The 3 Biggest Mistakes New Fund Managers Make

Okay. Today we're going to talk about the 3 biggest mistakes fund managers make. I'll restart here. There we go. What's up, y'all? Say hello in the livestream. I am going to confidently speak to these 3 things because I have made all of them multiple times. I currently run 2 funds. We manage 2 8-figure funds right now. We've helped launch 300+ funds through Fund Launch. And I've seen people make this mistake over and over and over again. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So welcome on, y'all. Thanks for the patience. Good to see you, Chris. Good to see you, Josh. Good to see you on here, Adam. Good to see y'all. Welcome on. Welcome on. Okay, so there we go. Stay on for the perfect audio. Here we go. So let's talk about the 3 biggest mistakes fund managers make. We're not going to waste any time today. We're diving right in. So number 1, the biggest mistake I see, no particular order here, but number 1 is my idea is perfect. Most people show up, you know, with Fund Launch, we help people all around the world do funds. And they're like, Bridger, I have this great options trading strategy. I'm out in New York. I think it's going to crush. I say, great. I'm going to go. We're doing farmland in Wyoming. We're going to put cows and organic farming together and hydroponic systems. It's going to be phenomenal. I say, great. That sounds very cool. The problem is though, people get too married to their idea. What happens if I'm going to draw on here? Number one, they don't backtest these ideas, meaning can, and not all strategies can do this, but can you go and backtest The strategy? Can you go back and see what's working and what's not working in the past? Number 2 is they don't iterate on the current idea. Now I'm going to zoom out for a second and actually show you. We talk a lot about this in Black Card and all of our funds. We have this Fund Launch Formula. This is a 4-step formula for launching funds. This is proprietary to us. This is this unique framework that we have used to help people launch funds. Now, if you're If you haven't seen this before, no worries. We can come back and you can see other YouTube videos and stuff. But we dive into, in a brief summary of this, what I'll say is we found after interviewing hundreds of fund managers that were successful, many of them followed this formula to a T and they didn't even know it. And we finally put it together and said, there's a strategic way that people go out and launch funds. Most people believe if they want to go launch an investment fund, Go hire the lawyers. Go find some lawyers and hopefully you go raise capital. That's if you go read a blog post or whatever, that's what people will tell you. And I always go, hold on. We actually put that last because what happens, the problem is most people, back to number one, the biggest problem, they come in, they believe their idea is perfect. They don't backtest and they think it's perfect. I'm not going to iterate on it. They They go hire a lawyer. They spend, let's call it $50 grand in legal fees. They hire the lawyer. They then go pitch investors and no one really invests. It's kind of a rough start. No one puts money in. And they go, well, this idea is amazing. I'm going to pitch more people. And it just doesn't quite fit into portfolios. It doesn't quite fit into, there's no strong compelling edge. For this firm, it's a me-too product. And it, number one, either just doesn't launch and you're stuck with a $50,000 legal bill for putting this together because you still, the lawyers are going to get paid, right? Lawyers are going to get paid. I know that. They're going to charge you. They're going to nickel and dime you. Okay? Or number two, you keep hitting your head against the wall. Keep hitting head against wall. Sorry, I'm writing this out and talking. And you wonder why no one will invest. Man, no one, it's so hard to raise capital. Capital raising is so hard. The reality is you built a fund no one wanted. So if I go back up to the 3 biggest mistakes fund managers make is they think their idea is perfect, they don't iterate, and they build A fund no one wants. See what I'm getting at with that? It's kind of like the analogy we use. Well, sorry, let me go back. So what we do with the Fonds Formula, what we found was successful funds did the exact opposite. Number one, they went over and they focused on the deal. They focused on finding asymmetrical risk, things with relatively low risk with high return. They structured it together and built a strong edge. We'll come back to this in a minute here, but they had a strong edge, something that's different from their competitors. I'll tell, well, I'll get there in a second. And then they went out and framed the fund. They figured out a great deal. They framed the fund out. They thought through all the mechanics of the fund. Then phase 3, they went and pitched real-world investors. When you pitch real-world investors, you're going to get feedback. You're going to get nos. And that's the most important part is learning why people said no. And what we've seen successful fund managers do after working with 300+ fund managers is the successful ones go back to phase 1 and back to phase 2, and they do this loop. I'm going to draw a circle here of this loop. They talk to investors, they kind of tweak how their offering's put together, they tweak the frame, and they find a fund that investors are dying to have. Does that make sense? If I came down and gave you an analogy, I'm going to come down here. Isn't this kind of cool, by the way, this iPad? I have, dude, I freaking mob out on this iPad all day. It's very fun. I have a good time with it. All right. So this is what we come down and found. Anybody can build legal docs. Anybody, any of you right now could go hire a lawyer. You could spend $50,000 in legal docs and go launch a fund. The big difference is what's, it's kind of like buying a platter. Any of you could go buy a platter off the shelf at a store. Any of you could go buy this item at the store, using an analogy here. The question is, what's on the platter? Is it a stinky fish, crappy meal that no one wants? Or is it a beautiful Gordon Ramsay dish? Does that make sense? All of you right now could go launch a fund. You could go buy a platter for $50 grand. The crux of what I teach online, what we do with Fund Launch, what I've done with my funds, is we want to build a fund that investors want. And this goes— this is true actually across the board. Any of you run businesses currently? Type in the chat if you run a business right now. Any of you could go launch a website, right? It's the same analogy. Anybody could go pay somebody to go launch them a website and build a website. The difference is what's on the website, right? There's a big difference between Amazon Amazon's website or Nike's website and some dinky websites built on Wix, right? Now there's quality and stuff, but it comes back to the product, the underlying value of what's on there. So oftentimes we confuse the platter with the actual end result. Does that make sense? So if I come back to the 3 biggest mistakes fund managers make, number one, people believe their idea is perfect from day one. They don't backtest. They don't iterate. And the final thing I'm going to add here, they don't think through how this fits in an investor's portfolio. They don't think through investors. Let's talk like a bigger investor. How does this actually fit? If there's an investor that has a $100 million net worth, They have certain allocations of what they're allocating to different asset classes. So for example, they might say, 50% of our firm is in, or our family is in equities, like stocks, and we could add, maybe add bonds in here, public market things. And then over here, 32% is in real estate. And let's say you're a real estate fund, right? You're wanting to do real estate. And a lot of people don't realize your pitch Actually fits into a piece of this. They've already decided they like 32% real estate. Maybe they have $32 million in real estate. They like real estate already. Why should they allocate a portion of this, maybe 5% of this to your fund? What makes it unique? Why would they go away from what they're currently doing to your fund? A lot of people don't even think that way and how it pushes into a profile. I'll tell you a real example. It's funny. So one of my funds that I currently run, 8-figure fund, is a crypto fund. It's called Ugly Unicorn. We help people and we have a risk-mitigated strategy in