Darren Marble - Creating A new Original Series That Allows Viewers To Invest in Reg A+ IPOs

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On Apple TV plus hold music. You want to avoid it and so do your customers. So say goodbye to holdmusic and hello to faster, smarter support with Salesforce. Make service more personal and agents more productive using built in trusted AI. Then watch costs and wait times drop and satisfaction soar. Support customers in a whole new way with Service GPT. Learn how@salesforce.com ServiceGPT what is going on everyone? Kasey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have Darren Marble here with us. Darren Marble is the co CEO of Crush Capital, a fintech firm with a mission to democratize the ipo. Crush Capital is the creator of Going Public, a new original series that allows viewers to invest in IPOs. His original series, Going Public comes out on Entrepreneur.com in 2021, so make sure you stay tuned. This is a show that I'm very excited about and once I heard about the concept, I reached out to Darren. We set up the podcast and our conversation today goes in depth on what they are creating. So that being said before we get started, please take a moment to share this podcast on your Instagram story. If you're listening on Spotify, you can literally click Share on Instagram Stories and it will automatically share the episode. So please take a moment. Do that and now let's get into the episode. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I never run ads, but I've made an exception because I truly believe in this company and actually use the product myself. So here we go. Today's episode of Rise of the Young is brought to you by Katch, a free tax withholding and benefits platform for anyone. Whether you're a podcaster like me, graphic designer, hairstylist, entrepreneur, or all around hustler, you can tell Katch to automatically take a percentage from each paycheck or payment you receive to be set aside for your taxes, time off or a rainy day. Katch also offers retirement accounts. Even if you have student loans or debt, it's never too early or too late to save for your future. With Katch's percentage based contribution system, it doesn't matter if you receive $30, $3,000 or $30,000 they'll put away whatever percentage you'd like each time. You're paid for free, so sign up now with promo code Casey2020 at Catch Co to get $10 after you save $100 in Catch. Here we go. All right, what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, we have Darren Marble here of Crush Capital and the creator of Going Public. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Darren.

Thanks, Casey. What's up, man? How are you?

I'm doing great. I'm just so fascinated about this new show you launched, man. I followed you. I think it was a week or so ago. We touched base on Instagram. But I'd love for you to kick off this conversation by just telling the viewers what this new show is called, Going Public, because it's a very interesting concept that I'm excited about, and I know the viewers will be as well.

Well, thanks so much, man. So Going Public is really a groundbreaking series. We follow the stories of five founders as they're raising capital and taking their companies public to NASDAQ in an ipo. And for the first time ever, we're allowing viewers of this series to actually invest into the IPO while they watch. And so we look at Going Public as the next Shark Tank and are optimistic this can become a cultural zeitgeist. More than anything, we think that customers and fans and followers of brands deserve an opportunity to invest into the companies whose products and services they use in their everyday lives. And Going Public intends to make that a reality.

That's so cool, man. And for those that are listening, I'd love for you to take us back. You know, how did it lead to this show Going public? Like, what made you want to create this concept? Because it's so different and unique, and like you said before we got started, there's nothing else like it. And there's a lot of barriers you had to jump. So walk us back. You know, three years ago, what was the thought for this show and what were you doing before that that led you to wanting to start this?

Sure. Well, I've been in the equity crowdfunding industry, or the regulation A industry, as they call it, for the five years. So if we look back, the jobs act of 2012 was a response to the 282008 economic crisis designed to make it easier and more efficient for small business owners to finance their companies and access capital. So a securities exemption called Regulation A was part of the Jobs act went into effect in 2015. It allows companies to raise up to $50 million, market their deal, and permits anyone over the age of 18 globally to legally invest in the offering. So I've been a part of that industry really since day one in June 2015, when it went into effect through today. And we've had the good fortune of being involved with some amazing financing campaigns and being able to experiment, trying to market investments with Facebook ads and Google Ads and PR campaigns and social marketing, influencer marketing. And what I realized is that, you know, buying $50,000 of Facebook ads was never going to cut it. And so the question that my business partner and I were asking is what would it take to truly democratize access to investment opportunities here in the US for everyday Americans? And more specifically, what would it take to democratize the ipo? Right. This is a financing that is usually a Wall street insiders game. It's reserved for the wealthy, the connected hedge funds, pension funds. The average American generally does not have access to those types of investments. And so what we realized is that in order to democratize the ipo, we needed a vehicle for mass retail distribution. And we have solved for that now by partnering with Entrepreneur Media, which runs the site entrepreneur.com a massive digital publisher. 14 million monthly unique visitors. This is our first step to democratizing the IPO is to really launch a series that is seen by millions of everyday Americans week after week. And from there we can grow.

