LIVE Black Card Q&A

Shopping you a fund is can be or usually is a really good tool. Making an informed decision on just running a fund—that was our plan for yesterday. We yesterday touched on this. We touched on the GPLP structure with limited partnership, general partner, the management company. How this structure works, how these can work for single asset funds or full blind pool funds. We talked about the other titans of industry. They a lot of them actually started very early on. You see 26 years old started their own firm. 25 years old, they usually started with a small amount of money. $105,000. You look at Ken Griffin. This is his crazy house. Started at 20 years old. The first time he raised money, he raised $265,000. That was it. Pretty small. They all started small, but they got in the game and started compounding. Saw Cathie Wood. They had a very slow start on launch for ARK Innovation Fund, now at $29 billion. We talked about this. We talked about the syndication structure, why I would not do this. This is how LLCs are put together. A lot of times you have these wonky structures. We can dive into more of that today. We didn't touch much on this when it comes to the fund waffle, your team that you are putting together. We talked yesterday about the waterfall structure, how pref, catch-up, carried interest splits work and how fund managers make money. We talked about closed-ended and open-ended funds, how these work together and how they stack on top of each other. So you'll have fund 1, then fund 2, fund 3, how these build and work together. We talked about timing right now, rate cuts. We had a cut last week and this is the probability distribution from derivative traders currently in the market on where they think cuts will be as of yesterday. This thing is pretty dead on, by the way. I mean, it updates with incoming data, but man, this thing is pretty accurate. At least I've watched this thing for years now. It's done pretty well. So we'll see hopefully a few cuts here. We have the October meeting, the December meeting, and the January meeting. You can see the probability of cuts here and where things will level off, but again, can change. We talked about a few stories. We did rapid-fire Q&A and went from there. So not too bad, yeah? People on YouTube, you guys can hear me okay?

Yeah.

We got people on Zoom and YouTube today, so welcome on. Let's hit a couple of these questions and we'll dive in. I'm gonna try to go fast today. I'm gonna try to keep on pace. I'm gonna try to keep, I might even set a timer, I got my phone here. Maybe keep questions to 5 minutes or less. I love to talk longer than anticipated, and so get into there. The last thing I'll share If you don't know who I am, one second on me, why I have authority to talk on this subject. My name is Bridger Pennington. I run a company called Fund Launch. We just hit the Inc. 5000, number 2652 of fastest growing companies in America. This is my story in one slide. I started 2 funds out of college called Blackbridge Holdings. They did extremely well. We ran those for 3 years, sold those funds. We got very good returns to investors. We then started Fund Launch to help people around the world learn about funds. We brought in mentors, coaches, people from all over the world. We started this in 2019 and then end of 2019, end of 2020, when COVID hit. During COVID we moved to webinars and online and things just blew up. We took off. And again, we just hit the Inc. 5000. It's done very well. You can see some of our stats here. And then I currently run 2 investment funds actively right now. So, I currently run Ugly Unicorn and Fund Launch Partners. Ugly Unicorn is a blockchain and crypto investment fund. And then Fund Launch Partners is a GP stakes fund. We actually invest into our favorite students out of Fund Launch. Last year, we reviewed roughly 1,200 funds applied to work with us at Founders Partners. We chose 10. Huge funnel down to 10. Our average commitment is about $1 million to $1.5 million. We write a check into the fund and we also partner and work with that fund. It's called the GP Stakes Fund. Currently, our aggregate portfolio AUM is over $260 million. Between these 2 funds, I and my team have raised $54 million of equity from investors. Not debt, equity from investors. in those 2 funds and we are still actively raising. We will be opening up Fund 2 next year for Fund Launch Partners. We just opened a second fund under Ugly Unicorn. That gives you a little bit on me. I also am married. I have 2 kids. My family is amazing. I live in Utah. I am an untraditional manager. I am off the beaten path, I guess you could say. I got 9 chickens and we live on an acre and a half. It is beautiful. It is awesome. I love it. There is Mace, my business partner, and this is a little bit about what we do. We have some events and other stuff. Sound good?

Awesome.

Alright, let's dive in.

Enough of me. Let's get into some questions here. So put me full screen if you can. Let's do this, 4 questions. Type them in the chat for people that are live. If you have a good one, people on, I know, so people watching on YouTube and stuff, we invited a few people on Zoom. I might bring some of you live. So if you have a good question, I'll just say, hey, come on live, like Joe or Matt or Dave, like come on live and let's just talk face to face. I'll pull out my iPad and we can go like that. So let's do this though. We will use the chat as the queue of questions. If people have multiple of the same question, we might bundle them together. Does that sound fair? My time— this isn't, you know, I want to help y'all to the best of the ability. So I'll give you a second. Type your questions out here. I'm going to make sure I'm on Zoom on my computer and then let's get going. So type them in. And if you can, I think make a couple of the other guys co-host so they can let people in the waiting room. So don't have people waiting. All right, here we go. Okay, chats perfect. Here we go. What's going on? Good to see y'all. We got a bunch of AI assistants in here. Perfect. All right, here we go. So first question from Will: Can a person be a successful fund GP manager? If money is not a high personal motivator? I guess, Will, do you want to come on and talk about that for a second?

Yeah.

Change the settings so they can unmute themselves, or at least for Will, let Will unmute himself. Okay, Will, try that again, see if you can come on. Can a person be a successful GP fund manager if money is not a high personal motivator?

Yeah, that's my question. Is I'm more I'm more mission and cause focused, and so I I love people that have million dollar houses and billion dollar houses and drive Bentleys. But none of that is is has ever been a motivator for me. The success of the mission is what's Is what, you know, I get most fulfillment and satisfaction out of. So are the 2 things mutually exclusive or can it work? Can it work if I'm not— I'm not in it to make $1 million, I'm in it to have a successful mission.

Oh yeah, if with that, yes, 100%. 100%. For you personally, if that's not a personal motivator, that's totally fine. I would say you most, you know, most if not all funds, you have a fiduciary responsibility to drive a as best return possible for your investors on a risk-adjusted basis. So you need to be motivated in that sense. Yes, I'm driving returns for investors, my shareholders. Yes, because that is your fiduciary responsibility. But personally, if you're like, no, my goal is to go transform businesses, my goal is to go, we're going to put, make this new technology come into existence. 100%, that's great. I don't think you need a strong money motivator. I don't know if there's a fund personality test of best fund managers to worst fund managers on where that scale would be. I don't have one in front of me, but I know, I think that's a great way to look at it. So there you go, Will. Alright, let's keep going. I got Ron here. If I just get this fund off the ground, who are the key people I need on my team? I've already got a business with staff, but who do I really need to help run the fund properly without overbuilding too early? Good question. We can bring on Ron here in a second. I'll set a frame and then Ron, I want you to come talk. So if you can share my iPad. Let's talk about team building. I'll share 2 slides here. I'm going to use this iPad a lot today. We'll talk about the Fund Launch Formula. Briefly, just give you a summary of the Fund Launch Formula. There's 2 sides of this. We have the fund launch side. We are focusing on the deal and strategy, the frame and structure, and getting verbal capital commitments for the goal of validation. We are validating you have a good idea. Then you jump to legal. Then and only then you do legal. You don't start on legal. You get validation first, strong validation, then we go to legal. At the end of legal, the goal of legal is to launch. You then actually have your fund is live. You file your Form Ds, all your securities documents, and then you're on the fund management side. You're doing capital markets, you're doing asset management, and you're doing firm management, and you're doing this in a circle. Okay? Both of these are in circles, so most people I'm talking to, I'm guessing you're on this side of the coin. And we're going to strive for strong validation. Anybody can go build legal docs. That does not make you special to have your legal docs set up. What does make you special and what Fund Launch is really good at is building a fund that investors want. That's what we focus on. So that's what we're looking at here. Now, up here, you'll see this is a more complex version of the Fund Launch Formula with all my sub-frameworks in it. So let's talk about the questions around team. What are the key people? Every fund has these roles in their fund. You have your expert investor, you have your fund manager, and your money raiser. Now these can be separate people. This could be a person, a person, a person. This could be one person that does all 3 roles, but all 3 of these roles need to be done. You need someone who's amazing at the asset class you're in. You need someone that knows the operations of a fund, how to run a fund, and the compliance, the legal, the setup, and then someone that can actually go and raise the capital. As you grow your firm, this might be 2 people, this might be— sorry, I'll put 2 here. This might be 5 people, this might be 7 people, right? But again, all 3 roles need to be solved in your fund. Okay? Now if we go a little bit more complex, I'll come down to our other framework, the fund waffle here, which you'll— oh, let's see. There we go. So the fund waffle. You see those 3 categories here? Then you'll see different on each one of these lines, different rows of potential roles that might be filled over time. You'll have an investment officer, underwriters, investment committee, board of advisors. You'll have in-house legal, internal audit, compliance. As you build your firm, you are going to start building out these roles over time. Your capital raise, you are going to have someone that does investor relations, that does events for you, does a copywriter, maybe pitch deck designer, website builder. You are going to start building out those over time. You don't need all these day one, but over time you build these. Then you have third-party partners. You'll have a third-party auditor, admin, prime brokers, banking partners, insurance partners, things like that. So, Ron, with that frame, does that answer your question? And feel free to come on live, uh, let me know.

That knocks it out of the park. This waffle really breaks it down. We're a builder-developer that's always done this on our own, and now we're reaching out to the next level. I have a great pipeline of projects, so we're looking to launch a fund to kind of get that off the ground. and make it sustainable long-term. We're partnering with a CPA initially to launch it, and then we're looking at what we need to build it out using the fund launch platforms.

Which area are you weak in? Meaning, which— are you looking for help in any of these areas? Is it, you know, and let's just talk these, these ones right here, just those for now. Any areas that are weak?

Yeah, probably with myself, all of them. I'm a builder-developer. I understand buildings inside and out and getting shovels in the ground, design development. That's, that's me. And this is where we are bringing in the CPA partner to kind of drive the fund manager box, we'll call it.