cryptocurrency. We've backdated it for years. We think it's a very compelling strategy. What's funny is we go and talk to these family offices. A lot of times I'll ask them, do you have any crypto exposure? Most, I'll put it in blue here, most of the time it's zero So it's a tiny little sliver right here. And what I'm jockeying for, I'm fighting for is, hey, can our firm manage a portion of, or maybe all of that crypto allocation? Does that make sense? Or, hey, you have zero, you should allocate 1% to 2% of your portfolio to crypto. I'm fighting to even have a seat at the table to be part of their allocation. Does that make sense? Okay, is this following along so far? Is this making sense? You guys like this so far? Okay, so that's number 1, my idea is perfect. People come in and don't want to iterate, don't want to change, okay? Let's go on to number 2, and then I'm going to share a story here real quick. So number 2 is, let me pull up my computer here, it just froze on me. Number 2 revolves around in the pitch. When people go and raise capital, one of the biggest mistakes I see fund managers make—I'm gonna put three little categories here. Let's move this. Actually, I'm gonna move this down a little bit. Okay, here we go. Number one in their pitch: number four, they don't address the macro situation. They hop and they think everyone you know already loves real estate or everyone already loves crypto. They don't address the to the timeless of the here and now. Number two, I kind of mentioned this. They don't have a distinct edge. And number three, they don't position as the. I'm gonna put it in quotes. Pretty girl. Okay. Let me tell you. Is it okay if I tell you guys a quick story? So on on this part of the pitch. So we'll talk about a couple of these here. But I so I had a buddy. Just yesterday, talk about, call me up, very wealthy dude, friend of mine. Bridger, you're the fund guy. I'm looking to raise money. I'm trying to replace a— I have this real estate property. It's like 230 units. I'm trying to replace a portion of that, $5, $7 million with a, you know, of a line of credit with investors. I said, okay. We're looking to do a syndication. We're putting capital together. They had a split. I, you know, something like an 8% pref and an 80/20 split, something like that. I said, okay, that sounds good. And he's like, yeah, no one's put money in yet. I'm trying to take down this $5 million tranche to go and do this deal. And this guy's wealthy. I mean, he's sold a company before. He does very well. He's a friend of mine. I'm like, great, let's talk about it. So he starts to tell me about his real estate deal. And if I come down here, talking about an edge, he just mentioned, all he told me was this. This was the pitch. Hey, it's in real estate. We bought it distressed from a fund. It was way discounted. So discounted. We're, you know, it's one of the best deals I've seen. He's done real estate for the past, I don't know how many years. Let's call it 5 to 7 years. One of the best deals I've seen in 5 to 7 years. So it's a good deal to him. We're going to buy it and, you know, we're going to do some value-add and just hold through this kind of market while rates come down. And we believe it'll be worth a multiple, some kind of multiple later. I said, okay. And in the back of my brain and talking with him, I was like, these are the questions I had. And sorry, I'm jumping ahead here. When talking about an edge in your firm, the questions I had was, well, number one, why should I buy real estate now? The asset class, like why should I get into multifamily real estate? He didn't talk about it at all, didn't address this. And for me, I'm like, ah, it seems like an interesting time to be in multifamily. A lot of rents, distressed properties are coming out, rates are high, rents haven't caught up as fast. Do I want to be in this asset class? Now, he could have convinced me on that, but he didn't on the phone. Number 2, the strategy. Okay? So once you nailed the asset class, the strategy was, well, we're going to buy it and hold it for a little bit and do some value add. Okay. Well, you and everybody else. So why should I invest with you versus these big firms on Wall Street or these great groups that go out and do this? There was nothing unique about the strategy. A lot of people do that strategy. Does that make sense? Furthermore, they went to team. I didn't dive deep on his team, but his team has done this for a few years. Nothing crazy, nothing bad either. It was a fine team, but it wasn't crazy. And then structure was, they wanted to do a 70 30 split with an 8% cash-on-cash return per year, which is average. So I look at this deal, this is yesterday, and I was like, huh, well, he didn't really explain why the asset class is compelling right now. So I don't know. That's a question. I'll put a— let me get my drawer out here. Question mark here. Strategy was a me too, meaning it's the same as other people. Team was okay. And structure was neutral to negative because it was a little bit expensive. Why should I invest in your deal? To be frank. Now, all of you watching this are like, well, yeah, that sounds like I wouldn't invest in that either. It's not that strong. Right? And it's funny, it's easy to look at other people's deals. It's hard to look at our own. Right? It's like we get stuck in, like we're fighting with a plastic bag sometimes. You know, we have this like paper bag over our heads. We can't get out of it. But other people on the outside are like, dude, just pull the paper bag off. Right now, if, if, if he would have come to me and said something different, if he would have said, hey, you know, the real estate market is very compelling right now. Number one, we bought this, which he's— which he did share. We bought this for a huge discount. Furthermore, we believe we can recap this in the next 12 to 18 months with a, you know, a multiple on the recap of the debt. Additionally, asset class of real estate right now, multifamily, it's a great time to be in the market because of X, Y, and Z. And there's these big tectonic plates shifting for this. Furthermore, we have a unique strategy. Yes, we're doing value-add, but we found— we looked at all 230 units. We found 37 of those units. If we redid a certain part of the unit, we could increase rent rates. It's occupied in these areas. We need it. We can— we have an expert leasing strategy person coming in, and we believe that we can get this to 98% occupancy in the next 4 months or 8 months. Okay. Very cool. So somewhat compelling strategy, at least confident strategy. The team, we've got a team with 40-plus combined years of experience put together. We found the top guys out of this other group that came over and helping us. Great. And the structure is very favorable to you. You get paid out first. Back on the back end, we're going to give you 8% and we're going to split it, you know, something favorable to you. Right? Very much different compelling pitch of why should I invest with you rather than somebody else? Many people don't think about their edge here of what is compelling For you in this edge. Does that kind of make sense? Hopefully that's now. I want to share one other story as well, and I've because I have made like all these mistakes. So um so here we go. So we mentioned macro situation. Why does this matter now? Uh and then distinct edge. Uh so we just talked about the edge piece, and then position themselves as the pretty girl. So on the same story, as I'm I'm honest, my buddy calls me up. What did he share with? And now he was looking for advice, so he probably wouldn't do this on a normal call. But some people, I've done this before. Hey man, we're looking to man, we're trying to raise this this deal right now. We got a fund that we're raising for. It's been you know we've been calling everybody up. We've been trying to get capital in. We we really need three million dollars by the end of this month. It's you know it's coming down to it. We're going to lose the deal if we don't get three million. So we're looking for I'm calling up to see. Any interest on this deal? It's a very, you could call it a needy pitch. Hey, I'm looking for some help on this deal. We think it's good, but very needy. Okay? And I've been pitched this way. I have sometimes pitched that way. Hey, yeah, if you could just wrap us up here, that would be awesome for us. It's all about me. And it's about how no one else is putting money in. It's the exact opposite of the pretty girl at the dance. We want to position our offerings as the pretty girl. Everyone's