I love that. When it comes to the show itself, you said you're picking five companies, correct?

That's right.

What, like for the companies that are involved, what should they be expecting? And you know, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this show. How are you guys vetting the individuals and founders that are coming on board for this? Because I know it's a very selective process, I'm sure.

Well, look, the difference between Going Public and Shark Tank, for instance, is that Shark Tank tends to focus and showcase, you know, very early stage companies, even kind of napkin idea stage stage companies. With going public, we are going to feature later stage startups. So companies that might have 25 to $100 million in revenue might have market caps or valuation somewhere between 100 and 500 million. We're looking for high growth consumer product companies, companies that have years of operating history. Maybe they've raised a Series A or even a Series B financing. Maybe they have half a million or a million paying customers, a track record of revenue growth, and they're ready to take their companies public in a NASDAQ ipo. And what they have to gain here is several fold. On the surface, it might look like that this series is a financing event for the company, but it's also a mass marketing opportunity. Right. And so we know what happens when no name companies go on Shark Tank for two minutes and then their brands explode and sales explode. Half a million in sales, a 10, 30, 40 million. Well, in this series, we're putting bigger companies on the stage for 10 weeks. Right. So each of these episodes is 22 minutes in length, will be seen by millions of people every single week. So what will happen here is these companies will not only raise 30 or 50 million dollars and go public to Nasdaq, they will also generate millions of dollars in sales by acquiring thousands and thousands of new customers. Because the people who watch can buy stock and they become customers as well.

I love that. Can you talk to, can you talk to the audience about the value of going public for a company that you know is growing year over year? For those that may not know the value of that, I'd love for you to explain it so that the viewers that may not know the value of that really get to understand why companies are going public.

Sure. I think there's a couple of reasons. So one of the reasons is that it's an opportunity to provide liquidity, liquidity for founders, early employees, investors. When you're a public company, you also now have a certain kind of rigor and compliance baked into the operations of the business that we believe makes you even more attractive to investors. So now when you're a public company, you provide ongoing disclosure. There's, you know, essentially complete transparency about the state of the business. And that's really an attractive feature to investors that are looking for transparent information about the business. So easier access to capital. Once you're a public company, it's also, I think, good for the brand. You can reference the company as a publicly traded company on Nasdaq, the second largest stock exchange in the world. So there's a lot of benefits from a brand perspective to being public, to being a NASDAQ listed company. And what we really want to do, Casey, with the series, is bring back the small cap ipo. And so if you look at what's happened in the last few years in capital markets, you see these big companies like Uber or Lyft, for example, they have raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in private markets for a decade. And by the time they go public, all the value has been wrung out by the early investors. And it's the general public, the retail investors that are left holding the bag with Uber stock. There's really not a lot of upside for that company because again, they waited 10 years to go public. And you know, if we use Amazon as an example, Amazon went public in 1997. So, you know, more than 20 years ago. But that was a great small cap IPO. Jeff Bezos didn't raise a billion dollars and go public. He didn't wait 10 years. He had waited like two years and he raised just $57 million. Amazon raised $57 million in their IPO. That's the type of deal we're looking for. We're looking for companies that have the potential to be the next Amazon, Google, but are going public at earlier stages in their life cycle. And of course that means there's more upside for investors as well.

Very cool. I'm sure that was a very tedious process to get this show launched. And you know, there's a lot of regulations you have to jump through. What was some of the challenges that you guys faced when creating this show concept? Because like you said, and I think I would agree is, you know, as a 20 year old, when I think of IPOs, I think of Wall Street, I think of, you have to be an insider to know what's happening. Right. So when you guys first had this idea, what were some of the challenges you guys faced early on before three years later now announcing it?

