving you the brass tacks, that's what happened for us. That's how we got over the finish line. And it's funny, capital raising can feel like this. If you're on like a time chart, if here's your timeline and like a graph of like how much capital raised, it can feel like this. And then for us, it was all the way up and you're fully subscribed raised. And that's what people post on Twitter, right? Or X or LinkedIn, right? But they don't talk about the average time to raise a fund right now is roughly 18 months is the average to raise a full-out fund. It takes time to raise money. Okay? So don't beat yourself up too much. But this is actually what happens. And we brought in good advisors. To bring us in. Now, you guys cool if I keep going? Is this useful? Type a yes in the chat if this was a little bit useful, yeah? Okay, let's go to the next layer of this. Give me a yes, give me some yeses though. You guys still alive out there? Yeah, there they are. What's up, y'all? Okay, let's go to the next level. And again, I give total credit to Lincoln and Ryland and the team, okay? This advisor we talked to really taught us something unique. And this is why, how we did this close. He taught us about, and I'll go over here, Process. Process. Process is the reason when, where was it? We had $20 million in verbals and only closed $1.2 because we had a horrible process. And this advisor to us, kind of a mentor to us, taught us his process. He told us, and these are rough numbers, don't quote me on them, but his last fund, he used this process They were trying to raise roughly $750 million. They did not raise $750 million. Sorry, let me make it a little bit bigger here so you guys can see it. They didn't raise $750 million. They raised $1.2 billion and they did it roughly in 4 weeks. And it was because of this process that he taught us. Do you guys want to hear the process? Yeah, would that be useful? Yeah. Okay, let me talk about this process for a second. Now there's variations of the process. I'm just giving you the high, like the big picture, but I'll show you exactly what we did this year with Fund 2. Okay? So we closed our Fund 1 a couple of years ago, I guess 18 months, 24 months ago. We said, hey, it's about time to launch a Fund 2. Let's go do our Fund 2. So what did we do? We followed, ta-da, the Fund Launch Formula. Okay? We put together our deal and strategy, frame and structure, and we started to soft and get verbal commitments for this fund. Okay? We followed this exact formula, but let me go back to our process. I'm actually gonna draw it out specifically for you. Okay? So, we started to drum up business in Fund 2. This is, and this is this year, so 2026. January and February, we asked for advice and got verbal commitments. Fund Launch Formula. Ask for advice, get money. And we really were testing the market. If they would've told us no, we wouldn't have done it, but we got good signal. We got good signal from the market, and this is primarily Lincoln and Ryland doing all this, so kudos to them. Great signal from the market, like, yes, we would be interested in a fund too. Awesome. So then what'd we do? We started building out our materials and fund. And the process, what we told people was, hey, our last fund was oversubscribed. We have a lot of people interested. We believe we'll be oversubscribed again. I don't know if I can even accept your full allocation amount. And listen, by the way, as I go, listen to this whole— I'm going to put it down below here. You want to be, quote unquote, the pretty girl at the dance. Meaning everyone wants to dance with you. We are— we have tons of investors. That's what you want to convey. And don't lie. But this is the process helps you drum up scarcity and urgency to join a fund. Okay? So we said, hey, last fund, we had a lot of great signal. We oversubscribed to our fund. So what we're going to do is this. Our data room is going live March 1st. Data room goes live. What's a data room? A data room is like all of our materials. So spreadsheets, investor or manager bios, our whole pitch deck, like all the materials you would need to underwrite our fund is going live March 1st. Okay? March 28th, so you have a couple of weeks to review, we are accepting IOIs. What's an IOI? An IOI is an indication of interest. It's a one-page document. It's non-binding. All it says is, I'm interested in X amount of dollars. You following? Now, why is that important? It's a baby step. Instead of fully subscribing, it's just saying, hey, if like if you got your full allocation amount, how much would you be interested in having? And we'll see if we can give you that allocation. Does that kind of make sense? And we said, we're going to do this just for people that are our previous investors, people on our list. Is that kind of making sense? And we said, you're going to submit this IOI because April 1st, we're going to go public. Not fully public, but we're going to take this to the market. And we're going to let anybody send in indications of interest that are due April 28th. So if you wait on your indication of interest, there's a chance you might miss it. So we did IOIs publicly. Now what was cool about this, okay? Because we had good signal here, because we built our data room, because we did this and this IOI, we got roughly, and don't quote me on this, I think it was roughly— $1.5 million. $15 to $20 million of IOIs. Again, these are