asking out us. We're getting asked to go to the dance with everybody. We're— everybody wants to talk to us. Everybody's putting money in. We're going to be oversubscribed, right? Many of us pitch this neediness. And I've totally done it in the past. And this guy yesterday, it wasn't his fault, but he was doing it to me. He's like, man, it's just been tough to raise capital in this market and we're looking for some help. Okay. Let me share the counter. So one of our funds, Fund Launch Partners, great firm. We launched this last year. Now I'll say this. Some data has come out. We actually have seen the data from 2024 was one of the hardest capital raising markets we've seen in the last 50 years. Multiple data points have told us from PitchBook and Goldman Sachs, 2024 was the hardest, the hardest in the last 30 years to raise capital. Isn't that crazy? There was so much volatility with the election, with interest rates, with just uncertainty. We had a guy I met. So I was at the Greenwich Economic Forum. I was with Ray Dalio and all these other bigwigs and about 200 people from Wall Street and stuff at the Greenwich Economic Forum. It was just a few months ago. We talked to a guy. His whole career is raising capital on Wall Street. He places $500 million to a few billion every year through his broker-dealer. Okay? And he's the head guy. He said 2024 was the hardest year by far. It was harder than '08, harder than '09, and similarly as hard as 2001 with the 9/11 and the dot-com bubble. Isn't that crazy? 2024. What we've seen since then, we had the Trump election. We've had kind of this new resurgence of excitement in America. And I would say in capital markets in America, this has flipped. There's a lot more capital flowing in and M&A activity, IPO activity started to pick up. We'll see how 2025 works out. But if you were trying to raise in 2024, it's okay. It's okay if you didn't do that well. It was a tough market. But I'll tell you a real story. So Fund Launch Partners. And as we were raising, 2024 was tough. We raised, I can't remember the exact numbers. I don't want to say a wrong number on here, but a few million bucks. Okay. We've raised and we were going at it and working hard and trying to raise money. We're trying to raise $50 million. It's the target for Fund Launch Partners. The last few months of 2024, we pivoted strategies and we actually brought in a partner He worked for a company. I don't want to share this all publicly, but I'll share because I don't know if I'm— I'm looking out the window to see if I'm approved to share all this, but I'll just share what he did. The last fund that he launched, this is a guy we brought in, they were trying to raise $750 million. They oversubscribed to roughly $1.2 billion. Okay. They raised it in less than 45 days. Isn't that wild? On his fund. And he came in and is now— we brought him as a partner in Fund Launch Partners to work with us as an advisor. And he was looking at our capital raising strategy and he goes, you guys aren't doing this. You're not positioning yourselves as the pretty girl at the dance. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, well, you're just pitching people just like, hey, you want to put money in? He goes, well, we got to change this whole strategy. I'm like, all right, well, you're the king of this. Let us know what you want to do. He said, all right, we're going to change this up. So we said, what we're going to do is we are going to take on, when you pitch somebody, so we're going to go pitch somebody, we're going to ask at the end for an LOI, a letter of intent. This is a non-binding agreement. It's a small couple paragraphs that just says how much they're interested in investing in the fund. That's all it is. Non-binding, nothing, but it's something on paper. That shows, hey, we're interested at this level. And what we're going to pitch is this. We're going to say, hey, at the end of our pitch, hey, this is what we're doing. We're setting a date. We have a close date, which actually we're, I think, I believe right now we're going to do a webinar in 2 weeks to talk about this. March 28th, we are closing out our fund. We are looking to close this fund at, I think it's going to be at $30 million. We believe we're going to oversubscribe this fund. We have a lot of— and actually we truly do. And don't lie about any of this if you're doing this yourself. We really do. We have, I think, roughly $65 million in interested capital right now. We've been working on this. Lincoln's been doing a great job. A lot of big institutional checks. They can write checks from $5 to maybe $15 million. We have a handful of, I think it's 8 or 9 of them that have been doing due diligence on us for 7 to 8 months. Multiple calls, multiple data rooms and updates. It's been, it's been really interesting. So we have a lot of capital here, but it hasn't quite closed yet. Initially, we have small capital and big capital. This is kind of the bigger capital. He's like, tell everyone, you know what? We got to wrap this thing up. We got a ton of deals coming in. We're wrapping this up at $30 million. We are going to oversubscribe at $30 million. We believe. And he goes, what we got to do is we got to get enough commitments. We're going to send out LOIs. If someone writes an LOI, hey, I'm going to put in $1 million, okay? Or I'm going to put in $500,000. You say, great. And you say, hey, we're accepting LOIs because we need to know how much we can allocate towards you. And they go, what do you mean? Well, we believe we're going to be oversubscribing this fund and we may not be able to accept your full subscription. So put in how much you're interested with, but we're going to see how much we can accept. And this partner of ours, his name's Troy. He did this at his fund. And what they did was if someone put in $1 million and we're looking, you know, right now I think we've raised, don't quote me on this, but roughly $22 million. We believe we're going to be well past this $30 million on March 28th. And so what we're going to do is we got a million-dollar LOI here and a $500K LOI and a, you know, $1.3 million LOI. What we're going to do is go back to these partners and say, well, hey, we're, we're getting oversubscribed here. We believe we're gonna be oversubscribed. You know, of the million that you could put in, we can only allocate $800,000 to you. Can you fulfill that $800,000 spot? We're gonna reserve a $800,000 spot for you. Does that help? You know, does that work? Oh, and you're going to do $500,000? Sorry. We're going to be oversubscribed. We can only take $410,000 from you. And they go, wow. Like you're turning away money. And it sounds weird to turn away money because the reality is when you turn away money and you oversubscribe, what it creates is you're the pretty girl at the dance. Everyone's putting money in. You're you're take you got so much money coming in. You've got to turn away some money. You need that psychology with the potential investors that you're pitching. Hey, we're looking to get oversubscribed here. Now we we can if we really want. We could bump this up to thirty-five million or you know. But we are we are trying to raise thirty million. But we might oversubscribe to thirty-five or we might oversubscribe to thirty-eight if people really want to get in. But man, we're looking to close this at. You know, $30 million on March 28th. We're already at $22 million. We believe we're gonna be oversubscribed pretty quickly. This also gives you something to follow up with, with people if they haven't responded. Hey, how's that LOI? We're collecting LOIs and we're trying to make a correct allocation to each group. Where are you guys at? It's an easy way to follow up with people that are, you know, on the fence about investing. Furthermore, what happens here when you parse back investors? And let's say they invest $800,000, right? Or maybe you just keep the— hey, we're going to give you a million-dollar allocation. The deal's here, but we oversubscribed, right? When you come out with fund 2 or fund 3, you've now trained your investors. It's like, oh shoot, this group, they're the pretty girl at the dance. Last time they turned away my money. Last time. These guys are legit. Like they're actually raising good money. So when you come out with fund 2, you say, hey, we're doing fund 2. We're opening it up. You were in the last fund. We're giving you first right of refusal. We're looking to add, you know, you were at $800,000 last time. You know, we're going to send out LOIs again if you want to come into