LIVE: Fed Meeting, Building Your Fund Team, Fund Launch Formula | Day 2 Launch Your Fund Challenge

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Oh, they can hear us now. Wow. There we go. I was just gonna start dancing. I thought, no audio, you got visuals, so we'll just, we'll just get dancing up here. Welcome on. All right, we're here. Uh, welcome in everybody. Uh, let me, let me know if it's still not working or let me know if things are not happening. But yes, this is live. Uh, I know I, I really should have busted out some dance moves though. It would have really got The crowd. It would have got the webinar just off to a great start. We'll save that for after. All right. Today we got a stacked agenda. So we have got Jerome Powell coming live. He's going to be streaming into our call today. I mean, not just to us, kind of. He's going to be streaming to the whole world. But we are going to be— we're going to be live streaming and actually watching it together. So we have a huge Fed announcement today. Looks like A big rate cut coming, either 25 basis points or 50 basis points. We'll see how that all plays out. But we'll be streaming that live during the call so we get live reaction, live feedback, all that kind of stuff. Additionally, today we're going to talk a lot building on yesterday. So yesterday we talked about building your fund. What if you know how these funds are working and how your funds are working and what we can do to, you know, help you get launched? Today we're talking about syndications and funds. We're talking about building your fund, going through the Fund Launch Formula, that process. I want to take questions. I've got my iPad here. We can just dive directly in. It's everything. Now let's do this. As people are joining, sorry for the delays. Type in, and I'll pull my screen up here. What was a big takeaway from yesterday? Something that you— if you were here yesterday, what was something that you took away from yesterday? Something that stood out to you? Something that was like an aha moment? And I'll do a little, a little thing, but type in the chat any, any aha moments or things from yesterday. As you're doing that, you can share my screen. Yesterday we talked about this. Anybody can build legal docs, right? Anybody can do this, can buy the platter. Anybody can buy the plate. This is the analogy. But what's on the plate is a big difference. Is it a stinky fish or is it like a Gordon Ramsay meal? We want to build funds that investors want. Anybody right now can go hire a lawyer and just get legal docs built. You can pay $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to build legal docs. You can all do that right now. But this is the big question mark. And a lot of people are asking me actually, hey, help me raise capital. We're gonna talk about capital raising today and tomorrow. But really, the easiest way to raise capital is to have a really good meal. When you have a stinky fish, it gets really hard to raise capital. When you have a Gordon Ramsay beautiful meal, it's a lot easier to raise capital. And so let's figure out how we can build great funds. We talked a lot about this yesterday. If you saw this on my iPad, we talked about Step 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the Fund Launch Formula. We dove into 3 roles in every fund: risk, control, return. We talked about the waterfall structure of a fund right here in the middle, the GPLP structure, all that yesterday. We talked about the new Black Card program. You guys saw that, the 4 phases of Black Card, how that works. We talked about the capital committee pitch. We're actually letting real-world people, our Black Card members, come and pitch real-world investors, pitch family offices, RIAs. We're actually doing this on the 24th. So for our Black members that have gone through the process, they can come and do all this, which is pretty cool. I'm actually going to— let me share my iPad for 1 second here. Oh, bear with me. It's going to go black for 1 second. So here we go. Let me see if that works now. We talked— if I can zoom in here, maybe. Aha, there it is. Okay, so we talked about risk control return. We talked about this concept of Asymmetrical risk. What is asymmetrical? Asymmetrical risk, right? Relatively high risk for low return. We talked about how to achieve that, how some funds can actually find that, find alpha in their funds. We talked about risk control, things you can and can't control, and how sensitive you are to those things. We talked about the 3 roles in every fund. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that today. We talked about your waterfall structure. Here it is. So Building actual waterfall, how fund managers get paid, why fund managers is the number 1 category of billionaires. The Forbes 100 list, the number 1 thing that made the most billionaires was investment fund management. I think number 2 is tech, number 3 is fashion. This is the best game on earth. This is the game that you want to play in. We talked about the GPLP structure, talked about how funds are structured, limited partners, limited partnerships, general partner management companies, the LP and PPM, how this all works together. We talked about— I think I erased it yesterday, but yes, we talked about this. We briefly touched on different fund types. So Reg D, 506s, 506s, who we're going to register with, Reg A's, Reg CF funds, how these all— all these funds work together. Kind of fun. We talked about, you know, the different phases, whether in the test phase, syndicate phase, or fundraise. We're going to talk a little bit more about this today. And we talked about our mission of democratizing Wall Street. And how we're doing that with AltStreet, with Black Card, and Fund Launch Partners. AltStreet's a totally free platform. All of you can go sign up right now. You're learning from some of the top fund managers on earth with AltStreet. Black Card is where we incubate. This is our core program. It's $30,000 to join, and we've had over 1,000 members go through Black Card. We've launched some incredible funds out of Black Card. It's been amazing. Since then, we've actually launched Fund Launch Partners. We are now raising $100 million out of Fund Launch Partners to go and invest into successful Black Card students. We've already invested into 3 firms this year. We'll write checks from anywhere from $200,000 to about $2 million in, uh, Fund Launch Partners. We look to do about 25 more— excuse me, 25 more investments over the next, uh, 12 to 24 months with Fund Launch Partners. So very, very cool, uh, what we're doing there. All right, that was a little review. Um, yeah, we talked about this a little bit. Uh, we talked about obviously the new Black Card, new Black Card offer. By the way, this went awesome. I looked at a bunch of your applications last night. It was really cool. We've had a number of great people start yesterday. We still— so how this is working, by the way, we are taking— we'll take, you know, let's call it around 50 applications. That's kind of where we're coming in at. We want 11 people that want to come on the cruise with us in 2 weeks, want to join Black Card, are really serious about this. What we're doing is allowing people to come and test drive Black Card for till September 27th. Okay. September 27th is the cutoff. If you'd like to be a part of that or join, you can. It's open still right now. What you'll do is you pay an application fee. It's totally refundable. We're looking for 11 people that want to come on the cruise. We already have about 180 people coming on the cruise. We have 11 more spots open. September 27th is the cutoff date of you can come and test drive Blackhearts. You can come in. It's $99 application fee. You come in, you can test drive phase 1 and come talk to the coaches, talk to the team, everything, and feel, see if it's a good fit for you. If it's not a good fit, no worries, we'll refund you the $99.

Okay.

But this is just a little bit of a way we want to— we don't want to work with tired people. We want to work with serious people that are actually going to go launch a fund that are, hey, I just want to test your product out. We believe this is the best group and system on earth to launch funds. So there's my, my subtle but not so subtle pitch. That's what it is, just straightforward. That's what we're doing. So if you're curious about that, if you're— if you want to learn more, you can go to that, that page right there. I think Adam Smith on my team is dropping a link in. If you want to share my screen real quick, this is what the page looks like. You come in, you can learn all about Black Card, this all-in-one fund solution. You can see we have one-on-one coaching advisors, the network with 3 in-person events a year. We have partnerships. We do all of your legal setup, all of your pitch deck design, all that kind of stuff here. You can go learn more about it. So boom, there it is. All right, cool. Hey, let's do this. So today, 3 topics I want to hit today. Here they are, and it's covering my screen here. If you can help me out a little bit, we'll see. But I'll move it for you too. 3 topics we want to talk about today. Number 1, how do you do your first fund or syndication? Like, how do I even start?

Where do I even go?

Number 2, how some of the best fund managers in the world approach their first fund and how to build and apply the FundOps formula. So I want to just dive into the meat and bones of things. Does that sound good? Meat and potatoes. Meat and bones. Meat and potatoes. Meat and potatoes. Meat and bones, I guess, is cool too. We can do the meat and bones, but we'll dive into the meat and potatoes. Does this sound like a decent agenda for today? If you're with me, say yes. If you like this, if you're not with me, say no. We can change it up, by the way. I can do other stuff. I'm here for you guys. Additionally, we're going to actually stream in, like I said before, Jerome Powell's speech. We're going to be looking at the Fed. They're doing rate cuts probably about an hour from now. They'll be doing those. So we're going to stream that as well. We're just going to pull up the livestream. We're going to have— we're going to pipe it into this call. So you're here. It's going to be pretty fun. Alright, I love it. Thanks for the, the, the love in the chat. Let's dive in. Okay, let's talk about— we already mentioned this. Anyone can build legal docs. Sorry, I'm, I'm skipping through here. Alright, here we go. This is kind of the 3 phases that we see most of us follow. And actually, I want you to type in the chat which phase you're in. Let's say you got a— you're like, hey, I've got this idea for a potential fund or an idea of this investment strategy, or I have a business that I think can scale. Most people fall in one of these buckets, and you can jump around a little bit if you'd like. But most people test it out on their own. They test with their own dollars, so they test with their own money, their own portfolio. They're flipping their own houses, they're buying their own businesses or building their own businesses. That's the test phase. The syndication phase is where you're starting to— you're going to syndicate outside capital for a one-off deal. So my definition of a syndication is one deal at a time. So if I said, hey, we're raising money for 123 Park Avenue, we're buying this cool building, we're going to raise $25 million for this building on this one specific deal. That would be a syndication. We're raising $300,000 to go buy a company down the street and we want to, you know, it's a franchise, it's a restaurant. We're going to go buy this restaurant and we need to raise $300,000. That would be a syndication. A fund is where you're actually going to say, we're not just doing one deal, we're going to do a dozen or a handful of deals together in one. And usually you— and we'll talk about how to approach each one of these. But the idea is, hey, you know, we just, we just did 123 Park Avenue as a syndication. It went great, right? All of us made money. Awesome. We want to do 20 more deals just like that. So put money into a fund over the next 18 months. That's what they call it, a blind pool fund. It's going to be a little bit blind because we don't— we haven't identified all the projects yet, but we have a thesis. We have a plan to go out over the next 18 months to buy these 12 to 24 properties in this certain market. Does that kind of make sense? So that'd be your 3 phases of test, syndicate, or fund. Is this making sense? Okay, so type in the chat which one you are currently in, whether in the test phase, the syndication phase, or the fund phase. Type in the chat. Or maybe you're like, I'm not even in any phase. That's cool too. Okay, test syndicate. And by the way, I see a bunch of people. Fun.

Perfect.

Type in the chat for me. By the way, this is live, dude. I need some feedback. I need some feedback from y'all. This is a live stream. Okay, I love it. Test syndicate. Okay, so people across the board.

What?

Let's— I'm gonna— let's start with— well, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the syndication and fund phase and even the test phases today as well. Now, I'll say this. If you go back to my slides, you don't have to do this exact linear path. Some people jump right to the fund stage. Some people jump to the syndication phase first. Some people go test, syndicate, fund. That's all the above work. My first— I went first to a syndication phase and then I went to a fund phase. And then I've actually done— actually, I have other people that I worked with have gone back and forth between fund and syndication depending on the type of deal they're looking at. So both work. Okay, so let's talk about syndication versus fund for a second, and maybe the pros and cons of each. Some people— Bridger, you're the fund guy, you hate syndication. Like, no, I don't. I freaking love syndication. Syndications are awesome. So let's do this. We can help people with both. I want to do a little test for y'all in the chat. Test your skills. You guys ready with this? We'll do it. We'll have a little fun here. I want you to— I'm going to pose a question and then you're going to say which one is better, syndications or funds. Okay. And do it in the chat. And this is just— we're gonna do a live poll in the chat with me. Okay? So, well, actually, hold on. Where are we going? Slide 0. Oh yeah, that's actually good. To define terms, we did this yesterday. If you can move that for me, they can see what's on here. So to define terms, investing in your first business would be the syndication version of a private equity fund. Being a day trader or doing a hedge fund incubator would be the beginnings versions of a hedge fund. Investing into a startup would be the beginning phase of a venture capital fund. Private money lending would be the beginning phases of a private credit fund. Buying one property would be the beginning phases of a real estate fund. Does that make sense? So to kind of get terminology down, we talked about this a lot yesterday. I don't want to repeat, but that helps a little bit on terminology. By the way, it's not that complex. All this is, is just they're just pools of money and they're buying a business or they're investing in the stock market or they're Lending money out. But they have these cool terms like private credit fund or venture capital fund or a hedge fund. They're very actually simple, relatively simple terms and concepts. And actually the backend is almost always the same as they are built because we have now built over 300 of these through this. Okay, so we have the 4-step formula to launch funds. We'll come back to this in a minute, but this is back to the test I wanted you guys to do. So I'm going to pose a question like this in the chat. Which one do you think is easier to raise capital for, a fund or a syndication? Type in the chat. We're gonna go fast, by the way. We're gonna go quick. So just type in the chat fast. What is easier to raise capital for, a fund or a syndication? Now with this, and as I go, there's always an exception. I'm gonna say that in general, though, in general, what is easier to raise for, a fund or a syndication? And some of these you could say, that's your opinion, Bridger. And guess what? I'm the one running the webinar. So yeah, it's my opinion. Okay, so my opinion is it's a syndication. After doing both, It is usually much easier to raise capital for a syndication. It's a deal-by-deal basis. You're raising for something tangible. Hey, we're gonna go raise for 123 Main Street over here, and you can go taste it, touch it, feel it, all that kind of stuff. A fund is more blind, so it's a little— usually you're investing more into a team and a thesis.