Gotcha. Okay. Um, this is something that we do very well at with Fund Launch is getting you to find these other people for your firm. If you're saying, hey, I'm, you know, I'm here, I'm Ron, I'm here. Yeah, I'm bringing some help in for this side or I'm bringing some help in for this side. Awesome. One of the first things we do when someone joins Funnel Launch is we ask them which role do you naturally gravitate towards? Great. And then which role do you need to help with? Okay, great. And let's see if we can match you up with somebody else in the community that also maybe has opposite skill sets of you. Now it won't be a perfect match every time, but we've actually had a number of people go through Black Card that found their perfect, you know, dream partners all in there that were all doing different things, which is such a, anyways, a thing I love about Black Card and Funnel Launch, what we do. So there you go. Good question, Ron, I love it. Alright, let's keep moving here. My team keeps telling me to move fast, so I'm gonna move fast, alright? Let's, I'll zoom out here. How much does it cost, this is from Phil, how much does it cost to raise $10 million for non-performing notes? Please detail ad spend required, HR spend, fund administrator costs, and interest paid to investors. So Phil, you want a breakdown of the cost to raise $10 million? It depends. I guess, Phil, give me— have you raised anything so far, Phil?

About $300 grand.

You've raised about $300 grand so far? Anything else? Where have you raised that from?

Facebook ads. Yeah, that's it.

So Facebook ads, interesting. So how, um, All of that was Facebook ads? What was your return on ad spend? How much did you spend to get that?

Well, about like $35,000.

So you spent $35,000 to raise $300,000, is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What about people in your— just people that you already know, not on Facebook? What about other, like, just people, like relationships you already have outside of social media?

I haven't tried, but I could, I could probably get something.

Why not? What stops you from trying?

Well, I just don't want to change the nature of the relationship. They're friends, you know, and when they become investors, they're giving me a loan, you know, and it changes the—

Yeah, it changes the relationship. I get that. How much of your own money are you putting into this fund?

$1.5 million.

So you've got $1.5 million of your own money and you're not brave enough to ask a friend for their money?

Well, I mean, we're asking random people.

Yeah, and I asked that tongue-in-cheek.

If I use my relationships, but I want to scale this, at some point I don't have any more relationships.

So let's talk about this for a second, 'cause I totally agree, you do not wanna burn relationships. These are people that you know, like, and trust. Like, these are, that know, like, and trust you. You mentioned Facebook ads, let's break this down for a second. Sorry if there's an echo, we're trying to pipe it through, so I apologize, but I can still hear ya, hopefully it's good. So, you've raised $300K, you spent $30K, And let's just call it Facebook ads, social media ads. Are you talking, Phil? Sorry, I can't hear you.

Yeah, in about 3 months.

In about 3 months, okay.

Just started 3 months ago.

3 months ago, okay.

We're ramping up, you know. The first month, it was like $25 grand, the second $100, last month $200, so.

How many investors is that for the $300K?

About 10.

So about 10 investors, so average check?

No, I'd say maybe like, the minimum is $25,000, so yeah, maybe like $7,000.

Okay, $7,000 to $10,000?

Yep.

Alright, and then turn on that other speaker just quietly so I can hear if he's talking. I have to mute on my end so it doesn't echo. So, alright, we got some data here, so let's talk about raising capital for a second. So a couple things. Facebook, very cool actually. So you spent, you know, you're about 10%, obviously the number's pretty easy there, spend-to-get ratio, which might be worth it depending on your strategy. For a lot of people, they would say no, that's too expensive, just, you know, for 10% goes to just marketing efforts to get the people in. Because now you gotta go invest that, you're already, now you're 10% in the hole on your budget, right? It's like, okay, crap, I gotta make 12% to get to break even and then I gotta go make money. It just makes it a lot harder for risk-adjusted rate of return to actually be successful in your fund. If you go hire a broker-dealer or a registered investment advisor, generally speaking, they are going to charge you anywhere from 2% to 6% of capital raised. These are hired guns. They are licensed to go raise capital. They earn a fee or a commission to raise capital for you. This is what broker-dealer and RIAs, again, that is generally speaking. Sometimes they take a retainer. They'll take like, hey, pay us 10 grand a month and then pay us, you know, 4% of all capital we raise. They can become expensive quickly. We've hired a number of these. Is this your first-time fund, Phil? First time raising money? Okay, first-time fund, okay. So, and you're putting in $1.5 million?

Yeah.

Okay. For a first-time fund, most broker-dealers and RIAs, it doesn't work. Because they're going to bring you qualified leads and they're like, okay, this is your first fund. You've only raised $300 grand. Okay, we're going to wait. This is way too small for us. These guys are used to going and placing with larger family offices and bigger groups. Now, how much are you trying to raise, Phil? $10 mil. Okay. Yeah, okay. So let's talk about, I came down to this framework of raising capital. So we've mentioned just one right here. Work, I call, this is how you get in the room. How do you get more people around you to talk to? Then secondly, how do I warm those people up where I can actually pitch and talk to them? And finally, how do I close those people? Obviously, you are doing well though. You've closed a number of people already with social media ads. That's one of them here. You can do the work of social media. And buy, and you can also buy on social media as well. Now there's other ways to do this. Networking groups, LinkedIn events. There's different clubs you can join to get a relationship with other people that can maybe put in bigger checks. Now we mentioned personal network. I don't want to, and I agree with this. You don't want to burn bridges, and I told I do not go burn bridges with people. The way I like to do it is this: people that I know, like, and trust, and know, like, and trust me. I go ask them for advice. I say, hey, Uncle Joe, I'm putting together this new offer. I'm trying to raise $10 million. Can I run it by you for 5 or 10 minutes and just see what it looks like? There's an old quote that I absolutely love. When you ask for advice, you generally get money. When you ask for money, You generally get advice. If you go ask Uncle Joe for money, he's going to give you a whole lot of advice and probably hurt the relationship. Don't ask Uncle Joe for money. Go ask Uncle Joe who's rich for advice. Hey, you do a bunch of these deals. Am I thinking about this the right way? How would you get to $10 million? What would you do? How would you approach people? Do you like the offering? And you run them through your deal and strategy, the frame and structure, how you're paying out. You go, I'm putting $1.5 million into this. Like, I'm pretty committed. What do you think? And they— 2 things will happen. One of 2 things will— well, I guess one of 3 things will happen. Most likely, number one, they are going to actually give you some advice. They are going to say, well, I would tweak the deal a little bit. I would tweak how you are paying people out. And they are going to train you and help you build a better fund. And you go, oh, Uncle Joe, thank you so much. Can I come back in a couple of weeks and see if my tweaks are working? Great. Second thing that will happen, they'll go, Actually, hey, are you actually doing this? Like, Phil, you actually— and you're like, yeah, I'm actually raising money for this, man. I actually am interested. They actually might give you money. The third thing they might do is just say, nah, I don't like it. I don't want to talk, which is fine as well. Some people don't want to talk and you say, hey, I'm just asking for advice. I'm just poking around. I'm new to this game. I just would love to hear your thoughts. So no worries. And it keeps and preserves a good relationship. Does that make sense? And then furthermore, when someone does invest, if Uncle Joe is like— and you go, hey, I don't love taking money from family. I don't want to do it. And they go, no, like, let me in. And they go, hey, If I'm going to let you in, we got to treat each other like adults. I'm going to make sure I disclose everything. This is a very professional business partnership we're doing here. Are you cool with that? And there's risks associated with things. We could lose money here, but hey, my money is right alongside. I got $1.5 million right alongside you. That's how you approach and not burn a relationship with other people. But generally speaking, pretty much everyone who raises a first, their first time raising dollars, they are going out to Their network of people that know, like, and trust them already. Because if you can't close them, then who can you close? Because if you go to somebody else, like if you hire a broker dealer and they put you in front of 20 family offices and you're like, yeah, we've only raised $300 grand so far. They're like, that's it? This guy, this guy has nobody in his circle that likes him. That's what's assumed. We did this last year and it didn't work. Anyways, any follow-ups there, Phil?

So you're saying how much do I need to be worthy, you know, to, you know, how much, how much capital do I need to start that fund, you know, $2 million? I need to give up equity. They're gonna want equity. All the people that want to invest with me, they want equity. I have 100% equity, you know.

Yeah, they want to partner, get a, get a slice of the pie. I don't know if you need— it depends on how your mechanics are set up, on how you're structuring your fund, on who's getting the fees. But if you make it incentivizing for an investor, what's your current fee structure, Phil?

It's, I have 100% of the, well, I pay a note about between 8% and 12% and I keep the rest.

Okay. So if I invest with you, Phil, I get 8% to 12%.

Term 1, 2, or 3-year.

Okay.

What's the risk on it? Walk me through the risk.

I mean, every asset that I buy, I buy the note underlying real estate, like a single-family home. So, I'm at Tops like half of the value.

So—

So what's protecting the downside risk on my end? What's protecting me? So if I put money in, great, I'll give you 8% to 12%, but I also can go buy government bonds right now at what, 5%? I think they're trading at 5.5% right now, some bonds. Is the additional 3% risk premium worth investing with Phil? Because what are you making on these? And what's backing these if you start losing money? What backs them?

Well, it's the real estate. It's the value of the real estate.

So you'll sell and liquidate the real estate. Now, how much are you making on these?

Like 30%.

Okay, so you're making 30% and you're paying your investors 8% to 12%. I would guess there's a, you know, well, what if the real estate market crashes? Right? Right? Like the underlying asset and how much, how much How much gap do you have on a real estate project? Like how much space? About 50%? Okay, so they're pretty, they're well collateralized it sounds like. So if I'm understanding you correctly, the real estate market would have to fall 50% for me to start losing money. Is that a good way to say that? Okay, that's pretty good then. Is that like ARV or is that like at current fair market prices?

As-is value.

As-is value. Okay, good. So yeah, you know, okay. I got a 3%. I'm getting a 3% premium for the risk investing with you and things like that. Might be good. So I don't know. I don't think you need to— now when I'm talking about raising bigger dollars, raising money is— it's really funny. Now you're offering a debt. You know, people are lending you money in returns of— well, and sorry, real quick. What causes 8% and what causes 12%?

8 is for 1 year and 12 is for 3 years.

Okay, so my money is locked up. So I have no liquidity, correct? For 1 year or 3 years. Okay. Okay, gotcha. Well, it might be a decent offering. It sounds like you've closed a few people. Is that risk premium worth it? Maybe, maybe not. And if it isn't, maybe you bump these up to 9 and 13. It looks like you are making $30,000. If investors want more equity, you go, alright, we'll do We'll do 10 to 14, right? You just tweak, you're gonna keep tweaking your structure over here on building your edge.

Don't forget, I need the pay for the Google ads, for the Facebook ads, for the guy that closes the, that calls all the leads, you know, so it eats up the margin.

