Making the Most of Tech Skills and Experience to Provide Maximum Value to the Industry - Episode 99

Today's show is sponsored by the Airbnb Kickstart course. My wife and I started our first Airbnb here in the last year and we've come to love the ability to earn more money than we would if we had a long term rental. If you're interested in starting your Airbnb business with little money, scaling your Airbnb business, or just learning tricks about the industry in general, check out our airbnb course@nextlevelincome.com Airbnb BNB. That's Air the Letters BNB and you'll get a 20% discount code. On today's show we have Eng Tang. Eng currently runs Tosi Capital, private equity investment firm with nearly 1100 investors and 300 million of assets under management. He has 12 years of experience investing in real estate with thousands of units of multifamily 10 senior living communities under management across states like Michigan, Missouri, Florida, Georgia, Virginia and California. Angel. And he also runs a bitcoin mining investment company with deployments across several states running on renewable energy. He's launching his first NFT and a DAO project and also runs a defi fund. Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to raise your.

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How to gain access to institutional quality real estate opportunities. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Man, I'm fired up here and I see the picture of your beautiful wife and son there in the background.

Yeah, yeah, I gotta get updated picture. I have two young boys, one and three.

Oh, that's awesome. Well, I'm a little ahead of you. We're 10 and 12, so. So. But I don't, I don't know if it gets easier or better, but it certainly is is a fun ride the whole way.

I hear it gets both easier and harder.

That's right. Well put. Well put. But Ing, I'm really excited to have you on. I've heard your story. Most people that are that are listening here to the podcast haven't. So I'd really love for you to start with how you ended up in the United States kind of your story early on and we'll go from there.

Yeah, me too. First of all, thanks for letting me on your show and thanks for your audience for listening. I like telling my story because it's a story that I think is both Atypical and typical of the American dream, if you want to call it. I was in a refugee camp in Thailand. This is more my parents story, but I have heard of tales from my parents that they trekked through the jungle with my older brother, who was one year old at the time, carrying the neck and trying to be as quiet as possible while the soldiers were hunting them. It was sort of the time of the Cambodian genocide. Pope Pot was ruling Cambodia. My parents were Cambodian Chinese and the Cambodian Chinese were persecuted at the time. I was born in a refugee camp in the Thai border of Cambodia, in Thailand. And I have some pretty pictures of me chasing chickens and in straw huts. Don't remember too much of it, but I came here when I was just before 3 years old and was lucky to, you know, come to America and be grew up in Los Angeles, grew very poor like most immigrants. But I don't think I've ever felt it. I don't think I've ever felt that I was poor or didn't have anything. It was just more, hey, we had ourselves, our family and that was sort of the most important thing.

Absolutely. No, it so is. And I think, you know, that is one of the things I really admire about Asian cultures is how, how close knit the families are and how they, you know, my, my great grandmother lived with my grandmother and it was, and she lived with my, my mother and my aunts and uncles, my grand, my, my great grandmother did. So it was, it was really neat. I didn't. Because it was normal to me. I'd go there and I'd see, you know, all these generations together and it was really cool. But that's really not normal in America. You know, we were kind of, we're kind of more separated between generations.

Yeah, it's I think western culture and me growing up in the west and being American as anyone else can be, but also having a little bit in Asia. Western culture is definitely more individual, which has lots of pros, some cons and I think eastern culture, if you want to call it that, is more collectivists, more family oriented, putting the collective, in most cases, family above of themselves. Which has cons and pros. Pros and cons.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so you end up in la, you grew up, went to public school, I assume. Let's fast forward a little bit. So you end up working for Apple, right?

Yeah.

What explain kind of transition us into your technology career and how that, how you got there because that's an impressive company to be working for in and of itself.

So you fast forward a lot.

Yeah, I did. I know. That's why I was like, let's, you know, I'll fast forward and you can kind of catch us up.