Okay.

All right. Good job on the first one, y'all. A lot of you got that correct. All right, next one. Which one gets better interest rates from banks? So if you are talking about interest rates with the Fed, which one would get better interest rates, a fund or syndication? Type in the chat which one gets better interest rates from a bank on, you know, if you're going to get debt, fund or syndication. Okay. In my opinion, and what I talk— and I'm just going to say the answer on this one is for sure funds. Funds get much better interest rates because Banks, they want to work with repeat clients, volume customers. If you're a fund, you're doing multiple deals, you're a volume customer, you will generally get better debt, better interest rates. And so syndicators versus funds, if they're both bidding on the same deal, a fund can probably bid more because they're getting a cheaper cost of capital. Does that make sense? Funds generally will— and we'll tie this up at the end. I'll tell a few stories, but that's— that's funds definitely get better interest rates from Thanks. Okay, which one can close deals faster, a fund or a syndication? Which one closes on a deal faster in general? Okay, a lot of you are answering this one, a fund, right? Now, there's— I put both X's here. I would argue a fund. Some syndications, if it's just obviously it's one deal, you can close faster than closing all 20 deals in a fund. But in general, if there is— if you already have a fund ready to go and a deal comes up, a fund can close in know, 10 days. I mean, a fund can close very, very fast on deals, uh, move a lot faster than syndications. Okay. All right. Which one's more diversified, fund or syndication? Fund or syndication? What's more diversified? Okay, you guys are answering it. A fund, right? Obviously, we've got, let's call it, 20 to 30 deals in a fund. Syndication has one. So a fund is way more diversified. Okay. Which one's more cost-effective? Meaning which one, uh, Is cheaper to start and run? Which one, if you're going to start right now, start a fund or syndication? Which one's cheaper and more cost effective to run? Probably syndication. Yeah, syndications are going to be cheaper. Funds are going to run you like I mentioned before. Legal costs just to set up your fund is thirty to fifty thousand dollars. Probably syndication. You can set up a syndication, you know, five, ten grand, something like that. Much cheaper. Maybe fifteen grand. Okay, good. Scalable. Which one's more scalable? Okay, type in the chat. I'd argue it's fund, right? Fund is way more scalable just by the nature of it. You're going to be doing way more deals out of a fund. Okay, next one. Which one's minimized investor liability? Now let me define this for a second. Maybe move my— they can't see it on there. Which one minimizes investor liability more? Meaning investors getting sued by each other or downside risk or you getting sued by the fund or by investors. Which one minimizes them better? I would argue a fund. Now, a great example of this is, if you guys seen the movie The Big Short, with— there's a great scene with Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale, and his, you know, his big investors come in the office like, they're like, Michael, give me my money back. And they're yelling at him and screaming. And Michael just goes, no, the housing market's going to fall and tough. If he was running a syndication, not a hedge fund, those investors, they actually can pull a lot of levers to move and shake things in a syndication. Sometimes your biggest investor might come to you and say, hey, sorry, I forgot to pay my taxes last year. Can I, you know, pull my money out earlier? Can we sell the property early? In a syndication, that can happen. People can pull money out earlier, do different things on a syndication. In a fund, you go, sorry, it's already written down. I have a fiduciary responsibility to the fund. I serve what's best for the fund. I do not do what's best for individual investors. See the difference there? Big, big difference. I do what's best for the fund. So if you want to— if you didn't pay taxes last year, I'm sorry. If you want to pull your money out, it's a 50% penalty. Most PPMs and LPAs say it's a 50% penalty to pull money out of a fund. Because you're protecting the fund. That's your fiduciary responsibility too. Okay. All right, next one. Which one's easier for accounting and tracking purposes? Ooh, accounting and tracking purposes. Fund or a syndication? Which one's easier to track and like manage? A fund or a syndication? Type in the chat.

Oh, oh yeah.

Switching mics here. Can you guys still hear me? Check, check, check. Yeah. Does that work? Okay. Accounting or tracking? Oh, way better. Okay. Ah, much better. Wow. Look at this. Was it going off this one the whole time? Oh, this one's glitching.

Okay.

That's why we got 2 mics. Here we go. Did you see that? Just switch. We just switched in and out of mics. All right. Which one's better for counting and tracking? I'm going to argue both. Uh, and for different reasons. Let me walk you through this. I think you're both right. Okay. A fund, accounting and tracking for a fund. If you are doing lots of syndications and you have all these one-off deals, there's a bunch of people in Blackbird right now, like, Bridger, I've done— I have 15 syndications currently going. It is way better to run a fund than run a syndication. If you're doing one syndication though, just one-off, it's probably easier just to account for one syndication. But once you start doing multiple syndications and multiple deals, a fund, what it does is it centralizes everything down to one location instead of running 15 different balance sheets and different K-1s and different P&Ls. It centralizes everything into one. So, depending on what you're doing, a syndication or a fund could be easier under both those. Yeah. Okay. Mic's working good. I love it. All right. Go back to my screen for me. I think— okay, there you go. So, in general, as I was speaking to a big group of real estate investors, this was a year and a half ago. And I asked them, I was like, they were all big syndicators. None of them had really ran funds. And I said, well, okay, has anybody ever bid on a deal? And who's doing real estate in here? Type in real estate if you guys are doing real estate. My real estate people, you ever bid on a deal before and you go, man, that person way overbid for that thing? Anybody ever said that before? Because I have. Like I'm bidding on something, someone outbids me and I'm like, oh, they're idiots, dude. They're going to lose their shorts on that thing. Like they're awful. Right? Anybody done this? I've done this. And I posed and I said, maybe they did overbid, but maybe they're not playing the same game as me and you. And they're like, what do you mean? I said, well, me and you are, let's say we're syndicators. We're pulling some money together to buy a duplex or a triplex. Okay? And a fund is bidding against us. Okay, well, a fund has better interest rates than we do. A fund can close faster. Uh, a fund, by the way, can— is— we have here scalable, minimum investor liability, accounting tracking is more centralized. A fund is buying a portfolio that they're going to sell maybe to a bigger group. So if you could close faster with a cheaper cost of capital, do you think you'll win more or less deals? Like, Probably more. Do you think you could bid higher or lower on those deals? Well, probably higher. I said, what if your job isn't to buy? You're a fund manager. Your job's not to buy one duplex. You're trying to buy $100 million of a portfolio, and you're going to sell that $100 million portfolio for $115 million to somebody else. And everyone went like, oh. I said, they might not be playing the same game. That me and you are playing. You know, when we're getting money together from grandma and our buddies to go buy a $600,000 duplex, they're pulling in, they're playing a way different game. And so, if we're bidding $600,000, they bid $650,000. Well, they don't care because they're throwing it into a $100 million portfolio that they're going to then sell for $115 million. Do you see the difference? The different game that's being played? This is why most successful people in the world of finance or investing eventually run funds. They're— they get better interest rates, they can close deals faster, they're more diversified, they're scalable, they limit investor liability, and they have way better accounting and tracking. It's naturally where almost everybody ends up. So back on this, uh, that progression of test, syndicate, fund— that's the reason that's progressed that way is because it's so freaking scalable. It's, it's just Phenomenal. Now, is that making sense? A little bit. Okay, let's now I know a lot of you mentioned earlier I'm in the syndication phase. So let's talk about I talked about funds a lot yesterday. Let's talk about actually the syndication phase. I believe there are thousands of ways to structure syndication. So there's not one perfect answer on how to structure like so sorry I'm changing gears a little bit. How do I actually put together a syndication? Like what does that even mean? What does that look like? Now, I'm going to give you an example of how I would put together syndication. Now, this is not legal advice. This is not financial advice. You do whatever you want. Go talk to a lawyer, someone else licensed, someone way smarter than me. Okay? But let me show you an example of what I've seen work very well. Okay? So, an example of a syndication structure. Here it is. And maybe for this, if you don't just put the whole screen full— well, yeah, you can bounce me around, whatever you want to do. We got a new business here. So let's— where's my private equity people? Let's say we're gonna buy this new business. Okay. Um, and maybe we run our— any business owners here, you're gonna buy a competitor out. You're gonna buy someone on your supply chain. Okay. So here's our current business over here. We have an LLC. Um, and, uh, we're gonna raise $500,000 to buy this business. We're doing a private equity play. We're gonna purchase this business. All right. Everyone following along? Okay. So this purple box is the new business. This is the new— this is a Syndicate that we've put together. We're raising $500,000 to buy a new business. Okay? Now, I, since I'm me and let's say me and you are putting the deal together, we're going to carve out 20% sweat equity in the deal for me and you. Okay? So, we're going to carve this out because we're putting the deal together. And then what we're going to say is there are remaining 80% of equity available is distributed Pro rata to the other partners. Now we have a business, we have an operating agreement, business partners here that we're bringing in. And by the way, it's crucial that they are business partners in a syndication. That's why you have less control, by the way. If, if you're raising money in a syndication as investors, you need to file a Form D and make it more, more feel like a fund. If you're doing a syndication, they need to be business partners. What you're essentially saying is, hey, we just got some business partners together. And we're going to go buy a business. That's how it's got to look and feel and operate on an operating agreement.

Okay?

So, let me give you an example here. So, we're going to bring in some business partners. They're going to bring in $500,000. We're bringing in the knowledge, the sweat equity. They're bringing in the money. And we're business partners. We're going to go buy a new business. That's how it's got to read and look. So, let's say someone brings in half the money. They bring in $250,000. Well, they are going to get Half of the remaining equity or pro rata of what's remaining. So, if they bring in $250,000, that would equate 40% equity. Okay. I'm going to pause. Does that make sense? Okay. We had 20% for me and you. We are going to give on a percentage basis or a pro rata basis. Someone brings in half the money, they get half of the available equity, which is 40%. Okay? And then someone else brings in 10% of the money, uh, and we kind of split things up this way. Okay? So someone brings in another chunk of money, another chunk of money, another chunk of money, another chunk of money, and they're split up on a pro rata basis here. Again, we're all business partners now. We have an operating agreement that governs how this will run. Okay? Now we go, we, we now we've, we've got $500,000. Everyone's got their equity in this new business. We go buy the new business. Now, maybe part of the operating agreement says, hey, Bridger and this blue box here is going to run the new business. Great. We're just going to be money, but we're all going to vote. We have voting rights. We have voting shares, all that kind of stuff in here. Okay. We then go buy the business.

Woohoo.