Yeah, your 10% here is a lot. That's what I'm saying, I think if it's a good enough offering, You might be able to go to people that already know, like, and trust you, or you go to events and meet people and/or go and find local RIAs, local family offices that you might be able to pitch and bring into this. Right? There's other avenues than just social. I think social media is a very expensive way to raise capital, especially $10 million. Now, it might work. It might just keep going, but it's like you just said, it's expensive. And so, is that expense worth when you probably have a good network already? And if you don't have a good network, You could try some of these other avenues to try to build your network, build your lead list of different people. And you are not paying a closer anymore. And by the way, are you paying a sales guy to close? Is that sales guy licensed?

No, no, because we only onboard accredited investors.

And is that salesperson making a fee or commission?

No.

How do you pay that salesperson? Fixed rate, fixed salary. Okay, so just a salary, it doesn't matter if he closes a lot or a little, he gets paid the same.

Right. Okay.

That's an SEC rule. Yep, I was about to ask, yeah, okay, so people that don't know, that's an SEC, you cannot pay someone a fee or commission unless they are licensed to sell securities, yeah. So you got overhead costs here and things like that. But I would push you to, I mean, you can, it's just expensive. It's going to be, it can be expensive there. I'd push you to try something else. But it sounds like you got a good thing, a decent thing going. If you, and you have these other leads that are asking for equity in the firm, just say, alright, well, you know what? How about we bump it to 10 to 14? I'm not giving away equity, but I'll bump it to 10 to 14. You change your structure. So this is the, when I go back to the Funnel Launch Formula, You're here and you're getting feedback from the market. You're going to take that feedback and go adjust your deal. Like, I'm giving you suggestions and you can take them or not. You can adjust your frame and then you can come back here. Right? And you tweak your offering until you get validation. I don't think you've received enough validation yet. $300K off $10 million isn't quite enough, but you're getting there. And maybe it's going to be the right thing. Maybe it's not. That's what I would say. And again, I would try asking for advice and seeing if you can get some more money. That's a good idea. Because maybe, you know, I don't like the debt investment, but I'll be an equity investor. Let's do an 80/20 split.

Yeah.

You know, and there might be a lot of investors that go, yeah, I'll do that. I don't want— I'm not in the market for this, but I'll do an 80/20. And I don't know, you got to go test your market and see, and that's why you do this circle of testing your market. And that's what we do with you and Black Card is we just keep testing to try to find a unique edge. Right now, I'm challenging your structure edge, right? And maybe it's good, but maybe we could tweak it a little bit. You know, and it might look like this. My dad's bridge loan fund, when he started, he did a 0% management fee and paid us 16% pref. So the first 16% of all returns went right to the investor. Anything above 16, I think they split 50/50 until it was like 20%. And then anything above 20, they took 100%. So that's how they did it. Now, they did it on an American waterfall, which is a deal-by-deal basis. So if you had a deal that made 10% in one month, on an annualized basis, that's 120% APY. Because they made 10%, 10 points in one month. Because you have points and all those things and how they structure their loans. That's one thing I would do. We are over time here, Phil, but I'll get to the next one. Hopefully that's helpful. Thank you, brother.

Yes, sir. Thank you.

Harold, will you be able to connect our fund site with our other business sites? If so, will Fund Launch assist with that process? I think you are talking website. Harold, we have a platform called Fund Launch 360. You can go build a landing page website, all of your assets on there. You're welcome to migrate your current sites over, but I but by linking them together, I guess connect our fun site with our other business sites. You mean like just hyperlink them to each other? Like if you click a button, it goes the other one.

Maybe. Or or as you said, Richard, to actually integrate them into the fun line.

Where are they currently built at?

One is with a site called SiteSell and the other is with a company called ProfitLifter.

Are those like website building companies or are those like turnkey solution companies?

No, they're website companies that you actually go in and build the sites yourself. I have a website developer that's working with me to build build the sites out, and we're almost complete with the other 2 sites, and I know in the Funnel Launch program they talk about the development of the fund website as well, so I wanted to have a little bit of information on how they all would be able to integrate and link together.

I'm not familiar with the other 2 spots. You can for sure hyperlink them to each other. You just have different sites and they just hyperlink one to another. That's easy, you can do that regardless. You can, and you could keep building on those other ones, you could build on ours. In some cases you can migrate over, but I don't think it's that big of a deal. We have like a number of sites, like we have a couple of our sites are built on Webflow, we have other ones built on Funnel Launch 360, I have other ones built on ClickFunnels. We've used a bunch of them and I don't think it's a big deal. If you look at funlaunch.com versus, so we just have, you know, our home site and then you can, you know, hyperlink over to whatever other products you're doing and you can go open those up. So, I don't, yeah, so that's how I think about it.

Yeah, our process or what we're developing and the reason why we're looking at getting into the fund space is as we begin to walk our clients and our customers through the first website into the second website, then they'll be in a position to where They will be able to be integrated into the current display. So that's the reason why I wanted to make sure that all 3 of the websites would be integrated some kind of way together.

So all you would do like here for Black Card, like this could be built on somewhere else and you just, when you hit that button, it could hyperlink over to something different. So I wouldn't be too concerned about that. You can do lots of different things. Yeah, I wouldn't be too concerned about it.

All right, sounds good.

Yeah. Amit, would— what would make LPs to invest in someone's fund if there are too many funds or there aren't any past results to build credibility? Yeah, good. Actually, this dovetails into that last conversation we just had on capital raising. I'll touch on, I guess, this edge piece. I mentioned this a second ago. The core of your— and this is what we are helping you do in Black Card and Fund Launch and like all the stuff we're doing, single asset funds. We This is what we help you do is build a strong edge because this is your competition. If you're pitching me your fund, I'm like, well, this is somebody else. I can go, they're already doing multifamily real estate. There's someone else down the street doing, they're doing value add. They've got 20 years of experience and 3 funds prior. And they charge a 2% management fee, 8% pref, 80/20 split. Why would I invest with you versus someone who's already done this for 20 years? What's the edge? What's unique? And so when you look at your edge, there's 4 different quadrants of where you can build out your edge. Your asset class can be an edge by itself depending on what you're doing. For example, Fund Launch Partners is in GP stakes. GP stakes is a very hot asset class right now. When AI first came out, all these AI funds were like, just the asset class, people were like, yes, I want to be involved. When crypto and blockchain, like I have a blockchain fund, compelling asset class, people just want to be in the asset class. That can sometimes be your edge. Now, after that, after you have the asset, and maybe it's not an edge, that's okay. Next is the strategy, the way you approach that asset class. So your competition is doing value-add, but you're saying, hey, we do multifamily, but in a whole unique way. We put farming boxes on top of every building. We have a full farm. And so all the tenants can go farm on top of the buildings. And we can charge a premium to our tenants because we do this. And it also has the drainage system, puts it back into the water, and it's amazing. And we have this incredible system that we do in our multifamily properties. Okay? Some— I'm making something up, but some unique strategy. It's like, okay, that's unique. Okay. Oh, and we're doing multifamily on top. We're doing mixed use. We're going to do retail on the bottom. We're going to do— we have a certain type of retail that we like to put in that helps our tenants have a a premium and we're only going to go to certain markets that have X, Y, and Z things going on in them. Okay, that could be your strategy edge. Your team edge, you mentioned on the question, for most of us, the team is going to be pretty weak. I mean, you probably don't have, you know, 30 years of experience in funds. Maybe you do, but this can be an edge. You know, if someone called me up and said, hey, Ken Griffin, Warren Buffett, and I don't know, Jeff Bezos are doing a fund together. Do you want to invest? I might say, yeah. I don't even need to know the strategy and the asset class. Like, I'm in. If those guys are in, I'm in. Right? That'd be a strong team. For most people in the— on your— as an emerging manager, your team's probably weaker. And so, okay, how can we go find team members and bring them onto our team? How can we go bring them onto our board of advisors and leverage their experience? I'll share actually briefly here. And you all know this, but I'll go to Fund Launch Partners website here. We felt this. So this is the first fund we built. We raised $30 million of equity for this fund. We just closed. I think we're oversubscribed now. So this is Fund Launch Partners. Here's some of our portfolio funds. So when we started, we just had, you know, we have a decent team, but we went through and we started to add advisors. So we brought TJ Bond here, former managing director and chief economist of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. This guy ran like multibillion-dollar funds. We brought Todd in. He's— you can read their resumes here. We brought Trenton in. as advisors in the fund and it built up our staff. We brought Troy Templeton. His last fund, he managed over $6 billion in his fund. So you can kind of see we started to beef up our bench. You can do the exact same thing. Harvard and these— they're graduating thousands of people a year that are all wanting to launch funds, all want to get into the fund game. You'd be surprised how many people want to work in funds. And you can pick people from their careers, They earn less money with you, but they get upside in the fund. Finally, structure. That is how you structure the fund. What kind of management fees, prefs, things like that that you are doing. So you can kind of see, this is how our fund looks as far as an edge. Both these funds, we felt like the asset class was strong, the strategy was strong, our team is okay, and our structure is pretty average. So no compelling edge there. I mentioned my dad's first bridge loan fund. This is how it looked. His asset class was pretty standard. It wasn't that special. They are doing loans. But his strategy was very unique. They had a very unique way to do this. Team was not that good, but their structure was good. I mentioned 16% pref and 0% management fees. That was a unique structure that people hadn't heard before that they liked. So what we're doing in Black Card and with Single Asset Funds is we are trying to build you a unique edge. We're going to spend the majority of the time working here, here, and here over and over again to build a fund that investors are dying to have, that investors want. Then and only then we cross-validation. Legal is pretty easy. I know people think it's so hard. We've done so many funds. Legal is the easiest part for me. Then you launch. Then we go and close all those investors, actually get hard commitments, do capital calls, get the money in, and we start buying assets and doing asset management. And then we keep building the firm. And you just do this. You keep doing this forever. Anybody can build you fund docs. You can just hire a lawyer if you'd like. But can you build a fund that investors want to have? That when you launch, like our— when we launched Ugly Unicorn, we raised about $10 million on our initial launch. Boom. Because we had done this so well that we had all these investors queued. They were begging to get in because we'd asked them. We'd asked for advice. We got input. We opened it up and bam, we closed a lot of people. Matthew, as S&P and global markets start to sell off in the coming weeks, Do you think more investors will look to invest their profits by the end of the year into private funds like ours? Who knows? You know, it could sell off in the coming weeks. It could also rebound in the coming weeks. You know, everyone's assuming a global sell-off. I don't know. We'll see. Now on that, let's talk about timing. I think, well, I had a slide. Anyways, we'll leave it here. You can put me full screen for a sec.

