Intelligent Data: Empowering Ai Development With Lucy Guo

I took money from people in the end because I realized how useful people could be just in terms of introductions, et cetera. Like they're very incentive aligned to help the company grow.

How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frasier and Ryan Deiss. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch, and today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com, and you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

Thank you for coming out and, uh, and being with us today. Really appreciate that.

Yeah, thanks for having me. And I heard that a lot of you guys are hungover, so thanks for being here.

These are the people that really want to be here. That's great. So, um, you've had a pretty cool entrepreneurial journey in, uh, in not a lot of time. It's It's pretty impressive. Would you kind of just give us the genesis? I know you interned at Facebook, and then you were the first female designer at Snap, right?

Yeah.

And a lot of other cool things. But just to kind of give us the overview of the entrepreneurial journey to date.

Yeah, definitely. So I was always an entrepreneur growing up, I believe. Like in kindergarten, I was selling Pokémon cards and colored pencils for money. I actually got sent to the principal's office and got threatened to get kicked out of—

And you're like, I'm selling Pokémon cards, not weed.

Yeah, exactly. And then around 2nd grade, I started learning to code. So I was making bots and then just using these bots to get rare items and Neopets on the actual site and then reselling them on forums for thousands of dollars. I figured out how to make a PayPal account via a Visa debit card. And you didn't really have to verify anything back then. So I didn't have a big account, but I had money sitting on PayPal, which I could use to spend on sites like eBay. And then just started making a bunch of internet marketing tools, made one one of the first Twitter bots out there that would just like auto-follow and unfollow people and targeted internet marketers who would spend quite a lot of money on it. And then yeah, I got into hackathons in college and that's when I discovered the startup world and that there were things that were even bigger than these like mini websites I was creating. So started diving into that and then decided to drop out of college and pursue my like bigger entrepreneurship journey.

I like it, I like it. And so in terms of going to Facebook, what was that like and what were you doing there in the end?

Yeah, so I was doing iOS engineering and worked on Messenger. And then afterwards, I decided I wanted to start my own company. So I had actually got the Thiel Fellowship, and the deal was that I could do the Thiel Fellowship if I left Facebook. So for people that don't know, it was called 20 Under 20 back then, and Peter Thiel was giving kids $100,000 to drop out of school and pursue their dreams because he wanted to make a point that you didn't need college.

That's pretty cool. And then, how do you feel about that? Are you happy with that choice? You've done okay?

Yeah, I'm very happy with that choice. I actually think everyone that pursued the Thiel Fellowship ended up doing incredibly well, and I think it's because they got a head start in life. They entered Silicon Valley when they're like 18, 19 years old, were able to network with other incredibly smart people, and realistically they just got like a 3-year head start with tons of resources.

So, and you self-educated on coding, or did you go through courses or training?

Yeah, so I self-educated myself when I was younger, but I did study computer science at Carnegie Mellon.

How important do you think it is to code these days?

I think the future is actually no-code, personally. There's a lot of no-code tools out there right now. You can use Airtable, etc., to just hack things together. And you're even seeing design software where you can press a button and it'll essentially code the site for you. That being said, I think that knowing how to code is important or understanding the fundamentals because realistically the best sites today and the best apps today, you still need a team of engineers and you will know how much you should be spending on creating an app, what the actual timeframe should be, etc., if you know how to code. If you are just a business person and you are hiring a team of engineers, you're going to get ripped off. Yeah, yeah.

So how do you do that? If, I mean, you partner with a coder, I guess? What's— how does the person who wants to go and do and develop some software app or something like that build a team without getting ripped off?

Yeah, so if you wanted to actually learn how to code, there's a lot of online resources that are free out there. I think App Academy is like one of the best out there if you wanted to like actually dive into coding yourself. Otherwise, I would highly recommend finding someone technical to partner up with. Like, students from MIT will gladly do it.

And you, I think, was it at Quora that you met your partner for Scale?

Yes.

Would you tell us a little bit about that story and then how that partnership came to be?

Yeah, for sure. So we were just both young dropouts, essentially. Well, he hadn't dropped out or gone to college yet.

You got paid to drop out, so that's okay.

