Bourbon Just Became Currency - Unicorn's Phil Mikhaylov

And that bottle is considered the Mickey Mantle of bourbon. Wow. It's a $150,000 bottle.

You guys have been all over the news lately, including a cover story on last week's Chicago Tribune. What was the biggest breakout moment?

We launched that first auction, and what we really realized was—

Phil Mikhailov built the largest wine and spirits auction platform in the US from scratch.

An early Uber alum, he applied world-class logistics to a $100 million-plus marketplace that's shaking up a 100-year-old industry. Now, 100,000-plus collectors Collectors, athletes, and celebs trade rare bottles, driven 90% by word of mouth.

Carmelo Anthony was actually one of my first investors before we launched the business, before anything. There was one collector that I knew and I reached out and he said, hey, my wife's driving me crazy. I have tons of bottles at home. I spent around $100 grand on them. Tell me what it's worth. And the appraisal list was $1 million. I was like, this can't be right. Let's do it again. 100% sell-through. Got him the $1 million. We went and picked up $1 million worth of whiskey from this guy in LA, and we came in and he had 200 samurai swords. He had every gun from the James Bond series, the originals.

What did you learn from them?

Everyone had the same feedback, which is when I knew that we were going to have product-market fit, which was

Welcome everybody to the 2nd episode of the Zeitgeist Podcast, where you'll hear the stories behind the breakout brands shaping pop culture. Today, I am really, really excited to have my good friend Phil on the pod to talk about his exciting new business. Not new, but like really in the wine and spirit world, something that's taking it by storm, Unicorn Auctions. Phil, welcome to the pod.

Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

So first off, a lot of people Haven't heard about Unicorn yet. Like, tell us what you guys do.

Yeah, I think the simplest way to explain it is that Unicorn is StockX but for spirits and wine. We're the largest spirits and wine auction platform in the country. Started about 4 years ago. It's been super exciting. And just like you, building in Chicago, hometown, and 75 people strong and growing. And it's amazing to see the growth.

Yeah, it's been an incredible— it's been an incredible ride so far. I'm a multi-time customer already. I was able to secure a really old bottle of Old Fitz, which I got from my mentor, and we're giving it to him for his 60th birthday next year because it was his birth year that it was bottled. I've also got a couple of Pappy 20s on there as well. So if you have a, if you need a good gift of bourbon or wine, Unicorn's the place. And then on top of the auction business, you also have a wine storage business as well. You want to talk about Vault?

Yeah. Vaulting is kind of how the business started. And I think, you know, one thing about product market fit, we knew right away that if we built this thing, customers would come. And the idea was people have, you know, bottles coming in from Napa or they live in the city and they have a small wine fridge and they want to keep wine stored somewhere. And so we said, hey, what if we build this modern storage platform where people can see their entire collection digitally, have everything shipped there, request it to, get delivered to their house, to the restaurant, whatever. And the idea was always, if we build this platform and manage people's collections, get their trust, then we can launch the marketplace.

And I'm a big customer on the Vault side as well. I was overflowing in wine. Like, I feel what happens to many people when they go to Napa, you know, they like the wine, they sign up for the wine clubs, then every year they forget. And next thing they know, there's boxes of wine that just show up at their house. Phil's team was able to come grab it from my place, inventory everything, and now I have a digital inventory of all the bottles that I have. And when you pair that with the marketplace, you're able to get real market insights of the bottles that you have, what they've sold for, and you can easily either put them on the marketplace to sell, or you can ship them out as a gift or get them anytime you want. So I highly recommend Vault if you guys haven't tried it yet.

Yeah, it's been kind of crazy when we started that. 25% of that clientele now is from overseas, Hong Kong, Singapore, UK, Canada. I expected everything to be in Chicago when we started, but what happens is people are buying wine from everywhere. The facility has capacity for up to a million bottles. We've filled it with hundreds of thousands of bottles, and now we have custody of over $100 million worth of wine and spirits that we have Trust of, and you know that was a great way to be like, okay. Well, we're already managing their wine and storing their wine. What's the next thing that they want? They want to be able to buy and sell wine. So

what's craziest bottle that you've got in the vault?

It's a bottle. It's actually crazy. So this this bottle was sixty dollars in 2002. It got released. It's called a Binnie's Twenty, and it there were sixty bottles, and no one wanted to pay seventy dollars on the shelf in 2002. They thought that that was crazy. And that bottle is considered the Mickey Mantle of bourbon. It's a $150,000 bottle. And so we have one of those and a few other super awesome bottles.