The timing of global markets.

First off, it is always, always been volatile. Not always, but the last few years it has been volatile. We have seen some crazy stuff. Me and you have lived through some crazy— people forget very quickly. Do you remember the regional banking crisis with Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank? Remember the tariff war 6 months ago? And the whole world was ending 6 months ago when the tariff war came out. Do you remember the yen carry trade last August? The single largest day spike in the VIX ever. It was Black Monday. This was last August. I remember like Sunday night, like the world's going to end tomorrow. It's Black Monday. We had this huge spike, huge crash. And guess what? About 3 weeks later, it was all gone. We all forgot about it. We've had crisis, like after crisis, after crisis, after crisis. And here we are. Through all that, we might have a global sell-off. Who knows? We have rate cuts happening right now. Things might sell off drastically. Great. That's a great time to be a fund manager. It's a great time to have a fund set up. The market right rally, also a good time to be a fund manager, right? When you live through volatility, the best thing I think you can do is be in the fund management game. Now, I don't— it depends on which asset class you're in. With rate cuts, we might see a big spur in real estate here that's been very suppressed. We might not, but I think we will. Other asset classes we're seeing, this is— but the unprecedented amount— actually, I'll share 3 slides on timing. We have some crazy, crazy stuff going on. Give me a second. Don't share it yet. All right, give me a second here. We have some unprecedented things going on in the world though that I don't think many people have baked into their models. Um, couple things. The federal government is spending about a trillion dollars every 100 days. I mean, that is, that has never before happened. A trillion dollars every 100 days. I think now I can share my screen. Let's talk about timing. I mentioned this earlier. We have rate cuts. So this, we'll see how this affects the market. We'll see if there's more or less. I'm not sure, but we'll see. Let's talk about something else, though. This is unprecedented. Now, I don't know if you, whether you like Trump or not, who cares? This is crazy. We have UAE has committed $1.4 trillion to the U.S. over the next few years. Qatar, $1.2 trillion. Japan, a trillion. Saudi Arabia, $600 billion. South Korea, $450 billion. $17 billion. I mean, this is wild. If I go down, this is one of about 30 pages of companies that have promised and/or committed to invest in the United States over the next couple of years. Apple, $600 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing. Stargate, $500 billion. Nvidia, $500 billion. Micron, $200 billion. IBM, $150 billion. This is unprecedented. Think of all the construction, the whole supply chain that goes into building all these AI infrastructure plants across the— that's just one sector. Furthermore, think about— this is Cathie Wood, a video I won't share. Well, we can even read it out. We'll see. You can't hear it. She believes GDP growth, I'll read it here, is going to accelerate. In the years ahead, we think in the next five years to seven. If you're an economist, sorry, I'll pause. She said it got written weird. She thinks it's going to reset to seven percent GDP growth in the next five years. Now, she goes, "If you're an economist, you think that's crazy." But she goes, "We actually saw this happen at the turn of the last century. We saw electricity mixed with automobiles with I think she has one other that she put together. We had this huge boom. Our GDP growth." 5x'd. 5x'd at the turn of the 1900s. Right now, we are seeing AI, blockchain, quantum computing, and robotics all starting to mix right now with, I think the total is about $17 trillion of foreign investment coming to the United States. That's interesting. Now, whether it goes down or up, I think it's a good time to run a fund. Furthermore, if you want to take advantage of a— like, all this stuff going on, if you're like, man, I would love to have a fund next year in 2026, you should have started yesterday. It takes time to build a fund. It takes time to raise capital. If you want to have a fund that's ready to go by Christmas or early next year, that's fully functioning, ready to take advantage of a drop or a dip or whatever thing that you see in the market, you need to start like 3 weeks ago. It takes time to put stuff together. We move quick, but to raise capital, get commitments in, get wires in, position your team, just, it just takes time. I'm just telling you, I've set up hundreds of funds with people. It just takes time. We have a crazy time we're living through. I don't, I'm, my business partner, Dan, he's been on the board of Intel for 17 years. He's recently retired. He's on the board of AMD as well. 2 of the largest chip manufacturers in the world. He's like, Bridger, you know, when the internet came out, he goes, I went all in on the internet in the 1990s. Yeah, 1990s. He goes, we did extremely well. It was awesome. And he goes, that was crazy. And we even, we had the dot-com bubble. Yeah, it blew up. And guess what? 18 months later, everything was back to normal. And think of like the growth since the dot-com bubble till now. 25-year, pretty much historic bull run in tech. He goes, I thought that was the one thing of my lifetime we had. And he goes, right now, we're seeing it again. We're seeing the emergence of major technologies, but not just one like the internet. We're seeing, some people say, as large as 10, as small as maybe 4 to 5. If you link in 5G, robotics, 3D printing, AI, blockchain, quantum computing, all converging at once. And they all compound and help each other. He goes, this is a crazy time to be alive. And I love this mental frame, but it's like, Grandma and Grandpa, what were you doing back in the 2020s when AI and blockchain and robotics were all taking off? Like, what were you doing? You know, we love to wear our rosy-colored glasses like, oh yeah, I would've crushed it back in the 1990s when the internet came out. Like, I would've done it. Or if I was back in the 1950s or '60s, like, I would've known. I would've been— or the '90s. You pick the year, we always look back, oh yeah, yeah, I would've done it. But really? What are you doing right now in the 2020s? Man, remember the boom of the 2020s? What were you doing? How did you take advantage of it? Did you lean in? And is that the reason all the grandkids are driving Ferraris now? Or did you just let it pass by and were just too scared to jump in and too scared to go at it because something happened? Now, that's up to you to decide. For me, I'm not wasting this opportunity at all. I actually have a full blockchain crypto investment fund. I have a GP stakes fund that invests in all of these emerging technologies. Well, not all, but most of these emerging technologies. And we are actually actively building Fund Launch AI right now. I'm sitting here like, man, we are seeing something unprecedented. I want to be part of the wave. When you see a tidal wave moving in a direction, get your boogie board and go with the tidal wave. And having a fund behind you, when you can aggregate huge amounts of capital behind you, To go and front run or invest or somehow make money with that. It gives you so much more leverage. It allows you as one person to do ten or twenty or a hundred times what you could do by yourself. What a cool time to be alive! Don't miss this moment. Don't be oh yeah, grandkids. I yeah, we we I don't know. We just didn't think we were. We thought the internet was a scam. We thought when it was just yeah, it was so scary in the nineteen nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine. I don't know. Google was just a scam. I didn't want to invest in Apple. I didn't want to invest in— you get what I'm saying? So back to timing. It's up to you. This is unprecedented, though. And we're getting rate cuts. We're getting rate cuts while we have record S&P 500, record gold prices, pretty much record Bitcoin. It's pretty— now, there's flaws in economic data. I get where they're coming from and I get where rate cuts are happening. But this is a crazy I mean, a crazy time to be alive. Furthermore, sorry, I can tell I'm going to rant. Furthermore, even if we do have a crash, governments have proven over the last about 15 years they will step in in a matter of minutes to save that market. We really don't have crashes anymore. We had the tariff crash. That was crazy. We had 3 to 4 weeks of like the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Government steps in, Trump steps in, whoever steps in, things come back. We had COVID. I mean, look what happened after COVID. If you'd have leaned in during COVID Grandma and Grandpa, what were you doing? Remember COVID? And it spiked down and there was— everything was like 50% on sale. Grandpa, why did you miss that? What happened? We could have all been millionaires right now, all of us grandkids, but you decided to sit on the sidelines and be scared during COVID Okay, sorry, I'm getting personal here. You can tell my point though. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be the guy that misses the moment. And what a cool thing, you can build a fund around something that you believe is going to take off with some pretty unprecedented things going on with this much. Let me just show you real quick. I'm on this thread, we might as well do it. If you go to the, let's see, foreign investment in the US, There's probably multiple spots. I was on the white— I spelled it wrong. Let's see here. I think this is— let's go investments here. Look at this list. Now, if you hate Trump, fine, you hate Trump. I don't care. Look at this list. In billions of dollars, how much has been committed to the United States? Look at how many things— a lot of you are in real estate— how much stuff needs to be built? I mean, what a time to be alive. This has all happened in the last 7 months of the Trump administration. Now, you might hate Trump. That's fine. I'm going to make money. I don't care. I made tons of money when Biden was in office. I made tons of money in Trump's first term. I mean, I'm going to make tons of money in Trump's second term. If Kamala would have got elected, guess what? I'm going to make tons of money. I don't care. I don't care who the president is. I'm going to make tons of money. That's how I'm— that's how I am. I mean, this list is crazy, okay? Like, what a cool time to be alive. What a cool time to be alive. All right, enough of that. I'm getting too long-winded. All right, let's go back to the chat here. Let's answer a few more questions. Maybe put me full screen if you can. Matt had no clue when he asked me that question, the— what we'd go down. All right, let's go to Yuri. I own a boutique hotel investment firm with $55 million AUM. Raising equity money is the only thing holding me back. I got a lot of deals in the pipeline. I have joined another online community that specializes in creating an online persona via LinkedIn and Facebook to raise money for syndications. I'm wondering why the community will not be more advantageous and not overlapping. Good question, Yuri. We've talked a little bit about capital raising. I'll touch on one other thing because we've already hit a few things. Capital raising is a symptom of your fund. Capital raising is a symptom of your fund. Share my screen if you can. Plenty of money out there. Plenty of people raising capital. It's kind of like saying, Bridger, I built a website. I built a website. And we're on Amazon and no one is buying. Just because you have a website or because you're on Amazon doesn't mean your product is good. Now there is something about driving traffic and getting more rooms. We talked about, we touched on that a little bit, how to get in the right rooms, how to convert those and connect those rooms, and then how to close those rooms. We didn't talk about those last 2. But the product. If you had a perfect, beautiful money-making machine, you could literally take a table, actually, you could take a table and turn it to solid gold right now. Do you think you'd have a problem raising money? On an extreme example, probably not. If you could literally walk into an investor's office and say, hey, look it, I can take your bottle and turn it into solid gold. You would probably raise money pretty quickly. Now that's an extreme example, but back to what is your actual investment product? What is your, like I said, your edge? We used to spend a lot of time on capital raising as a group, and we still do. We still spend a lot of time on capital raising. We'd set up appointments, like we'd try to do all this stuff for capital raising, and what would happen is I would send our members to these appointments or meetings or whatever, like whatever we're trying to do, and they're like, man, no one's closing, no one's closing, no one's closing, and I'm like, It's because your product is not good. You have not made a good product that has asymmetrical risk, which is a fancy way of saying relatively low risk for relatively high return. And you can't prove why that risk premium is worth it to get into your fund. And so let's spend more time building out a really good fund, a really good product, a really good team, a really good strategy that has asymmetrical risk, that is institutional ready and graded. And then when you walk into that boardroom and you have that meeting, it's way easier to close. Marketing and sales is a tax on having a bad product. Marketing and sales is a tax on having a bad product. And this is coming from a guy who loves marketing. I spend $100,000. I think this month we'll spend $130,000 this month on social media ads. I spend about $1.2 to $1.5 million a year on social media ads. Marketing and sales is a tax on having a better than great product. Now, do keep doing marketing and sales. It's always good. Talk to more people. Build be. But if you can build great products, man, it makes everything so much easier. So we've touched on capitalizing a few times. I wanted to mention that, but we'll keep moving on. What's the suggested percent for GP in the early stages? So now you're asking GP commitment. If you're asking GP commitment, standard is 2%. So if you're raising $10 million, the standard GP commit would be $200,000. However, the better answer and the answer you should always give is a significant amount of my net worth is going into this project. Now, a significant amount of your net worth could be $25 grand. It could be two million, but a significant amount of your net worth should be in your fund. So that's what I say.