We bought the business. Great. The business starts making money. So the business makes money and starts splitting off excess capital. The capital flows back to us and we're going to split it up just like business partners. Okay? So 20% of the money that comes back goes to the blue box, 40% of the money that comes back goes to the red box, and so on and so forth. Okay? So we do distributions on what's called a pro rata basis or a percentage basis, meaning just whatever percentage you own, you got it. Okay? Now, Does that make sense? Let me pause for a second. Pause for effect. That is how I have seen successful syndications set up and put together. The moment you start saying, hey, I'm raising investor dollars or bringing investors in and we're going to change the terms and there's no control over these investors, it starts to look more like a security. And if it's a security, you need to file with the SEC and do a Form D and all the stuff that we talk about funds, which you can do, by the way. But I see a lot of people do something like this on their first syndication. And this is, in my understanding, totally legal and totally great to do. You bring in a handful of business partners, you're all putting money and time and effort into this new business, into the LLC, and you're going to go buy a real estate project or a new business or whatever. And whenever that thing makes money, it just flows back to the gold box over here, and then we just split up the returns. Okay. Is this making sense? Type a yes in the chat if you— if that makes sense. Okay. Any other comments on this? Yeah. Following along so far? Hopefully that's kind of useful for, you know, my syndicators out there now. And again, we help people do all of this. We help people do syndications, we help people do funds, we help people do all of that. Okay. And so this is what we will help structure and put together in like our Black Card program, for example. Okay. We help people do all of that, all the above. Someone asked like, why is it 40%? They put in half the money and they got half of the remaining equity. Me and you took 20% of sweat equity. They got half of the remaining equity, which was half of the 80%, which is 40% because they put in half the money there. Yep. Yeah. Cool. All right. So, um, now next I'm going to go— I told you guys I'd go fast today, but that's cool. Is that good? Um, This is— this sounds somewhat complex as compared to a fund. Uh, I mean, they're all somewhat complex. You got to learn all of them. So I would say this is pretty simple. Yeah, this is pretty simple. Pretty simple way to do it. A fund is also complex as well, but it's, it's, it's— everything's complex from the outside until you learn it and you understand it. You can teach it back to somebody and then it's not that complex anymore. So, all right, now I want to answer a few different questions here. So, Bridger, from yesterday as well, I'm looking to do a fund or syndication, or I'm looking to get in this game of funds. Big question I get is like, what happens if I lose money? How does this play out? And I'm going to go over to my iPad. Has anybody ever thought that, by the way? You're probably on this call, you're like, okay, I'm going to raise money. What happens if it goes bad? Do I go to jail? Or what happens? Okay, let me share my iPad here for a second. We'll talk about this. So what happens? Let me— let's see if this works. What happens if I lose money? Okay, first off, not good. Losing money is not good. Okay, like, let's not lose money. The first rule of investing is don't lose money. The second rule is don't forget the first rule, right? That's Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger right there. Okay, but You're not going to bat 1,000. Part of the game is sometimes investments don't go perfect. So, what happens if you lose money? Okay? There are 2 main outcomes that I see. Okay? Generally, what typically happens if you really lose money, like not just it goes down for a little bit or goes up and down, like if you actually like lose a lot of money in a deal and it's just like bad, what typically happens is people want to know why. Your, especially your investors or your business partners, they want to know why, like what happened. So typically, they're going to look into what happened. I gave money to Joe over here. Here's Joe. We gave money to Joe and it didn't go well. What happened to our money? So, and there's 2 main outcomes. Number one is the investments. It was like, let's use an example of like venture capital, for example. We invested money into a startup. We hired a bunch of, you know, developers and, you know, programmers and all that kind of stuff. We got an office space and we started this business and on a venture capital thing. And it just, we had a competitor come in, they just beat us out and things just went, I'll put it in red here. Things just went south. It was just, you know, it just didn't work out like we thought it would. Okay. By the way, I'm going to mention this. That's okay. Not every investment is going to go perfect. The other side of this coin, I'll come back, I'll kind of flip-flop between either one. The other side, what they're trying to investigate is why is, was there fraud? Did someone lie? You said you were going to put your money into this startup, but you actually took the money, uh, to Africa and you bought a bunch of gold bars and you did something totally different. Or you took the money and you, you stole it and you went and bought yourself a, you know, A Lambo, Lamborghini. Okay? Like, that's what they want to figure out. Most people, most investors, by the way, VC is a great example. VC investors are okay losing money. You always hear like 9 times out of 10, these investments go to zero, but the one that takes off goes really well. VC investors and investors in general are okay, you know, taking a bet, taking a risk. If they lose money and everyone was honest, Everyone did this thing the right way. Uh, we're okay to lose. It's like, yeah, well, that's the nature of sometimes investing. And yeah, I knew what I got into. It was disclosed. It was upfront. And just whatever reason, this, this startup we invested into just didn't work out. I can stomach that. I'm not okay if someone took my money and flew to the Bahamas and took a 2-year vacation or lied, right? Or bought a Lamborghini for themselves or bought gold bars. And they weren't supposed to do that. Does that make sense? Now, if you're on this call today, I want to make a, I don't know, a pledge with everybody. Like, I don't know if you want to type in the chat or whatever, but like, I will have integrity. Type in the chat, like, I will play this game with integrity. If you are someone who has a propensity to lie, if that's just part of your psyche, some people are that way. They just lie about everything, big things, small things. They're not good at managing money. Do not get in this game. Do not even start. You probably should just leave the webinar right now. Like, you're off. Like, it's not worth it. If you go down this road, you'll eventually get into a spot where— and I think most people that commit, let's call it fraud, don't— didn't intend to commit fraud right when they started. What happened was they had a fund, they raised $10 million, and they're supposed to invest over here into good stuff. But then, you know, mom got cancer and it's $1 million to treat her cancer. And we got to fly her over to Europe and do this big thing. And mom's going to die unless we have cancer. And you go, well, I have $10 million here. What if I just shaved off $1 million? Because it's a good cause. Mom has cancer. And it's okay. I'll pay it back. We'll pay it. Like, no one will even know. And what happens is they just committed a serious securities fraud and they might go to jail for 10 years, even though it was a just cause. Mom has cancer. But you promised investors that you would not do that. You promised them you would invest over here into stuff that you said. See how that kind of happens? That's when integrity is hard. That's when it's tough. And so, if you're someone who has a propensity to lie, get off this webinar right now. But I love everyone in the chat. I will have integrity and play this game. I'll play this all out. And by the way, if you're someone who has integrity, you don't even need to worry about this side of things because that'll never come up because you're going to play this game with honesty, with integrity. And by the way, when you play this game, how we run our funds, I say, hey, and this is what everyone in Black Card, I make you get a third-party auditor and a third-party administrator. A third-party auditor and administrator will check all of your books, all of your stuff to make sure you're doing this. I will not invest in a deal that doesn't have a third-party auditor and third-party admin on it. I just won't put my money in because I don't want to put someone in a situation where they have to do something like this over here. Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's where you— people are like, man, somehow some people commit fraud. Like, no, people, like, they commit fraud. Like, they know they're doing it. They are lying to investors. That's what happens. People don't just wake up one day and commit fraud. Put in good guardrails for you and your team. Do it the right way, have integrity, and you can play this game at an extremely high level. And guess what? If you do lose money on a deal or two, it's not the end of the world. You go look at the best investors of all time. All of them have lost money on deals, but they did it with integrity. They did it with honesty. They disclosed to investors. They were very forthright. And guess what? They picked themselves up and they went back to the next one and the next one and the next one, and they did extremely well. Okay? Sound good? Good little segment there. I will have integrity. I love it in the chat. Thank you guys for typing that in. Okay, boom. So we've talked now about syndications and funds. We've got a few minutes left here, and then we're gonna have Jerome Powell come live, and and we're gonna talk about the Fed. Let's talk about this. So a lot of people message me over you know while I've been doing this, and this is the concept you want to share my screen is I need to work on Wall Street for twenty years before I could start a fund. I need to do this for 20 years. I got to go to Harvard. I got to go to Ivy League schools. I got to do whatever to launch a fund. Anybody thought this before? Type a 1 in the chat if someone's said this before, you thought this before. I thought this before, and I was going to do this. So, my story, I was doing finance in college. I got a big internship in Silicon Valley. I was going to work at this big firm, and I was going to work my way up the corporate ladder. And one day, because I knew I wanted to launch a fund, I had that vision, but I was like, okay, maybe I'll spend a decade working at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan and investment banking, and I'll end up consulting, right? Like, that was— I was going to do this. And then I started to actually research and look at what have some of the greatest investors of all time— what did they do? Well, how did they get to the top? Like, what did— what was the path they took? And it was really surprising to me. And I started to develop this concept around, I rarely listen to what people say. I watch what people do. I, people will tell you to go work on Wall Street for 20 years, then start your firm, but they didn't do that. Let me give you a few examples. Let's look at, uh, how did the kings and queens of Wall Street do this? Let's look at Warren Buffett. And maybe, uh, yeah, I might have to move my little picture around so they can read it here. Um, how did Warren Buffett do this? Well, if you look at Warren Buffett's story, it's kind of actually crazy. 25 years old, 25 years old, raised $105,000. They go buy a small business, does extremely well. He got in the game, started a fund at 25 years old. Today's net worth's $138 billion. He has been in the game for 68 years. He's been in this game to compound. You guys know that compounding effect, like the calculator, compounding calculator? Warren Buffett just got in the game, started compounding, and yeah, today he's worth, I mean, and greatest investor of all time, but it took him decades to get there and get moving. And he got in the game, started early, and just started moving, started playing the game. Let me show you another example. Um, I'm actually gonna skip this for a second. I'm gonna go to the, I'm gonna go to the next one down here. I'm gonna go to Ken Griffin. Okay. So, here's Ken Griffin. That's, by the way, his new house he's building in West Palm Beach. These properties are each worth $60 to about $100 million each. He has bought, I think, 5 or 6 of them and demolished them. He is building a $1 billion property in Florida right here. Here's a picture of them going into development. It is crazy. They think it's going to be the largest home ever constructed. Which is wild. This is Ken Griffin. Okay? Ken Griffin, here he is, started at 19 years old, started trading at 20 years old, started a convertible bond arbitrage fund. He raised about $265,000 for his first hedge fund at 20 years old. Okay? He started and got in the game. 30, by 30 years old, he was managing a billion dollars. Now that sounds crazy, like, wow, by 30 years old managing a billion dollars, but He, he had done this for 10 years, a decade. People oftentimes think in terms like, what can I do in a year or 2 years? What can you do in a decade? He spent a decade running a fund and ta-da, he's running a now a billion-dollar fund by 30. Okay. Most successful hedge fund of all time, highest dollar return to investors. Today he's 55 years old, relatively young. Last year he made over $4 billion. Pretty wild. Uh, 35 years he's been in the game. Okay, if you're gonna pick a game and get it, like, get in the game and let yourself compound. Now I was going to share, uh, this, this with Ray Dalio. So this is a picture of me actually meeting Ray Dalio. Uh, do you guys know Ray Dalio? Written some incredible books, recently has put out some awesome stuff. So I went and I, me and Lincoln flew out to the Greenwich Economic Forum. It's about 200 people there. I had a chance to— so he, Ray Dalio, I'll tell this story really quick. Ray Dalio comes on stage, speaks, and then he gets off the stage and they're doing kind of a little meet and greet on the side. So, I'm like, I'm going to go meet Ray Dalio. Now, we have wanted Ray Dalio to come speak at one of our events for years. If you guys have followed me for any bit of time, I'm like, it would be so cool to have Ray Dalio come. We've given him offers and talked to his team and we've done all this kind of stuff. So, I'm like, man, I'm going to go meet Ray Dalio. So, I go get in line. There's probably 5 or 6 people in front of me and they're meeting Ray Dalio. And you can put me full screen if you want, but, and you can kind of go back and forth. So I'm there and I'm like, I'm going to meet Ray now. And the people in front of me, they were— you could call them like fanboying over Ray. They had a book. Hey, Ray, can you write— sign my book real quick? Thanks. Get a picture. Bye. And they like wouldn't even— they weren't even treating me as a human. They were just like, hey, can I get a picture?

Okay.