non-binding, just essentially documents that say, we're interested in this. So, what do we do April 1st? We tell everybody, hey, we already have $15 to $20 million in signed IOIs interested to come in. And by the way, we're targeting a first close. I failed to mention this. Our first close is over here. Our first close is a target of $30 million. We just anchored that target. And by the way, our whole fund is targeting $50 million. But did we say $50 million? No. We just talked about first close. First close is $30 million. That's what we're targeting. We've already got $15 to $20 million signed IOIs. So if you're interested, you have a couple weeks to send in your IOI and we'll see if we can get you the allocation. Okay, April 28th comes. Guess what we got? We had, I think roughly, again, don't quote me on about 40 million to 45 million of IOIs. And again, kudo to Lincoln and Ryland. They were pushing. They were doing an awesome job. This is all their. This is all their credit. I'm giving. I'm telling their story for them, but they crushed it with this. So now do we? What do we have? We have. We are overcommitted on our $30 million close. And so what do we tell everybody? Hey, we tell all these people, we have $40 to $45 million in IOIs, whatever the— I think it was like $42 million in IOIs. We're only trying to do $30 million. So subscription docs are now out. Subdocs are out. I think it was May 1st. And what is a subscription doc? That's them actually signing into the fund. That's binding. And subscription docs are due, I think it was like May, end of May, middle of May. And we're doing our first close June 15th. So, if you want to get in, you better get moving. See the urgency, the scarcity, that we're the pretty girl at the dance. There's lots of people wanting to invest in this. You're going to be lucky if you get involved. Does that kind of make sense how that changes the narrative? And guess what happened? Of the, I think it was like $40-something million right here, almost exactly $30 million came in on our first close. This was June, June 15th here. We had one straggler that we got in right after. But yeah, roughly $30 million bucks right at about end of June-ish. And we held our first close. Isn't that kind of cool? Pretty sick, right? That's a process. That's a process. And you hold the line. And I love Travis Kalanick. He was the co-founder of Uber. When they raised— Uber raised billions of dollars. And he's like, I didn't care about the raise. I cared about the process. I was committed to the capital raising process. Is this kind of making sense? Okay. And this is what he did here. Now, in a second, I'll come back. I'll talk about what we're doing for now final close. But is this kind of making sense? Yeah? Somewhat useful? This is what's working. By the way, this is not like 10 years ago. This is not 20 years ago. This is what's working right now. This is what we do right now in our businesses. Now I'll come back to this in a second, but hopefully this is somewhat useful with the Funnel Launch Formula. Ask for advice, not money. Going out and again, primarily we're raising from high net worths and family offices. Okay? We talk to a ton of institutions, but most of them will wait until your 3rd or 4th fund to come in. And we're on our 2nd fund, so it doesn't really make sense. But hopefully that's somewhat useful, right? On this process. Now, if I can for a second, I'm gonna come back. Let's talk about final close, and I wanna answer questions. I know there's a lot of questions on this. I wanna answer a bunch of them. But if I can for a second, is it okay if I share with you, I mentioned at the beginning, What we do to help implement this. I will teach all of this for free, but what we do to help implement this with other people. Does that sound fair? Can I do that for a second? Type a yes in the chat if that's cool. And by the way, we haven't done a giveaway. Put me full screen for a second. Let's do a giveaway. Type a yes in the chat if it's cool if I share with you guys what we build at Funnel Launch and if you want $100 to Amazon as a gift card because I promised we wouldn't make this call boring and we'd have a little more fun with it. Sound good? Okay, type a yes in the chat. You're welcome to spam the chat if you want. I'll give you 5 more seconds. Here we go. 5. I'm going to pick somebody. Actually, Jackie's going to pick someone at random for me. So, it's in Jackie's purview, but we're just scrolling live here. Okay. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay, Jackie, stop on somebody. Who is it? Kareem R. Kareem R. Kareem R., congrats. You got $100 to Amazon. Send us a message to bridger@fundlaunch.com. We'll send you $100 there. Okay? If I can for a second, I'll talk about how we do this at Fund Launch. I'll give you an example of how this actually looks and feels. So share my screen once it pulls up here. So Fund Launch AI, when you're a full member, how this works is let's say you're building a real estate fund here, you're doing $100 million. You say, hey, I'm, I'm buying Class B apartments in the Dallas, I don't know, Fort Worth area. We do value-add. We've got, you know, whatever experience. I'll just put this for now. You hit enter. What this does is helps design— it calls on about a dozen or so subagents to help build out your fund with you. We identify unique coaches or advisors that can help you specifically