fund 2. All of a sudden, people are now back to this, you know, Troy right here. This is how he raised $1.2 billion oversubscribed. In 45 days when he was trying to raise $750 million because all of his investors knew, oh shoot, this guy is legit. He turns away capital. He's the pretty girl at the dance. Everyone's trying to give him money. Last time he turned me away. I couldn't even give him the money I wanted to give him last time. So this time, you know what? Yeah, I'm in. I'm in way faster. And all of a sudden, you can close rounds way quicker because you start to build a reputation where your funds fill up, they oversubscribe, If you want to get in our deals, you got to be fast. You got to be on the point or otherwise someone else is going to grab it from you. Does that make sense? Isn't that kind of cool? Is this making sense? Type a yes in the chat or hello or something in the chat if that's making kind of sense to y'all. Is that working? Very, very useful strategy. And this has helped us raise a bunch of money in Funnel Launch Partners. We're looking and we'll do a webinar here in 2 weeks with Funnel Launch Partners. We're looking to— and I'll share this in a minute with Black Card. We're actually investing into our Black Card members fund. So here's Funnel Launch Partners. We're actually investing into the funds that are inside of Black Card, which is kind of cool. Isn't that sweet? We've done, I think last year, so far we've done 7 deals already. So of our Black Card members, we have about 1,000+ members in Black Card. Black Card is an incubator to launch an investment fund. So if you're looking at this, you're like, man, I don't know how to do this. And these guys do a lot of it. We actually have a group called Black Card. We incubate your fund with you. We have a full team of advisors, people that all come together to incubate your fund to help you go from A to B faster. Okay? Because of that incubator, it's allowed us to have some pretty incredible deals. So Fund Launch Partners right here, we started to write checks between $200,000 and $4 million into these funds. Okay? And what we did was we started to write these checks. We come in, we join their team, we partner with them. We give them a check of capital and then it allows them to go hopefully launch and crush it and do incredible things. So called the GP Stakes Fund. We'll have a webinar here in a couple of weeks that talks more about it. But if you want to learn more about that, it's fundlaunchpartners.com. You go from there. While we're on this, I'm going to get to number 3 here. So to review, people believe my idea is perfect. People believe, and thanks for the yeses in the chat. You guys are awesome. Welcome on, Chris and Melanie. Good to see y'all. What's up? Number two, the pitch. People don't position themselves as the pretty girl. I've done this myself a couple times, and they don't define their distinct edge. We talked about this a second ago, right here with their edge. What is their unique edge for their fund? Okay, we'll get to number three here in actually in a second. Well, I'll just share it right now. Actually, you know what? Screw it. Let's just dive in. So that's number one. The three biggest mistakes I see fund managers make. My idea is perfect. They believe on their pitch. They don't talk about the macro situation. They don't talk about distinct edge and they don't position themselves as the pretty girl. In our incubator, maybe I'll talk— sorry, I'm jumping around. I'm gonna talk about our incubator for a second. So we incubate these. What we do, I think better than anybody else, back to this analogy, we help people go and make a beautiful ditch. When you do those things, you position yourself as the pretty girl. You have a distinct edge, a unique offering. Something has asymmetrical risk that Follows the Fund Launch Formula, it allows you to launch a much more successful fund than you would've done before. And that's why we've had extreme success with our program. I'm going to use my eraser here. This is our program called Black Card. Now, if you're okay with it, you guys okay if I spend 1 minute talking, 2 minutes talking about what Black Card is, how it works? Is that cool with you guys? So like I said, Black Card is an incubator. We've done this for years now. We found that after— I currently run 2 8-figure funds. A lot of our mentors and people in our group have run incredible funds. We started to put together these building blocks right here into a systematic process that helps people go from A to Z effectively and fast to launch successful funds. Now down here, you can go and look at all these amazing testimonials. This is Jacques Bazinet. He's actually a portfolio fund inside of of Fund Launch Partners, but you can go read all these different testimonials of dozens and dozens of members of Black Card that have absolutely loved it and thought it was an amazing, amazing decision to be a part of it. Essentially what we do, we have a full team of coaches, account managers, legal team, softwares, capital raising events to help you right here in the center go and launch a successful fund. So if you're in this game of wanting to raise capital, wanting to put stuff together, we designed our entire program Based around this, our incubator. So we help you join Black Card. We incubate you from phase one. You join phase one. We talk all about the deal and finding asymmetrical risk here. So we go through your deal, your thesis. This is actually a screenshot of the back, and I can show you in a minute. We have a full scorecard assessments. You start to meet with our coaches here. You work through the curriculum and resources all right here. And some of these are you get put into an asset class. So if you're in the venture capital track or the hedge fund track or the Canadian track. You join that asset class track and we help you with mentors and coaches and people that are on that same track as well. You get assigned a personal accountability coach that helps you keep on track in the incubator. Furthermore, we have a Slack community right now with over 12— oh shoot, it's too big. 1,200 members right now in our incubator. 1,200 people in the Slack community in our incubator right now. And additionally, you get assigned one-on-one coaches for your asset class. So, if you're really good at real estate, you'll get a real estate coach or a venture capital coach that'll help you through this process. As we figure out your deal, then we go to phase 2. Let's frame out your fund. Okay? This is all about how your fund is built, how it's put together. If I go back to— if I zoom out over here, this is figuring out what's your waterfall structure? Are you going to do an international feeder fund structure? Are you going to do a, you know, how are you going to structure your general partner limited partnership? Are you going to do a Reg D 506 or a 506, a 3, 3, or 3 fund? How are you going to structure it? What licenses do you need? We're going to figure all that out. So I'm zooming out and moving back over here on phase 2 in the frame. And you'll have a coach that works with you specifically there. And you have our full Fund Academy program that trains you on all of this. Okay. And then also additionally, if you need, we have interns. We have roughly, I got, I put a post on LinkedIn. We got 500 applications for LinkedIn or for current college students that want to intern for our Black Card members funds, which is crazy. So we can place interns into your fund here and actually help you launch. Then you go to phase 3. This is all about capital raising and stress testing your offering. We go and we build a custom pitch deck with you from our design team. They go and make a beautiful pitch deck. We have again coaches that help you with these and your asset class. We have Fund Launch 360, a full backend software that helps you design a website, email, text, CRM, managing investor database to go there as you launch. Once you're ready, we have a relatively new thing called Capital Committee. This is made up of a dozen. We're looking to get to two dozen family offices, high networks that are ready to deploy into different funds. You get a chance. You have to apply and be on here, but you come and actually. Sit on Capital Committee and be a part of this group. Additionally, we have different capital raising events. Our next one is in April. We're going to the McGuire Woods event as a group. We're doing a 1-day event before in Dallas, and it's a 3-day capital raising event that you can be a part of when, when you're