Like, thanks, Ray. Like, bye-bye. Like, it was so— it was like really kind of strange. And so I thought, man, when I talk to Ray, I'm going to try to make a connection with him and do something different. And I actually had brought a gift. I'm like, I want to stand out like crazy. I actually— we did some research. I found out Ray was a big hunter. He loved hunting. So, I got him this gift. If you go back to that picture, you see me holding a box. So, I had this box custom-made for Ray Dalio. So, I bring this box and I'm like, this would be amazing. Ray's going to love this. We'll have a connection. We'll talk for a few minutes and maybe I can provide some value to him and maybe let him give back and talk to our audience, whatever. Okay? So, I'm in line and Ray Dalio, he is currently worth, what, $28 billion? So, I'm sitting there waiting. I'm kind of getting nervous. And then these— I look up and I didn't realize, but Ray is surrounded by 3, 4, 5 bodyguards that are like these huge jacked dudes in black suits. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, oh gosh. And one of them makes eye contact with me and I'm like, hey, what's going on? And he starts walking towards me and I'm like, oh, like what's going on? And he's like, he, and I kind of look up at him like, hey, how's it going? He's like, he looks down, he's like, what's in the box? And I'm, again, I'm holding this big box. And in that moment, I knew I had made a grave mistake. Because most people, you know, when they bring a gift to a deca-billionaire, they bring them chocolates or flowers or I don't know, whatever you give a billionaire, some cool pen or I don't know. Not me. In the box was a lethal weapon. I had brought Ray. I knew he was a hunter. I brought him a 13-inch custom hunting knife blade made out of a woolly mammoth tusk. This thing's legit. But I was like, dude, I was like, I just brought like a lethal weapon to meet Ray. And now the bodyguard calls over another bodyguard. So, there's 2 now. And I'm looking up at both of them and I'm like, oh, my heart kind of seems like, oh crap. And he goes, what's in the box? And I go, it's a knife. And I just, it's a small knife. It's not that sharp. And they're like, it's a knife. Like, whoa. And they like kind of, and I'm like, oh, it's not that big. Like, here you go. And they proceed to then look, they open it. Can we open up? I'm like, yeah, go ahead. Whatever you need to do. They open up the knife, they look through it, they're looking under it. They're like bombproofing this thing. They got 3 guys over here. And I'm like, oh gosh, like, what have I done, dude? I'm going to get booted out of this place. And I'm literally sitting there with this box and They then look through it and he gives it back to me and he goes, no, you're good. Like, and they kind of like laughed about it. Like, yeah, you're— they kind of looked me up and down like, yeah, you're fine, dude. Yeah, go give it to Ray. I'm sure he'll love it. Like, go get him, buddy. Go get him, pal. Like, I'm sure he'll love your little knife. Like, I'm not a threat to Ray Dalio with a freaking 13-inch blade knife in my hand. Like, I'm not a threat. They like looked me up and down like I was like Teletubby. Something like I work out a couple times a week, you know, like holy crap. Anyways, I get— they're like, good luck, go get him, he's going to love it. And so I get up to Ray, I finally get my turn. I go up to Ray, I go, hey Ray, good to meet you. Here's, you know, I knew you're a big hunter. I want to get you a custom gift because I wanted to say thank you from our community. And I said, and I presented the knife to him and he was like, wow, this is amazing. Very cool. And I said, hey, you know, we've got 30,000 members in our community at the time. I think today we're over 100,000 members, but I said 30,000 members in our community that are all learning about hedge funds, private equity, launching funds. We've launched over 300 funds in the last few years, and a lot of our community looks up to you. And you probably don't have any clue who we are or what we do, but your books, your podcast, you've inspired a whole new generation of fund managers. And I just want to say thank you. And he kind of lit up. He was like, wow. He's like, tell me more. And so, I then proceed to tell him, I said, yeah, we're throwing these big events. We have people flying out from all over the world to come teach and share. We're called Fund Launch, and we help people launch investment funds. We bring in mentors and coaches to really dive in and figure out how to build great funds. And he said, this is incredible. And we talked for probably 2 minutes. And at the end, he said, hey, I love— thank you for the gift. Thank you for this box. This is amazing. He goes, I want to send you a return gift. And I said, no, you don't need to send me anything. You've already done enough. He said, no, I need to send you something. Get my assistant. He calls his assistant over. He's like, assistant, come here. Get his address, get his phone number. I want to make sure he gets a gift and return gift and a thank you card from us for doing this. And I was like, wow, well, Ray, thank you so much. I shook his hand. I said, I know you're busy. You got to go. And thanks. And somebody grabbed me after and was like, dude, how did you do that? Like, you and Ray, like, connected. And I'm like, I know. That was awesome, right? And like, So, I talked to his assistant, I get the number, we follow up, and it's been a year and I've never got a return gift from Ray. So, what the heck, Ray Dalio? I got nothing, dude. I got no return gift, no follow-up. His assistant, we talked about having him come to our event and he couldn't make it for that scheduled time. But anyways, like, what the heck, Ray? What's going on? So anyways, which was awesome. When I shook his hand, I'm like, I'm never going to wash this hand again. Um, anyways, if you go back to my slides here, so it's Ray Dalio here. Let's, let's break down Ray Dalio. So, um, if you look at Ray Dalio, sorry, that was the squirrel as a side story here, but Ray Dalio started his first fund at 26 years old. 1975, he started Bridgewater. Today he's worth $150 billion AUM of their funds, $28 billion net worth. He's had 48 years to compound. He started early and got in the game. Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, I just mentioned Ken Griffin here, right? 19 years old, 20 years old, starts his first fund. 35 years to compound. Cathie Wood, okay, started a little bit later in life. Cathie Wood, 54 years old, starts ARK Investment Management, 2014.

They—

she said they had a very slow start and launched. A lot of people didn't want to invest. It was a slow start, but they started. Now today, 10 years later, they have over $50 billion AUM. She's had 10 years to compound. They got in the game and they started moving. Robert F. Smith, okay, 39 years old, founded Vista Equity Partners. So kind of in the middle, 39 years old in 2000, okay? Today over $86 billion AUM, 24 years to compound. They got in the game, they started moving. If you watch what people did, not what they say they did, what they actually did, they got in the game, they started making decisions, started moving in that direction, okay? You guys have seen this before, but a penny doubled every day for a month. Any guesses on what it will be? Day 10, it's $5.12. If you took a penny and doubled it every day, by day 15, you're at $163. By day 20, you're at $5,000. Any guesses where it ends up on day 31? Where does a penny doubled every day end up? Any guesses in the chat? Penny doubled every day. On day 20, you're at $5,000. Day 31, it's over $10 million. Get in the game and start compounding. Too many of us sit on the sidelines. We wait for this perfect moment. We wait for something to come up, something, uh, whatever it is to get in the game. And I, my message on this segment at least is you still have time. We still have time. We have a lot of time left. It doesn't matter where you're at. If you take 80 years old and you minus your current age, that's how many years you have left to compound and maybe beyond 80. Right? Warren Buffett's what, 94, 95 years old? But let's just take 80, for example. If you're 50 years old, that's 30 more years. Imagine what you could accomplish in 30 years if you put your direction on something that was massively scalable, just like funds. Okay? A great example is Grant Cardone. Love him or hate him, but look at this example. Before Cardone Capital, Grant Cardone was just kind of a sales trainer online, had done okay. At 52 years old, he starts Cardone Capital in 2010. Buy real estate projects. Okay, you guys have seen Cardone, right? Today he's 66 years old. You guys realize this? 66 years old, $4.5 billion AUM. He's had 14 years to compound. All of these people I'm mentioning, they all started slow. They just started. They got in the game. They started compounding. Okay, this is making sense. Anybody following along? Type a 1 in the chat if that makes a little bit of sense, kind of where I'm getting at. Now, um, we've talked a lot about the Funnel Launch Formula yesterday. We talked about this, this process of the Funnel Launch Formula. And what I want to do is actually share how I've done this, how I've actually applied the Funnel Launch Formula in my life and what it's done for me. Does that sound good? Um, okay, let's— I'm gonna share a few examples. Uh, Funnel Launch partners. Okay. Um, case study. And I'm gonna go quick through these, but I think you guys will get the, the kind of the example. We started thinking about ways to benefit Black Card members. How can we benefit our current Black Card members? What could we do? And we're like, could we? And a lot of them wanted to partner with us. And for years we said, no, we're not partnering with anybody. We don't want to partner with people. But then finally said, like, what if we did this? And 2022, we partnered with actually 8 groups. We took our favorite 8. We gave— we said, hey, could we— like, they wanted to partner with us. We said, fine, we'll do it. We'll sit on your board. We'll be an advisor to you. We'll help you launch your fund. We realized we could— we could just invest in our Black Card members' funds. There was great funds coming out of Black Card. Why don't we just invest in them? So 2023, about a year ago, our GP Stakes Fund was born. Okay. December '23, we've actually deployed into 3 deals and we're raising $50 million. Actually just upped that to $100 million. Now we're raising $100 million for this fund. We've seen— we've had a lot of activity, a lot of interest. So now we're upping it to $100 million for bigger check sizes. But it started small. We got in the game, we started moving. And now this is— we think this is going to be one of the most coolest things we've ever done in Fund Launch is all of our Black Card members that come through, they have a chance for us to actually invest into their funds and offerings to go through this Fund Launch Formula, stage 1, 2, 3, and 4. Uh, Ugly Unicorn— this is my current hedge fund we run in crypto. Okay, let me share an example. Uh, prior to Ugly Unicorn Crypto, we were going to do Ugly Unicorn Real Estate. Okay, we were actually going to do a real estate fund June of 2021. Uh, and if you want to move my little thing there, we had, um, this is during COVID we saw a lot of big box stores that were shutting down or lease payments. Like, what if we bought these old malls or big box stores, we put in, uh, uh, higher and better use cases, self-storage or virtual offices or something like that into these, into these units? Kind of a cool idea. Anybody like, that's an interesting idea? Uh, and we were like, yeah, that'd be pretty cool. During COVID very opportunistic. We can buy distressed properties, get them for pennies on the dollar. This would be a good fund. We went out and tried to pitch this thing and we I would argue we struggled to get the right team. So, we went, we did phase 1 deal, 2, which was frame, 3, raise capital, and our investors really pushed back. Like, we went through this process and people hated it. We went stage 1 to a student, and by stage 3, we just could not get investors to get onto this idea. And so, we went back to the drawing board and we're like, what do we do? And again, I'm committed to the game. And we said, well, what if we built a team in crypto? We had a strong— I had a business partner, Dan Young. I was like, what if we brought him and a whole other team in crypto? I love blockchain. I love this crypto thing. What if we built a great team? So, we pivoted. We built a new team in crypto. We ran a bunch of test portfolios. We ran these huge test portfolios. And by June 1st, on our initial launch, we raised $10 million. Boom. An overnight success. And today, we've— by— in December 2023, we had 63% net rate of return to investors. Okay, in April 2024, we had $27 million AUM. No leverage, by the way, no debt on this fund. Interesting, right? If you go back to this, we went through the fund launch formula. It didn't work on our first idea. We then restarted. We went through the next idea and it worked, and we bam, we raised $10 million. We launched it. It's been an incredible fund. Um, All In Ventures. Okay, this is a great example. They, uh, did their first $50,000 deal with 2 investors. This is years ago. This is a venture capital firm. They then went on and syndicated 27 different startup venture capital types of deals. They attended Fund Launch Live in 2023 and decided to do a fund. They actually joined Black Card in 2023. We started to work with them. They did a fund October, by October. So, 6 months later, they framed out their fund. By December, we actually wrote them a check from Fund Launch Partners. They were one of our favorite funds that had come through Fund Launch Partners. We wrote them a check. We invest with them. Uh, this is, uh, as of April, they had raised $6.9 million in signed commitments and another $9.5 million in verbal. I believe today they're around $10 million in signed commitments. This is now where this would today, September. Um, and they've crushed, I mean, these guys have done incredible. This is a year, let's call it a year and a few months ago. They joined, they got in the game, they started moving, and they've already got a number of deals that have markups. They've already been investing in deals and have done incredibly well. But they got in the game. They started, they started on this process. If that— is that making sense? And actually, they end up speaking on stage at FunnelHacks Live in 2024. We had them come back and speak on stage, and tomorrow we're doing an event with them in Utah, and we're doing a capital raising event to help them raise more money.

Okay.