to Dallas-Fort Worth area value-add apartments. It helps build out your materials. The legal team that's going to work with us and help streamline this whole process. So right now, this is a live demo. You're seeing us build out your fund here. It's being built. Okay, we're loading into the platform. Let me zoom out for a second. You can see this is a rose diagram. You're going to see it kind of update and adjust. You can see my agent bar on the left of what it's actually building with my fund. Now again, this is just the software that underpins with all the advisors and coaches, but helps give us a clear picture of your fund. So what you can do is actually come in here and say, hey, here's the terms of my fund. the fees and carry I'm going to use. Here's my management fee. I can change and adjust that, but it's going to set things to best practices. It's going to help train you and teach you on what things go into a fund, what's, you know, right for timeline, what's best practices for your fund and strategy. You know, take legal and compliance for a second. Take like an ICA exclusion. You're like, man, I don't even know what ICA exclusion is. You can hit get insights here. And what happens is it'll actually train in the context of Dallas-Fort Worth area, Class B multifamily value-add apartment complexes. What is best practices for ICA exclusions? What would be best fit for what you're doing? So it'll give me a sense here. Okay, here is what you can do. Here's the options you have for a 3, a 3, or a 3. It, you know, it believes 3 is optimal for you. Here's a few other considerations. Here's a trade-off if you want to change things. So It gives you a sense and starts to teach you what IC exclusions are. These are SEC regulations on this, you know, style fund you are. Kind of cool, right? You also have example pitch deck here. It gave me a name, Trinity Forge. So you have materials that are being put together. You have, here's our coaches that you get to work with. So you can work with people like a Ben Julius or a Ben Reader. Let me get, like, click on a few of these guys. Like someone like Ben Julius has managed over $250 million in real estate. Does a lot in real estate. Someone that you can meet with. You can use credits you have on platform to book a call with him and actually guide you through the process. Someone like Jim Riggio actively manages a hedge fund right now. He does options and futures. If you're a hedge fund person, he's someone you would work with. Dan Pearson actively does private equity. He's a broker in private equity. He does a lot of his own deals as well. So actively doing this. Again, these are people that are actually real into this right now. Let me look at, for you, let's see, let me scroll down. Jeff. Jeff. If you're in crypto, he actually actively runs a crypto trading fund right now. You're welcome to join with him. So, you get the idea. We have real people that are live to work with you. We have office hours happening every week. We have people talking about cap raising on Monday. Rhonda, we have our Jim Riggio call. I'm live right now here. So, you get the sense of this community that is put together that you can actually meet and work with other people. Once you're ready to launch and we work, your team works with you, your advisor works with you, we help build out a great fund. The underpinning of all this. Is that we take care of you. We take care of you. Let me go back to my screen here for this. Now, that's Fun Launch, okay? Kinda cool, right? That business, this business has been amazing. It's put us on the Inc. 5000 of fastest growing companies in America. We've done just under $50 million of revenue. And let's do this. I wanna share this. Aha, this one right here. This is one of my favorite quotes of entrepreneurship ever. Since I'm on the topic, I had to go find it. I wasn't planning to share this, but this comes from Mr. Jeffrey Bezos, okay? I love this, Top. Share my screen if you can. So he's talking about entrepreneurship and taking bets and taking chances on things. And I thought this quote was, and by the way, over time, Jeff Bezos, I think, is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. I mean, this guy, it's so cool to watch him in 1995, '96, '97, then 2000, 2001, Amazon almost died like 5 times. Jeff Bezos was worth, I think, $2 to $3 billion and still drove a Honda Accord to work, an old beat-up Honda Accord to work every day. He was just this nerdy dude that was building Amazon. And it just almost died. It almost died. It almost died. You can go read his investor letters. He wrote a quarterly letter every quarter to investors. And then AWS launches. And then they finally were profitable only like in 2012, I think. They lost money for 10 years. Crazy. So he says this, I love this quote, outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time, but you're still going to be wrong 9 times out of 10. Okay, so you get this logic, like if you have a 100 times payoff, And a 10% chance of a 100 times payout, you should take that bet every single time, but you're still going to be wrong 9 times out of 10. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a tronched outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is 4. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's so important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments. This quote's amazing because it talks about the idea of what's called a power law. As an investor, you should know this and you will know this as you invest, but it's The idea of a power law. You make a— venture capital does this best. They'll make 20 bets knowing 10 of them will fail, 5 of them will do okay, 3 of them will do really good, and 1 or 2 of them will be their moonshot fund returners. It's a power law. They keep playing the game because every time they make a bet, they know they have 100 times payoff. I believe what we have in front of you is a pretty good bet. You can join and start building out a fund, which is the number one category of billionaires, the most, I believe, lucrative business model in the world around building investment funds. And maybe the whole plane isn't built right now, but what I'm saying is we've built it before. I've built 5 of these myself. We've built 400 of them with clients. Let me just make sure, 'cause if I log into the wrong one, it'll kick people out, so I don't wanna do that. Okay, I think I have that one here. It's for some reason it's not letting me do it. Let's try it one more time. So again, hit that link. Okay, yeah, send that to me. That'd be excellent. Oh wait, here we go. Oh yeah, I'm in. It worked. Thank you. All right, now I can see your chats a little bit easier. My eyes don't have to squint up at this big screen up here. Okay, let's answer questions. Oh, sorry, I just joined though. The questions only work now going on. So if you have a question, copy and paste it and retype it in the chat. And let's talk about more of these. And again, we'll leave that link open for the next few minutes. I wanted to talk about this process again around the fundraising process. But again, oh yeah, drop your questions in again. Let me see if they have them here. Hey, I'm here. What's up? Okay, now I can see them. Can you explain— please explain how you will mentor? So part of our process in Fund Launch is you meet with an account manager, you work with our software, and then you meet with coaches that help you build your fund with you. So what we're going to do is when you join, you get access to the software today. You meet with your account manager, they'll get you all on board, and then I will step in and help tailor and answer questions directly with you and work with you on your fund. It's your fund though. We don't have any ownership. It's your fund. And then you work with your, your, our team, our account manager. We essentially just take care of you on the process. Once you're ready to go, we then hit submit. We submit it to our— we have 2 legal teams that step into the platform. They review all your documents, you answer questions, and then they help build and launch your fund with you. Your fund is then launched. It's your fund. And now we're officially on market. We then follow this process we talked about earlier to get investors in and we go from there. But we serve as a guide to help take care of you through the process. Yep. Really cool. Okay. Good to connect. Hey, I'm here following along. Awesome. I don't have a very strong network of high net worth or family offices. How long does it take an average person to raise funds with your process? Sachin, let's talk about this. Let's share my screen. I got a little lost on here, by the way. Where? Alright, let's see. There we are, okay. You guys can see that okay? Okay, let's talk about who we're raising from. 2 things I'll say. Number one, if you notice from my story earlier, what did we leverage? other people's networks, right? And so we used our own networks of people that knew, liked, and trusted us. And Sachin, it's a good question. Like, how do I grow my network? Bring in— first, the easiest way is bring in other partners that have a better network than you. That's the easiest thing. That's what we did. If you go back to Funnel Launch Partners, what did we do? Right here, we brought in advisors that had different networks than us that could bring us investors. Okay? Number 1. Now, number 2, though, let's get more specific. Okay, this is when I talk about capital raising. I like to use this. There we go. You can see that, right? Okay, this this is our kind of three-phased approach to capital raising. Let me there we go. You can see that better. Okay, step one is getting in the room, just getting around wealthy people. Number two is how do you connect and warm up with those people? And number three is how do you close those people? Okay, and by the way, welcome people that have joined in the group. I'm excited to work with you guys next few days. So congrats. Welcome in y'all. I think the link is still live, so it means I think there there might be one one spot left or two. I don't know how many spots are left. They haven't told me yet, but. If the link is still working, that means there's at least one spot left. So you're welcome to click on that link down below. All right. So let's talk about though, how do I— so we have get in the room, connect the room, and close the room. The question is around how do I get at more people? That would be getting around more people with money. How do I get in more rooms? Right? This is— and when I say room, I just mean like, how do I get around, like in the vicinity How do I get in the vicinity, the actual room where wealthy people are? Wealthy people, where are they at? Like, you know, and sometimes when you're on the outside looking in, it's