Yeah, I got paid to drop out. He was a tech lead there, and we were just like, okay, we're the youngest people at this company. We're crushing it. We would just have lunch together every single day and we were like, yeah, let's start a company together one day. And then I was at Snap and I was just getting bored working on projects on the side every weekend. So I hit him up and I'm like, okay, now I wanna do a company. Y Combinator applications are coming up, we should just do it. So we were just coding random things during winter break or something and then applied to YC. And we applied with several different ideas, but which neither, we didn't work on any of the ideas we actually applied with, but they ended up They ended up accepting us because of our history.

So Scale AI went through Y Combinator?

Yes.

What did you think of that? Well, actually, first, would you tell everybody, just in case they don't know, what is Y Combinator? And then why did you choose that route, and would you do it again?

Yeah, so Y Combinator is probably the best accelerator program in the world. Twitch came out of it, Dropbox came out of it, et cetera. They created several unicorns. I enjoyed the experience. I think that if you're a B2B company, it gives you an unfair advantage, 'cause it's just like you can sell to all the other YC companies. And it's just like ongoing infinite network of companies that have funding that can spend on your product. So if you are a B2B company that has a product that's useful for any company out there, like it's a no-brainer to do. Would I do it again? The answer is actually no on my end. That's because it's a lot of dilution. Like they take a large percentage.

What is the percentage they take?

I think it's new now. It used to be 124.7%. They have a new deal where they invest $500K, but a portion of it is on an uncapped note, which is good and bad in a lot of ways. Technically, you get more of the money for less dilution, but they're doing that because they want to squeeze into your next round and get more ownership.

Yeah. How did the partnership come about for Scale and evolve?

Yeah, so we just decided to be co-founders, and then We got an OIC, and then I ended up raising some money in Los Angeles too from this guy, Paige Craig. He coined the term Silicon Beach. And then we just started building. Yeah.

And when you're talking about going into business like that, a lot of people, I think, have challenges with, well, how do we know who gets what percentage and work that out? And then how do we work together?

I mean, we were both so early. We were both technical. We were very complementary. So it was just very 50/50. And I'd actually highly suggest it be 50/50 for anyone that's just starting out. I think the only exception is if you've already raised money, right? Like if you've already raised money and then you bring on someone, then it's absolutely fair to give them a lower percentage. And it's just like what capacity they are joining you in. Like if you're adding them as a co-founder post-fundraising, what's typical is 10%, or like a CTO, et cetera. If you're hiring like an engineer, I would say be equity generous. Give them like 1 through 5% for your first engineer depending on Like how much you've raised.

And would you, uh, and is that typically done through options? Do you find that's kind of the best way or?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And you've done a lot of fundraising. You, you had written a, uh, an article on it and it couldn't pull it up, which has gotten me totally hanging because it was like, I wrote this long thing on exactly how you do fundraising. Would you share with us how would you go about doing that if you didn't have any connections right now?

Yeah, so we just created major FOMO. What I did was I looked at friends who knew investors and asked them to send the investor, like hype me up essentially, right? And say like, you have to meet Lucy, blah blah. Or I'll send a forwardable to them and then they forward it to the investor and then we get introed. But like once it's hyped up, I align all the meetings all at once. Start off with like the investors I care less about that I view as like a practice round because like they're going to ask questions and then I can like reform my pitch and then have all the like big bigger investors that can write larger checks in the end. And then kind of just say like, oh yeah, I'm really busy because I actually have all these other meetings, or I'm going to be on Sand Hill Road these dates, so it's best to meet at this time. And then suddenly they know that you're talking to other investors without you saying who exactly you're talking to, which you don't actually want to reveal because they will backchannel. So if you're like, oh, I'm talking to this person at Sequoia, and then they end up passing, they—

Yeah, absolutely.

It'll cause other investors to pass versus if you leave it up hanging, everyone's gonna try to figure it out, but that creates insane FOMO and there's not one person they go to where if they end up passing on you, they know.

So when you have the conversations with the investors, how do you prep for that? What do you do to get ready for that conversation, including do you show 'em a deck? Do you show 'em a demo, a wireframe? What do you do?

Yeah, so in general, I like to send the materials beforehand. I think that having a naturally flowing conversation is much better because you want to get the investors talking. Because once they're talking more than you, they are already convinced and they're convincing themselves to invest versus like if you walk through a deck during an investor meeting, like you're doing most of the talking and they're probably falling asleep.

Right.

Yeah.

So you ask them questions or like how do you get them talking more?

Honestly, like I just let them talk and I don't interrupt until There's silence.