And, and obviously you guys have been all over the news lately, including a cover story on last— in last week's Chicago Tribune. So congratulations there. One of the things that I think many listeners will find amazing is that this, you know, 4 or 5-year-old company just broke the record for most expensive bourbon ever sold at auction. You guys are going against the big boys like Sotheby's that have been doing this forever. Tell, talk about that story. How did it happen? Love to hear more about it.

Yeah. So when I started the business with my co-founder, the Sotheby's, the Christie's of the world felt very inaccessible and just way outta my price point. When you think Sotheby's, you're like, oh, they probably sell million-dollar paintings and, you know, $100,000 cars and crazy stuff that I can never be a part of. But there's everyday stuff that could still be a unicorn. It could be a $10 bottle that you can't get in a store. It could be, you know, a vintage birth year that you're trying to give as a gift to someone. And then we would go to Sotheby's and Christie's, wouldn't buy anything, would see how some of these auction houses operated. And it was just to the 1% and it felt super closed off. And we just thought, man, there needs to be a way that this is democratized and gets people into the space and launched our first auction and it really took off. And, you know, you didn't get the $100,000 bottles right away. Actually, it's amazing kind of the way that this all took off was there was one collector that I knew and I reached out and he said, hey, my wife's driving me crazy. I have tons of bottles at home. I spent around $100 grand on them. Just appraise it. Tell me what it's worth. Okay. We came and he had super rare Willets, Macallans, McDermott's, all types of stuff. And we appraised it and the appraisal list was $1 million. I was like, this can't be right. Let's do it again. And then the guy was like, are you sure this is correct? I'm like, yeah. He's like, dude, I bought this like 6, 7 years ago. And he's like, if you get me $1 million and we got the bottle, yeah, I'll sell it all. So we put it up in auction and 100% sell-through, got him the $1 million. And that felt amazing getting someone $1 million on something. And And after that, it just kind of started cascading. People started trusting us, knowing that it's real, it's a real platform. There is a barrier initially where people are like, what's this platform? I've never heard of it. I'm spending money on it. But that's where we were relentlessly focused on saying, hey, get this bottle out in 24 hours, send a handwritten note. I'm very big on handwritten notes. I think they go a long way. And once people got that bottle, then it just became word of mouth. And You know, we've been fortunate to grow to over 100,000 customers in this short period of time. 90% of the signups have come organically. It's really just word of mouth. People are excited and inherently it's a social product. You want to crack something and open it. And so,

yeah, no, it's— I think the personalization is so interesting and there's actually a lot of similarities to Cameo in that, right? It's not all about, you know, Snoop Dogg or Tony Hawk. Sometimes. Absolutely. It's like that random person in a random show that you liked. So I think back to college and particular bourbons I might've drank in North Carolina that I probably would never find at Binney's or anywhere else. Yeah. But I could go find that here. And that's really, really exciting. So you talk about how much the business has grown word of mouth. What was the biggest breakout moment for you as you think about transitioning from the vault business into the auction? Obviously, you guys merged a couple of companies together as well. We can get into that in a second. But what was your first moment where you kind of hit the zeitgeist and went viral?

It's a good question. I think the first moment when we launched the auction, we used a third-party platform You could white label, you know, any auction. It could be selling cattle or cars or whiskey bottles. And we just kept, you know, our mentality was done is better than perfect and you learn from doing. And so we said, let's just get this out there and see how it goes. And we launched that first auction. And what we really realized was that when the auction sold through and we had all those bottles, we're like, wow, People know what these brands are. The brands are spending billions of dollars to advertise what a Macallan is, what a Jim Beam is. And so they're already doing the hard work for us. We're just putting it up there. And we put up a few photos on social and it went absolutely viral. People are, you know, started sharing it. You can get Pappy here right now at this price. And, and so that was like the first moment. I'd say the second moment was When we were fundraising, we were very intentional about who the first— people go to venture funds and people go to strategics. I wanted to get the 20 biggest collectors in the world that I knew for wine and spirits. And it's a nontraditional way of raising, but I knew that if I could build the product with the customer's voice in mind and say, hey, here's prototypes, here's a Figma clickable thing that you can use. Like, what do you think? Is this cool? Would you use it? And so once we had that installed customer base, I knew that those guys also had their micro networks of people that they went to dinner with. And so we launched the auction. There was a lot of learnings that came out of the first one, but once it sold through, it just took off. And then we just said, let's keep riding the momentum. Next week launched an auction. Next week launched an auction. We never looked back. It's been hundreds of auctions every single Sunday at 6 PM and every single auction it gets bigger. And so honestly, it's just a momentum thing and just continuing to build off of it.