hard to like visualize this. Like, where do— like, there's all these wealthy people, where are they? So I'm gonna go out to— let's see, I'm gonna go to this one. It's a little bit easier to write on. Okay, where are wealthy people at? Well, the first thing we have to remember, and I have this framework that I use, is called work your way or buy your way in. So, there are certain rooms you can get into. Okay? You can work your way into those rooms or you can buy your way into those rooms. Both are effective. But the bigger concept, I'll draw it up here, is wealthy people already hang out. There are already groups of wealthy people. And I say wealthy people just generally, family offices, people with money, groups of wealthy people. Or investors. Where do they hang out? Well, they they might hang out at box seats to the to an NFL game. They might be at charity events. They might be at political gatherings, like political events, charity events. They already get together. Wealth people already are in these groups. Now, it feels intimidating to get into these groups, but like, you can get in and you can— and there's ways to buy your way into these groups and there's ways to work your way into these groups. Then you can obviously— you're reading ahead here, but like LinkedIn, our biggest investor in Fund 1, they are a $2 billion family office. Guess how we found them? Oh, you can't see it there. There we go. Cold LinkedIn outreach. Now to do that, we had to send hundreds of LinkedIn messages. But hey, like it worked. We actually found a— our biggest investor in Fund One came from a LinkedIn message. You can go to free networking groups. Wealthy people roll around these places. By the way, there's a misconception that like rich people only drive Lamborghinis and live in big houses and whatever. Like there are a lot of Wealth people that are pretty darn normal people. Did you guys know the average baby boomer? You know the baby boomer generation, the boomers. The average is a millionaire. The average baby boomer in the United States is a millionaire. These are regular folks that are in the grocery store hanging out like most many wealth people that you. We don't, they're not like actually that pomp, you know, pompous and like, like kind of annoying rich. These people are very, like I was in a grocery store, like I, 'cause I know the area I'm at and I know people where I live. It's like, I'm like, I'm in there at grocery, I'm like, that guy walking by, I know his name. Like that guy's worth like $400 million. No entourage, no, no, he's just buying chips and salsa for his kids and like just a normal, totally normal dude. Like totally normal. No security, like nothing. Dude, these are people, like you'll be surprised how many wealthy people there are. There's way more than you think. Way more than you think. So how do you find them? Again, you have social media, events, throwing your own events is huge. I'll give you one or two more stories. This year, we just bought box seats to the, Utah just got an NHL team, and guess what? We bought out a box, we spent money, We bought out a box and we invite all of our people that we know to the box and they're like, yeah, I'll show up, right? I'll show up to a box game. We believe we'll raise immense amount of money for that. Me and Mason bought our first car. So, when we started making a little bit of money out of college, we bought a, let's see if I can pull it up here, 2014 Audi R8. This car is sick, dude. We bought this car, okay? This is a supercar. This is the Iron Man car, and we had a convertible, so it looked even cooler. This is the Iron Man car. OK? Guess how much this car goes for? Right now, you can buy them for roughly $70,000. $60,000 right there. And that's an RS7. $70,000, you can buy one of these cars. So, me and Mason put our money together and we bought an Audi R8 together. Wow. And guess what, though? An Audi R8 is a— Quote unquote supercar. And so, guess what I started doing? I started going to supercar meetups. And they're— most of the time, they're just free. You just have to kind of have a supercar to be there. Cars and coffee, other things. And I'd show up with a car and guess what? Because I had a cool, like a somewhat cool car, I started to meet other people with cool cars. By the way, I looked at all these meetups. But guess what? I was hanging out. Like, I would show up and I would be in a drive with a guy with an Aventador, a $600,000 Aventador. And my car is like $70,000 and I bought it with my business partner. You know, like, it's once you're in the club, you're kind of in the club. There's levels to the club, obviously. But I met a ton of investors by having a supercar. So again, I'm getting too granular here, but there's ways you can buy your way in. and ways that you can work your way in. I would recommend doing both to get in the room. There are already rooms put together for you. There's investor clubs, investor meetups. There's family office groups that get together. There's angel groups. There's tons to do there. Okay? Okay, if you're ready, click that link down below. You guys can join. 14-day money-back guarantee. I'll work with you one-on-one. It's in the chat there. Do we need to be registered with FINRA or the SEC? Has anyone ever Prospectus or cool-off period, or does that not apply? Do investors need to be accredited? It depends on your fund. So typically, you'll have an