Okay.

And then I'll follow up with maybe a question or a point that I know that they'll like based off what they said.

Okay. Now, so there's all these different structures for raising money too. You could sell direct equity, you can do a SAFE, you can do convertible notes. Do you have one of those things that you think works better than the other?

Yeah, I think SAFEs are the best way to go for your first round of funding because it's cheap. You don't really need to use lawyers because the YC SAFE is just so standard. And it's fast, right?

Would you give everybody just an outline of what a SAFE is and kind of how that works?

And, um, so SAFE is a promise for future equity, essentially, when the round converts into a priced round.

Yeah, awesome. And, and then when you're, uh, when you're doing those pitches, do you already have your team together, or do you try to raise money so that you have enough to attract a team to say that I'm funded now, so don't worry, you can come over here and I always think it's really sketchy when someone puts together a deck of their team when the team isn't actually full-time or hired.

I think it's a really big red flag for investors. Whenever I've raised, I've just been like, hey, I'm a solo founder, or hey, I have a co-founder.

Okay. And when you're talking to people who are going to be on the team, what kinds of questions do you think it's really good to ask to be sure that you're getting the right people?

In general, I think I want to see what their work ethic is like. Obviously, if I'm like, interviewing an engineer, I'll give them engineering questions. If I'm interviewing a marketer, I figure out like just how good they are. I'll do like reference checks with 10 other people. That being said, I don't look for like all perfect reference checks because I do think that like a lot of people are just very polarizing. So I see like, are there at least some good reference checks? But I try to like evaluate their skill set and like whether they're willing to grind the first like 2 years, let's say, because I think work-life balance is incredibly difficult to have your first like 2 years while you're trying to like Yeah, and as far as finding those people, do you like search firms?

What do you think about using a professional search firm or recruiter?

I do not because I generally think the best talent, the second they even mention they're going to quit, they already have like 10 companies on them, right? So they're not going to have to even need to use a search firm. The best people you're going to get are like you convince them to drop out of college, you convince them to quit their job where they're already excelling at.

How do you find those people if you're sitting out here and don't know how to find those people?

One way I found those people was I figured out every single student at Stanford, MIT, et cetera, back in the day when Facebook was popular. And then I added their email to my Facebook account so I can access these student groups that I would just post job listings in colleges that I didn't go to. And I've done a lot of technical interviewing, and I just knew which colleges I thought had the best engineers. So I like targeted those colleges. But I would say like really infiltrating student groups and infiltrating like great companies.

Okay.

So I would like go to lunch at certain companies like Stripe, et cetera, and like just make friends with every single person and kind of figure out from there who is like there for 4 years, et cetera, thinking about leaving. If you really wanted to go cold, you can go on LinkedIn and like look at who's been 4 years at a certain company or 3 years even because they're about to like Their golden handcuffs are almost gone, because almost every company has a standard 1-year cliff, 4-year vest.

Can anybody go to lunch at Stripe, or do we have to know somebody?

You have to know somebody.

Yeah, who should we call? No, I'm just kidding. So you also have gotten into venture investing yourself through Backend Capital.

Yes.

Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about and how it works?

Yeah, so it came about because I was just like, okay, I've done everything from founding a company, product engineering, et cetera, I want to try venture, right?

Yeah.

Also my lead investor, Accel, for Series A was like, hey, we want to just give you some money to play around and do venture with and you'll get the carry, et cetera. So I did that and I was doing a really good job.

Nice.

So I ended up just raising a fund and then investing in early stage companies. So I focused on pre-seed and seed. I think that's my specialty. I like betting on people versus Traction, because sometimes there's traction, but there's an upper limit like TAM, right?

How do you vet the investments that it's going to be?

Yeah, so my thesis is invest in technical people because if you have a team of, let's say, an engineer and a designer, they never need to hire a single person. They have indefinite runway to continuously pivot. So as long as they persevere and never give up, they will probably figure out something. I have a very good friend who I met in the Thiel Fellowship back in 2014, and he's been pivoting and finally raised a giant round like this month. Yeah. Um, and like finally figured it out. Uh, 'cause he never gave up 'cause he was technically like he could just live off ramen for the rest of his life.

That's great.

Yeah.

Uh, and, and for the fund, do you like some of the tools like AngelList provides for people for funds so that all the backend is taken care of? Or do you think it's better to have your own team or, or what, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so I've done both. Like fund 1, I used AngelList and fund 2, I had my own team. I would do AngelList again.