So as you start aggregating all these like super whale connoisseurs and you're telling them about the idea and then showing them Figma and, you know, asking them not just to, you know, put their product on the marketplace, but also to invest, what'd you learn from them? What were some of like the uncommon insights that, that you're just like, wow, only like a true connoisseur would've known that? Or how did it change the product?

Everyone had the same feedback, which is when I knew that we were going to have product market fit. Which was, this does not exist. It is a pain in the ass to manage a collection. People had it on Post-it notes, spreadsheets, old apps. They just didn't know what they had, what it was worth. There's some stuff that's depreciated in value because, you know, it's over the hill and it's a 50-year-old white wine that's not drinkable. And so everyone just said, wow, you're basically taking things that are offline and you're bringing it online for me. And that was the consistent theme, which was, if you bring it online for me, then it's going to be easier for me to do anything with it. I can ship it, I can gift it, I can sell it eventually. And they kept saying the sell thing. They said that all of them also had the same feedback, which is the biggest pain point of buying from a Sotheby's, a Christie's. And then there's, there's a whole other secondary world, which is people trading on Facebook. It's an illegal gray market area, but You'd meet a guy at a 7-Eleven parking lot in Berwyn, Illinois to get some kind of pappy and do a cash deal. And that's also a weird experience. And so I just kept saying, okay, what are the biggest pain points? And they said, it's logistics, it's knowing what I have, it's the end-to-end, call it verticalization. And so they kept saying verticalization, verticalization. And that's when I was like, okay, we need the vault, we need the logistics, and then we need the marketplace. And we're giving them that experience that doesn't exist today.

I think there's one other really critical component to your marketplace, and that's authentication and the authenticity of every bottle. Talk about that. Obviously, this is a space that's writ with counterfeit. Sour Grapes, one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. And, you know, these guys are so sophisticated. Talk about what you've learned about authenticity from this, what you guys are doing to make sure that that bottle of Pappy 20 that I buy is actually the real thing and hasn't been fucked with? Tell me all about it.

Yeah. So Sour Grapes is funny, and I love that documentary. I was obsessed with it. It really got me into wine as well. And so the problem with Sour Grapes is people think that every other bottle could be fake, and really it's less than 1% of bottles, especially because right now we're processing hundreds of thousands of bottles. But we do have a very robust authentication process. I think Unlike a StockX where it's going from Steven's closet to Hal's closet and there's a middleman that's authenticating, one of the regulatory compliance ways of how we operate our business is you actually have to take possession of every single bottle. And that, that's also why the vault is so critical. So every bottle that comes in immediately, whether it's going into storage or whether it's going into the auction, there's a 5-step QA process of authenticating. We track every empty sale. On eBay, we track serial codes of bottles that have been sold. We digitize the bottle, give it a unique identifier, put it on an immutable ledger, and then we also take a full 360 rendering of that bottle. And so when you're selling hundreds of thousands of bottles and you put up a Pappy 20 and the color is super off, or that bottle has sold previously and we know that it was cracked and it goes through, then we're able to match the color against other photos. And we also have Whiskey experts who fortunately have been in the industry for 20 plus years and have caught a lot of these bottles. But the guy who actually caught Rudy Kurniawan, he worked at a prominent auction house for 20 years, and we were fortunate to hire him. And so hearing those stories and seeing some of those bottles that we have for reference are really fun.

Give us give us a fun story. What's do you have any good stories of like counterfeit bottles that you caught? How you caught it?

Yeah, we we recently caught one. And, you know, I wish we could be so much more public about these because we have caught hundreds of bottles.

Yeah.

There is a barrier before you purchase on Unicorn, which is— or before you sell on Unicorn, you have to give us your social, fill out a 1099, driver's license. So we know who that customer is and they're— you know, we can go after them. The unfortunate reality is that 95% of bottles that, that we caught that are fake are people that have bought off of Facebook. And it was deals that were too good to be true. They see what it sells for on Unicorn. They thought they were going to make a quick flip. meet a guy at a parking lot at 7-Eleven, and then they bring it to Unicorn and then they find out it's fake.

Yeah. And that's a big bummer for them as well.