Yeah, thank you very much. What I'm struggling with actually is that I already brought around thirty three hundred k and I'm bringing half of million in next month and a half. So what I'm asking is. that I have few people that are helping me at the moment, and I just want everybody to be satisfied. And most of them want to have equity, but also I need to keep equity for the LPs as well. So what is your suggestion? Because I'm 100% owner of this, and I came with the idea for the fund and working 20—

25 years.

4 hours per day on this, so.

Yeah, so you're asking equity split up of GPs and LPs, like what to do there? So, number one, so 2 different questions there. Your GP, which is here, currently you own 100%, sounds like.

Yes.

And you have some partners that are asking for equity, is that correct?

Yes.

Are they also investors?

No, they are not. They are just helping me to bring this to life.

Okay, gotcha. You gotta make that decision. It's always hard to decide on how much equity to give away and who to do what with. One thing I have liked on partners, so I'll come back here. This would be in your GP, right? You have your 3 people. I have something like this. You can determine what their worth is or not worth is. That's up to you. Down the road, what I've seen in big firms is about a third of the equity goes here, about a third of the equity goes here, and about a third goes here. That's just what I've seen. Now, if you're doing some of this role and some of this role, you can justify more, but I see it split up this way. Furthermore, you need to incentivize people to be on board and be all in with you. So, a couple things you can do, and we did this for one of our funds. You have your equity split up. Let's just say you have some partners here. And let's say you have, just for simplicity's sake, 25, 25, 25, and 25. Each person has specific roles they need to fulfill. Capital raising, putting the deals together, whatever. What we did is we did it every year. One year we do a clawback. If the— it has to be supermajority, 3 out of 4. Vote, so 1, 2, 3, 4, we actually can claw back half of someone's equity if they are not fulfilling their roles. Does that make sense? So if you bring someone on to, I don't know, help with your backend, back office and they, whatever, people just get busy. They don't want to work, whatever. Great, at the year mark, well, you are going to be cut in half and you go down to 12.5%. And then another maybe, and you can do every 6 months or every year, but let's call it one more year later. You can be cut again down to 6.25%. So you can do clawbacks, which is— we've seen that be very useful. It keeps everyone on board. And we've had a scenario we had to actually claw back one of our partners because they just didn't fulfill their roles. And that's okay. Furthermore, you're going to be opening up, you know, this is just fund 1. You're going to be opening up more funds in the future most likely. You'll have more GPs and then on fund 2, So for us, we clawed back a partner like this and then we said, okay, we're opening up fund 2, which is GP, you know, 2, and there's a new partnership. And guess what? Only these 3 partners are going to be involved in fund 2. And we, you know, we leave this partner out of fund 2. So that's one way to do it. I've seen big, huge multibillion-dollar funds do that. It's been useful. On the LP side, Most of the time it's, you know, an 80-20 split. You know, similar to the water, you can see a waterfall structure here. So you have a 2% management fee, 80-20 split here. That's the most standard. You can change that, but that's standard. Saniyya, is that making sense?

Absolutely, yes, and thank you so much.

Awesome, good questions. Alright, let's keep going here. Hillary. Looking to connect and looking to open private equity fund. Okay, just pitching in the crowd, alright. We're doing different levels of projects, apartments, commercials, land developments, hotels. Is it better to roll all these into one fund or set up separate deals under one main umbrella? I want to keep it simple but protect investors. Yeah, good question. If they work together in a strategic way, You can put them together, but I would argue keep them separate. I tell you, keep them separate. One of my mentors, they have a huge multi-billion-dollar fund and they have a— oh, I'll use this pen— senior assisted living, senior assisted living, senior assisted living, yeah. They have multifamily. They have, and they're all separate funds. Commercial real estate. And an investor, you know, if they have an investor that likes all of them, great. You can put $100 grand here, $100 grand here, and $100 grand here. Separate— separation usually is better. The, the only time you'd combine them if they do really have synergistic things together. Um, I think it's harder to combine. I had one guy, he ran a fund. They did like land, RV parks, and they did multifamily, and they called it recession-proof recession-proof fund and they felt like all 3 of these balanced each other really well and to create a recession-proof fund. That was their angle. But it's much harder to raise for something like this because you are trying to establish yourself as an expert in a certain field and when you have multiple asset classes, you come off not as an expert. Like I'll use a crazy example but if I said, hey, We have a fund. We have 2 sides of our fund. We're going to do, yeah, we're going to do multifamily. And we are absolute experts in multifamily. We're the best people in the world at multifamily. We're so good at multifamily. Like, we're so good at this. Oh, and by the way, we're going to also invest into early AI startups because we're also the best in the world at investing in early AI startups. And we're so good at it. And we're just amazing at it. It's like, really? You know, it sounds like BS. I'm calling BS. Really? You're the best in the world at multifamily and at the same time you're the best in the world at early age startups. And why would I want those both in my portfolio at the same time? That's an extreme example, but it proves a point of this is how investors view it when you mix senior assisted living and multifamily and CRE all together in a fund. Sometimes they don't want that in their fund. Ron, any follow-ups to that?

Yeah, the only question is, would you look at them as an individual fund per specific project or by asset class? Let's say if I have a real-world life example, if I have an 8-acre commercial development with a grocery and pharmacy anchored tenant, would you close that project and make one fund specifically for that? Or grow off with other commercial real estate? And sorry, there's an echo if I'm not making sense.

No, that makes sense. Yeah. And sorry for the echo. That's on my end. So that's a question of, I think if I'm understanding it correctly, doing one deal or doing multiple deals in a fund. Am I correct? Yeah. So that's a different question here. So doing a single asset fund versus a, what they call a blind pool fund. And you guys know, like, we have a single asset fund product in Fund Launch. And then we have a blind pool product called, we call it Black Card. We help people do both of these. So, and they're both good for just different reasons. They're both structured like a GPLP. So, general partner, limited partnership. Over here, general partner, limited partnership. They're structured very similarly. The documents are much more advanced for blind pools versus SAFs. A SAF, a single asset fund, you're doing one deal. You're buying that piece of land, you're going to develop it and do whatever you're going to do with that. Great. A blind pool says, hey, we're going to go buy. Yeah, we have this one deal we want to start with, but we're also going to do 22 more deals over the next 3 years that look and feel just like this. And we're going to be a farmland fund. And we're going to be— I have a team, we're scouting projects. Yeah, we have one that we're starting with, but we have 22 more that we want to do over 3 years. And so as an investor, you're going to be diversified in this portfolio here. A single asset fund is like, hey, we're just buying this one deal. You want to get in? Both are— there's pros and cons of both. SAFs, great to— easier to raise money for, easier to get started, less expensive. If you don't have a track record, it builds you a track record. A blind pool, the pros of getting to that is once you have a track record, investors are like, hey, I don't want you calling me every 3 weeks about a new deal you found. Just do them. Just do all the deals. Do them all together and put them in. You get diversification in all these deals. It's a longer time period. You can commit more dollars. You can negotiate with the bank to get cheaper loans and better debt. You can usually get economies of scale. So each one of these projects is actually cost lower to do. So there's a lot of benefits to getting into a blind pool. Most people start with single asset funds and then eventually go into blind pools eventually. Ron, is that making sense?

Yeah, just one really quick follow-up.

On the backend system, we're looking at FundLaunch 360, of course.

Let's say we set up that blind pool and we have that first deal, and then we're rolling into the 22 more deals that we introduced to the investors day one. Is there a way to manage the future investment into that pool and maybe discount or credit the early adopters?

Am I understanding correctly? You're saying you want to start here and then convert to this eventually?

Start with the blind pool and one deal and add deals into it after. How do we treat the early investors versus the people that are jumping in a year down the road?

Ah, I gotcha. So this is done in blind pools. It's pretty common. Great question. Um, this is— so where's my timeline here? Yeah, this will be useful actually. Let's use this timeline. I'm gonna duplicate this and let's make this bigger. So in a blind pool fund, this is kind of your timeline here. So you are, and this will answer your question, but in a blind pool fund, you are capital raising. You're then starting to buy assets and then you're value adding in them and then selling them here and then you're closing after 8 years and you're trying to buy Let's say you're buying 22, 23 assets total. Well, you're going to start and you're raising $100 million. We'll use simple math. So what happens is you start raising capital. And let's say you got $10 million lined up right here. Well, what you do is you hold a closing. And you do your first closing and you take that $10 million and you actually go buy. An asset. You buy your first deal. And then you keep raising money. And then let's— and we'll use— well, yeah. And then you have another closing. You strike a net asset value, a NAV, and you raise $20 million. $20 more million. So you're at $30 total. And you take that money, you do a closing, and you can go buy 3 more deals. And then you keep raising money. And then 6 months later, you strike a NAV, a net asset value, and then people People can come in and you can buy from there. That's kind of what's happening. You're doing closings and you're buying deals as you raise money. What most funds do on each one of these NAVs, they do a rebalancing. So they rebalance the fund and they also have it baked into their docs. They pay a premium to investors who came in earlier. So if you have an 8% pref right here. You know, 8% preference rate of return. So let me, I'll draw this out one more time here. So let's do like this. So this is day 0. This is 6 months. This is 12 months. This is 18 months. Okay? You do your first closing here. Second closing here. Third closing here. Like I just talked about. First closing, people just come in. You raise that $10 million. Their capital has been at risk longer than other people. So at the 12-month mark, you raise another $20 million, so you're at $30 million total. The $20 million that comes in, you strike a net asset value, a price of where the fund is worth, and you pay a premium to these investors that were in earlier of the pref. It would be a 4% premium because their money, they earned the pref because their money was at risk longer. And then you do another 6 months. You do a closing. You strike a net asset value. And then these investors, let's say you raise the remaining $70 million for a total of $100 million. Everyone comes on the last close. These investors pay a 4% pref to these investors and an 8% pref to these investors. Now it's not 8% of the $70 million because it's only $10 million bucks. It's only $800K. Am I doing that right? $800K. So it's not that much. It's a blip here, but you pay a premium for when they came in because their capital has now been at risk for 12 months. And these later investors are coming in on the last, the final closing, and their capital is at risk not as long. Is that making sense, Ron? That's how one of my mentors, they run a multi-billion dollar fund. That's what they do.