I'm going to bring us back a little bit. Pull it back. One of the things that I was always graviting towards was just trying to figure out how to make it in this world without really a lot of guidance from my parents. It's not like I had a dad or uncle or somebody who was in corporate America. My parents didn't have any skilling at all. They didn't go to elementary school, didn't go to high school, middle school, no school. So it's not like the typical Asian immigrant story where like PhD doctors or whatever it is now. They definitely emphasize education. So that's definitely part of my upbringing. And I was really good. I was really good at data pattern recognition, which was useful when I was in investment banking and is useful when I was in tech. So a lot of the reasons why I got into tech was pattern recognition and data analysis. My last job at Apple was leading data science in the Siri team. So, so imagine trillions of records of data parsing out every little thing that you say to Siri if you're using Siri and trying to figure out how to make it better, how to make it more, you know, how to make it more responsive and understand everyone's accents and intonations and desires and try to read their minds. So very interesting time. But yeah, it was cool to get into tech because I've been in lots of different companies, both in Media and DIRECTV and AT&T and then in investment banking. So I think tech, one of the better cultures out there.

Yeah. So walk us through how did you end up. Catch us up through college as well. So you went to Wharton. Right. So, you know, that's. Again, you may. You're making these big leaps from, you know, fairly humble beginnings. Um, so why, you know, why tech? Why'd you go to Wharton? What were your, what were your interest in high school throughout that period?

Yeah, my high school experience was I went to. Nothing was ever intentional for me. As in, like, my parents didn't set me up for this and this, which is now as I have two kids, I have two kids, like, okay, how do I set them up for success? I don't think my parents have thought that. They probably thought like, how do we survive? How do we make it day? And so I went to like a public school that I remember. We were at the postage out, literally on an advertisement for a bond, a school bond program to get more funding for schools in California. It was not a great school. Lots of drive bys and school shootings. And I remember this in microbiology classes, girl overdose in my fell. My lap and I had to like hey. So that was, that was a memorable moment. But yeah, what I loved was really I was day trading in high school. I remember this trying to go into the public libraries before those funds before I had a cell phone for Internet was widely available and trading on, I think it was E trade at the time. And so I got really hooked on that. I really love trying to look at these patterns. So I thought, okay, what am I going to do? I'm going to go to Wharton Economics. Study economics at Wharton, at Penn. I played a lot of poker and that's how I put my tuition amongst my four jobs that I had. Yeah, yeah, it was great. Won a couple of tournaments and I think professional except for the fact that, you know, when you're an immigrant who don't have much, who doesn't have much, you kind of have, there's, I think you're limited with this scarcity mindset. Like if, if you're, if you're like crazy about spending $5 or $10 meal, which by the way, I still am I still begrudgingly like $10, $15. Should I get that? You know, I have like I have more than I need point. It's just my residual upbringing. But when you're, when you hate losing money, it's actually pretty bad for both being a stock trader, which I was, and a poker player, which I was as well. I overcame that with math and tried reasoning. It had the hard pounding moment of putting $1,000 in the pot or more than that sometimes it was challenging. So that ties into this whole concept where I like investing. I'm really good at it because I think I'm really good at math. But I also hate trading. I hate losing money or the feeling of it because every little dollar feels like I need to have that. I've been trying to get over it time and time again. I think more abundantly now. I hope that's what most of your audience, I know, you do as well. Yeah. So I did a lot of different random things that led me to where I am now. I think all part of this narrative and the tapestry.

Yeah, no, I was in college when I started day trading. Same thing. It was like, oh, this is great. I still remember that first big loss though. I mean it just made me sick to My stomach for days and weeks. And that's what ultimately led me to real estate because I was like, I need something I can control more. I was like, this is great. So. So talk us through your first real estate investment.

Yeah, I was in financial, the financial industry and investment banking and the financial crisis just happened.

I was, I'm sorry, so when did you came out of school? What year?

06.

Okay, so you were right before the financial crisis. So you got a little traction. Yeah, you got a little bit of traction. Yeah, financial crisis happened. You're. You were with which, I'm sorry, remind me again which firm you're with then?

I was getting my sacks.

Yeah, you were. That's what I thought.