Isn't that kind of cool? So this hopefully gives you a sense of like using the FunnelHacks Formula, going in and doing all this now, and whether you're in the test phase, syndication phase, or fund phase, we can help in whatever Phase you're on. If you want to start a fund or syndication in Q3 or Q4, you should start today. Everyone got started and got in the game, which is awesome. Now, in a few minutes, I'm going to scroll out here. We're going to go and actually show, we're going to see, we've got Jerome Powell coming live here. The Fed meeting is happening. So in a few minutes, we're doing that. Now, I know, and actually, I want to talk as well. Let me go back. Where's my slides here? I want to talk about what I call the fund waffle and building out your team in the fund waffle. Can you share my screen? So I want to talk about this in a few minutes. Okay. Is that cool? Can I come back to this in a few minutes? We're going to talk about our fund waffle, building out your fund team, how this works, uh, how SpaceX did it, all these other groups did it. Does that sound good? Now, before I do that, um, and for the next few minutes, we're going to have the Fed drop their minutes in just a minute. Uh, a lot of you were asking me, and I mentioned this a few times, about Black Card, how Black Card works, what it is. Are you guys cool if the next two minutes if I share a little bit about Black Card and what how Black Card works and what it is? We mentioned it yesterday, but I just how how it all works. Type a yes in the chat if that's okay, and then we'll come back. We're going to stream Drone Powell, and we'll talk about the fun waffle. Sound good? Yes is coming in. Okay, I love it. So we mentioned this. I'm going to go very fast through this because I know a lot of you have heard some of this before, but I want to yesterday I went I went almost too fast. I think I didn't share enough, and I had a ton of questions after like what does this mean? What is how does this work? I was like you know what. Today, I'm going to spend 5 minutes, 4 minutes talking through what Black Card is, how it is, how it works. I've mentioned a few times today and just how we help people, how we've helped over 1,000 fund managers get in the game of funds. This is the ultimate service to get your fund or syndication launched. This is the thing. This— there is no better group on earth for launching funds. We are by far the number one company on earth that helps people launch funds. We have over 100,000 members in our community. We have helped over 300 funds launch in just the last couple of years. Now, it doesn't matter if you're in test phase, syndication phase, or fund phase. We help people in all these. We call it the, you know, the Ignite phase, the launch phase, or the scale phase. We can help you in any of these phases. Now, there's 3 core pillars of Black Card. I'll briefly go through each one of them so you have a sense of what we do and how we help people drastically speed up this process because it's— it is frustrating. To figure out this game on your own. I was lucky enough to have a dad and a brother that already were incredible at funds. And I was— I understand how lucky I was. And what I— what we've done now is, can I provide that same thing to you guys? Can you have the same opportunity that I had to have an incredible dad that ran a deca-billion-dollar family of funds, a brother who's an investment funds attorney who was a chief compliance officer at a $600 million real estate fund? Could I provide that and more to you guys? And that's where the basis of what we started with Fund Launch. And now it's grown to this huge behemoth of a company. It's been just amazing to see the growth of you and to be a part of this process with you. Okay, so there's 3 main pillars of Black Card: advisors, network, and partnership. And I'll go through each one of these briefly. So let's talk about advisors first, briefly. Um, we've launched 300 funds in the last 3 years. Uh, it's been phenomenal. We have a 4-stage process to launch your fund. Hey, just like the 4-step Fund Launch Formula. We step you through fund part 1, phase 1, your deal and thesis. Phase 2, we go through your frame, capraise, and launch. And we have specific advisors and scorecards and processes for each part of the phase. So it doesn't matter which phase you're in, we're going to help you. Uh, one-on-one coaching from 16 different coaches. Here's our coaches that are all specialized in different things. We have capital raising coaches, people that are good at go-to-market strategies, people that are good at, uh, hedge funds, private equity, venture capitals. They are specialty coaches that can dive deep with you on your specific project. Now, to keep you on track and accountable, everyone that joins Black Card also gets a dedicated account manager, okay? Helps you ones-on-one, keeps you stuck, coordinates and meets with the coaches, keeps you on pace. One thing with, you know, me, I— anybody join like a fitness program or something like— and it's, it's way better if you have someone that keeps you on track, that keeps your goals on pace and keeps you going with you. Okay. So, we have a dedicated challenger. All of you get assigned this person that if you're like, hey, where's my logins? How do I get back in? How do I use it? Where are my goals at? These people keep you accountable. They're amazing. Olha, Tanner, and Jackson are amazing at this. They keep you on track. They keep you accountable, keep you on pace.

Okay?

Additionally, we do group coaching. So, we have office hours every single day, excuse me, 6 days a week. You can get questions answered to anything. So, sometimes it's like, hey, I just need one question answered to something. You can log in and hop on a call with one of our guys. Uh, did a full track at Harvard on financial modeling. So he does an office hour every week. You can hop on and see what other people are doing or your own fund and do a full financial modeling for a full hour and figure out your financial models. Anybody want access to that one? That'd be kind of cool. Okay, so now to train your team as well. Sometimes it's hard to get your team up to speed. You get access to the full Fund Academy. This is a— we have industry-specific videos: forex, venture capital, private equity, crypto funds, Reg A funds, hedge funds, uh, the whole gamut here. Uh, you get the Fund Academy, uh, when you join Black Card Wealth. It's a $497 product. We have fun Excel templates, 200+ videos. This is an amazing product. We've had over 3,000 people go through our Fund Academy. This is a tried and true product. It's absolutely phenomenal. Now we're going to talk about your fund waffle in a minute, but to build out your fund waffle, we'll come back to this. We're going to start checking these boxes as we go through and things that we solve in here. Okay, so number 1, advisors. We have one-on-one calls, daily office hours, and the Fund Academy course to help train your team. Okay, now number 2 is network. Um, so we do a lot. A lot of you obviously know your network is your net worth. Raising capital, finding partners, all that kind of stuff is here. So we have a community of not 500 but over 1,000 fund managers now in our community, which is bonkers. This is a picture of us in Cancun, uh, just last year. Um, is this Cancun or— we went to Hawaii the year before. Anyways, I'll talk about that in a second. But we have— this is our— this is our Black Card group on the beach. It was awesome. We had an incredible time with our community, and some of our community members are doing incredible things, uh, raising $300 million multifamily fund. They've raised now 4 funds, $800,000 investor deposits. I mean, it's been pretty cool to see what our, our fund managers are doing inside of Black Card, to be part of a great community. We have people doing incredible things in Black Card. So it doesn't matter whether you're on your syndication phase or the fund phase, we help you. Now, why a group? If you're here and you're kind of trying to go to the next level, we have coaches and mentors that pull you up. We have the Fund Launch team that kind of pushes you from below, and you've got peers, people next to you to help you, kind of on the side by side of you to help you get to the next level of where you're going. Okay, so the network, we do virtual and in-person. Uh, we have virtual, virtual events, private Slack group, group calls, and one-on-one Zoom calls you get all full access to. And then additionally, uh, we do in-person events. We do 3 exclusive Black Card events a year, and we also, on top of the 3 events, we usually do, uh, every month or month and a half, we do meetups all across the country. You can meet and be with Black Card members in person. So we do an exotic style event, a workshop style event, and usually Funnel Launch Live. And you're invited to all those. You get VIP access to all these different events. So our next event is actually in about 2 and a half weeks. We are going on a Caribbean cruise with Royal Caribbean on, uh, first week of October, uh, 2024.

So just—

we are right around the— right around the mark here. Additionally, we're going to Salt Lake City in Q1 of 2025. You're gonna fly to Salt Lake City and we're gonna do an event out here, which should be pretty fun. So again, to summarize, building your network— you have private Slack channel, virtual events, unique cohort, 3 in-person events, uh, alumni speeches and training, all that kind of stuff with Black Card. So, um, to, uh, to summarize, you have your advisors, uh, you have the one-on-one calls, daily office hours, your Fund Academy, and then with network, you have the private Slack channel, 3 in-person events, and a group to work with of a cohort. Finally, number 3, partnerships. Okay, when launching a fund— and we're talking about this in a second with the Waffle— um, when running a fund, you need a lot of external help. There's a lot of groups you're going to use: taxes, audit, third-party admins, marketing, all that kind of stuff. All this stuff down here, we're talking about brokers, prime brokers, banking partners, insurance partners, all that kind of stuff. So we've gone out, we leverage our group to go get discounted partnerships with Kaplan, Prequin, Scalar, NAV Consulting, Interactive Brokers, AC, and many, many more. So you get access to all of these different third-party discounted partnerships, uh, with us. And those are à la carte. You can use them as you'd like, but we have gone and spent the time and effort pulling all these pieces together to help you. Okay, to answer that for your waffle, you get all the checkmarks there for your fund waffle. Now, a few of these are included directly with your Black Card program. 2 of them specifically. Number one is our pitch deck designer. All of you need pitch decks. And so this is an example of someone that did it before and after. Okay, so this is us designing someone's deck. We go through and design your deck, make it look beautiful, make it look amazing, all that kind of stuff. Additionally, one of the biggest questions I get is how much money is legal going to cost? What's the legal setup to start a fund or syndication? We had everyone needs legal. So we finally said, what if we just bake that into the cost of Black Card? What if we just made it part of the offer? And we actually went and found a bunch of law firms. We now have 8 different law firms that we partner with. At every Black Card member, we match you with the appropriate law firm that'll work best for you. And all of you get access to full fund legal setup on your own. This is just straight from Google. This will cost you anywhere from $50,000 to $300,000, or $20,000 to $150,000 for legal setup. It can be very complex and it's time-consuming to work with lawyers. So we included this all with your Black Card membership. So all of you get access to LPA, PPM, subscription docs, US domestic fund. And additionally, if you wanted to do an international feeder fund, if you're in Canada and you want to do cross-border stuff, or Luxembourg funds, or, uh, you know, Dominican Republic stuff like that, we can use international feeder fund structures as well. It's just an additional cost Uh, inside of Black Card. Okay. All included though with your Black Card membership. Isn't that kind of cool? Okay. So again, to summarize, you get the advisors, you get the network and all the partnership stuff, um, down here in Black Card. And we've had, again, the, the best part about Black Card is the community, is the people you get to be around. And, and it takes an army of people to do this. We have about a 50-person company here at Funnel Launch, all dedicated to helping you in Black Card be successful. Um, so I'm going fast here. We have Fund Launch 360 as well. You get a full email backend software, CRM pipeline manager, all right here. Fund Launch 360, you guys all get access to this as well, which builds your entire marketing platform and helps every piece of that. And if you're worried about which part of the path you're on, we have actually people that help you in the test phase, the syndicate phase, or the fund phase. Okay, here's some more testimonials of incredible people in Black Card crushing it, raising, you know, $1.5, $1.15 for January allocation, another million for February 1st. Which is awesome. Rhea Campbell crushing it here as well. So let me pop through this. This is a good question, though. If all this did was just get your first deal or syndication or fund set up and running, would it be worth it? It just got one fund set up. Would it be worth it if it just allowed you to hang out with 500, now 1,000 fund managers? Would it be worth it if all this did was just get your family involved? Like my dad, he learned what funds are, taught me and my brother about it and got us in it and got us in finance in early stage, like, would it be worth it? Uh, oftentimes we think, like earlier, we think in 1 or 2-year segments. We rarely think in 5, 10, 15, 20-year segments. Like, what would this mean for your kids, your grandkids, if you understood what funds are, how they're built, you hung out with a community of 1,000 fund managers? And I didn't mention this, the best part is Black Card is for life. Once you join Black Card, you're with us for life until the nuclear bombs go off between Russia and China or whatever. You're with us, okay? Until it all goes down, you're with us. You're with Black Card for life. Your kids can come to the events, the cruise next week. This is a family event. Bring— I have a— I'm bringing my wife and my son. We're bringing our families out so that your families can also learn about investment funds, what, what's happening, all this kind of stuff. You get Black Card for life. Now, Black Card, like I mentioned yesterday, is $30,000 one time. Once you're in, you are in. You're in Black Card for life, which is Phenomenal. Now, additionally, we can break that up into payment plans and other things like that, but it's $30,000. But we've done something special just for this couple of days. We've never offered this before, and you can join on a $99 application test drive. This is totally refundable to September 27th. A lot of you have asked, like, Bridger, can I join Black Card? Can I test it? Can I taste it? Can I feel it? Can I get in? And we've always said no. And now we're doing today and tomorrow, we are saying, hey, if you want to test drive this thing, it's $99. You can apply to join Black Card. What will happen, you fill out an application page, you come, you apply to our team. My team and myself will review the applications. We'll hop on a call with you. If, you know, if it matches up, if you're a good fit for a good potential fit for Black Card, someone that would add value to the group, we're very picky about who comes into Black Card, by the way. We want good people that are going to add value to the group, the quality of the group. We want to continue to increase. So, we're going to do an application, but once you pass that application, if you do, you then get a full test trial until September 27th. So, about 10 more days. You can come in, you can talk to coaches, you can meet with team, you can be in Slack channels, all the coaching calls, the daily office hours. Come join it all. And then if you still don't like it, we'll just refund you the $99, but we're pretty confident you're going to love it. Okay? We're looking for 11 people that can come on the cruise with us and join Black Card fully. Okay. Yesterday, we had a bunch of people join as well on applications. We had a handful take the— of the 11 spots, we had a handful take it. We still have a few spots open for the cruise. This is first come, first serve. We have 11 spots for the cruise and to join Black Card fully. We're taking, I don't know, let's call it a few dozen applications. We'll kind of whittle that down to 11 people that want to join. So, Adam dropped the link in the channel. You guys can click that link if you'd like right now. I'll give you a minute here. Um, and let me, uh, you can apply for just $99. Sorry, let me, let me speed through this to this end slide here. So bam, here it is. So if you want to start, go to fundlaunch.com/apply. Again, Black Card is $30,000. We can break that up into different payment plans and payment options, but once you're in, you are in. This is for serious people. This is not for everybody. This is for 1% of you.

Okay?