And there's a tool within Fund One Fund Launch 360 helps manage all this stuff?

This specifically, no. Fund Launch 360 is more around capital raising, marketing, doing email, stuff like that is in Fund Launch 360. This piece, the NAV, this will be handled by your fund administrators. So like one of, we have a handful of different partners you will use in the backend once you're ready. Like I use, for example, NAV Consulting. They help strike your NAV. It's a third-party administrator. Other one is Carta. We get, I think with Carta, we get like a 30% discount for our members if they come through Black Card. So you get these huge, like, you know, these are expensive. You're spending a decent amount of money to have a third-party administrator. You want a third-party administrator, by the way. You want a third party to give you these numbers, strike the NAV at a fair price for investors, done by a third party. They'll help produce the statements, make sure things are rebalanced appropriately. Yeah, third-party administrator will help you do that. That. So we have all that for you in Black Card or Single Asset Funds. So once you, as you go and launch, we then partner you or you can select which one you want to use and you actually go run your fund. And that's a piece of running your fund. That's one of, so that's this piece right here, third-party admin. You also need to go get your third-party audit and taxes done, your brokers and prime brokers, banking partners, insurance. There's like 20 more right here that you'll get. As you go through, so Fund Launch 360 is one of those, and Fund Launch 360 will help you with right here with copywriting and investor relations and do a few of these things. But that's just one of those partners you'll get. Pretty good, y'all. Okay, let's keep going. Good questions, Ron. How to be fully compliant with the SEC if raising capital for other people? Yeah, so if you're raising money for somebody else, couple things. If you're going to be paid a fee or commission, you have to have a license for somebody else. Now there's a thing called the owner's exemption. If you're part of the general partner, you can raise money for your own fund and you don't earn fees or commission. You just, you're a part of the general partner and the management company and that's how you make money is on the performance of the fund. And so you can actually, like me, I can sell and solicit my funds. I don't earn a fee or commission directly from the sale of the fund, but I do earn performance fees and management fees from running the fund. And I fall under the owner's exemption because I'm an owner of my fund. I'm a part of the general partner and management company. So that, yeah. If you're going to raise for somebody else and you're a hired gun to raise for them, either you come in on the general partner, you become a partner with them. Or you get a Series 65 license or a Series 7 license. You hang it at a broker-dealer or registered investment advisor, and that's how you can get paid a fee or commission for raising money. AJ Rounds, fund structure aside, will you talk about your top 3 fundraising techniques that helps bring in investment dollars? Sure, let's do it. Let's talk about fundraising. So I mentioned this earlier, build a great product, number one. Not to be overlooked. For me, on a first-time fund, and I'm just going to say this straight up, raising money is hard. There is no magic bullet. By the way, launching funds is hard. Doing this whole business is hard. We make it a lot easier. It's still hard, though. It's still a lot of work. You are building a super business. Like, this isn't just some, oh, little side hustle. Like, you're taking people's hard-earned money and you're going to manage it for them. To try to outperform a market. Like, this is a hard business to be in. Okay? Everyone cool? Put their big pants on. Like, this— but it is the greatest business on earth to be in. It is worth the work. I had a friend, he was like, you know, man, this sounds like so much work. It's gonna be so hard. It's like, well, yeah. But if we do it correctly, we're gonna make like $80 million. He's like, oh, well, if you put it that way, let's do it. Like, it's worth the hard work. You know, if the carrot is big enough, it's worth the hard work. What I'm telling you is the carrot's worth it. So, number 1, have a great product. Have a strong edge. Have asymmetrical risk. Now let's talk about actual capital raising. So down here, a couple of things I like to do. I want to get around more people with money. Okay? I want to get around and be in the room with more people. I mentioned a few things earlier. I'm going to join Mastermind groups, clubs, meetups. I go to a lot of events. You'd be surprised how many events I go to. Some are good. Some are bad. Last year, we sent Lincoln, my partner, and my other partner, Adam, to about 20 events last year. These are paid-for events. One event was like $20,000. Another event was $8,000. I mean, these are expensive events. Of the 20 events, I think 16 of them literally did nothing for us. Like, they were a zero. But guess what? 4 of them were amazing. And of the 4, I think we raised like $21 million. But we didn't know which 4 out of the 16 were amazing. We had to go kiss a lot of frogs. We just had to go try stuff, okay? It's 80/20, man. It's like, it's a lot. I've seen success, and you'll have things that are successful for you. I've seen people be very successful with like supercar clubs. They buy a Ferrari, they join a club, and guess what? They're now in the Ferrari Club of Dallas, Texas. They go get box seats, the pay-to-pitch. They get in the rooms. Wealthy people are already assembled. They're already put together. You got to just get and insert yourself in those rooms. And again, to frame this, I'm primarily talking about raising from high net worths and family offices. Pretty much nobody on the— nobody on their first or second fund is really going to raise from institutions. There's just, and there's a lot of reasons for that. You're just not gonna do it. I'm just gonna tell you straight up. There's just a lot of reasons it's not gonna happen. But you will raise from here and you will raise from here. That's what we're talking about. So for me, I've seen a lot of success on those. We've thrown like cars and coin events. I throw events myself. I like bringing people to my office or place. I get to meet people. I get to go to other people's events. One of our biggest checks, by the way, for our last fund was a cold LinkedIn DM. We raised $5 million from a cold LinkedIn DM. This is last year, early or early this year. Excuse me, early this year, $5 million. Now we sent out I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn DMs, and we literally raised from a large family office a $5 million check from a cold LinkedIn DM. It is like it is just work. Real estate groups, social media meetups, events. There's just a lot there now. I'll mention a couple other things. Now, once you are in the room with these people, how do you warm them up? One of my favorite ways to do this, you could just pitch somebody, I guess, if they're— but most people, when you're at events or meeting people or whatever, people ask you what you do. Hey, what do you do for work? What's going on? Hey, I run a private equity firm. Or I'm setting up right now, putting together a private equity firm. We look at amazing deals and companies that we're looking to buy and invest into and roll up. That's all I'll say. Now, some people that spikes their interest. Others, they'll be like, oh, and they just move on. But if I can tell someone's a high-value person, what I do to them is this. I say, hey, it's good meeting you today, Joe. Man, it's awesome meeting you. You know, I run this private equity fund. I get tons of great deals across my desk. And most of them I can't do just because the nature of our fund is pretty narrow. If I get a good real estate deal or other deal across my desk, do you guys look at deals? Do you want me to send you deals your way? 9 times out of that, out of 10, that person's like, yeah, oh yeah, I'd love to look at good deals. You go, man, we get these amazing real estate deals. I just can't do them because our fund is in private equity. But can I send them your way? Let me get your email. And you get someone's email and literally, I start, I put them on my quote-unquote list. You can build this in Fund Launch 360. And I start sending them. I actually do get a lot of deals. A lot of you will start getting deals. And I start sending them updates and things of deals in real estate. I send them updates about my market. And what's going on. And I start building over the next 3 weeks, 3 months, even 3 years, I start building this relationship of, oh, Bridger is a guy that runs a private equity firm and he's got good deals. I'm not just some guy he met at a party a year ago. He's like, oh no, Bridger like provides value to me because he gives me good deals and good stuff. And I don't have a dog in the race. I'm not trying to make money. I'm just saying this is a cool deal. You could go check it out. Eventually, I'll send them an email and say, hey, I've got a good deal. It's called my fund. Do you want to learn more about it? Or I'll go ask for advice. Hey, Hey, I'm looking to open up fund 2. What's your advice on how I should structure this raise? And now we've built this relationship over a while 'cause I've warmed that person up to the idea of Bridgers, you know, someone that actually adds value to my life. I know a lot of wealth people. I have a friend who grew up in a really wealthy household. He gets in a lot of rooms. Ton of rooms. People, you know, he's in some wealthy rooms. But no one sees him as someone that could actually raise money or actually manage money. They just see him as little Jimmy. Oh, little Jimmy, he's— but he's in, man, he's hanging out with billionaires and really great people, but they all see him as, oh, that's just little Jimmy. There's a difference of being little Jimmy and being someone who actually adds value and actually runs a firm and makes stuff happen. And then finally, the close. You warm that person up, you finally get the chance to have your pitch deck. I like to run my pitch deck through, you know, vehicle, internal, external. We can talk about that later, how I actually structure my decks. And then I run through this with my offer and how we actually pitch and close is a full dance. We teach you guys all that in the backend platform. It's pretty fun. We've had a very high close rate. I've closed, I bet I've been on over 1,000 investor calls in the last 3 years pitching my funds. My current fund, Ugly Unicorn, we have about 115 active investors roughly. Don't quote me on that, but it's around there, 115 active investors. For each, you know, I bet we're at about a 50% close rate, so I probably pitched my fund to 230 people. Of those 230 people, I think I out— I bet I prospect over 1,000 people if I'm going up my pipeline. I had over, you know, I don't know how many people on my list. I think we have like 3,000 or 4,000 people on our list on Funnel Launch 360. So, it's a pipeline. It's a game. Now, that works for me. It might not work well for you. There's 1,000 different ways to raise capital. And so, something that works for me might not work for you and something that works for you might work for me. We had a guy in Black Card. Couldn't raise a dollar. He then found this Facebook group. He's a dentist and it was a dentist Facebook group, dental investment group. And he joins and the guy's like, hey, we once a month we do investor calls and we have people like pitch their investments. And he's like, cool, can I do it? He hops on. He raised, I think, around $5 million.