And you know, I was firsthand experience, you know, just front row seats into the whole calamity and coming probably several months away. I was pretty young, so I didn't necessarily know how to react to it. But one thing I reacted was I lost 60% of my net worth. I worked hard for that. Now I was making more money than I ever dreamed I could make. It was like 50, $60,000 a year, which is a lot to me back then. Now I was like, I think people go into Apple nowadays, freshmen, first year coming out of college, you can make easy and software engineering. So it's wild. But I felt that pain and I saw also that real estate was actually getting really great value. So I bought my first real estate triplex in LA and it lost 66 pence. Value was in a foreclosure. I made a bid on it and I won it. And then the whole brrrr method. Didn't know what brrr method was, but I added paint cabinets. I was unemployed and so I had some time in my hands and then just re. You know, then I refinanced it out after six months and I got my equity back at the bottom. So that first one, I was making like a thousand dollars a month net and I was like this is really nice. I like it a lot better than making like $10,000 in one trade or whatever it is. I was like, I like this predictability, I like this stability. And I got hooked on it. I got hooked on investing. So that's the type of investing that I love love nowadays.

Yeah. Okay. And then it, but you still, you still worked in corporate America, so you continue on. You had, I mean, I mean your, you know, your resume is pretty outstanding. You're with, I mean you mentioned DirecTV, even had a couple other experiences before that. Your CFO for a period before you ended up at Apple. When did you start to scale your real estate business and bring on other investors either in syndications or as partners?

Yeah, I didn't think that was going to be my trajectory. I was buying real estate every year. Also working. I went to the Peace Corps after financial crisis. Most of my friends went to grad school. Tried to get safety in the academics. I went to Peace Corps in Republic of Georgia a year after Russia invaded and annexed Asia. This remind my wife.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, she was a lone American voice, sea of non American voices and English voices. And so it was very interesting times story on that. But the whole time I had real estate and I was trying to buy more real estate. And so I get really good at using, doing the side hobby and thinking of it as like my, you know, my side hustle. My, my, you know, I wanted to just leverage what I had, which was a nice W2 income. Not, not back then at Peace Corps, but right after I came back working at Brad Games and then, you know, a couple other companies. And every time I just use my W2 income to just add another thing to my portfolio. By the time I was at Apple, I was making, by my. A couple of years into Apple, I was making enough of my passive real estate income and as passive as I could make it to offset sort of what I was making or make as much as I was making at Apple, which is significant. And then I started really loving talking about it and I didn't really. For many of us, we don't like talking about how much we make what. How we make it and what we do.

And I, that's another, that's another thing about America. We love to talk about what we do, but we don't like to talk about how much we make at what we do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was just too. Because I'm not sure if you're honest or you, you were in corporate America, but you know, you always sort of just talk about like, oh, how much is going to make? Oh, I should get promotion. I want to get this job. And so that's my whole thought process all the time. Because I was trying to get more and more and more because trying to get that security for my family. And so I started to just talk about my real estate investing experience and realizing that, wait, you guys don't know about this. It's not doing this. This isn't a thing that people do. And I remember that every cube mate that I had for three Jobs, all of them ended up buying real estate because of me. And I was, you know, I gave them my motto, and I helped them look at some deals. I made calls for them. I tried to figure out, like, you know, and I really love that. And it was only a couple years ago that I started to scale up, as you say. And it was.

I remember seeing some of your first. I think one of your. I think I saw your first or one of the deals in Kansas City.

A couple years ago.

I think that was the first deal of yours I saw.

Yeah, it was two years ago. Two years ago I made our first deal and raised some invested capital. And it was never really comfortable to raise capital, to ask people for money, because I wanted to make sure that I was very comfortable with how this works. And so by that time, I was like, I did the deal myself, actually. I had enough money, I had built enough. Well, I had a snowball engine that was just generating capital and wealth. But people kept asking me all the time, hey, can I come in with you? Can I get in, take my money. And so it was such a weird experience to do that and then realize that, oh, that's actually adding value to people. That's actually helping people. And that's what I love. I love being a service, presenting opportunities. So that's how I started Tosigappa and what I do now, I guess.

Yeah, no, I love it. And it is amazing. You get to that point. And so I was in corporate America. I was always in sales, so it was a little bit more transparent because if sales reps paid on commission and you get paid 10% just using a round number and you sell, you know, 10 million worth of product, people know you made a million dollars. So, you know, it's. It's interesting. You have some very, very strong personality, shall we say, in sales, because those types of people gravitate. So it was a little less foreign to me. But, yeah, it is wild. You know, you talk to these people and that's how we started, too. It's, you know, investors would say, well, hey, Chris, what do you like? What are you doing? What are you buying? And next thing you know, it's like, well, how can I get in on that?