Yeah, it's a lot of work.

Yeah, it's easy. Yeah.

And, um, and then as far as picking, did you have someone to kind of do the ops for the fund, or are you doing everything?

Um, back when we were on AngelList, I was just doing everything because AngelList was essentially the ops. And then for Fund 2, we hired someone to help out with some of the ops.

Okay. Yeah. And, um, for one of the things that you have— well, what are some of the companies you've invested in?

With Backend?

Yeah. And is that fund still open?

It's still open. It's not open like you can't invest in it anymore, but we are still doubling down on current investments.

Okay.

So Ramp is probably our big winner, like multiple billions, maybe $7, $8 billion the last round. And we invested in Pave. Ramp is a credit card for companies essentially. So it helps you save money and figures out where you can save. And then we invested in Pave, which is compensation transparency. So you know how much to pay others. That is also a unicorn right now. How much to pay others? Yeah, so like it's like, okay, so like you're an engineer, right? Like you're a Series B company hiring an engineer of this status. Like how much are other companies offering similar profiles?

Okay.

Main Street, which finds you savings on companies, which is awesome. Yeah, just a bunch of random companies. We invested in Crossmint at a great valuation. This is actually a company that we essentially incubated because we started our own thing similar to Y Combinator except like Our thing was we provide housing, we give you less money, but we take less equity. They just raised at a $70 million valuation, I believe. And that was— it's like a MoonPay competitor on Solana.

If somebody wants to get into investing, whether it's through funds or trying to get into those rounds, what do you think is the best route for them?

Yeah, so if you know people, obviously a fund is less risk and you get management fees. So let's say you raise like a billion-dollar fund, you're getting like 20% in management fees essentially. So that's like $200 million for you to manage the fund but also pay yourself.

Right.

That's a lot of money. Um, I personally think that if you're well connected, SPVs make the most sense. So you find out a company in like a Series D that might IPO soon, so you have like a shorter time frame on liquidity. You get a large allocation because they're already raising like, let's say, tens of millions or hundreds of millions. So it's not hard to get like a $1 to $2 million allocation, and then you run an SPV on it, you charge management fees and carry on it. And you can run through as many of these as you want.

That's great. What are some of the best companies you think that present opportunities to invest in right now?

Huh.

Not specific companies, but categorically.

Categories, I would say AI is super hot, and Web3 is still super hot.

Okay, and what does Web3 mean to you? 'Cause you hear that thrown around a whole lot.

Yeah, I think it's decentralization and just ownership of your fans. I think it's cutting out the middlemen, because for example, credit card processors, right? They can charge a lot of money, And if you can cut that out, then suddenly, woohoo, everything is great. Escrow services, like, if you can cut that out, then you suddenly save a ton on fees also.

Who's doing that right right now?

Who's doing that right right now? I actually don't think there are many Web3 companies that are, like, Web3 isn't popular yet because everyone is trying to take this, like, very Web3 approach that Web2 users don't understand. For example, like, in the creator economy, a lot of people are doing social tokens and, like, you can buy your favorite creator's tokens and stake them, etc. And like, people are like, I don't understand what that means, right?

And it's hard, right? You gotta set all these accounts up and it's not easy, right?

Yeah, like, I think who's doing it right would be actually like probably pretty big brands. Like Dolce Gabbana just launched an NFT, but this NFT is tied to utility. So like, they are throwing parties around the world, you get invited to their exclusive fashion shows, they have like vacation trips to take you You get exclusive merchandise because you own this NFT. So like, for a lot of people, that's like easy to understand. I think Royal is really interesting. So they're like a music NFT platform where like artists can sell a percentage of their songs and then their fans can earn royalties on it, which also makes sense. It's like, okay, like if you're betting on the artist essentially, right?

Does that tap into like ASCAP and BMI and all those royalty organizations? Do they connect those?

I believe so, yeah.

Okay, cool.

And then I would say like even the monkeys, like Bored Ape Yacht Club, is doing it right in the sense that they are throwing parties around the world and having big performers like Snoop Dogg, where I've like, I personally had friends that really wanted to go to a Bored Ape party during NFT Week and like buy an ape that costs $200,000 just to go to this party.

That's funny. Yeah, but they kind of hold their value, right?