Yeah. We actually had an issue last week and it sucked, but, you know, we had to go after the client. But the gentleman spent, you know, close to $200 grand with us. Super legit. EY Entrepreneur of the Year, spent a lot of money on the platform. Like, oh, okay. And then he said, hey, 2 years later, he wanted to sell some bottles. And we ran the bottles through the photo detection system, and we noticed that when we sold the first bottle with that serial code, that there was a peel on the label, like a slight little mark on the label. And this one was clearly glued back down. And so that was flagged to our team. And then we pulled 10 other bottles for reference, and we saw that the seal is in a slightly different place. And so we took pictures. Reached out to the brand directly to say, "Hey, we have suspicion that you know this could be a fake bottle. We'd love someone to verify. Could this been a factory error, etc." We called the gentleman, and he said, "Let me get back to you." And he and he told us thirty minutes later, "God damn it! My seventeen-year-old daughter drank it." Ordered resealing equipment, which you you have to be a savant in order to do that, like a Rudy Kurniawan. Yeah. And so, yeah, it wasn't great, but we ended up having to go after him. But that's because we take a lot of pride. At the end of the day, we sell wine and spirits, but it's a trust platform. People are buying from your platform because they trust you. And if you erode trust and fuck up one time or two times, then you're going to have the repercussions from that.

Obviously, the wine world especially, is become a really hot space for a lot of celebrities, athletes. You hosted an amazing dinner in Chicago with Carmelo, who has got his own brand now and is putting it out there. Talk about some of the most famous people that have used Unicorn either as consumers or investors and some of the like crazy, can't believe this has happened to me things that have— that you've crossed paths with. Because of what you do.

Yeah, that's been a very fun part of the job. I mean, Cameo, you get to meet so much talent and, you know, we're not as fortunate with, but, you know, we get MLB players, NBA players, NFL players, ton of golfers. And it's funny because they're getting this product, they're bringing it into the locker room or they're going to play a round of golf and they bring a bottle of Pappy and they're like, where'd you get that? And they're like, Unicorn. And so every week we're seeing players from every sports organization sign up. Carmelo Anthony was actually one of my first investors before we launched the business, before anything. I just remember always reading about Melo and cigar aficionado or wine enthusiast. And he was the first guy in the NBA who really broke out wine and LeBron and Jimmy Butler and JJ Redick and all these guys started drinking wine because of him. And all the rookies aspired to have an epic wine collection or bring something to him. And so I just did a cold outreach to him and they got back the next day and we hopped on a Zoom and he said that, hey Phil, I love what you're doing. I'm launching a brand. And for us, we feel that this is an inaccessible space to everyday people that want to learn about wine and spirits. I said, that's exactly how I feel about the business. And this is a perfect platform where There's 100,000 customers who have maybe never heard of his wine, but it's accessible. It's a great wine. How do we launch more wines like this or bring more producers into the fold? And so he's been incredibly helpful from introductions to sending out gifts. I remember Braun came in town and we went to the Four Seasons to drop off his birth year wine. And I was like, wow, that's the perfect use case. And so yeah, it's been very cool. But I think the amazing thing is that this is the passion sector. And so people who are collectors of anything, cards, you know, cards, memorabilia, etc., they're inherently, you know, interesting people. And they— so wine is— they're just excited to talk about it and share more about it. And so Melo's been, you know, the man.

So Bing Gordon, one of my board members, has Always talked about this concept that 10% of humans are just addicted collectors. Talk about the mix shift between people that are buying for themselves on the platform and those that are giving it as gifts. And what surprised you, if anything?

What surprised me, I think when we started the platform is we very much were catered towards collectors. That's where we knew the whales were. And so we had to go after them. What you found about that is that these people are a bit eccentric. You know, you go to a guy— it was a funny story, but we went and picked up $1 million worth of whiskey from this guy in L.A., and we came in and he had 200 samurai swords. He had every gun from the James Bond series, the originals, and the Declaration of Independence. He had like all this weird stuff. And so you just, if you collect one thing, you collect multiple things. And so collectors are awesome people. There's actually, I really want to do a podcast called like the Collector's Corner, and I don't care what you collect because that 10% of people are very, I mean, any of your friends that collect things.

Hey, we got, we got the setup here now. So if you need to come and use the space to film, we can do it.