I was never in sales, but I bet it would have been a really good. I don't know why I wasn't in sales. Probably because no one ever told me to be in sales. Probably because I was an Asian kid who was good at math and getting into the analytics and data science, which I did very well anyways. But I realized that I was making. I was really good at making deals and then presenting opportunities. And if you're in corporate America, you pitch to executives all the time.

That's all sales is.

Yeah, yeah, I'm really good at making a good keynote PowerPoint and I never knew that skillset would transition. It'd be actually useful outside corporate America.

Yeah. And that's what, you know, look, if you're listening, and I know we have a lot of salespeople listen to the show. Sales is just about communication. And you know, people say, oh, I don't like to sell. And there's this conception that people say, oh, you know, you have the, this good, good salesperson can sell ice to an Eskimo. That's probably not a good salesperson. You know, it's, it's about fitting a need. And you came about your business from a service mentality. And I think that's the idea. If you, if you go out and you try to provide value and you have the expertise and that empathy for other people, I think that's really at the core of what makes, makes a good salesperson. Um, so I, I believe that you would be good at sales for.

I think empathy and relatability is very critical. And then also simplicity. That's something that I learned at Apple. How to simplify things. My message to complicated tech piece of technology into something that your mom could understand. And so the kind of investments I do now, a lot of times this is the first time people are investing in this type of asset category, whereas senior living, bitcoin, mining, oil and gas, whatever it is. I love to just think about the problem of how do I explain this in terms that people can relate to and you by being deeply empathetic with who somebody is, what they are. So my background as an engineer and data science, I can relate to other fellow engineers in Silicon Valley. I think that's actually a very big portion of our investor base. I can relate to them. They're very analytical. They love thinking about the math of it and I love to present that, but also relating it to their real world experiences.

Yeah, that's certainly a good place to have access to capital, for sure. So we started talking about real estate and you just talked about senior living, which I think is going to be, is going to be big this decade. But then you mentioned bitcoin, oil and gas. So I've seen a transition with what your company's been doing here over the past year or so. Bitcoin is something that I set out last year to really educate myself on. You've been Investing in bitcoin. Buying bitcoin for about a decade. Is that right?

Yeah, almost nine years now, since 2013. So I've been buying, holding, selling bitcoin.

I know every time I hear you say, I wish I never sold it.

Yeah, you never know. And by the way, even I bet five years from now, I would probably look back in this year or last year and where I sold Bitcoin at 50k and like, hey, why did you do that? When it's like 500k in 5 years or whatever it is, I can regret it now. I can get it then. You regret everything you do, and it's just like, if you're not making decisions, you're not making regrets.

That's right. And you're not learning either, probably.

Right.

All right, so tell us what got you interested in bitcoin? Because when I really dove in and learned about it, I had an Austrian economics professor in my MBA program, and I never really knew until last year kind of the history with bitcoin. So tell the audience a little bit about why you got into bitcoin in the first place, and I'd love to hear more about what your company's doing in that space.

I got into bitcoin because it was the only way to transact in certain markets. It was like digital representation of a currency that you can then trade for a dollar. And it was mostly for. It was a cool technology. I wanted to try it out. My I in the circus I was traveling and people talked about a little bit. So I bought some. I used it. So I didn't buy it to hold. I didn't like, oh, this is gonna go wherever it's gonna go. I never thought it would be where it is now. But then I got into also the technical aspect of mining of it, which is just validating transactions. Like Visa Network, you validate every transaction that you swipe your card in. And visa takes a 1.5% fee or maybe more. And bitcoin mining is very similar to that. You're validating these transactions by sending bitcoin a miner to validate that transaction. So I started to just do that at a home basis. And so that was making a couple of bitcoin, which back then wasn't that much. I was like, this is cool. Little passive income. Very relatable to my real estate. Set it up upfront capital, get some cash, returns, whatever it is, depreciation, all the good stuff. And then realizing that, oh, as of last year, the game has changed. It's institutional scale now, not Just bitcoin, but bitcoin mining. And when institutions come into any space, they change the game and it makes it much more robust. I saw that happening and I thought this is a once lifetime opportunity to then get into this industrial scale and make as much connections and be a forefront of this. And that's what we've been doing at Tosy Capital, launching our fifth fund and probably going to be subsequent more in bitcoin mining. And I think it's a really interesting opportunity for our investors.