a part of this incubator. Additionally, you have the chance to pitch Fund Launch partners and be reviewed, and maybe we'll write you a check from $200,000 to $400,000 here for capital raising. Finally, so after you figure out the deal, we've worked through that, we framed it out, we then have done capital. We then go launch your fund with legal. We have 8 different law firms that you work with. Uh, we'll, we'll pair you with the one that will match you best. We go and figure out all the fund documents. Again, you have a coach helping you here. We have partnership discounts for a third-party admin, licenses, insurance, investor databases, marketing and PR, tax and audit, capital raising, the whole gambit. And then finally, to kind of summarize everything, we have all these different areas and groups helping you Go out and raise money for your deal and make a successful launch and offering for your fund. And then you go launch. You can work in our group and we can help you after and post-launch to scale and grow and make sure you hit your targets. And then again, you can come work with Fund Launch Partners potentially. Again, there's no guarantee, but potentially you can come pitch Fund Launch Partners and see if we'll write you a check into your firm and if you want to partner with us. And if not, no worries. You can go from there. Okay? Our whole goal is to help you Streamline the process of making whatever you're raising capital for efficient and effective. That's why we've done this now. Today's actually our five-year anniversary from our first webinar we ever did like this to go and launch, and we have all the you can go read all these testimonials of how we've helped dozens and dozens of funds go out and launch and be extremely successful. Right now on our website, we've we've reported four point seven billion dollars is reported as client AUM. This is our clients that have gone out and crushed it with their funds. That's how much they currently manage in their funds. Okay? So if you're interested in talking to one of our team members, you can go to fundlaunch.com/demo and you can book a call right now on their calendars. Let's see if actually I'm going to jump over here. This is what it looks like. If you go to fundlaunch.com/demo, you just put in your name, phone number, email, you'll hit okay. It goes to a calendar and you can actually pick a time on one of my teams. We have about 7 individuals here that all work with me, trained by me. All the nights, like right here in our offices, you can talk to and actually walk through, is it a good fit to be in Black Card? Here's the testimonial page. You can see Colin says, our first fund is approaching a hard cap of $10 million. We can click in here. I've spent many years running oil and gas portfolio companies. It was time to cut out the middleman. We launched our first fund doing oil and gas, $10 million. And it's done really, really well. You can come— oh, you can come through here and you can read through. If you just click through here, there are tons and tons. We just did our first million-dollar raise. Fortress committed to over $150 million in funding. Goldman is helping to look over the hotel brand. I've raised over $1 million this week. You can kind of keep scrolling through and see, and you can just hit load more and see all the people that are in Black Card that are crushing it right now inside of our incubator. If you're serious about doing this, hop on a call, talk to our fund advisor team, and we can see if it's a good fit for you. Now someone in the chat's asking about pay. How much does this cost? Great question. We go all out. I mean, we have a full team of people here working with you, helping you, and putting you together. Black Card, it depends on what you need. So what we've done in the last few months, we've made it more custom to you of what makes sense for your fund. So Black Card ranges anywhere from about $20,000 to about $50,000, depending on what needs you have for your firm. Okay? This is, by the way, the same amount You would spend just on the legal part of launching a fund. With Black Card, you get legal. If you'd like it, you can add or take away what you want. But you get the legal, you get the pitch deck design, you get all the coaching, you get a full community of Slack access. We do daily office hours with all of our coaches. You get the academy and all of our partnerships to go and successfully launch your fund. So again, if you want to talk to one of our team members, Fund Launch. I'll give you 30 seconds here. You're not going to miss anything. And then we're going to go back and I'm going to find the— we're We're gonna go to number three, the biggest mistake people make when launching a fund. So right here, fundlaunch.com/demo. That's your link. I'll give you a thirty seconds here. You're not going to miss anything if you want to click on that link and go over. I think Adam dropped in the chat here as well. Fundlaunch.com/demo. You guys can go check that out. It's pretty fun. Thanks in the chat. Yeah, I know we were five years ago. We were just a free Facebook group, and you know. We had honestly, all we had 5 years ago was a small course that we'd put together with 7 to 10 mentors on how funds are built. It was a few videos. We then grew that bigger and bigger here with the Fund Academy. And then now we said, what if we could really help people like actually launch? Not just give them videos, not just train them, but really help them one-on-one. And that's how we've developed Black Card now over the last 3 years into this behemoth. We are the best on planet Earth at doing this entire process, the Fund Launch Formula, and pulling this together for you. So if you're interested in hearing about this, fundlaunch.com/demo. It is somewhat timely right now. We are doing our next capital raising event very soon. We are getting final RSVP, I think is the end of next week on the 28th, the end of February. So this is a capital raising event in Dallas. You guys can fly out and actually meet real limited partners and real family offices to raise capital with. I'm going to be there. Awesome. on one of our demo days. So if you're interested in that, fundlaunch.com/demo, you guys can go book a call and talk to our team members and see if it would be a good fit for what you're doing right now. All right, let's go back here. Well, that link is still live. We'll leave it live again if you can stay on here. But if I come back to what we were talking about before, so 3 biggest mistakes fund managers make. Number 1, my idea is perfect. They don't iterate. They don't test. They don't They just think, yeah, it's just everybody's gonna love my idea, which never is the case with any business, right? There's always iterations, pivots. Number 2, they don't talk about their distinct edge. They don't address the macro situation of what's going on, why it's timely now. Why is it an amazing time to be in residential real estate? Why is it an amazing time to go do farmland in Wyoming? Why is it a phenomenal time to get into the options trading strategy? Okay. And then furthermore, people pitch in a needy pitch. Okay. Number three, the biggest mistake I see fund managers make. Oh, I put a number three right here. Is I'm gonna go back to bigger pen here. They jump to legal too early. Too often, people get excited about their idea. They think everyone's gonna love their pitch, and they go and just pay lawyers fifty grand. They just jump to phase four. Right? And they're just, yeah, that's— I just need the legal docs. I'm ready to go. Everything's perfect. And what happens is they realize— I'm sorry, I'm gonna erase some stuff here and then I'll redraw it. They realize they spend the $50 grand or the $30 grand or the $70 grand. They realize no one wants their fund. I'll tell a true story. I have a buddy. He spent over not $50 grand, $500,000 launching his first fund. Because what happened was he did it, he didn't do it this way. He went to legal first. He went and talked to a lawyer and the lawyer, lawyers talk slow. They're nice guys. I use lawyers all the time, but they talk slow. And he asked, well, what kind of fund do you want to do? He said, I don't know. Because he didn't do phase 2. Well, do you want to do a Reg D 506 or 506 or a 3 or a 3 or 3? And he said, I don't know what those mean. And so a lawyer said, oh, no worries. I'm going to bill you $800 an hour and I will teach you what is a 3 fund or a 506. This is all the stuff. This is simple stuff that we talk about in our program, but he had no idea. Hey, are you