account with FINRA. Depends on your fund though. So if you're a smaller fund in venture capital, your registration requirements are way easy. If you're a hedge fund in crypto, your registration requirements go up, but most our funds can file as exempt reporting advisors. And no, there's not a cool-off period because it's a private offering. So we're filing for exemptions. This is called the private fund exemption. These are meant for funds. You can see here. Anyways, Fund D types. So we can file as a Reg D fund, 506 or 506. Oh, sorry. Probably can't see that there. And this helps you be exempt from a lot of those registrations. Many of our managers, some need licenses, some don't, but we help you with that. We help you figure that out, Kareem. Yeah. Something we do. What do you think about crypto funds right now? I run a crypto fund. Crypto funds, I mean, it just depends on the crypto market. We have a lot of new regulation coming out. Crypto is, I think, in a cool spot right now. I'm very bullish on crypto personally because I just, the institutional adoption is massive and a fund can do well in that space. It also can do bad. It's like any other investment. Yep. I'm doing a Boston-based hedge fund. Can your fund structure be customised to include side pockets? Uh-huh, yep. Who would serve as fund administrator? Up to you, so you can decide. So in Fund Launch, we give you the optionality. You're weighing us versus Repool, it looks like. So Repool does a lot with like specifically just hedge funds. We help with, we help more on the customisation. We make very custom— put me full screen if you can. We make very custom-based funds. For you. So yes, you can do side pockets. It's your fund after you launch. Your administrator is whoever you want to choose. So we have a— we have our service providers. We have groups like Carta who give us a massive discount. Other groups for hedge funds specifically that give us discounts that you guys can use— Nav Consulting is one. Depends on the size of your fund. If you're running a small hedge fund, you're probably going to want to use a more cost-effective administrator. If you're running a large fund, you're going to want a more— probably more robust administrator. So yeah, we help you with all those. Okay, good questions. Yeah. Okay, I think I answered most that I can see. If you have a question that I haven't answered, drop in the chat again. William L., I'm successfully trading DTE options on the SPX and would like to trade this as a fund. Is this something that would work with your process? Yeah, it would, William. So we, um, 2 of our advisors is Jim Riggio and Peter Privian. They both actively Run hedge funds right now. They're both licensed and registered as a commodity pool operator, which is what you would need to do. Great. What are the questions you guys have? What can I help you with? Thank you for dropping that in. For a first-time VC fund manager, what percentage of your members successfully close their funds and how much of that capital comes through FundLaunch's investor network versus the manager's own relationships? Yeah, good question. So for VC, of all of our funds, venture capital is I think about 15% to 20% of our funds that come through. One of our advisors, Ben Reeder, actively runs a venture capital firm right now. We've had a number of great VC funds come through Fund Launch. You asked like the percentage of how many people close their funds. One of the things about Fund Launch that's frustrating a little bit is we help people launch their funds and then they don't come and report back on how well they're doing. We have to go ask them for reports. And so what we can report is our clients manage $7.1 billion of AUM, but it's kind of like university. How many of you graduate your university and then go back and tell them how cool you are? Like, you usually don't do that. And so, so I don't— I do not know the exact number of how many people have closed their funds or what percentage, but we've had a number of great ones come through venture capital funds and do very well. How much capital have they raised through Fund Launch's investor network? So I'll make this clear. We do not raise the money for you. We're not a placement agent. We're not a broker-dealer. So we can't promise that at all. You have to be— and anyone who does needs to be a placement agent or a broker-dealer. If someone's promising you they can raise money for you and they're not registered, they are probably violating securities law. So what we can do— so we don't raise the money for you. It's your fund. However, what we do do is put you in a good position to raise money. So what does that mean? The inputs we talked about earlier. So your team, your strategy, your materials and data room, how it's organised, the process you run through to raise money, we can help with. We do events and we have a community. You can meet people in our community, go to our events. We've had lots of success from there, but it's indirectly. We don't make capital intros for you because it's against the law for us to do it unless we're licensed as a— Broker. As a broker-dealer. So if that makes any sense, our mission is to help you get launched, to put you in a great position to go be successful because it's your fund. What are key criteria for Fund Launch to take the GP stake on the fund? Any specific things you look for? Yeah, so of all the