But these folks are interesting and, you know, and the story of why and how and how they got into it. I think that's what I'm like very fascinated by. As a kid, you know, I had my first company that I started was in high school. I went to Glenbrook North, you went to Glenbrook South, rival high schools. But as a kid, I lived across the street from the Bulls practice facility and my business called All-Star Authentics. And what I would do is I would wait outside of the Bulls practice facility or go downtown to where players are staying in hotels. Call and ask for the you know assistant coach and just to check and verify that they're staying at that hotel, and I'd get as many autographs as I can, put it up on eBay, sell it. That was freshman sophomore year, and then eventually I got to the point where I could start doing public signings. I'd go to Northbrook Court; it's a mall in Northbrook. Rent a kiosk for two hours and have lines of people outside the door waiting to get a signature from Devin Hester, Bernard Berrian before the Super Bowl. And I would just pay these people direct. Yeah. And so that was like, you know, the start of understanding the collector mindset, what they wanted. They wanted it fast. They cared about authenticity. They cared about a great experience. And so I was always fascinated with that. But the shift that we've seen in Unicorn as of late is 70% of our clients now are Gen Z and millennial. And so, you know, this is everyday people who are just looking for either a drink that's cheaper than a retail store, which is a unicorn for them, or they're just starting on their journey and they don't want to go into a local store and, you know, just get their second option. They want exactly what they read about somewhere. And so, yeah, the shift has gone from, you know, sippers to flippers, or it's gone from collectors to just everyday enthusiasts. And, you know, I think that's kind of the misperception of unicorn is that it's an app for expensive bottles, and we do sell a ton of expensive bottles. But last year we also had close to 70,000 transactions under $100.

Yeah, that was amazing. I read that in the Trib and, you know, super surprising, but also makes sense, right? This generation, you know, the Gen Zs, they've, they've made money on crypto, you know, meme coins, all this stuff, huge NFT collectors like you see the— and they probably have actually been more aggressive in you know, buying cards or buying shoes than we were, you know, when we were their age.

Yeah. The, the other thing about this Gen Z, like the NFT craze and the crypto kids that has really enabled our business that we never saw was going to be a big opportunity is digital trading. So now people are storing in the vault, they have this digital collection and the bottle will sit on the shelf and trade 2, 3 times before a person's actually taking possession of it. So it's a real-world asset. It's like physical meets digital. And that is actually the clientele that is very into the digital space.

And how do you, like, how do you guys deal with that as a platform? Obviously. So I buy and before it even gets shipped to me, like I'm relisting and auctioning it out. How have you changed the way that the platform works because of the behavior that you've seen?

So when we launched, you know, everything was scrappy Google Sheets and duct tape and popsicle sticks and just hustle. I think now we've really invested in what we call Unicorn OS. It's the entire backbone of our business. It's our operating system that has a full track on every bottle of where it's at in the facility. Everything's scanned to location from the second we receive it. We know that, hey, it just got received, it's scanned, everything's NFC tagged. And so once it's on the shelf and someone buys it, it goes into their vault if they choose not to take possession. And then we have an expedite reconsign button on the back end. And so if a client says, hey, I want to sell these 20 bottles, or they get a push notification saying, hey, that bottle you just purchased is now up 20%. And so people can just quickly say, yep, I want to sell it. We already have all the pictures, everything from that bottle. It sat on the shelf and never moved. And that same bottle is traded. In the last month, we've done over $1 million of digital trades, meaning the bottles just sat there and traded multiple times. And That's the dream, is just to continue to build up this facility with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bottles and to keep trading.

So prior to Unicorn, you had some really good experience working in different logistics businesses, whether it's Uber. What did you learn from those and how did you— how's that impacted the way that you've run this business? Because obviously you have this top of funnel where you're getting really interesting bottles from cool people that are doing word of mouth. But at the end of the day, like, I think the thing that people really, really, really appreciate about what you do is how seamless the logistics are. Talk to me about what you learned there and how you took kind of your past experiences and golden processes and brought them into Unicorn.

Yeah. So I worked at Uber for almost 10 years, early Uber employee, and actually my office was right next door to here. I was telling you before this, before West Loop was a thing. Uber was the best place that I could ever have imagined starting my career. I worked there, you know, as a 21-year-old kid for almost 10 years. And the thing about Uber is that they drill 2 things into your head, and it's one of the same core values that I have in our company, which is be an owner, not a renter. And everyone operating with that mindset, whether you're launching a new market or whether you're doing a partnership, You're acting with the business in mind and trying to create the best experience. The second thing for Uber, it was just about making— it was a relentless focus on creating that best experience where you order something, whether it's food or whether it's a car, and the supply and the reliability and the trust of the platform is that someone's going to arrive and get you that thing. And so that's exactly how I wanted to build Unicorn, which is something like this didn't exist in the space. Having a platform as seamless as Uber where you can request a car, why does something like that not exist in wine and spirits?