So yeah, yeah, I like view it as like a more expensive SoHo house.

That's funny. What about the crash in crypto right now? What do you see happening with that? Is that going to adjust?

I think crypto is always cyclical. I think it's going to go back up eventually because there is a lot of reasons why Web3 and blockchain technologies are useful.

Yeah. You have a new venture that I think you started in April. And I was a little confused because I saw Moment some places and I saw Passes some places.

Yeah. So basically, there's another company called Moment. and they owned the trademark, so we were forced to rebrand.

Okay.

But I like passes because it immediately tells you the utility and you don't think about it as NFTs. And we're taking an approach of like not even mentioning NFTs on the platform because I think that like a lot of people are turned off by the idea because there's so many people that did projects that were essentially rug pulls. Like they launched an art piece, they sold it, and then they disappeared. And it's just like a random piece of art that you can do nothing with that's not even like A nice piece of art. So for us, we're like, okay, let's tie it to utility. It's going to give you merchandise access, live events, digital membership to exclusive content, and just call it fan club memberships. And that's something that everyone can easily grasp. And we just have all the benefits of Web3 without people knowing it's Web3.

So because there wasn't a lot— I joined the waitlist, but there's not a lot about it. Can you tell us, like, what is it if you were pitching that, if these are your investors and you're pitching passes?

Yeah, so essentially, like, it's just a paid exclusive membership club. So let's say I am like Miley Cyrus, someone can buy my NFT, which is essentially a pass, and—

Do you have to have it pre-created, or does it mint there, or how does that work?

Yeah, so it mints on the site. So you just press a button and it will mint one. Different membership tiers, and depending on what membership tier you have, you get different access to different perks. So on the baseline, let's say exclusive content, so behind-the-scenes footage, etc., you can message me and DM me. And if you want to like tip me in crypto, you can, or in dollars, but it's beneficial to tip in crypto because like let's say I had a superfan, right, and they really wanted to get to me, they could tip $1 million and then I'll notice them. And then the cool thing about NFTs is that it's interoperable. So if I wanted to offer like a meet and greet, I can use another website like Ticket Fairy, TokenProof, and instead of meet and greets specifically for my NFT holders. I can do merch drops specifically for them. And the great thing is I get like way more data on my fans. Like let's say these passes were tied to tickets to my concert. Traditionally, if a person were buying a ticket to every single one of my concerts, I might think they're a superfan, but I wouldn't actually know if they attended or not because they could be reselling the tickets and scalping.

Hmm.

Now, if they're like selling the passes, I know exactly who they're selling it too, and I know they're a ticket scalper. But on top of that, like, normally Ticketmaster would take the fees, right? I could set a 10% royalty fee on my passes, so every time it transferred, now it's not Ticketmaster taking the fees, I'm getting the money back. So that's a lot more money for me. What's also cool is I can see like every other thing that's happening in their wallet. So I can see like, okay, they have a bunch of Illenium NFTs. So like, for whatever reason, my fans are also Illenium fans, so I can do a collab with Illenium.

Ah.

Or wow, they're spending a lot of money on this like one eyelash brand.

I should That's so cool.

Yeah, it makes everything super transparent, and this is data that they just didn't have before.

What is the— if you were designing, if you were consulting with someone about designing the ideal NFT, what would you advise them to do in terms of utility, and smart contracts, and all that kind of stuff?

Yeah, so in terms of utility, I think they should definitely tie it to in-real-life events somehow, because I think that's—

So in-person events.

Yeah, I think that's easier to swallow. Because people are willing to already pay for tickets to in-person events. I think sites like Patreon, OnlyFans, et cetera, are making it make more sense to tie it to a digital membership as well. But like, if you can have both, that's awesome, right? I would also just say merchandise drops because it's like Bored Ape Yacht Club merchandise drops just sell out instantly. And like, you have a skateboard that like you could have bought on a merch drop for $100 that's now selling for thousands of dollars. and people are still buying it.

Right.