funds, Fund Launch Partners, we look at, I think last year we looked at over 1,000 deals. We'll look at a lot of funds, we review a lot of funds. We want to see managers through Fund Launch Partners that already are doing great. Like they're— they have traction. They got that dog in them is a good way to put it. But they got a dog in them, meaning they got like that grit that they're going to make it through. They also have pathways to raise capital. Again, we're not a placement agent. So what's their network like? Can they raise capital? Do they have traction on deals? And then what we come in is we fill the back office lift. We become value-add partners to them, typically on back office. Do you recommend being a solo GP? I do not recommend it. It's usually easier with partners. However, can you be a solo GP? Yes, especially in the world of AI. It's becoming easier to be a solo GP. So I think that's a much more prevalent thing we'll see in the future. I'm a partner guy. I like partners. I like working with other people. I like different opinions. And usually investors like that too. They like to see multiple opinions. They like to see, hey, if you die, who's going to take over? If you retire, what happens to my fund? So those are the questions you get around being a solo GP. Is there a timeframe for this programme? A year. So we have a 1-year timestamp on when to use, you know, your legal. We can't hold your credit forever. So yeah, essentially you come in and you have a year to build out and launch your fund. What about a cadence of ongoing legality requirements reporting? Does the product help on that end or just the launch? Today's— what I offer today is all around the launch and we support on the backend. And what does that mean? So we have service providers that you plug into, so tax, audit, legal, accounting, but you have to go hire those groups. They usually give big discounts because they're in our group. We have events we host. We do office hours. We have a community that you can tap into as well. If you're stuck on running your financial models, every— I think it's every Monday we have a coach go live and do full financial modelling with you guys. What about cadence of ongoing legality requirements? Does the product help on that end or just the launch? Oh yeah, sorry, you just asked this. And then one more thing on the reporting requirements. We typically have you work with one of our partners that's a compliance partner. You get a discount through us and they help with annual ADV filings or your blue sky filings, et cetera, to run you long term. Does your platform help onboard potential LPs? Does it help with their paperwork, et cetera? Currently, no. We're building into that. But currently, we work with— usually, we let you select the service providers that you want to work with. So take, for example, Carta. And actually, I'll share my screen just to give you guys a sense of what I'm talking about here. So this is Fund Launch AI, if you guys can see my screen here. Give me a second. Alright, so if I go to my service providers here, these are all of the partners we have in FundLaunch. Now the cool thing about FundLaunch is we let you decide what's the best fit for your fund. Instead of wedging everybody into one thing, currently we let you pick. So for example, ACA Global, very good at compliance. They're one of the top 2 compliance companies in the world. They provide a discount for all members inside of FundLaunch. Here's another one, Carta. They're a well-known firm. Many private equity or venture capital firms like Carta, they offer roughly, I think it's like, was it $10,000 discount year 1 to use Carta? By the way, all these service providers are paid for by the fund. These are expenses of the fund. So the fund, once you raise it, pays for these things like comply.com or Cherry Beckett, a tax and audit firm. Okay, these are all paid for by the fund. Okay, that's, that's what we have here. So pretty cool. Yeah. NAV Consulting is one I've used. They, they help like a lot of our hedge funds that are smaller use NAV Consulting, very cost effective. You don't want, you know, if somebody, if a, if you're running a $2 million hedge fund, you can't be spending $300 grand a year on administration work. That's not going to work. NAV Consulting is very cost effective, can help you grow. Anyways, you can see that we have a lot of different law firms that you can help with. So these are all help you with ongoing things. Many of them give discounts to clients because they come through the Fund Launch process. Okay, put me full screen here. Good questions. If someone already has a fund thesis, an LP pipeline, deal flow, what are the 3 biggest things Fund Launch would help them accomplish the next 90 days? That's a perfect fit. So you come in, we help organise that all into a cohesive thesis, map out your process for raising money, get the docs actually signed and over the finish line. If I share my screen again, you'll see in here, as you work with our software, we actually are drafting docs with you in real time. So you can see your investment management agreements are already here. To put— oh, sorry, it went away here. That's okay. There are roughly 13 different documents that go into building a fund. This costs roughly $30,000 to $40,000 to put together anyways. These documents are robust. They are complex. And so we use essentially very smart templates