Wow.

On his like one call, one Zoom call. And then he went back a few months later, he raised another $7 million. And then he raised, I think, another $4 or $5 on the third one from one Facebook group. I mean, the dude couldn't close anybody for like a year. And then he found this one little niche. Apparently, I guess he just with dentists, he can just close them. I don't know how it works, but he raised, you know, $15— over $15 million from this dental group. Online on Facebook, so there's a lot of different ways to do it. That's why I like the framework of how do I get in the room? How do I connect in the room? How do I close the room? B.A. Wool, what do you think about putting up a fund? By the way, is this useful? Hopefully today's useful. Anyways, I want to. I'm going to try to hit questions a little faster here. Furthermore, for people on YouTube, you can throw up the link again if people want to talk to one of my team members. There's a link fundlaunch.com/saft. You have that. That link you can pull up. Try a few different screens there. There's the link if people want to talk to our team or work with us. There's a phone number and then there's a link there as well. Hopefully this is all right, useful though. I like taking these. You guys have good questions, man. You guys are awesome. All right, let's hit a few more here. What do you think about putting up a fund for nature-based solutions like planting mangrove and growing high-volume seaweed? What do I think about it? I think it's kind of cool. I have no idea is the answer. I have no clue. I don't know that market at all. I'm not going to lie and say I do know that market. I think it sounds interesting. So nature-based solutions, seaweed, could be very cool. You probably know 10 times more about it than I do. Could be very interesting. We've had people in our group, by the way, do the craziest funds ever. And I love learning about like these funds. I mentioned this yesterday. We had a guy, he had the— at least he told us the largest hydrogen manure to hydrogen facility in the United States. They would take cow manure in Wyoming and they would put it into this plant and would turn it into hydrogen. And it was this— anyway, phenomenal. He had a $60 million plant, was trying to raise another $60 million to get to $120 million. It's like, dude, let's do this. We've had some really unique funds come out of Fund Launch and they're— I love seeing them. I love looking at them. I love being a part of them. We just actually invested into a timber fund. They literally grow trees. I think down in Georgia, they grow trees. And then they also rent out the land and they make a bunch of money on the land while the trees are growing. He's like, trees are the most recession-resilient thing ever. They just grow. And like, it takes, you know, you have different patches. We harvest certain times. Even if there's a bad winter, trees still grow. It doesn't kill your crop. Anyways, it's really interesting. And he's like, he showed, you know, the industry average is like 5% to 6%. He produces about 12%. So he's way above his industry. Really, really cool manager. Anyways, we have other guys doing oil and gas. You know, anyway, there's just cool stuff going on.

All right.

Can PE funds have singular focus or purpose? Do potential investors have different goals? Equity ROI, reduced tax exposure? Yeah, 100%, Will. So some funds, oh yeah, you build your fund around that. I've seen some funds really focus on reducing taxes for investors. So they invest into, I mentioned oil and gas or energy. There's certain energy tax credits. So they take your money and they put it just into energy and they take a little fee on it. Yeah, 100%. That happens all the time. Some funds are just going for alpha. Some funds are going for a more beta-neutral. Some funds are just going for tax advantages. It just depends on the risk-adjusted rate of return that you're going for for your investors. But taxed, reduced tax advantage funds, man, I wish I had a fund like that. I have a buddy. He runs a fund. He's like, every Q4, we raise thirty to fifty million bucks. And he's like, we he's like, we raise zero dollars all year. And then Q4 comes around. Everyone has problems with taxes, and then everyone just dumps their money into our thing, and we go buy mobile home parks. We buy oil and gas, and that's how I'm like, dang, that sounds pretty nice. That sounds pretty nice. We got all the otter AIs, man. I'm I'm so sick of otter AIs. We gotta kick these. Guys out. No, don't kick. I mean, don't kick them out. You can leave them in. But like, I'm saying for just the future, the otter AIs just—I don't know. I don't like it. I don't like the idea of it. All these note takers, like fifty note takers. Every time I do a Zoom call, fifty note takers join, and I'm like—and then they all are posting stuff in the chat. Like, get out of here. I don't want no. Get out of here, clunker. You know, these these AI bots. Bridger, you skipped my question. Would you mind sharing your thoughts later? Can you just drop it again? If I quit, if I skipped a question, just drop it again. I'm sorry. Please just drop it again. Any chance we get a copy of the Zoom call? Yeah, this will be— this is live on YouTube. So if you go to YouTube, my channel, you'll see the live streams. It's at— we're streaming right now to YouTube, so you guys can go see that there. I worked with a fund. We funded North Atlantic Seaweed. Very cool. A company in Ireland that has the very pure ocean, amazing seaweed. Okay, very cool. Do you eat it? Are you eating the seaweed? Is it for some other Some other thing. This is amazing, learned more in the last hour than the last 18 months. Looking into this incredible opportunity. Canadian father, I need to get a kid to the hockey rink. Okay, awesome. Thanks, Ron. I'm a— my mom's from Canada, Ron. I got a bunch of family up in Alberta. Edmonton, Cardston, Calgary. I'm half Canadian, my mom's from Canada. My mom's from Alberta, so. Go Oilers! We can't win a freaking Stanley Cup. We can get close, though. We can get close. Go Oilers. Good to see you, Ron. I'm setting up a fund for investing in Latin America distressed assets. I have about 5 deal originators and more than $10 million in pipeline of potential deals. The idea is to raise $10 million for the first fund in Canada and the US. My problem is I've never managed a fund, worked on the distressed industry, or have anyone in the formal team that has this experience. The deal originators, however, have extensive experience in the industry. How to close the gap? Okay, so Andre, you, sounds like you're kind of trying to broker a deal here a little bit. You have 5 deal originators and they have $10 million in the pipeline of potential deals. You want to go raise money and help them. Am I understanding that, Andre, correctly?

Yeah.

Okay, sweet. Do they know how, do they, Want a partner? Like, could you actually be a partner with them on their deals, or are they just looking for a hired gun to raise capital for them?

So the idea is to be a partner. What I thought that I could do is setting up a fund here and then with an SPV down there to sort of a co-investment with them. Some of them do this through a formal structure, asset management structure in Brazil. Some of them don't. So my My idea was to do some co-investment.

Okay, gotcha. So yeah, they'll put you— so if they want to be a partner with you, you're— yeah, you just would refer to them as your partners.

Okay.

Yeah, like these are your—

It wouldn't be a break of anything, right? I thought about on the pitch deck, just put myself and maybe my partner here that we don't have the experience, but we have all the connections, and put them there, the people, the companies.

Well, it depends. And again, I would make sure you're— maybe you guys are all in the GP together, or you're all in the entity together, and you Then at that point, you're truly partners, right? Now maybe it's not going to work that way, but I would, if it was me, I would try to get them on the deck as like, hey, these are my partners. I found this great firm down in South America doing, or in Latin America doing these incredible things. You know, Partner A, Partner B, Partner C, you know, we together, we're going down and doing X, Y, and Z, and we think it's amazing because of A, B, and C. I would make it feel very cohesive. And hey, I'm before you today. I'm pitching and trying to get people to drum up. If you'd like, I can set up a call with them and we can do a bigger Zoom call and we can all talk about this asset class. That's kind of how I would frame it if I was you. Now, you might not be able to do that, but that's how I would frame it.

And would it be nice also? Would it help for me using your circle of this strategy and fee, etc., to get the edge? I thought about the first one just reducing to zero. 0.5% plus expenses as fee and then doing a 12-15 pref and 20% above that.

Yeah, that would be— I think that would be very advantageous. It'd be below market, which is good. Investors like when it's below market. So you can test the waters a little bit, see what investors like, but that's how— where are you based out of, Andre?

I'm in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Okay. And so it's all going to Latin America and you want to raise out of the US and Canada?

Yes. Then I'll have a fund structure here and then I'll just funnel that feed.

Yeah.

An SPV in Brazil to invest in this.

You'll have to talk to our Canadian people. What I've heard is domicile the fund in the United States. So you would do like a Delaware fund and the money would come from US investors into Delaware, Canada investors into Delaware, and then that money would then go to Latin America. That's what I've been told. Now, if you're just raising from Canada, you, you can maybe cut that out. But if you're doing Canada and US and maybe other countries, I would, I would probably do Delaware. One other option, you could invest directly into maybe the Cayman Islands and do like a Cayman Island or British Virgin Islands fund. You'll need a, you'll need a smart attorney to make sure where the money's gonna flow.

Okay.

Yeah, that's awesome, Andre. Good having you on here.

Thank you.

All right, is there a replay then on YouTube? Yes, yeah, the replay is on YouTube. You can scroll back to the beginning, end of this. Yep, and it should be live right now. So, and people on YouTube, there are people streaming this live on YouTube. I know people on Zoom. And by the way, for my people on YouTube, if you wanted to be on the Zoom call, these are all people that have talked to my team in some way, shape, or form already, and they had some questions. So we just said, let's do a Zoom call, we can hop on. If you wanna talk to my team, there's a link, Maybe, Jorgen, can you put that up? Should be a link there, yeah, funlaunch.com/SAF, and then there's a phone number down below you can just dial in. If the lines are busy, just go to funlaunch.com/SAF, you can book an appointment to talk to our team. We have a bunch of cool bonuses and stuff we're doing for people that join by the end of the month, so welcome in, y'all. Okay, when to launch Funnel 2? Good question. Let's talk about Funnel 2. Where is that slide? Let's see if I can find it.

I think it's on the next slide.