guys going to be an investment advisor, a registered investment advisor, an ERA? And he's like, I don't know. What do those mean? And the lawyer said, yeah, I'll happily teach you for $800 an hour. We're going to do international Cayman feeder funds. Again, same thing. He spent, I'm not joking, over $500,000 on his first fund because he didn't know what he didn't know. On the contrary, when you come through this process, the Fund Launch Formula process, You work through your deal. You find asymmetrical risk. You frame it out the right way. You know exactly what you want. You go and talk to potential investors early and you reiterate because they're going to want to change stuff. Same thing with him. When he was launching his fund, investors didn't like his waterfall structure. They wanted to change something. And he said, yeah, it's a good idea. I'm going to go change some of that. It's going to give me a stronger edge right here. And so because of that, he kept changing and the lawyer would bill him every time he changed. And He again spent 500 grand. If you do it the right way and you go phase one to phase two to phase three and you iterate here, and then when you're ready, this is what I did with my fund. I walked into a lawyer's office. I said, "Hey, I want XYZ with a drink and a side of fries. Can you build this fund for me?" I knew everything. I already have it figured out for you. All the stuff you need. Boom! Can you just put it onto paper for me? Great. My fund cost me ten grand, fifteen grand. Something like that. The same lawyer bills $50 grand for funds. He billed me, I can't remember if it was $10,000 to $15,000, somewhere in that range because I knew all the stuff. I saved the lawyer so much time. Lawyers are billed by the hour, right? If you can do the hard work upfront, you save tons of money when launching. And additionally, you launch a fund back down to here. That investors want. You launch a fund that has, you know, the Gordon Ramsay beautiful meal on it. And you're not just guessing and, you know, going to launch a fund with a stinky fish on it. Okay? That's the beauty of it. So again, if— that's what we do in Black Card. That's what we do in our fund incubator here. So if you're interested, again, here's the link one more time, fundlaunch.com/demo. I can take some questions from you all. So type questions in the chat. I'm happy to answer whatever questions you have here, but hopefully that helped. The 3 biggest mistakes that I see fund managers make, I put them up there. We can go back and talk about them again. Type some questions in the chat. We'll leave this open. fundlaunch.com/demo if you want to book a call and talk to our team. Okay? But I got the chat open here. Rod, good to see you. Adam, Rich, thank you. Yeah. Does it work for real estate? Yeah. About 48% of our funds we launch are in real estate through this. But we help funds in, we have complete, so we've now pivoted our program. We actually have certain asset tracks and specialized training for each one of those. So if you're in private equity, you're buying businesses, or if you're in hedge funds, you're trading stocks and bonds and options, or if you're in venture capital and you're doing early-stage startups, we have custom asset tracks for you. Of course, we have real estate. We have residential and commercial real estate. A lot of our clients are doing that, that we help walk you through with specific coaches. That help you in that. And we actually have subgroups in our Slack community to help with all those as well. Yep. Yeah. What does it cost to work with us? It depends. It's anywhere from about $20,000 to $50,000 to work with us in Black Card, depending on what you want. You can come in and say, hey, you know, I don't really need, you know, I don't really need the interns. I don't really need this part or this part. Okay, great. We'll build you a custom plan for you. make sure it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Mike said, I'm a current Black Card member in real estate. I highly recommend it. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, man. I mean, we have— our Black Card members are doing phenomenal stuff as well. It's really cool. We just did a livestream this morning with them. I do one every single week with them. We ask questions. We talk about it, all that kind of stuff. Does the private credit debt fund talk about hard money lending, private capital? Yep. Yeah. So you can call it a few different things. Some people call it private money. Hard money lending, private credit would probably be the most, you know, nice or known term. You call it a private credit fund. Yeah. My dad's first fund was a private credit fund. They raised about $75 million back in 2004, I think they were doing it. And then he pivoted later. If you guys know my story, my dad, I didn't know he was rich at all until really I was in college. My dad was just an entrepreneur, figured out the fund game. And he launched a huge deca-billion-dollar family of real estate funds. He's now retired from that and has done extremely well with that. I didn't know any of this really until college. I learned about funds in college. I launched my first fund at 22 years old. I pitched my dad for money. My dad said no. He said, I'm not going to put money in your fund, but I will teach you how funds are put together. And so in college, I ran a small fund. We got a good return, 64% return, but small, is about, is less than $50,000 of capital. I then launched a second fund in college as well. I ran that for about 3 and a half years. We did extremely well. We raised and deployed millions of dollars out of that. And then now today I run 2 8-figure funds. I think total AUM is coming up on about $50 million. We're hoping to push to $100 million this year in those 2 funds. I have a crypto hedge fund that I run with a few hedge fund partners. And then I run Fund Launch Partners, which is a GP stakes firm. Yeah. So I'm in the game right now. I'm doing this actively. I am in the game launching funds with you guys right now. So there you go. Maybe on the chat too, if you can help me, Kendall, if there's any good ones, just scroll up or down so I don't miss them because they're kind of coming in fast on here. GP stakes are when you take, yeah, you take a minority stake in a firm. So back over here, Fund Launch Partners, you know, Will, if you have a great fund in Black Card, Right here, you come out of black card, and you come. We'll talk to you if you it's up to you. But a lot of times we'll say, "Hey, we want to be partners with you." We'll sit on your team. We'll help you on your board. We'll help you with all this type of stuff. We'll write you a check from $200,000 to $400,000 or four million dollars. We're gonna write a check into your firm, and then also you know we'll take oftentimes it's like you know seven to ten percent of the firm will actually be on your team with you. Okay. We'll help you grow and be a part of the growth, help you with audits, all the reporting, all the stuff in there. It's an average kind of deal for us. Yeah. What's the difference between Fund Launch and Black Card? Black Card is the main product of Fund Launch. Fund Launch is our company, but Black Card is our incubator in Fund Launch that we go out and launch funds with. Yep. Again, people looking for the link, there is the link right there, fundlaunch.com/demo. What about emerging markets, specifically West Africa? We have a number of funds that are doing stuff all throughout Africa. We have people doing farmland in Africa, people doing supply chain in Africa, venture studios in Africa, private or small— what do they call that? Micro-lending in Africa. We have a number of people in Black Card doing African-based funds. It's very, very cool. Bridger, can you tell me how we can create a forex trading fund? Yeah, we have a ton of people doing forex in our group. Go to the next question below, Khan. He was asking about, we make good return with low risk profile in forex market, how the process can be? Yeah. So one of our asset tracks in here is hedge fund. We would run you through the hedge fund asset track. We have a number of people doing forex. What we would do, number one, let's go make sure you have asymmetrical risk. So let's backtest your portfolio, which it sounds like you already have done. How can we minimize risks with maximizing returns? What are things that we can and can't control? We're going to minimize those together and you'll be with the coaching staff. And then putting— what we'll help with is how do you put