So one thing I think that's also interesting about the makeup of your company, right, coming from Uber where you're hiring a lot of people out of like, you know, the top schools and then, you know, if they didn't go to Illinois Business or Northwestern or UChicago, they might not have even gotten past the pivot table part of the interview process.

Yeah, I don't know how I got in there.

But like, you founded this business with like a bartender and like when you go into your back, backroom ops, like the people that have built it, it's very, very different from the type of people that you worked with at Uber. Talk about like the building of the culture, who you guys look for and what makes a great unicorn employee.

Yeah. At Uber, a lot of great operators and folks from all different backgrounds. I think there's, call it the zero to one phase of building Unicorn. My co-founder Cody came from a hospitality background, owned a bar, a very upscale bar in Evanston. It actually was like Bar of the Year. And they took so much pride in what he did. And he, you know, dabbled in the auction world where he would get his supply, sell it once a year, the once a year that someplace had an auction. And he had this idea, but The idea was always, how do we marry hospitality, which is a core value of what we have, and tech, and how do we bring this at scale? And so in the beginning, when his bar got shut down, he didn't want to furlough anyone. And so Juan or Pedro, who was the dishwasher, ended up being someone that works for us now. And John, who was a bartender, was leading intake or photography at the time. And so we were able to bring all these folks in who You know, quickly pivoted from the bar scene to the restaurant scene. But on our side, I always knew that we needed to invest in tech. And so marrying the two kind of hospitality and tech approach, I was able to go out and start recruiting folks from Uber, from Foxtrot, from Amazon, and bringing some of that talent. I think what you see is that, A, it's also an inherently cool thing for employees when they come into the company. They're like, man, I never knew about wine and spirits, but this is fun to learn. And we encourage them, hey, go, go become a somm if you want, or Take, you know, whatever classes you want. We do tastings all the time. So they're having fun, but they're solving real tough problems at scale that, you know, historically maybe someone from a more brick-and-mortar industry didn't have. And so we married the two. And I think now it is— it's a perfect mix of, you know, people that are industry experts, but people that are also not coming from the space. And historically, you can't recruit from the tech space into wine and spirits. And we've been able to do that.

We had a similar, not issue, but similar dilemma as we were building Cameo because on the one hand we had our talent acquisition side, which was almost like a new age WME, CAA, 2.0. Like, what does that look like? Who do you hire? And then secondly, we had a marketplace just like you would've had at Uber with product designers and data scientists. And at different points the companies kind of oscillated between being more like sales-driven versus being more product-driven. How have you, you know, what type of tensions has that played in? You know, you mentioned like your Unicorn OS is like such a secret sauce competitive advantage for you guys right now. I'm sure like there's other things logistically that, you know, are happening behind the scenes that maybe you had to pull back from to like go all in on that type of investment. But just talk about like balancing Kind of this like traditional brick and mortar with like cutting-edge tech?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think the biggest challenge is that at, you know, when I look back at my time at Uber, there was, you know, majority of the company could have grown from 0 to 100 with the company versus at Unicorn, there's kind of, there are people that could only grow from the 1 to 10 phase or the 0 to 1 phase. And so the business is evolving and that is the tension point right now is that You know, right now there's a huge investment in tech. And so when you're making folks, you know, learn a whole new system, whole new process, you're investing a ton in AI and that's something that someone didn't have. You're either having an opportunity to learn and grow and kind of personally develop within the company professionally and personally, or the company outgrows you. And that is just the unfortunate reality of kind of what happens within businesses. But You know, it's also been awesome to see folks that have never had this background but have dove all the way in and are learning to code or they're learning all the systems and they're continuing to grow in their career. And they, you know, I think that's a very important thing of building culture and keeping people excited is making them feel like they're personally learning, developing, growing. But there definitely is tension all the time when, you know, ton of engineers now in-house, we're investing in stuff that people are like, oh, I liked it the old way. And it's like, yeah, you Can't be complacent. We need to keep evolving.

Yeah, it's really, really interesting. Yesterday I was at a YPO HBS event and the case study we were talking about was Domino's Pizza, right? And one of the things that the CEO of Domino's said in the case study is that nothing that you white label can be a competitive advantage. So, you know, coming in, like building your own operating system that's tailor-made for exactly the way that you work, that would follow his model. One other thing that we talked about during this case study was how do you take an industry that's like declining in some ways and actually like be an outlier? Most people wouldn't know this, but Domino's actually outperformed every stock in S&P 500 for like a 20-year period. It was above Apple and Intel and any of these companies. At the same time, pizza as an industry was actually shrinking. There's it's been very highly publicized that Gen Z are not drinking in the same way that we did. In fact, I've seen reports that say that they're consuming up to 70% less alcohol than you know people did ten years earlier, twenty years earlier. Yet you've got this business that has been flourishing at a time where you know the industry is facing some. Some tailwinds from like nonalcoholic beers and spirits, etc. Talk to me about what that's been like. And, and while the headlines may say that the industry has been coming down, like obviously you've unlocked something that— yeah, there's a ton of value yet to be created as well.