There's just like an indefinite amount of things you can do. Like, I would probably tie it to like maybe a lifetime discount to something, so then it holds value for life as well. So it's like, okay, you own this NFT, like you get like 50% off McDonald's for life. If you're like a big McDonald's fan, like that NFT is gonna resell for a ton. I think Coachella actually did a really good job of this where they sold NFTs that gave you like essentially lifetime artist guest passes. And now those NFTs are going for $1 million or so, and every time it resells, Coachella is probably getting like $100K, $200K kickback. So they're like making money indefinitely for it. And the crazy thing is it was priced at the point where you could buy artist guest passes for life and it wouldn't add up to the cost of NFT. But I think that like people like the flex, they like the art, and like it's just an easier concept to swallow in their heads. Like, oh, I get lifetime passes. And to them also, like maybe they'll even make money on the NFT by reselling it as it gains value in the future, right? So like, then the total cost is either $0 or profitable to them, which has actually already happened with the people who have resold it. Meanwhile, Coachella is just making tons of money from like the initial sale and the royalty fees.

So, and the only thing I'm concerned about there is, so like you sell it, now you're getting paid as they resell.

Yeah.

But what happens when you're fully at capacity? And so let's, let's say that, let's say that we did it for an event here. So we have only so many seats that we can do. When we have sold the full amount of seats, now other people are selling that and we're making money off the resales, but we can't really issue any new things because we're out of capacity.

But you're not issuing new seats because when they resell it, they're giving up their seat.

Right. So, but that's it, right? You just, you kind of say, okay, when I'm calculating what is this going to be worth, is this a good thing to do? Yeah, you need to think about Okay, well, I can sell this many. And obviously, you can sell as many Bored Apes, I guess, as you want, right?

Yeah.

But so is it good for places that would have physical limitations like that, or?

No, so like what you would do for this is, let's say there's like 5,000 seats, right? You just sell 5,000 NFTs, and if they resell, then you're getting all the royalty fees and ticket resales, but like you still only have 5,000 tickets, right? So like 5,000 passes, and it's only going to those 5,000 people. What I would do though, personally, would be like, have like some VIP access. So it's like 100 is the VIP and like they get different perks and that's super limited. Or just like offer some NFTs that get you like first rights to access. Like imagine if you had an NFT that like for life you got to buy tickets to Burning Man. Like you got first access to Burning Man. People get stressed about Burning Man.

Right.

And Coachella. Like they would pay just to even be able to like have first access to buy The normal pass.

Right. That's really cool. Who would you say are the competitors to Passes?

I would say the closest competitors right now are actually Web2 platforms. So it'd be like Patreon, OnlyFans, et cetera.

Ticketmaster?

Ticketmaster, yes, but we're not totally focused on ticketing. At the moment, we'd rather them plug into other websites like Ticketberry or Tokenproof to handle ticketing. Because NFTs are interoperable, which is interesting. They could take the NFT and take it to any other platform they want. For now, we just want to focus on the exclusive digital content, and we'll help creators plug into the right platforms to offer merch drops, to offer ticketing, et cetera.

How do you keep track of what is— because that's such a changing world, everything in Web3. What do you read, consume, watch, listen to that helps you stay on top of things?

Honestly, I'm the type of person who just clicks random links. I think Twitter and like listening to the smartest people is awesome.

Who are some of those people you think?

Vitalik is awesome. I really like Multicoin, my lead investors. They're like on top of things. You have a16z, who I think is like one of the best crypto funds out there. It's like Chris Dixon, Jane Lippincott. On the consumer side, like just like thinking about consumer, Alfred Lin is like a legend. There's just So many, and I'm in these communities, right? So I do go to these tech events and meet people and talk to people. I like crash random DAOs in New York and talk to people in there too.

Nice. Okay, and in your new company, you took some funding from— was it Antifund?

Yes, Jake Paul's fund, Antifund.

Yes, Logan was here last night.

Yep, I saw.

What—

so I think this will be good for people to hear. Why would you go out and take money from somebody else versus funding yourself in something like that? Because it's $8 million, it's not a ton of money, it's not nothing, but—

Yeah, so initially I was planning on self-funding, but I realized people were willing to invest at any valuation I named. So I ended up saying I wanted to raise at a $50 million valuation and it worked out. But I would say I took money from people in the end because I realized how useful people could be just in terms of introductions, et cetera. They're very incentive-aligned to help the company grow, right? Versus if I funded it myself, like, yes, I would own 100%, but I wouldn't get the outside help. And I've gotten a lot of like helpful intros from my investors.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in your kind of going crazy, crazy fast at all the stuff that you do, you also find time to run 10 to 20 miles a day?

Oh no, no, this was during COVID in Singapore. I was running 10 to 20 miles a day. I did 2 Barry's Bootcamp classes a day now, so That probably equates to closer to 6 miles a day.