together the vehicle to raise capital from outside investors to go and scale? Instead of trading $100 grand in Forex or $1 million, you could go trade $5 million or $10 million or $20 million. I'll give you a quick story. We had a guy in our group, named David Yao. He actually spoke at one of our events. David was a pharmacist. So get this. He's a pharmacist. You can put me full screen if you want. He was a pharmacist. He learned how to trade. I guess pharmacists have these long hours. It was like this location had no one there. So in the back, he would trade, day trade. He got very good at it. He backtested his portfolio. We helped structure a fund together. He went and raised roughly, don't quote me on this, but I think it was roughly $15 million. Million that he started trading in a portfolio with investor capital. And isn't that kind of crazy? He went from a pharmacist to a full-out fund manager. And I got to get the update from him. I don't know where he's at today. But he spoke at our event 2 years ago in front of 2,000 people and told them how they did this. So that's the idea. You go from trading your small portfolio to now a large portfolio. If you're a business owner, you know, you go from running your own business and you could scale your own business or go buy out your competitors' businesses and roll them together into your business. Are there payment options available? Yeah. Yeah. So hop on a call. We can figure out all that kind of stuff. We can make a package that works for you. That's why we don't have a set price on Black Card. It really depends on what you need, what we can provide. The price range is total $20,000 to $50,000, but we can do payment plans, all that kind of stuff to make it work for you and make it a good deal for you. Can I do a 506 into your Black Card? I have a all my trust structures set up. So you already have a 506 set up? Yeah. So we have some people that already run funds, and maybe they want to launch fund 2 or just scale or just be in the community. They want to meet other people that are running funds. Yes, totally. So hop on a call. We can structure to make sure we get a good deal and make sure it's a custom fit for you that makes sense for you. Yeah, totally. We can help you. I've been trading and investing in stocks. Last year, my return was 29%. My current year-to-date is 12%. Would you guide me on the best strategy for the fund? Jamal, congrats on the good trading, man. That's awesome. Just like I just mentioned, a fund would allow you to take in friends and family or outside capital together, and you could go and scale that to, like I mentioned earlier, he scaled up to $15 million in his fund. Our hedge fund right now, what are we at? Roughly $25 million in assets, something like that. So instead of trading your small little portfolio, you can now trade tens of millions of dollars in your portfolio. Now I'll say this. When you take on investor capital, it's a serious business. I know I talk about funds a lot and oh yeah, just go launch a fund. But like when you take on investor capital, it is a serious game. You got to make sure you're compliant. You got to make sure you've got audits done, third-party administration. You have all your ducks in a row. And that's what we help you do. It's kind of, it's very confusing to go out and try to learn how do I, who do I have to register with and how do I do compliance? Like We help put all that together in a nice box and package so that you can make sure that you're launching compliantly, you're doing it the right way, it's structured, and hopefully can go out and raise a ton of money and really, really do an incredible job. That's our goal with Black Card. That's what we focus on day in and day out. Good question. Quick— good stuff. Quick question. Of all the people that go through Black Card, what's a ballpark percentage focused on real estate? Oh yeah, we mentioned this already. Roughly 45% to 48% are in real estate. So a vast majority of our Black Card group is in real estate, which is great. And they're doing cool stuff. I mean, we have people, it's funny enough, we have a lot of people that partner up in Black Card. So they join and, hey, we're doing real estate in Florida and we're doing residential or we're doing multifamily value-add. And people, they talk in our group and go, hey, I'm doing that too. And number one, they just, sometimes they share deals or they bid on each other's deals. Or number two, they go, We're doing the same thing. You have complementary things to what my team has. Let's just partner up together. You know, you bring the capital raising, I'll bring the deals. Let's do it together. We've had a number of people in Black Card partner up and work together. It's one of my favorite things when people come in. And like I mentioned, we have 1,200 people in Black Card right now. A lot of people for you to meet and talk to. You can read testimonials. You can go back to my screen here if I'll show again. If you go to funlaunch.com/testimonial here, you can read all the testimonials. Again, here's the page. You can just load it and just zoom out a little bit. You can come down and just, you can watch videos of people. You can read testimonials. You can see what people are doing and how they're working. It's pretty phenomenal. How much money do we need to start a small hedge fund and keep it small due to liquidity issue in short-term trading? We have some people that do a hedge fund incubator. They'll start with $30,000, $50,000, something like that. The idea, and maybe this is a good point too, people always ask, how big do I need to be? We can make sure it's— you don't want to spend too much money. If you were trading $1,000, it wouldn't make sense to spend the money to set up a fund. So you got to have enough, depending on your cost to set up, and we can figure out those costs with you, what you're going to do. A hedge fund incubator would be much less expensive. So the cost of setup versus how much you're going to make. But additionally, the game we're getting into with funds is not— this is not a get-rich-quick scheme at all. This is a slow burn, get rich in the long-term scheme, if you could define it that way. Running a fund is not going to make you rich overnight. But if you look at the Forbes 100 list, The number one category of billionaires is fund managers. It is the get really, really, really, really, really rich in the long-term business. This is a business of getting in the game, even if it's a small portfolio, starting with that, proving to investors that you're a good manager of capital, that you're a good fiduciary, that you do annual audits, that you structure your thing compliantly, that you have, you can produce K-1s and tax documents. You can do everything the right way. And you build trust over time. And a lot of these funds, they've been in business for 15, 20 years. And Ken Griffin, you know, he made $4.5 billion last year running his fund. He's making $35 million a week if my math's correct on that. A week. Like Ken Griffin, dude, he bid on one of the U.S. Constitutions, the original document. And people, there's all these articles. I can't believe Ken Griffin spent so much money on blah, blah, blah. I can't believe. And I think he bid $45 million for one of the original documents of the U.S. Constitution. OK? He is building the largest, most, I guess, largest, most expensive home in America. It's going to be $1 billion. He's building it in West Palm Beach right now. And you might say, wow, that's just stupid money. He's just throwing money away. Well, if you're Ken Griffin, you make, what was it? $45 million. You make that pretty much every work week. One week, Monday to Friday, you make that amount of money. A billion-dollar home, which is crazy. He makes in about 4, 3 months, every quarter. So from now to March, he'll make enough money to go buy a billion-dollar home. Again, this is not his net worth because net worth goes ups and downs. Like Elon Musk, his net worth goes up and then it goes down based on Tesla stock price. That's not net worth. This is take-home capital to him for running Citadel, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. This is a great game to be in. If you want to be in any game, all of us pick career paths or games that we want to play. I decided long ago, I want to play a game That has huge margin, big upside, and I can dedicate my entire life and not hit the top. You know? Some games, you know, if you're in the concrete business, you're going to cap out at some point. Or if you're in the, you know, the