Well, it was a really interesting process and we've learned a lot along the way. So we actually founded Crush Capital three years ago. It's taken us three years to get to a point of finally announcing the series and moving into casting. When we started the company, the first thing we did, we actually cold called our way into Amazon and CBS and some other big publishing companies, broadcast, etc. And we had these meetings and I think the audiences were intrigued by the concept. The first question they asked is, well, are you guys showrunners? Who's your production company? We didn't have an answer. We didn't have a production company. So we said, okay, we're skipping steps, let's go bring in the production company. So we partnered with I and E Entertainment out of Studio City. One of their founders, Mark Koops, executive produced and co created the hit TV series the Biggest Loser. So the production partner came on first. From there, we signed distribution with Entrepreneur in November 2019. And that was probably the biggest unlock here is convincing a major brand and a major publisher to allow this series to be distributed to their millions of monthly unique followers and promoted to their 15 million followers on social is about a 12 month process, end to end. And then the last piece was investment banking. It's always been important for us, Casey, that we don't just want to have a series where companies raise capital from retail investors. It's important that companies that have high potential raise capital from traditional institutional investors as well. And so we partnered with Roth Capital that has agreed to firm commitment underwrite the IPOs in the series. And really what that means is that when a retail investor or a viewer of the series is watching the show on entrepreneur.com and they click to invest in an IPO, they'll actually be investing alongside traditional institutional investors like family offices, hedge funds, pension funds, and even better, they're buying the IPO shares at the same price that the smart money is buying. So there's no discount for the institutional investors. They're not coming in at a 30% discount. They're literally buying the same shares at the same price. And that's also one of the ways that we mitigate risk for the crowd, is to have that institutional capital in the deal. So, long story short, it was at first the production company, then signing distribution, then getting Roth Capital to agree to underwrite the deals. Three years later, that led to our announcement.

Very cool. For companies that are going to be on the show, is it a guarantee that they will go public or what does that process look like?

It's a great question. You know, the truth is, no, there's no guarantee that any company goes public. And there have been some high profile companies, really in the last 612 months, I mean, from Endeavor to Airbnb, that have talked about going public and had plans to go public and in some cases pulled their IPO at the wire at the last minute after 12 months of work with investment banks and advisors and consultants. So the truth is there is no guarantee. That said, we are looking to kind of eliminate some of the risk in that process through the partners we've aligned to process the deal. And as we diligence and vet companies, we're looking for companies that really do intend to go public. And we'll do everything we can to bring those companies to light in the series.

Very cool. I want to take a step back. I'm just so intrigued by not only the show, but your career. When did you become an entrepreneur and what take us back in time. What was Darren doing at 18, 20 years old and what led him to where he is today?

Well, it was a long and windy road, truthfully. So, you know, I'm from the Bay Area. After High school, I came down to Southern California, attended UCLA for five, five and a half years. Ended up getting distracted with kind of friends and social activities and I dropped out of school. And after I dropped out, I found that there were of course limited opportunities for someone without a college degree. But I got into the subprime loan business at the time, this was the early 2000s, selling loans for a mortgage lender. Found I had a talent for cold calling, making hundreds of calls a day and four or five hours of phone time. And I'm a little bit ADD and OCD one of those two. And so I was able to kind of apply that talent to banging the phones and setting appointments and bringing in borrowers. Ultimately got into the Oracle software world and went from over a 10 year period, you know, an inside salesperson to a director of sales to a vice president, senior vice president of sales. And then at the end of that career or maybe in the middle of it, you know, I knew I wanted something more. I was looking for a challenge. I had seen some people in the Oracle industry that were 20, 30 years older than me, very successful, making great incomes. But I thought, I don't want to end up like that guy showing up at the Oracle office when I'm 50 years old. That actually scared me. And so, you know, I was always looking for a business opportunity. And then, you know, I think 10 years ago I started my first company and probably made every mistake a first time entrepreneur could possibly make. Starting a business for the first time. Co founded a tech company without a tech co founder, had no idea, you know, how to build a real business that would generate revenue. All these mistakes and then 10 years later we got into this business. But the bottom line is it has been a long and windy road and of course I don't regret a day of it because it's led to this.

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking on, I know that you touched on starting a tech company and some of the early lessons. Can you talk about the value of the right partnership and the right business based on your experience? Because I think a lot of the listeners that are listening today, you know, they're 18 to 25, they're starting their first companies. And I'd love for you to touch on some of the lessons you've learned through that process of founding companies and just becoming successful in which you are.