Every investor or, you know, person that I talk to is asking the same question. People are drinking less. We're seeing it. The Surgeon General said it's bad for you. I definitely don't advocate and condone for, you know, drinking every day and doing it, but If you think about drinking, it's been done for centuries and it's really what makes the world go round. When you travel to any country, you know, Italy, people are drinking wine or you go to Mexico, people are drinking tequila or, you know, you go to India and they're drinking single malt scotch. Like every country has their alcohol and you go to any restaurant or bar, people are still drinking. The thing, the shift that I've seen is that Maybe it's people aren't drinking less, but they're drinking differently and they're being more intentional with what they're drinking. And so I would say that with Unicorn, it's like you can come and get that premium product. And premiumization is actually the fastest growing category within alcohol, which, you know, is one of the benefits for us is that people can get a premium product and choose what they want. And premium is $50 plus. So, you know, you're not going after a bottle of Everclear or Absolut on the platform. But if you want, you know, a very unique vodka from France that you haven't been able to get, you can get that. And so I think the big change that we've seen is that people are just drinking differently. And so they're getting whatever they want as opposed to just going into a store and, you know, getting that first option.

Talk to me about category expansion. Obviously, you found a great You found great product market fit in spirits and wine so far. As you mentioned, the collectors that are your super whales, they don't just collect bourbon, they don't just collect, they don't just collect wine. What are some other verticals that you guys have thought about? And, and obviously, how do you balance kind of focus and being like, you know, the kind of category king in a particular domain versus like expanding on and trying to gain more wallet share of these collectors?

Yeah. I think about that all the time. I'd love to get into other categories, but I want to do it intentionally. And so right now, I think that there's a ton of room for us to continue to double down on wine and spirits and do incredibly well. The thing about wine and spirits is that unlike any other collectible category, whether it's watches, cars, handbags, baseball cards, brands know who that end consumer is. And so brands have the exact visibility of how many Ferraris you've bought or how many Hermès Birkins you've bought, or they know how many watches you've bought. But unlike with wine and spirits, brands actually have zero visibility into who that end consumer is. So when you go and buy something from a Binney's or you get something from your local alcohol retailer, that level of data doesn't come back up to the brands. The brands are only getting case data, so they're able to see Hey, that store, that's a good account. They sold 20 cases of Maker's versus on our platform, we're able to see, you know, I actually stole this from Cameo, but as soon as I saw your visualization of where all the requests are coming from, we built that. And it's really crazy to see around the world, people are buying everywhere. But how important is that data for the brands to actually be able to double down and reach out to those clients, especially in an environment where perhaps alcohol sales is declining? Going back to your power users and offering them an experience or an opportunity to get the first bottle of something like that. So the next category expansion that we're going to get into is, is really leaning into a data platform, data visualization for brands that they can see who the end consumer is. And I think that's where kind of the, the things are trending in alcohol is that brands want to know, but they don't even know where to begin. And the industry's been the same way for 100 years since the, the Al Capone era.

Well, and a lot of that's also because they're not, in many cases, able to directly sell, right? They have the distributor model and even state to state, it's what bar has this distributor determines what you can order, what bourbon you can order, what wine you can drink. Yeah, I find that super fascinating. And obviously another really good friend of ours, George, what he's seen with Ray's very similarly, Gift card marketplaces is by allowing brands like Walmart to go direct and directly sell gift card inventory at a discount there, they're actually able to get richer customer data. So it's different from the person that's going to Jewel or CVS and buying a gift card and taking it. They're getting that actual data of who the user is, and that's really, really valuable.