local, you know, I don't know, you know, you're a chef in the chef market. You're trying to be a chef. There's a certain level of income that you kind of cap out. And maybe you got to make TV shows and other stuff to get out of that. In the fun game, I mean, this is the biggest game on earth. This is The game Grant Cardone is in. This is the game Ray Dalio is in, Warren Buffett is in. This is the game of the most successful people on earth. Forbes 100 billionaire list, this is the game you want to be in is fund and fund management. Number 2 is tech. Number 3 is fashion, by the way. There are some tech outliers, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but those are a lot fewer than if you look at all billionaires, the vast majority is finance, investments, fund management. All right. Let's take a few more questions here. Hopefully, this is useful. You guys are awesome. What about opportunity zone funds? Yeah. Opportunity zones, that was Trump's first term. He put out these things called opportunity zone funds, which were in inner city areas. Every state put out— these were areas that were, if you invested in them and developed them more than 50%, you would get a tax-free, you know, there's no capital gains on it essentially. And they adjusted some of the things over the last couple of years, but it was Last time I checked, it was $100 billion flowed into inner cities from the private market. It was the biggest investment of all time into inner cities from the private market from that. Now, a bunch of firms have launched and done that. Trump 2.0 term, there's rumors that he's going to bring back Opportunity Zones with even a bigger gain or whatever. We will see. But it's a pretty interesting asset class and a lot of opportunity there, I think. What if I want to find an investor for my tech business? So Jamal, yeah, it sounds like you put one investor in there. You might, if you're just doing one investor for your tech business, maybe just go find an investor. You set up an AngelList or something and you put money there. If you're trying to raise like a Series A or Series B, you could use a fund. You could not. Some of the people in our group are doing that. Some aren't. It's kind of a 50/50 split. If you're raising money for one company though, we can still help you, but it's not our core focus in Black Card. Where our core focus is on raising like a venture capital fund that would go invest into startup businesses like yours. If you're raising like a Series A, Series B, we, we could kind of help you, but it wouldn't be our core competency. You'd probably find, you know, help other places if you're doing that. Thanks for all the tools. I'm in the standard Funnel Launch, still thinking about Black Card. Okay, very cool. You're welcome to hop on. Yeah. Again, if you pull up my screen again, funnellaunch.com/demo, if you want to book a call. I think calls are actually, I think they're gone. I think we only have so many call spots. They might be gone at this point. You can go check there. How it looks if you go to funnellaunch.com, we are pretty full. We only have a couple of people taking calls. Like every person's trained by me. They're in our office. Like We don't have like a whole, like it's a pretty tight-knit team. So if you want to get a demo or someone to look through your fund, go to fundlaunch.com/demo. You can put your name, email, phone number in. It'll take you, the next page will be a calendar link. Uh, my team though, I, they might be gone. All the calls might be gone for the next week or so. So first come, first serve on those. Okay. Can you find me, maybe go down to the bottom of the comments. Let's see if there's any new ones here. Can I get $1 billion in funding for my first hedge fund? Maybe. Stephen Schwarzman did that in his first fund. That was private equity with Blackstone. Now to do that, what I would say though, it's a long game. Don't try to play the get-rich-quick game. I would say probably not. Most of the time to get $1 billion in a firm or fund, it's proving to investors. It's back to the buy. It's biblical. If you're good with something small, I will give you things that are great. If you're good with a small amount of money, you're going to probably end up with a big amount of money that you're managing. If you can manage a small portfolio well, you probably will end up landing— hopefully you can manage a big portfolio well. Now, it always doesn't work that way, but that's the proof. Usually you start small and you prove yourself over time as you grow. Ned, you missed the beginning. What are the 3 biggest mistakes fund managers make? We went through it all the last hour, but Here they are right here. My idea is perfect. They don't backtest. They don't iterate. They fit into a portfolio. My pitch: they don't focus on macro distinct edge. They don't position themselves as the pretty girl. We had a fun conversation about that and how on positioning. And then number three, they jump to legal too early. We shared some interesting stories about positioning, putting funds in here. Anyways, you can go back on the live stream on YouTube. You can see from there. All right, y'all. Again, final call if you want to come on Black Card Incubator. There you go. Hopefully today's training was good. I'm if you guys should do more of these. We're thinking about doing these like maybe once a week. I hop on and just do a live call and I train on something. Today was the 3 biggest mistakes fund managers make. What do you guys think? Is that worth our time? Maybe every other week. If you would want me to do a live stream, type in maybe some things you would want me to do a stream about. I'm happy to answer questions, but type in the chat if there's, you know, a topic or something you think would be compelling for us to talk about. Type them in. I'd love to share with those in the next couple of weeks and get back on a good cadence of doing live streams. We used to do these a lot. And I want to get back to them. So y'all are amazing. Go do good in the world. Go help people out. This is the game you want to play. We'll keep helping you. We'll keep doing great stuff for you. Our plan, this is what we do, by the way. I try to give as much value as we can for free to everybody, as much as we can, just free value, free value. And if you need one-on-one help, that's what we have Black Card for. We'll walk you through this entire process, structuring the deal, going through asset class tracks. You get a personal accountability coach, one-on-one coaching. The Slack community. You then go to phase 2. We look through the frame of your fund. We have curriculum, how to build out all that. You have the Fund Academy to help you there. Again, one-on-one coaching, intern placements potentially in your fund. And number 3, capital. We go and build a whole private pitch deck for you, stress test your fund with our coaches and our team. We help build out a list that you can go out and pitch. We have Fund Launch 360 to design your website, all your softwares, your CRM, all to manage everything. And then you go, potentially can pitch to our capital committee. It's a dozen or so investors of high net worth individuals. And then also join some of our events. We have capital raising events. We're going— the deadline is next week to come to the next event we're doing in Dallas, Texas, with McGuire Woods, the capital raising event you guys can come and join and be a part of. And then finally, Fund Launch Partners. We can actually write checks into your fund for $200,000 to $4 million if you qualify and if you're a fund that we want to partner with. Finally is legal. We have— we'll help with the full legal formation, one-on-one coaching. Partnership discounts. And finally, kind of, this is an analogy of we have all these different groups helping make you successful. We have discounted audit, tax, accounting, admin work, capital raising events, coaching staff, account managers, interns. We have a full legal team, Fund Launch 360, all helping you to go be successful. Truly is an incubator. And then after you launch, yeah, we want to talk to you with Fund Launch Partners. Maybe we'll do a deal with you and partner up with your firm. Okay. That's the goal. You can go read testimonials here from dozens and dozens of our Black Card members on their experience with Black Card. We have been doing this for years and years and years. It's not our first rodeo. We help a lot of people do this. You guys are amazing. If you wanna learn more, go to funnels.com/demo and you can book a call with our team.