Yeah, look, I think there's a couple key lessons that I would share. The first is you have to build something that people want. This is maybe the single biggest reason that startup companies fail. You get an Individual or a group of people together that start a company and they build something, a product or service that nobody wants or very few people want. So more than anything else, you have to solve a problem that a lot of people have. And that might involve market research. It might involve going corner to corner and asking people for feedback, talking to your potential customers. So make sure that when you start a company, you're actually solving a problem that a large segment of the population has. And so you always hear investors talk about total, addressable market. You want to solve a big problem, a real problem in a big market. I think the second lesson I learned, Casey, was it's easy to start a company and think that the way to success is to go raise money from investors. Let's go pitch venture capitalists, let's go to Silicon Valley, let's go do a fundraising round. I think nine times out of 10, the better approach is to solve a problem and get paid for it. So the minute that I, in my own business started generating revenue, and initially we were selling services for Kickstarter campaigns, we were selling packages for $5,000 per campaign. Then we went into equity crowdfunding. We were selling deals for $50,000, then $100,000, then a quarter million dollars cash for crowdfunding campaigns. Although bigger campaigns, that's when everything started working. So it's not just solving a problem, it's solving a problem and getting paid for it. So second piece of advice to aspiring founders, go out and sell something. Generate revenue, bring in a customer, sign a contract, and get paid for your work. And last but not least, price your services to win. And when I mean win, price it high. I think first time founders make the mistake of commonly undervaluing their brand, their business, their product or service. And I made this mistake when we were grinding away for years selling, you know, marketing services for Kickstarter campaigns. Nobody was making any money. When we're selling a package for $5,000 and we had a team of four people, but when we started selling campaigns at 100,000, a quarter million dollars, we were able to hire really talented people. So don't be afraid to price yourself at a higher level or to price your product at a level that will actually work for the business.

I love that. No, that's some great advice when it comes to Entrepreneur and the partnership you guys formed. What made you guys want to work with Entrepreneur? Because I know, you know, you guys could have went with anybody. But why Entrepreneur? What are you excited about with them?

Well, what we love about Entrepreneur is that of Course, they're passionate about the entrepreneurial spirit. And coincidentally, they happen to have a series out, which is out today, that was very much aligned with, you know, kind of what we're doing, and made the Going Public series a logical next step for them as a brand. So Entrepreneur has a series called Elevator Pitch, which airs online today. It's similar to Shark Tank. It's very well produced. Entrepreneur gets in an elevator, pitches the camera for 60 seconds. If the judges at the top like the pitch, the doors open, and then they negotiate a deal. And so Entrepreneur had been really curious and intrigued about the JOBS act regulation, crowdfunding regulation, A. But they're not expert in it, and they never really understood how we could create a series that allows their viewers to invest. And so when we came to them with the series, because we're industry experts, we've been operating in this space for five years, we had a good answer to every single question. Not only that, we had the whole thing architected. So this was now two and a half years into it, we had put the groundwork in place. We showed them how we could make it possible in an ethical, in a compliant manner. And that was really the key to the deal. And what we love about Entrepreneur as well, is that this is a company, Casey, that's been around for 40 years. Started off as a magazine. In fact, the magazine is still in circulation. But they were one of those brands that transitioned very early into, you know, online presence, Internet, digital. And so they've been very successful in that transition and very pioneering and forward thinking, and they continue to be pioneering and forward thinking. So we're really humbled to have, you know, their support and partnership in the series and very much aligned on Ethos.

That's amazing. I'm excited for this show, man. Like, the show itself, can you kind of give me a visual indication of. For the viewers that are gonna be tuning in, like, what does each show look like? Is it about, you know, is it internally digging to the company? Is it, like, what is the plot? I'd love for you to talk more on what the people should expect when the show airs.

Absolutely. So the format of this series is what's called a serial or serialized narrative. And what that means simply is that we're following the stories of these five founders independent of the others. So, for example, in episode one, we introduced the first two companies. The two founders of those businesses basically spend 10 minutes each talking about their backgrounds. Who are they? What is their vision? What is their mission? What are their values? How did they come to be founders of a $50 million a year business. That's episode one. Episode two. Those two founders begin developing the materials for their roadshow. There's an institutional roadshow, there's a customer or retail roadshow, marketing campaign, et cetera. We introduce company number three, so on and so forth throughout the series. There's mentors that come in. Billionaire investors, founders of NASDAQ listed companies that took their companies public in the 90s. They come in to coach and guide and advise the founders. And then at the tail end of the season, episode seven, that's when the companies close their financings and actually have the IPO at NASDAQ market site in Times Square, New York. There's nothing more exciting. And so by that point, the viewers will have followed that founder for the last six weeks as they're raising capital, getting guidance, going through the motions, the drama, the ups and downs. And maybe if they invested in that company, they now own shares, they've bought IPO shares, they can sell those shares in the market or hold onto them forever if they think it's going to be the next Amazon. So five companies, their stories are told week after week for 10 weeks in second half of the season. These companies, IPO.