Yeah, no, I think it's fantastic. So just real quick. So when I was talking to my wife and to be transparent, I've invested in two year funds at this point and when I was talking to my wife, she's like, who are these miners? And I was like, no, no, no, they're not minors. Like people like going to. These are, these are, you know, these are computers essentially. So can you just recap that so when I share this episode with my wife, she can listen to this part.

That's a funny answer because I do have investors who say, do these miners get a break now? The break 21st.

Not the ones who are in China now that we're, you know, the ones.

In the U.S. you know, Osho goals.

That's right. We have safe spaces.

Yeah. So they are computers, right. They are essentially just an algorithm. And Bitcoin, you can talk about crypticology, that's it's all on a code. And we call these things called, we call it blockchain, which means that I send you bitcoin and I have two bitcoin and I send you one. Now the ledger will say that I have one and that you have one. And this thing will be written out in every computer that's on a network and that's how we validate or secure the network. And what that means is no one can ever say that, oh, you don't have that much bitcoin or hey, we had a central bank issue or the sovereign government is sanctioning and freezing your assets and whatever it is, rightly and wrongly. And all those things happen because these computers exist to essentially inform the global network that these actions are happening. And that's what a lot of new technologies in the blockchain universe are going to happen. And bitcoin so that it has first of all one of the first and one of the. Otis. It's Otis. And there will be a finite nature of 21 million bitcoin in a row and 19 million mine. What that means is every 10 minutes one lucky computer gets 6.25 bitcoin. It's a lot of bitcoin now. And they do that by essentially doing these mathematical problems to guess this number. And if you have a lot more computers, you have a higher chance of getting that lucky. 6.25 bitcoin, he said.

Just like poker.

Pure math. Pure math, exactly. Yeah. So it's the same thing about real estate. Like if you have. You have a set number of renters and if you put more property, you know, everyone just gets a little bit lower rent. And it's very much a mathematical game, which I love math. So it caught me.

I do, too. I wasn't as smart as you, so they pulled me aside. My advisor said, you should go into sales, Chris. You have two too much. You're not quite smart enough. And maybe too much personality. Yeah. So. All right, so why Tuzi? So why Tuzi Capital? What's the name come from?

My wife thought name. She's Chinese American and she. I was trying to think of a name like to be. I believe in a technique as my tech background. I wanted, like, have a name like that. Tosi told. It's really the name. It's Mandarin for investment. So investment invests your capital.

Yeah.

And I mispronounce it myself all the time. So.

So it's, it's. So how am I supposed to. I apologize.

Well, I say tosy, so that's how people should probably say it. But in the. In the correct pronunciation in Mandarin, which I don't speak very well, it's to. And I will never say like that, but it's toese, basically.

Gotcha. Well, whatever you call it, I'll call it. Well, Aang, we're going to have to have you back because I'd love to dive even deeper into all these different things. I know there's a lot of listeners that want to learn more about what you're doing at. I'm going to mispronounce it Tuzi Capital. Tosi Capital. What's the best way for them to get in touch with you, learn more about what you guys are doing?

Yeah, I love for everyone to send me an email, probably take a little time to reply, go on our website, sign up, and then you'll be automatically added to our education webinars, which we try to have once every month or so. And recently I've been trying to get more education webinars on defi and crypto stuff, but I love talking about taxes and senior living and all these investments. I'm just an investor. I just like to look at interesting opportunities and invest myself and then if it makes sense, present to our investors. So that's something that I will continue to always like. And if the world changes tomorrow, I'll probably find another investment that hopefully the investors will like and I will probably invest in.

Absolutely. And we love your story. We love what you're doing here at NextLevel Income because that's our mission, to provide investors with education and the opportunities to do it. Thank you so much for sharing all that today.

Thanks for having me, Chris.

My pleasure. Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.