Okay.

Yeah.

And not 5 and a half hours of working out anymore.

No, not 5 and a half hours of working out. I work out 2 hours a day.

Okay, I like it. What is, are you still living at, is it 1 Museum Place?

1000.

1000, yeah, okay. And I know you've got some famous people that live there. How does that feel? Do they seem normal, neighbor-like, or you've got David Beckham.

Yeah, it's nice. I've reintroduced myself to David like 10 times 'cause I apparently can't remember him.

Can't remember your name.

But he's awesome.

The one in the elevator the last time. Very cool. So I guess just as a last question, is there anything that you think that you could share with us here? We're a bunch of intermediate to advanced marketers looking at Web3 versus other kinds of marketing, and you've built tools for us. I bet some of us have bought your Twitter follow/unfollow and things like that back in the day.

Yeah.

But is there anything that you would share as far as just kind of looking forward into the future that that we might be thinking about in terms of resources, in terms of direction, in terms of focus, anything like that?

Yeah, well, I think for marketers especially, like, what's really interesting is you can hyper-target people. So let's say you wanna target like all music fans for whatever reason, you can literally Google, or essentially Google like who owns like these music NFTs, and then you can airdrop something into their wallets. And I check my wallet all the time for like random things that get airdropped in, and people will literally like see like, oh, I have this like random, I don't know, like water bottle NFT. Let me like click it. And then like it has a link to your website and suddenly you get like direct exposure to people that they're forced to look at. Um, you can like essentially Google for anything. Like you can look up like high net worth individuals, like, um, like people who have like shopped at a certain place, etc. So it's like really hyper-targeted marketing that I think is like probably better than spending on ads personally, especially as like Ethereum 2.0 comes out, the gas fee should be a lot cheaper, but also on other chains like Solana. Like let's say I want to target like fine art, like ThankUX has like a lot of NFTs on Solana and I could just like find wallets that have it and like drop in like my art fair NFTs. I don't know. That's great.

That's actually really, really cool. And are there any tools to help automate that or anything like that?

Um, I mean, if you look up just like NFT wallet finders, I'm sure you'll find something. Okay, awesome.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and share with us. Let's give her a big hand.

Hey, Roland Frasier here. If you're looking for a way to grow your business exponentially, to get more customers and ultimately increase your wealth, there's no faster way to do it than to acquire other businesses that already have the customers, products, services, teams, and media that you want. If you want to double your sales, just acquire a company that has the same sales as yours. It sounds simple, but far too many people end up starting new businesses that fail and forget that they could skip all the hard stuff and just acquire one that already exists. There's a reason why private equity firms, family offices, big companies like Apple, Google, and some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet do not start new businesses from scratch. They acquire already successful businesses, and when they do it, they instantly increase their sales, their profits. If they want market share, they increase that. They can get new products and services to offer all instantly. Hey, look, 90% of new businesses fail.

90%.

Why not acquire an already successful business and increase your chances of success by 900%? What most people don't realize is you can acquire highly profitable businesses with no money out of your own pocket in pretty much any country in the world, regardless of your credit, and without having to go find a bunch of investors or needing any experience. Look, I've been acquiring businesses For over 30 years now, and I cover the whole process in my Epic Investing Strategy training, and I want to give it to you 100% free. Just visit businesslunchpodcast.com/epic to get your free access to my Epic Investing training right now while it's available.

Ever wonder how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals, and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the Epic Deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business but you keep getting stuck, whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing, or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years, just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The Epic Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program, and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one-on-one to help you find, fund, and close your first or next deal. And once you do, we're going to plug you into our elite Epic Board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install 3 powerful systems in your business. The first is the deal flow engine, so you always have high-quality off-market deals coming to you. Number 2, we give you our offer and funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively, many times with no money out of your own pocket. And number 3, our closing and integration system so that you don't just buy a business, you actually successfully run and scale it. Once you have acquired it, plus you'll have direct one-on-one support from an epic deal advisor every step of the way. And that's people that have actually come up through this system and done these deals themselves. That's the only way to become an epic deal advisor. And if you're serious about acquiring a business this year, don't just sit on the sidelines. Just text "I'm in" to 334-458-9034, and we'll get you in. So text "I'm in" to 334. 458-9034. We'll get you in. No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal-making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now. I'll see you there.