Wow, this is exciting, Darren. This is something like I said from the start. I heard about just the whole concept of going public and I was like, wow. This, as someone that is seeing entrepreneurs all over, to be able to be a part of it, is just so unique. And I'd love you to talk about the investing side of it as a viewer of the show throughout the. You said seven weeks, correct?

Correct. And so basically the way it works is when you watch this series from episode one, technically you're able to invest in one or all five companies, but it's not an infomercial. Right. So you essentially, as a viewer, you have six weeks in which to make an investment decision. You click to invest. We have a technology platform that allows the Viewer to buy IPO shares in about three minutes. And if the company actually IPOs to Nasdaq, those shares then clear, settle and trade. And now you're an investor in the deal. You bought the IPO shares at the IPO price. If you want, provided there's liquidity, you can sell your shares. You could transfer them to an existing brokerage account if you have a Robinhood or Schwab account. Or again, you could hold onto them because you think you're sitting on the next big thing.

Yeah, totally. This is super cool. And just regarding looking forward into 2020 and the show itself. What are you most excited about and, and how are you spending your time getting ready to launch this show?

You know, the number one thing we're doing right now, Casey is casting. And we have what we see as, you know, lightning in a bottle, a very unique opportunity to do something really incredible. Our focus is on finding five incredible founders that are probably a little bit younger, diverse backgrounds, female founders, minority founders. We want to showcase the entrepreneurial fabric and kind of founders that are representative of entrepreneurs in America today. So we are intent on casting a very diverse and dynamic group of founders with these later stage startups that are looking to take their companies public to NASDAQ in a small cap IPO. That's where 90% of our time is being spent interviewing companies. We've had dozens of Companies apply on goingpublic.com submitting their companies. We're meeting with founders, talking with founders every day. And that is where our attention is for the next few months. And then after that we go into production and then the series will air in April 2021.

Very cool. I'm looking forward to it. I have two more questions before we wrap up here, Darren. One of them is just for young people that are listening today. I know we touched on this briefly about just lessons throughout your journey, but if you could go back in time and give yourself a piece of advice to someone that is starting a company today, just regarding financing, raising capital, but most importantly, just building team culture, what advice would you give yourself or to that young entrepreneur that is starting today?

You know, I would encourage founders to be patient. I think, you know, one of the things I've realized, Casey, is that sometimes as a founder, the moment you're closest to failing completely is actually the moment you're closest to breaking through. And you almost never realize that until you're on the other side. And I think it's so easy and tempting for founders that are struggling. They're not selling deals, they're not raising money, they're having challenges to want to give up. And so my biggest advice is to keep going and to be patient. It took me about 10 years as a founder to hit my stride. I'm 40 years old. I started my first company when I was 30. And even with all this enterprise sales experience in my twenties and a lot of success as an executive in the Oracle world, it still took me 10 years to figure out what the hell I was doing, how to run a proper business now at 40. So, biggest takeaway, keep at it, be patient, stick with it, and over time, you will win.

I love that. That being said, Dan, before we wrap up here, I'd love for you to tell the viewers where is the best place for them to stay updated on going public and when the first show is going to air. Because it's something that I'm excited about and I know the View are as well.

Absolutely. So people that are interested in learning more about the series can go to goingpublic.com that's got information about the series, how it works, what types of companies we're looking for. That's also our application system as well. So anybody who's listening to this podcast that's interested in applying to be in the inaugural season can click apply now and submit their company for review.

Very cool. Well, Darren, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on today and I'm looking forward to watching the series when it goes live next April. And we'll definitely, we'll definitely do a follow up interview around the time when it launches so that we can, you know, have another conversation through the process. So I'm looking forward to it, Darren. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Casey. It was a real pleasure. Thank you.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple original.

Series the world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours.

Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Legacy of Monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.