that we use. And then these— our lawyers come in and actually build with you your fund. You can leave comments in here. But this helps you work on your fund docs in real time. Once you're ready, you'll hit submit for legal review and then real attorneys step on the platform. We help launch Build Your Fund. That's how we can do this so cost-effectively is because we have— we help split up a lot of the work. So we help organise this, get you across the finish line, get you launched, give you access to service providers, give you help, support, community as you go and build your fund all inside of here. Community access is lifetime. Yeah, so once you're in our community, you're in with us forever. Yeah, the actual just hard cost of launching your fund, we give you a 1-year timestamp, but once you're in our community, you're in it for life as long as the community's alive, and you have access to office hours in the community as well. Do you provide— do you also provide services and setup support for European funds? If not, are there any partners you can recommend? So we— depends on the nature, and if you want, you can send us an email. If you're doing a US-domiciled fund but raising out of Europe, you would use an international feeder fund structure most likely. If you're setting up a European fund and doing all the European compliance, which is immense, by the way, we just had a group do this, it's quite a bit more expensive. We have 2 law partners that say they're welcome to do this, but it's The cost is probably $40,000 to $50,000 to do all that if you're setting up a European-based fund, like structured in Europe, lives in Europe. If it's set up in the US, much cheaper, much simpler, and you're getting European investors in the US. You can still invest into Europe. I'm just saying the domicile of the fund. So if the fund sits in Delaware in the United States, much more simpler, at least for our process. You can still raise from Europe through international feeder funds and invest in Europe, but that's the difference. So maybe give us, give us more context if you can. Thanks for the meeting. I learned a lot. Awesome. This portal is our proprietary software under FundLaunch, FundLaunch AI. Hey, when one of your investors becomes a fund advisor, who introduces you to his investment or business deal networks? What is the percentage stake given to him as an advisor, as an investment referral, or as a dealmaker? Oh, you're talking about when we brought in our advisors? Yeah. Typically for advisors, the low end for advisors is half a percent to 1% typically. But that would be like a— an advisor that just sits on your pitch deck. We wanted our advisors to actively be in the business. They helped us on investment committee. They helped us in other ways. And cap raising was one of those ways. And so I don't want to say the exact number of what we gave our advisors, but it goes up from there. 0.5% to 1% is kind of the typical advisor amount. We did more than that because our advisors were more involved. But we gave them— Now what we've done for comp structures though with all of our partners, so we have a handful of partners, we did clawbacks. So what we did is we gave advisors and ourselves, even Bridger, me, if I don't show up to work and I don't fulfil my duties, and we made the duties pretty middle fairway, I can be clawed back 50% of my equity. And same with all our other partners. So we have, I don't know how, it's like 7 people now, 7 or 8 people. if they retire, if they don't want to work anymore, if they grossly neglect their responsibilities, and it's got to be grossly, and it's got to be a supermajority vote. So all the other partners agree, Bridger or somebody else didn't fulfil, we can— I could be, or my partners could be cut back 50%. So we did that. We modelled that from a few huge firms that did that. Kind of keeps everybody accountable. Because in businesses, sometimes people just get distracted or they want to do something else or they want to stop working or for whatever reason. And so we said, hey, we can't have dead equity on our cap table. We want to have that person, you know, we want to make sure that they're involved with, you know, with us or not with us. So that's what we did. So, and our advisors, I believe, are the same way. Okay, sweet. Yeah. All right, y'all. Pretty fun. Good questions. Drop any more questions you have. Pretty cool. Drop any other questions you guys have in the chat. Did we answer most of them? How we feeling? A good call today? Worth your time for all y'all that showed up? Yeah? Not too bad? Pretty cool. If you guys can type a yes or a thank you in the chat for my team. They spent a lot of time on this and putting this together. Good time today? Worth your time? Okay, you guys are amazing. Thank you so much, team. Tony, good to meet you. Kareem, Sachin, good to see you guys. Hello. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's awesome. Thank you guys so much. Great call today. Hopefully that was useful on capital raising. That's what we've done to raise capital, and we are in process right now to raise capital for a final close. So we are pushing for a $50 million final close, and it should be pretty fun. Okay, you guys are amazing. Well done. We'll leave this link open for just 1 or 2 more minutes, but open up Chrome, Safari if you want to join. And we will see y'all later. Thank you guys. Bye-bye.