This is not for everybody. So Black Card, um, but the people that come in are phenomenal. That's why I love hanging out with our Black Card members. Our Black Card members are phenomenal people. I love being with them. I love talking with them. I love a part of this. And now I'm going very quick through today. There's a lot more to Black Card, but this is kind of the quick summary of how we do this. It's been, it's been an incredibly successful program. It's been phenomenal. And our Black Card members, if you actually go to this page, you can read testimonials. Let me actually, I'll pull it up for you. Here it is. So once you click apply right here, you can test drive Black Card for $99 here, take you to the page, you can check out, and then it'll actually the next page after you can come and actually book a call Uh, where's the— where are we at? Right here. Boom. It'll bring you to this page. You can come book a call on our calendar. You can hop on with one of my team members, and there's a few spots open, um, after you come and book your call. But also here, you can come and just scroll through. We have 1,000+ members, 300+ funds launched, all-in-one fund solution. Come through here and you can kind of click through to partnerships. How do we work with partnerships? Or legal. What's our process? How do we do this? You can come and learn who we are, some of the groups we worked with, uh, testimonies. You come actually watch videos of testimonies of Black Herd members that come through, um, and just been, you know, have done— and I don't want to take credit for them. They've done incredible things. They've launched incredible funds. Their funds are phenomenal. Here's a few frequently asked questions as well in, uh, down below. And then if you have questions here, something's not working, you can come chat with Matt here. He's live on the back end as well. Okay. All right. So there's the summary, um, of BlackRock. So I'll give you 1 minute here. Um, feel free to click on that link. You can go book a call and then come right back. We're going to stream Jerome Powell. He'll be live here in About 15 minutes, we'll talk about the Fed rate cuts. It looks like 50 basis points. Someone just dropped that in the chat. We'll go read their notes they just dropped. It looks like it's 50 basis points, and we'll hear again. It can be a dovish 50 basis points. It could be a hawkish 50 basis points. We will see. We'll kind of listen to Jerome Powell's call here in just a few minutes. But again, there's the there's the whole program on Black Card. We're only looking for 11 people. This is an exclusive program. This is not for everybody. We're looking for people that are serious, that want to move. forward that see this vision. And guess what? I'll say one more thing. Even if you're not ready to launch a fund like today, that's totally fine. We have a lot of people, actually, I'd say the majority of people join Black Card and they hop on calls with other people in Black Card. They listen in, they learn, they're on the inside, and they learn from other people launching funds. And just by nature of osmosis, it moves the needle way faster in their own business. And it might take you 3 or 4 months, and you might, for the first 3 months, you might just show up to the meetings and calls and listen in. And then 3 months from now, you go, okay, I've put together all the pieces. Now I'm going to go ahead and I'm launching this syndication. I'm launching this fund. That's what happened for me. That's how I launched my first fund. I got in the right rooms. I started to understand by osmosis, absorb a lot of stuff. And then it showed me back to, uh, kind of the analogy we've used is that, um, The the fish analogy right here with Gordon Ramsay. That's what makes a good fund. That's what's a good offer. Anybody can go build legal docs. Can you build something that is? Here's some more testimonials. I was going to see if I had the the that Gordon Ramsay picture again. But can I build a fund? Is at the beginning up here. Can I build a fund that isn't a stinky fish? That's like a beautiful meal. Anybody can buy legal docs. Anybody can go hire lawyer. By the way, that's the easiest part of the process. in my opinion. The big crux is, can you build something amazing? This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is a get-really-rich-in-the-long-term scheme, I guess, if you want to call it that way. Funds has produced, by statistics, the most billionaires of any category on earth. Okay? So, with that, go grab that link. Adam will keep dropping it. We'll have it live in here. Here it is one more time. And then let's actually pull up the Fed minutes here and kind of dive in. Um, to what they said, then we'll, then we'll stream Jerome Powell here in about 15 minutes. Does that sound good? Okay. Um, let's go over here. So let's refresh our screen here. Okay. FOMC statement. Can you guys read this at all? Let me zoom in. Okay. So recent indicators suggest that economic activity has continued to expand at a solid pace. We'll probably hear him read this in a minute. We want to achieve 2%, uh, in the longer run. Great. We're doing awesome. The committee decided to lower the target rate for federal funds rate by a half percentage point. That's pretty awesome. Pretty fun. Now, we talked about this earlier. I'm curious to hear his comments and hear their, you know, the rhetoric behind this. But we talked about the Fed funds rate here. Almost every time they lower the Fed funds rate, it causes a recession. Almost every time. One of the main big exceptions, and I'm sure Hill's going to You know, he they're going to shoot for. So if you look at the moment they've lowered, they've either lowered rates in a recession or right before recession. This is 2001 dot com bubble. They lowered rates right before 2007-2008. They lowered rates right before COVID and right now we are here. So can they do what Ray Dalio talks about as a beautiful deleveraging? 1995 is a is a one time where they lowered rates. If I zoom in here, maybe I can see a little bit better. They lowered rates here without. Causing a big market crash or recession. Now, that's the big discussion right now with the Fed. So we'll see what Jerome Powell says. I'm sure he's obviously trying to do a soft landing. We're going to see if this soft landing really works and really comes out. But that's what I'm sure they're targeting for. They're going to try to communicate to become something like that. Now, I mentioned this yesterday, if you guys missed, but the fact that the federal government is spending about $1 trillion every 100 days. Is wild. I personally think it's hard to have a crash when you're spending a trillion dollars every hundred days. It things can't crash. I know people on YouTube like if there things are supposed to crash, things are supposed to crash, but it's almost impossible to crash if you're spending a trillion dollars every hundred days. Like like you know things get like remember two weeks ago at the beginning of September we had that Black Monday. The almost Black Monday, and the market sold off. Market crash—it's here. And then guess what? Four days later, it was bought right back up, and it's actually you know gone right like it's there. All this cap on the sideline came back in. There is so much liquidity. There's so much capital on the sideline. It's hard for things to crash. You look at another example I was sharing. Let's look at real estate. Medium sale prices of homes. Here they are in Fred. So if we look at the last decade here, 10 years, so home prices, they spiked a lot since COVID We raised rates at the fastest rate in history and median home prices have fallen. I think it's 8% since the top. $442,000 is the top report here right now at $412,000. Like they haven't fallen that much. However, affordability for homes has almost been halved. It's twice as expensive to buy a home today than it was back in 2020 because of interest rates. But home prices have barely faltered. Again, we'll see. I could be totally wrong. But when today we're, you know, 50 basis points down, if they keep cutting— today we're going to get a dot plot from the Fed and show the next— their projections over the next 12 to 18 months. Do you think home prices are going to go up or down if interest rates drop?

Probably up.

Right? Way more, way easier to buy a home. How many people do you know that are on the sidelines waiting, right? They're waiting for rates to come down. I know dozens of people. Oh, I'm waiting to get a home. I just am waiting for rates to come down. It's like, well, when rates come down, guess what's going to happen? There's going to be way more buyers. And guess what? Prices go up. And so, we'll see. Maybe I'm off. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see how the market responds. My prediction, I'm going to put my prediction out there. I think we will have short-term volatility. I'm saying 2 to 3 months, short-term volatility. Um, but 6 to 12 to 18 months, uh, very bullish. Uh, we're also having a presidential election right now. Uh, 9 out of 10 times after the president is decided, the market rallies. Right now we have 2 options. We have Harris and Trump. Both options, in my opinion, uh, as much as the media wants to paint it's The death to America if either one gets elected, I think it's going to be kind of the same. Now, I have my political opinions on who I want to vote for, but I think if it's a Trump presidency or a Harris presidency, I think as far as markets go, I think it's going to be relative. I mean, there's obviously some big changes and shifts, but as far as markets go, it's kind of like, remember going from Trump to Biden? It was going to be the end of the world. And guess what? Things are kind of the same. Remember going from Obama to Trump? Guess what? Things were kind of the same. Trump's presidency, I think, did very well, and Biden's had some problems, in my opinion. But overall, the market rallied. The market went up. Like, things, you know, as far as an investment point of view, the way I think about it is I don't care who president is. I'm going to make tons of money. That's the way I think about it. And obviously, I am— I study politics a lot. I don't like to share that on my stuff right now here, but either way, I'm making tons of money. Anybody else agree with that? Like, I don't care who the president is. I'm making tons of money. I'm going to figure out how to make a ton of money, whether it's Harris or Trump. I'm making tons of money on this next 4 years. I'm going to crush it. I'm going to kill it. I'm going to do amazing. So, boom, that's the mindset. So, let's plan for either one. And the market right now is pretty fearful of a president, which it was last time, and it was in 2016. We've had some crazy presidential elections. I mean, 2016 was wild. 2020 was wild. 2024 is already wild. And every time after the president's decided, guess what? The market rallies. And so that's kind of where I'm at now. I won't go any deeper on all my political opinions and things, but anyways, I do pray for our country though. I pray for our country a lot. I really hope there are good people that can get elected and run this country and be honest and be good. And I know it's a far-fetched thing, but man, We could use some help. Um, but either way, I'm gonna make tons of money. So, all right, okay, let's go to the home. We got, um, 8 minutes left here until Jerome Powell goes live. Let's do this. I mentioned earlier I was gonna talk about, um, uh, the waffle, the fund waffle. So let's talk about this for a second. We'll, and then in 8 minutes, we'll, we'll tune in live to Jerome Powell. So here's that link. Adam's, uh, Adam and my team can keep dropping that link. Feel free to go, uh, book a call. Our team, if you want to learn more about Black Card. All right, so let me scroll back up. I skipped this part. So we were talking. Where are we? Where are we on here? All right, so we talked about yeah, here we go. We talked about starting and getting in the game. We talked about Ray Dalio, Fun Launch Partners, Ugly Unicorn, like how we did all this. We talked about Penny Doubled Every Day, Robert F. Smith, Kathy Wood, Ken Griffin, how they did this. They all start started and got in the game. So um. I love this concept of how do you condense time? And a mentor shared with me, and I love this. He said, money is faster than time. Money is faster than time. Anybody heard this before? The concept is about speed. Money is faster than time, meaning if I have lots of money, the leverage of money, I can do things much faster than putting time towards something. If I wanted to build a house, and I'll share that example in just a second, if I put my time towards it, I could— Bridger Pennington could learn how to do electrical and plumbing and framing. But if I have a lot of money, I can pay and get leverage and buy labor to come and build the house for me. My house can get done a lot faster. Okay? The concept of money is faster than time. And then he shared further, he said, there's only 2 things in business. The best business owners on earth learn strategy and build teams. Kind of all they do. They learn great strategies and they build great teams. They're very— if you look at the top companies, Apple, Google, Amazon, what are they all focused on? Recruiting, people management, talent management. They'll pay huge salaries because they understand attracting the right talent is what builds these great strategies. Like AI right now, like they are paying top dollar for whoever can build the best, fastest AI. They learn strategy, they build a team. Jeff Bezos, use him as an example. This is Jeff Bezos in 1998. I freaking love this picture, by the way, of Jeff. Like, this is hope for anybody. Like, you're only a couple hundred billion dollars away from any life you want. Okay? I want— if you take one thing away from today's call, you're only a couple hundred billion dollars away from any life you want to live. I love, like, the jacked Jeff Bezos. Okay? Okay. So, that's where— that's all we're at. Let's take Jeff Bezos, for example. Okay? When they obviously CEO of Amazon, they wanted to launch AWS. Okay, AWS. There's a whole interesting story about how they came up with AWS. They have a rule in Amazon: you can't say no to things unless you can write up a detailed report on why it should be struck down or it's a no. Well, this idea of AWS came out, and no one could figure out why to say no to AWS. And so finally said, "Let's do it." So they took he took Andy Jassy. Said Andy, go do this new thing of AWS. What did Andy and what did Jeff Bezos do? So they went and they built a team. Okay, so Jeff Bezos didn't go build AWS. He got Andy Jassy. They went and built. Here's their team, and ta-da! They went and built the AWS. One of the most profitable, successful companies of all time. A lot of people don't talk about AWS or think about it as much as far as Amazon. AWS is a behemoth of a business. Okay, Elon Musk. How does Elon Musk do it?

How does he do all this stuff?