So make it way easy. Well, I'll just say this. Actually, let's do this. Yeah, let's go back to the— you got my iPad still? So Fund 2, when to launch it? 2 schools of thought. Well, not schools, but ideas. So you have Fund 1 up here. Let's do this. Fund 1, and then you have Fund 2. Okay? Fund 1, you've raised capital for and you're starting to deploy. Many groups will— well, I'll kind of go this way a little bit. So if I drew a timeline here up and down, you can kind of see I've raised capital. I'm now deploying. Once I'm maybe 80% deployed in fund 1, then I'm going to start raising fund 2. And I'm going to start doing that. And then once Fund 2 is going and I'm 80% deployed in Fund 2, I'm going to go open up Fund 3. And what you can see here is, you know, while Fund 1, I don't know if you guys can see this okay, yeah, there you go. While Fund 1 is maybe selling assets. Fund 2 is deploying on assets and Fund 3 is raising capital. Does that make sense? And then you'll launch a Fund 4, but you'll see you're, you have a team selling, you have a team buying assets and a team raising capital all at the same time. So that's how a lot of firms do this as they go. And then you'll build Fund 4. Usually by Fund 4, Fund 1 is completely closed out. Fund 2 is in the middle. Fund 3 is, you know, there and Fund 4 is just starting. Back to my comment about institutions. Many institutions will not invest in your fund until you're at least on Fund 3. The reason for that is we don't really know until Fund 3 if you're successful. We don't really know if Fund 1 is successful or not because it's still, you know, the jury is still out. You know, if like when you launch Fund 1, you go launch Fund 1. It's an experiment. You hope to do well and you might do well. You might not. When you launch Fund 2, it's still kind of an experiment because you don't fully know how well Fund 1 is going to do, but you have a little bit of traction. By Fund 3, it's like, okay, Fund 1 is doing really well. Fund 2 is on track to do the same thing. All right, let's talk about Fund 3. And I'm an institution. Okay, I'm going to invest. There's many institutions that like part of their due diligence, they ask, are you on Fund three or above, and if you say no, they say we don't we don't want to talk to you. So that's why it's important to like a lot of you are looking to do in a single asset fund. Start this process. The you're going to make the majority of your money is made on fund three and beyond. Fund one you'll make you know you'll make some money. Fund two you'll make a little bit more money. Fund three that's where you make the big money. Fund four it's where you make the big money. We're trying to get to, and then you're gonna, anyways, that's what we're trying to get to. This is again for, I'm talking about closed-ended funds. For open-ended funds, it's not the same. Open-ended funds just run in perpetuity, but closed-ended funds, that's kinda how it works. Good questions. Alright, let's hit a couple more of these, I think. Had to jump off, thank you. Can we connect and share ideas, Andre? Yeah. So well, when you guys join Single Asset Funds or Black Card, I have a Slack channel and a WhatsApp group. Like we just just ping me. Like yo, Bridger, I have some questions. I get messages pretty much every day from members, and I so anyone that's in our group, like you have a direct Slack. Like you can Slack me in Black Card, and then Single Asset Funds we use we have a WhatsApp group. You can message me again. I'm I'm I got I got stuff to do too. I can't answer every minute of every day, but I try to get to them. A couple times a week I go through and answer all my questions. Yeah. What's your typical fund length? It depends, Andrew. So it depends. Some funds, you know, again, average right here, I'm kind of pointing to like an 8-year fund. But you're targeting to be done by 6. That's average. But some funds are 4 years. Some funds are 12 years. But I would say on your first fund, The quicker you can go, the better, because you can get faster about building a track record. So I would tell somebody, if you're deciding, try to do a strategy that's quicker because you'll build a track record faster and you can add and build more credibility quicker. You know, if I have to wait 12 years to know if your fund strategy works or not, it's a long time. But I have to wait 3 years to know if you're working or not. That's a lot better. Is fund 1 length ideally lower length than fund 3? A lot of times they're similar. You know, fund, like I mentioned earlier, that fund 1, 2, 3. Again, I'm talking in a traditional sense. Let's talk like venture capital fund 1, venture capital fund 2, venture capital fund 3. Generally speaking, they are, they can be tweaked slightly, but they're the same. It's the same business, essentially. If you saw that stack, I guess I deleted it already. Maybe I could go back. But you saw that stack. Let's see, is there an undo button on here? Nah, it's all gone. You're in the business of investing into startups as a venture capitalist. And so we're just going to continue to invest in venture capitalists. We're never going to stop. Right as fund 1 is deployed, guess what? We have fund 2. And right as fund 2 is deployed, we have fund 3. We're always writing checks. Now, by fund 3, can you get bigger? 100%. But a lot of venture capital firms find a point where they get too big and they don't— so they say, hey, we're going to— we don't want to go over $200 million because we lose our advantage. And so you'll see that with your fund. Every fund's a little different on where maybe too big is too big. But that's how that works. Real estate funds, though, a lot of times they can just scale. But someone asked about timeline. Strategy is similar. So I would say timeline is generally similar. As the thesis changes, does that mean you should look to maybe start the next fund? Let me know if you need further— So Paul, yeah, so what I just described when I did this stack, you know, fund 1, fund 2, fund 3, that's assuming you're in the same thesis because they kind of dovetail well together. Right? Now there are other firms that are more— this is less common, but let's say you're here and you launch funds in different verticals. Okay, so you have a vertical here of like, let's say you started out, you're like, hey, we're doing— I'm just going to use something simple. We're doing land development. And you start running that. And then a couple years later, hey, we should do, I don't know, mobile homes. So they obviously, you can use your track record, but this is kind of a new vertical that you're building in your business. And let's say another one, I'm going to use a crazy example. We're going to do Bitcoin mining.

Okay?

So these verticals, yes, it builds you a track record as a manager of capital, but each one of these Then will go do its own kind of fund 1, fund 2, fund 3. Does that make sense? That's kind of how it feels. So you're, you know, you're in the mobile, hey, we're on mobile home fund 1, mobile home fund 2, mobile home, and then we're on Bitcoin fund 1, we're on land development fund 3. And so you're building these verticals because again, they want a track record that you are a good manager in that space, in that vertical. Does that make sense, Paul? Any cut?

Just a further question on that. Some of the research material you guys provide for free is if you wanted to stack the fund, let's say based on your example, 80% land development, would you recommend doing that?

I touched on this earlier. I would say no. I mean, you can do it. Sorry, you can do it. You can do whatever you want. It just— if you do it, make sure they have a reason, a very strong reason to be together. It will hurt your capital raising, in my opinion. It hurts. It's hard. It's much harder to raise capital when you stack. So, if you're gonna do it, make sure there's a strong reason to do it because you come off with a lot of— it's like a lot of BS. It's like, Paul, You're like, hey, I'm an expert at Bitcoin mining. We're the best team in the world at Bitcoin mining. Great. Oh, and we're also amazing at mobile homes. Right? It just comes off very disingenuous. Oh, and we're also amazing at land development. Okay, like, really? You guys are the best in the world at all 3 of those and I've never heard your name before? It just comes off. And furthermore, when you start talking to family offices, they have specific mandates. So they have already decided. 23% of our portfolio is going to go to multifamily real estate and 7% is going to go to commercial real estate and 32% is going to go to equities and 15% is going to go to bonds. They've already decided that. Family offices, that's what they decide. And then in— so take the one vertical I just shared. Let's say 23% is going to multifamily real estate. Inside of that, for a family, you know, a billion-dollar family office, And that's their target. They're going to have 3 to 5 managers that manage their multifamily portfolio for them, funds essentially. And so they're saying, hey, Paul, welcome. We are considering adding you in as one of our 3 to 5 managers. And we're going to kick out a manager or we're going to make a 6th. You're going to be the 6th manager. And you're like, oh, awesome. Great. And they go, we already have a mandate for multifamily. Just tell us why we should pick you over everybody else. Okay, great. And then you start giving your pitch and you're like, oh, by the way, we do Bitcoin mining. We love Bitcoin mining in this fund. And they go, well, shoot, Paul, we only have 23% allocated to multifamily. We don't have— now you don't fit. Now you don't fit our mandate. We don't know where you fit. And so we're not going to invest with you. That's what happens. And it's a sad thing. So that's why most groups segment. You have a Bitcoin mining fund, you have a multifamily fund, you have a land development, because family offices, they are very precise with where they want their dollars going. So that's why you do it. Does that make sense, Paul? Good? Sweet. Good question. How can open a fund to target self-directed IRAs? All, pretty much all your funds can target self-directed IRAs.

Yeah.

There's an ERISA rule. You can— the cap is, I believe, 25% is how much you can take from retirement funds. So just make sure 25% of your fund is not from RA dollars directly or ERISA. Now, there's a— actually, I need to look into this. Self-directed IRAs may or may not fall under ERISA, so you might be able to round that 25%. So if you're raising $10 million, only $2.5 million can come from— ERISA. RISA funds, but there might be, I was looking at this rule change of maybe self-directed gets around that, so I was gonna look at that. So I don't know the answer to that. Alright, pretty good, y'all. So again, talk to my team. If you have more questions, you can go talk to my team. We can get you set up. Throw that thing up again, fundlaunch.com/saf. We do this day in and day out, and again, our whole thing is build funds. If you learned anything from today, this is like a little, this is the hors d'oeuvre. Of what we do in Black Card and Singlass Funds. Like, we, we go very deep on this. Anybody can go just set up a fund. Can you go and actually build a fund that people want? Furthermore, if you want a fund that's ready to go in December or January or next year or whatever you think the market's gonna move, I would start now. You need to start building the blocks, setting up the relationships, The partnerships, the team. We can set you up pretty quick, but it, you know, we can't raise capital for you overnight. We don't raise capital for people because we're not a broker-dealer. That would violate securities laws. So setting up all those things, it just takes time. And furthermore, I would tell you, get started and get in the game. Back to Ken Griffin. I mentioned in the beginning, Ken Griffin got started at 20 years old, just got in the game. Warren Buffett started his first fund at 26 years old. Ray Dalio started his first fund at 27 years old. They just got in. They just got started. You might start small. That is okay. But get in the game. Get moving. All right, y'all. Great call today. Can you take 1031 money? Yes. Usually you do a sidecar and/or JV on a deal. So they have to, because they have to be directed on. So your fund would invest half and the 1031 would invest half. Great. We're going to cut it off there. You guys are amazing. There is a recording of this on on my YouTube channel, um, Bridger Pennington. So you go to YouTube, just go to Bridger Pennington on YouTube, and you can see all of our videos. We have a ton of stuff. Let me go here. So come in here, just go to Bridger Pennington. There I am. Boom. Come right here, you can see I'm live right now. And then you can just click on our channel. We have, I think, over 4,000 vid— or 1,000 Excuse me, on here. Large videos, small videos, but you can come and actually click live and you can see all of our previous. You can see yesterday's livestream, which I thought was pretty awesome, and then you can go to today's livestream as well right here. Okay? You guys are amazing. We'll see y'all later and have a great week. Peace out. Go do good in the world. We'll see y'all. And then when you join, by the way, send me a message. Be like, yo, I was on the call last week. Send me a message in Slack or WhatsApp. I'd love to get to know y'all and let's get your funds going. See y'all later. Bye-bye.

Bye.