Rockets. Like, does Elon Musk do this all himself? Like, obviously not, right? He hired Gwynne Shotwell when they're launching SpaceX. COO of President of SpaceX, formerly at NASA. Ta-da! Gwynne went and built a great team. Elon had the strategy. We're going to be multi-planetary. We're going to go to space. Let's go build a great team. Money is faster than time. Let's spend the money. Let's go get people. Let's go do this faster time. There's only two things in business. You learn strategy. And you build teams. And when, at least when this mentor of mine, he put this down for me, I was like, oh, it like simplified so many things for me. If I can just learn strategy and build a great team, I can kind of do anything. I don't need to go learn how to do all this crap. I just need to learn the strategy and build a team that can do this. Okay? Just like I mentioned this with the house, like it'd be very inefficient to go learn how to plumb and be in electrical and how to roof. It's way better to Have a strategy and go build a team. Many of you on this call, I'm guessing yesterday and today, are like, hey, I would love to build a fund. Okay, Bridger, show me all the mechanics of building a fund, which I can do. I will happily go into all that stuff. I can show you how to plumb and how to put a window in and how to put garage doors in. But we can also talk about teams and building a great team. Learn a strategy and build a great team. These are the 3 roles in every fund. We talked about this yesterday. These 3 roles need to be taken care of, whether it's 1 person that does these or 50 people. All 3 of these roles need to be done. The expert investor, this person is great at the trades or the investing. Fund manager, this person is really good at funds. So compliance, HR, SEC, working with SEC legal, all that kind of stuff. And a cap raiser, this person is very natural-born salespeople, just is well networked and get in the door, can talk to anybody. Okay. Now, you, if you learn the strategy, you can build the team. Type in the chat for me, which one do you gravitate towards more? Are you more right now the expert investor, the fund manager, or the capital raiser? Which role do you gravitate towards more, like currently right now? And I'll tell you this, I, Bridger, I'm a very good fund manager and I'm a pretty good capital raiser. I do not claim to be this world-class investor. What I do is I'm pretty good at, pretty good at funds or pretty decent at raising capital. And I go find really good experts that I can partner With that's what I do. Okay, you don't have to do that, but other people type in the chat which one do you gravitate towards more? Are you more the guy that's hey, I've done real estate for twenty years. I'm just amazing at expert investor, and I'm going to try to find a fund manager capital raiser. Type in the chat which one do you gravitate towards more? Now what's cool about this is people on the call right now, your partners are here. No one does this alone. I mentioned Blackheart earlier, but that's what we do in Blackheart. We try to connect everybody to the right people on their team, like Gwen Shotwell, right? Andy Jassy, how they went and built their team. When I was looking at this, it kind of felt like a waffle. I was like, this looks like a waffle the way these things are put out. So we started to make a little framework called the Fund Waffle. What are the teams that you need to build for your fund? Now I got 2 minutes here. I'm going to go very quickly through this, but these are the teams that I would say you would build. So you have your expert investor, your fund manager, your capital raiser, and you have third-party partners. In your fund, okay? Now there's a lot of sub-items underneath there. Now you can do multiple roles or one role or five roles, whatever you want to do. But let's go through each one. An expert investor. This would be like your chief investment officer, your underwriting, your investment committee, your board of advisors, your asset managers would all fall under this expert investor tab. Number two, fund manager. This is in-house legal, internal audit, compliance officer, financial officer, KYC, AML. I'm going faster. We got we got we got to move. Investor relations, event coordinator, copywriter, pitch deck designer, website builder, all here. And then your third-party partners, your third-party audit, admin, brokers, banking partners, insurance, and there's more. But it gives you a sense of building out your waffle. If you want to spend time doing this, this kind of estimated how much time it would take to do all these. Uh, it'd take 11 years to be proficient at all these above. Now, uh, some people do this. Some people try to go and be proficient at all of these different Money is faster than time. Okay? If you ever mess with someone that keeps getting degrees after degrees after degrees, and I had a PhD guy came and spoke to me. He goes, I was so scared of changing the world that I kept going to school. You ever met someone like this?

No.

And he was like, that was me. He's like, I have 3 doctorates and a master's degree. He's like, I was so scared of changing the world, I went and kept getting degrees. Now, how much time or how much money would it take to buy this? And I'm going to, I'm going to end right here, but I like this. I'm going to end here. But instead of being 11 years away, you're only maybe a quarter million dollars away. Money is faster than time. That's hopefully, that's very freeing to you. It's much faster. Instead of 11 years, $285,000 isn't actually that far away. And then we talked about with Black Card how we actually come and we checkmark and fill all these roles with you and go through and actually help you figure out and do all this inside of your fund. All right. I'm going to wrap on that for now. Let's go here. We've got Jerome Powell coming live. Here he is.

Good afternoon. Uh, my colleagues and I remain squarely focused on achieving our dual mandate goals of maximum employment and stable prices for the benefit of the American people. Our economy is strong overall and has made significant progress toward our goals over the past 2 years. The labor market has cooled from its formerly overheated state, Inflation has eased substantially from a peak of 7% to an estimated 2.2% as of August. We're committed to maintaining our economy's strength by supporting maximum employment and returning inflation to our 2% goal. Today, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to reduce the degree of policy restraint by lowering our policy interest rate by a half percentage point. This decision reflects our growing confidence that with an appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the labor market can be maintained in a context of moderate growth and inflation moving sustainably down to 2%. We also decided to continue to reduce our securities holdings. I will have more to say about monetary policy after briefly reviewing economic developments. Recent indicators suggest that economic activity has continued to expand at a solid pace. GDP rose at an annual rate of 2.2% in the first half of the year, and available data point to a roughly similar pace of growth this quarter. Growth of consumer spending has remained resilient, and investment in equipment and intangibles has picked up from its anemic pace last year. In the housing sector, investment fell back in the second quarter after rising strongly in the first. Improving supply conditions have supported resilient demand in the strong performance of the U.S. economy over the past year. In our Summary of Economic Projections, Committee participants generally expect GDP growth to remain solid, with a median projection of 2% over the next few years. In the labor market, conditions have continued to cool. Payroll job gains averaged 116,000 per month over the past 3 months, a notable step down from the pace seen earlier in the year. The unemployment rate has moved up but remains low at 4.2%. Nominal wage growth has eased over the past year, and the jobs-to-workers gap has narrowed. Overall, a broad set of indicators suggest that conditions in the labor market are now less tight just before the pandemic in 2019. The labor market is not a source of elevated inflationary pressures. The median projection for the unemployment rate in the SEP is 4.4% at the end of this year, 0.4% higher than projected in June. Inflation has eased notably over the past 2 years but remains above our longer-run goal of 2%. Estimates based on the Consumer Price Index and other data indicate that total PCE prices rose 2.2% over the 12 months ending in August, and that excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core PCE prices rose 2.7%. Longer-term inflation expectations appear to remain well anchored, as reflected in a broad range of surveys of households, businesses, and forecasters. As well as measures from financial markets. The median projection in the SEP for total PCE inflation is 2.3% this year and 2.1% next year, somewhat lower than projected in June. Thereafter, the median projection is 2%. Our monetary policy actions are guided by our dual mandate to promote maximum employment and stable prices for the American people. For much of the past 3 years, inflation ran well above our 2% goal, and labor market conditions were extremely tight. Our primary focus had been on bringing down inflation, and appropriately so. We are acutely aware that high inflation imposes significant hardship as it erodes purchasing power, especially for those least able to meet the higher costs of essentials like food, housing, and transportation. Our restrictive monetary policy has helped restore the balance between aggregate supply and demand, easing inflationary pressures and ensuring that inflation expectations remain well anchored. Our patient approach over the past year has paid dividends. Inflation is now much closer to our objective, and we have gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%. As inflation has declined and the labor market has cooled, the upside risks to inflation have diminished and the downside risks to employment have increased. We now see the risks to achieving our employment and inflation goals as roughly in balance, and we are attentive to the risks to both sides of our dual mandate. In light of the progress on inflation and the balance of risks, at today's meeting the Committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate by a half percentage point to 4.75% to 5%. This recalibration of our policy stance will help maintain the strength of the economy and the labor market and will continue to enable further progress on inflation as we begin the process of moving toward a more neutral stance. We are not on any preset course. We will continue to make our decisions Meeting by meeting, we know that reducing policy restraint too quickly could hinder progress on inflation. At the same time, reducing restraint too slowly could unduly weaken economic activity and employment. In considering additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks. In our SEP. FOMC participants wrote down their individual assessments of an appropriate path for the federal funds rate based on what each participant judges to be the most likely scenario going forward. If the economy evolves as expected, the median participant projects that the appropriate level of the federal funds rate will be 4.4% at the end of this year and 3.4% at the end of 2025. These median projections are lower than in June, consistent with the projections for lower inflation and higher unemployment. As well as the changed balance of risks. These projections, however, are not a Committee plan or decision. As the economy evolves, monetary policy will adjust in order to best promote our maximum employment and price stability goals. If the economy remains solid and inflation persists, we can dial back policy restraint more slowly. If the labor market were to weaken unexpectedly or inflation were to fall more quickly than anticipated, We are prepared to respond. Policy is well positioned to deal with the risks and uncertainties that we face in pursuing both sides of our dual mandate. The Fed has been assigned 2 goals for monetary policy: maximum employment and stable prices. We remain committed to supporting maximum employment, bringing inflation back down to our 2% goal, and keeping longer-term inflation expectations Well anchored. Our success in delivering on these goals matters to all Americans. We understand that our actions affect communities, families, and businesses across the country.

That's a razor, razor thin edge.

Our public mission. We at the Fed will do everything we can to achieve our maximum employment and price stability.

Saying we have a strong economy, but we we'll see some questions here. But yeah, that's a it's an edge he's got to fall in. I think it's a good speech. I think that. Markets will respond well to that. See what he says here.

In July, you said you weren't necessarily thinking about it. You didn't want to be specific, but you said you were thinking about a 50. The inflation data last week came out a little firmer than expected. Retail was strong. Third quarter GDP running 3%. So what changed and made the committee go 50? And how do you respond to the concerns that perhaps it shows the Fed is more concerned about the labor market? And I guess, should we expect more 50s in the months ahead? And based on what should we make that call? Thank you.

So he's not going to answer that question.

Let me jump in. So since the last meeting— okay, the last meeting, we have had a lot of data come in. We've had the 2 employment reports, July and August. We've also had 2 inflation reports, including one that came in during blackout. We had the QCEW report, which suggests that maybe— that not maybe, but suggests that the payroll report numbers that we're getting may be artificially high and will be revised down. You know that. We've also seen anecdotal data like the Beige Book. So we took all of those and we went into blackout and we thought about what to do. And we concluded that this was the right thing for the economy, for the people that we serve. And that's, that's how we made our decision. So that's one question. What was, what was the second and third?

I think he's just going to answer these. Just, we're going to make data as we come in. But he's asking if there's another 25 or 50, how do we determine that? He's just going to say we're going to decide at each meeting.

A good place to start is, is the, is the SEP. But let me start with what I said, which was that we're going to be making decisions meeting by meeting. Based on the incoming data, the evolving outlook, the balance of risks. If you look at the SEP, you'll see that it's a process of recalibrating our policy stance away from where we had it a year ago when inflation was high and unemployment low to a place that's more appropriate given where we are now and where we expect to be. And that process will take place over—

So it's, I mean, they should ask him about We're 20% up though since COVID Just look here real quick.

The actual things that we do will depend on the way the economy evolves. We can go quicker if that's appropriate. We can go slower if that's appropriate. We can pause if that's appropriate. But that's, that's what we are contemplating. And again, I would, I would point you to the SEP as just an assessment of where What the committee is thinking today, but the individual members rather of the committee are thinking today, assuming that their particular forecasts, you know, are realized.

Yeah, uptick on pretty much all markets are rallying right now. Bitcoin's up, S&P, Dow. Thank you.

The projections show that the Fed Fed officials expect the Fed funds rate to still be above their estimate of.

Long-run neutral by the end of next year.

So does, does that suggest you see rates as restrictive for that entire period? Does that threaten the weakening of the job market that you said you'd like to avoid? Or does it suggest that maybe people see the short-run neutral as a little bit higher? Thank you. I think it would— the way I would really characterize it is this. I think people write down their estimate, individuals do. I think every single person on the Committee, If you ask them what's your level of certainty around that, they would say there's a wide range where, where that could fall. So I think we don't know. There, there are models.

Yeah, he's gonna ask that. We don't know. Sorry on the volume, by the way. I'm just going off my computer here. We didn't pipe it in very, very— we're kind of using the microphone. But yeah, markets are rallying right now. Most, most are responding well. So we'll see if it, uh— I keep saying short-term volatility, but we'll see. Uh, and I'll just say next— yeah, we'll just see how it goes. I hope someone just pins him about the election. You know, are you? That's last time that somebody pinned him. He was like, "We don't do anything on the election," but it's a good question, man. Cutting right before an election. So they usually do. So we've been talking about for a year is cutting right before an election. But I they're they're walking this this razor thin, you know, razor thin this razor thin mark right here. And I think he had a good speech. I actually think it was like, "Hey, we're gonna we're gonna walk this." line of a good economy to a bad economy. We're going to make decisions as they come in. We're not going to give you any projections. That's how you would, if you're trying to do the 1995 deleveraging without causing a recession, that's exactly what you would say. And good job on you, Jerome Powell, for saying it just like that. And I think markets will be pretty healthy. We're spending $1 trillion every 100 days. So how do you not have markets continue to rally? And I think once we decide a president, I think, I personally think markets are going to continue to rally. So it should be pretty fun. Let's dive back in.

What you have is our individual accumulation of individual estimates of what that will be in the base case.

Howard.

Howard Schneider with Reuters. How close was this in terms of the decision? You do have the first dissent by a governor since 2005, I think. Was the weight clearly in favor of a 50 or Was this a very close decision? I think we had a good, a good discussion. You know, if you go back, I talked about this at Jackson Hole, but I didn't address the question of the size of the cut, left it open. And I think we left it open going into, into blackout. And so there was a lot of discussion back and forth, good diversity of opinion, excellent discussion today. I think there was also broad support for the decision that the committee voted on. So I would, I would add, though, look at the SEP. All 19 of the participants wrote down multiple cuts this year. All 19. That's a big change from June, right? 7 of the— 7 of them wrote down 3 or more and— sorry, 17 of the 19 wrote down 3 or more cuts and 10 of the 19 wrote down 4 or more cuts. So, you know, there is a dissent and there's a range of views, but there's actually a lot of common ground as well.

Wow, there we go. So maybe, yeah, maybe a lot more cuts this year. Keep, yeah, keep driving in.

Give us some guidance that sort of follows the statement on the pacing here. Uh, would you expect this to be running every other meeting, uh, once we get into next year? Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna take it meeting by meeting. As I mentioned, we, there's no sense.

Yeah, no answer there. But that's, that was interesting. He's like, we, most of our, our, yeah, we, '17, we wanted 3 Cuts, and he said 10. I think wanted 4 cuts this year. There you go. There's some rate cuts. He's got to follow this razor edge thin though of of we have a strong economy. We're good, but we're going to cut just slightly. We need to cut, but we're really strong. It's a hard line to bounce, which he's doing pretty well in this press conference. But and hopefully keeps keeps going carefully. Yeah, he's just going to say meeting by meeting. Yeah, to answer that question. That's all he that's all he said here.

Jeanna.

Hi, Chair Powell. Jeanna Smialek with The New York Times. Thanks for taking our questions. You and your colleagues in your economic projections today see the unemployment rate climbing to 4.4% and staying there. Obviously, historically, when the unemployment rate climbs that much over a relatively short period of time, it doesn't typically just stop. It continues increasing. And so I wonder if you can walk us through why you see the labor market stabilizing, sort of What's the mechanism there, and what do you see as the risks?

That's a good question. So, again, the labor market is actually in a solid condition. And our intention with our policy move today is to keep it there. You can say that about the whole economy. The U.S. economy is in good shape. It's growing at a solid pace. Inflation is coming down. The labor market is in a strong pace. We want to keep it there. That's, that's what we're doing.

Yeah, good answer. Keep it going. Except for the labor market, they keep revising the jobs reports. I think 9 of the last 9 times they've revised the jobs report down. I mean, it was worse than what they reported. Constitute a catch-up in action given recent substantial revisions to the employment data, or is this larger than typical rate cut a function of the elevated nominal level?

of the policy rate such that an accelerated cadence could be expected to continue.

Okay. He said they're— yeah, revised data. They keep revising the data. So they, they post good data and then they revise it bad.

We think this is timely, but I think you can take this as a sign of our commitment not to get behind. So it's, it's a strong move. Sorry, your other question was?

Well, is this, is this about what happened in the employment data between this meeting and the last meeting, or is this about the level of the funds rate, the high nominal level of the funds rate relative to what might be expected if you're trying to maintain equilibrium?

I think it's about— we come into this with a policy position that was put in place, as you know, I mentioned, in July of 2023, which was a time of high inflation and very low unemployment. We've been very patient. About, about reducing the policy rate. We've waited. Other central banks around the world have cut, many of them several times. We've waited. And I think that that patience has really paid dividends in the form of our confidence that inflation is moving sustainably under 2%. So I think that is what enables us to take this, this strong move today. I do not think that, that anyone should look at this and say, oh, this is the new pace. Uh, you know, we have You have to think about it in terms of the base case. Of course, what happens will happen. So, so in the base case, what you see is look at the SEP, you see cuts moving along. The sense of this is we're recalibrating policy down over time to a more neutral level, and we're moving at the pace that we think is appropriate given developments in the economy. In the base case, the economy can develop in a way that would cause us to go faster or slower. And if I could follow up on the balance sheet.

In 2019, when you did the mid-cycle adjustment, you ceased the balance sheet runoff.

With a larger cut today, is there any—

should there be any signal inferred about how the Committee would approach end state on the balance sheet? Great question, dude. Great question.

Current situation, reserves have really been stable. They haven't come down significantly. So reserves are still abundant and expected to remain so for some time. As you know, the shrinkage in our balance sheet has really come out of the overnight RRP. So I think what that tells you is we're not thinking about, about stopping runoff because of this at all. We know that these 2 things can happen side by side. In a sense, they're both a form of normalization. And so for a time, you can have the balance sheet shrinking but also be cutting rates.

Yeah. So they're, we'll see if they keep, I mean, during COVID they bought, you know, I can't remember how many trillion of equities they're buying stocks. Like they're, it's crazy. Let me hear this. Is this just a function of a normalizing labor market amid improved supply, or is there anything to suggest that something more concerning perhaps is taking place here given that other metrics of labor demand have softened too?

And I guess in Derek Paul's But, Jeanna, is— do you not— why should we not expect a further deterioration in labor market conditions if policy is still restrictive? So I think what we're seeing is clearly labor market conditions have cooled off by any measure, as I talked about in Jackson Hole. And— but they're still at a level— the level of those conditions is actually pretty close to what I would call maximum employment. You know, so you're close to mandate, maybe at mandate on that. So what's driving it? Clearly, clearly, payroll job creation has moved down over the last few months, and this bears watching. By many other measures, the labor market has returned to or below 2019 levels, which was a very good, strong labor market. But this is more sort of 2018, '17. So the labor market bears close, bears close watching, and we'll be giving it that. But ultimately, we think, we believe with an appropriate recalibration of our policy that we can continue to see the economy growing and that will support the labor market. In the meantime, if you look at—

Yeah, I love— actually, Michael, I agree with your comment. Long-term inflation remains anchored. I totally agree with that. Yes, year-over-year inflation has come down, but we are up roughly 20% on everything long-term. We are in an inflationary decade. I think we should call it. That's one way to think about assets right now. All the assets that me and you own, I think there is a new benchmark. I mentioned this when I was talking. Let's see. Let's go here on real estate. Real estate median real estate prices. Obviously, we've raised rates, and now we just cut 50 basis points today. But median home prices, right? People are like, where's the housing crash? I think this is the crash. Crash right here. I think that is the housing crash because houses really should be up here because of this new inflation data. Like we're at we are anchored now in inflation. We're up 20% on pretty much everything. And maybe this is already the bump, but I think we're this is the new base. This is the new level of where the base is and where things are going. That's my opinion on this next let's call it decade, the 2020s. I don't think we will ever see a 327 median house price again, like in the at least the I mean we can go back this is 2014. Like I just don't think we're going back to that level. I don't think we'll ever get back to that level. That's how much money has entered the system. So but we'll see. We'll see what they end up doing, and and we'll go from there. We can see some more of these questions. Great call today, you guys. Thanks for coming on. I'll probably stand for just a few more seconds. And I think actually it's a good speech. I, you know, some people really criticize the Fed and maybe they were too late on COVID, but man, I think that was a good speech. I think they've done decent about raising rates and balance this balancing act of what they're doing. We'll see how it plays out. I actually, I thought today's cut was appropriate. I think his speech was great of like, we have a strong economy. We're balancing. We're gonna go. We're gonna go meeting to meeting. If he had came out and said we're cutting ten times over the next year, I mean, I think the markets would sell off. I think it would be panic. I think there would be all sorts of crazy stuff that would happen. I'm I'm actually happy he's kind of planning close to the chest. I it looks from that one comment though. He says we are most of our board thinks we're gonna cut three to four times this year, which was telling. But he then went back and said we have no plans. We're gonna. go meeting to meeting. So target end, yeah, 3.5 by the end of 2025. So yeah, they're going to slow and steady. If they can do pull off this, if you go back to my slides here, 1995, this is what they're trying to pull off is right here. Can they cut rates without causing a recession? And I think today's speech was a good first step in that direction. So we'll decide a president here in a couple months and hopefully no one gets assassinated and Hopefully it all just works out and we have, you know, a new administration that can put us in hopefully a decent direction and make tons of money. So anyways, good call today, you guys. I'll put this out one more time. Adam can drop in the chat too if you guys want to apply. We've had a bunch of people come on, come apply. We'll do calls after today and tomorrow if you want to test drive Black Card from now until September 27th. So 9 days, it was 10 days yesterday, announced 9 days. You can come apply, $99 application fee, totally refundable. We're looking for 11 people that want to come on our cruise and hang out with us and join Black Card fully and be part of Black Card. It's pretty fun. So yeah, pretty fun. Okay. Y'all are amazing. Great call today. You guys can still tune in more, I'm sure. Maybe we listen to one more question here. Let's see how they— what we're talking about.

Low mid-3s. Last year, but if you look back over the sweep of the years, that's a that's a low that's a very healthy unemployment rate, and anything in the low fours is is a really is a is a good labor market. So that's one thing. Participation is at high levels. It's you know we we've had we're right adjusted for demographics for aging. Paul participation's at at pretty high levels. That's a good thing. Wages are still a bit above. What would be their wage increases, rather, are still just a bit above where they would be over the very longer term to be consistent with 2% inflation. But they're very much coming down to what that sustainable level is. So we feel good about that. Vacancies over, you know, per unemployed is back to what is still a very strong level. It's not as high as it was. That number reached 2 to 1, 2 vacancies for every unemployed person as measured. It's now below Around, it's around one, but that's still that's still a very good number. I would say, you know, quits have have come back down to normal levels. I mean, that could go on and on. There there are many many employment indicators. What do they say? They say this is still a solid labor market. The question isn't the level. The question is that there has been change over particularly over the last few months, and you know, so we what we say is as the as the risks the upside risk to inflation. have really come down, the downside risks to employment have increased. And because we have been patient and held our fire on cutting while inflation has come down, I think we're now in a very good position to manage the risks to both of our goals. And what do you expect to learn between now and—

So yeah, the one thing I would say back is labor statistics, they keep revising them down. They come out these great jobs I think it's nine of the last nine they've revised to be worse. Yeah, we had this great job, and then like two months later, oh, we had to revise it. But no one sees the revised numbers; they just see the big headline. If if you're really running a sample size, fifty percent should be up, fifty percent should should revise down. Nine of the last nine have revised to be worse. Like who's doing these numbers? You know, they're anyways. I I think it's that's an interesting thing. I wish they would talk about more. Additionally, the labor market—if you go look at the actual jobs created—a lot of them have been part-time jobs. The part and which count as there's full-time and part-time jobs—they count as the jobs report. The part-time numbers are way higher, and that could be from people they you know they got Uber, they got a second, they got a third, they got three jobs in one because they got three part-time jobs to make up for one full-time job that they lost because of you know this kind of. Pseudo-recession we're in. So anyways, uh, those are a few of my thoughts. Um, you guys can go, uh, finish up here. I got to run to a meeting. Um, pitching a bunch of great people in just a second, so I got to run. I'm actively running a fund right now, people. I'm running a fund. I'm doing this full-time, and I, I'm coming on with you guys today. Tomorrow we'll be back at 11:00 AM, uh, Mountain. That'll be 1:00 PM Eastern. We'll be live for day 3. We're going to talk more about, uh, specifically your fund, uh, a lot of the mechanics around your fund. We're going to talk about international feeder funds. We're going to talk about, um, capital raising all tomorrow. It should be fun. Should be pretty good. So, y'all are amazing. Have a great day. Go do good in the world. Go help people out. Today was awesome. Thanks for staying on for quite a long call today, but it was pretty fun. You guys are amazing. Thanks to my team and everybody helping out here. So, we'll see y'all later. See you guys tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.