Yeah, it's funny, I was talking to a handful of large alcohol brand CEOs, and I asked them, I said, hey, do you know who your customers are that have spent $1 million a year on your product? And they're like, no, that would blow my mind if there's someone that spends $1 million. And I pulled up, you know, the visualization of what we have of someone that had spent $1 million last year on Sazerac or $500,000 on Beam products, and they couldn't believe it. I'm like, That is your biggest enthusiast. And the crazy part is that that consumer is begging us for an intro to be able to go pick a barrel, have an experience, let me go down there. And if you were thinking about any other collectible, like if someone at Walmart, you know, was like, hey, this guy spends $500,000, Walmart would fly them out to the Super Bowl or something like that. But in alcohol, that doesn't happen. And it feels very closed off and gated off because of what you described. It's the 3-tier system, which It's here to stay, but I think that there's a way that Unicorn can make it more efficient and kind of bridge that gap of who that collector is. How do you engage with them? How do you invite them to these kinds of events or let them come on site and everything like that?

Yeah, this hits so close to home. We just in the last few weeks launched, in the past few weeks, just launched our first loyalty program. And we went back and looked at all the customer data in the history of the company. And one of the crazy things that we found is there's over 150 people that have spent over $100,000 on just consumer Cameos, not B2B, consumer Cameos. And the thing is, like, my team, we didn't know any of these people. And part of that is in making Cameo, it's so viral, we actually decided to have a very frictionless buying process. So, you know, we might have their email, we would have their email or cell phone number, but we didn't require really anything else. So over the years we've worked on, initiatives like closing the loop to understand, you know, what's Phil's actual name? Like where does he live? What's his zip code? What teams does he like? What are other things we can do? So what we're doing right now is we're going back and giving people in credit 5% back on anything they've ever spent if they fill our loyalty program out. And then they have till the end of the year to use those credits. So this is a way to like, you know, go win back some of our best customers, but also like really roll out the red carpet to them. People are excited about it and, you know, know, obviously with Uber, you, you guys saw, um, you know, these massive whale customers and, and the loyalty programs that you would do and what you would do to incentivize them to keep coming back. How have you thought about that at Unicorn?

Yeah, on the loyalty front, I think there's, there's 2 ways that we think about it. One is, uh, being able to engage the brands directly with the consumers to unlock that experience. So the dream scenario is, hey, someone spends $10 grand, $20 grand, $100 grand, whatever it is, even $1,000 on Unicorn, but they're so loyal to that brand. What if they can get all of the merch that's sold just in Kentucky at that one store for that brand? Or what if they can go and get a barrel experience or take 4 friends on a tour to just see how everything's made? And so that's one way that we just want to get closer to the brands and be able to say, hey, we have this customer base. How do we become the gateway between the brands and the consumers? The other thing is launching, call it an Amazon Prime type model, like a Unicorn Prime, which is allowing folks to be able to, if they're storing with us, we can waive their storage fees or encourage free shipping if they're spending X amount. But I think that program will continue to evolve over time. But I think the big thing that we also have seen, we've done 10 pilot auctions for experiences. And they've absolutely crushed, which is we auctioned off a barrel. You can go and buy the barrel. You get to go to Kentucky, meet the master distiller. You can create that bottle for you and 20 friends. Name what that bottle is. We were fortunate to actually just do that. I brought a gift for you, so just crack that open. It's in here.

All right, hold that.

I'll hold this. I'll take these out.

First off, we'll give it a beautiful branding. It's our first unboxing, guys. Here we go.

Let's go. It's right here. All right. So, an amazing Chicago company, second-largest alcohol brand in the country or globally. is Beam Suntory. They were so gracious and the CEO helped set up a meeting for us to go out to Kentucky and read what that bottom label says.

The Unicorn Barrel Select Bourbon, Unicorn Volume 1.

Unicorn Volume 1. And so that was amazing. We got to go out there. They rolled out 6 barrels for us, tasted all the different barrels, and this is the one that we picked. And that experience was amazing. And this yielded 100-something bottles and should crack that open. Here's some unicorn glasses for you.

I feel bad cracking this collector's item open.

We got another one for you. But yeah, I think what's amazing about that is people want to get closer, what we call from barrel to bottle, and they know what they like. And so, if they're able to taste what they like and So we've done 10 experiences and they were, they were able to go with their friends to have this dinner and have this full experience. And now they're lifers and now they know all these stories about the brands. Cheers. Excited to see what you think. Unicorn Volume 1. It's the first opening. First opening of the bottle. It's great. That's delicious. Thank you. But that's what I think consumers want. And that's why I think that data and the platform is incredibly important. And I think if you're, you know, the biggest Nike shoe buyer, you should be able to get some custom Nike shoes the same way that if you're a huge buyer of Knob Creek, how can we connect those customers and allow them to have this kind of experience?

I touched on it earlier, but one of the things that you do is bring collectors together and give these once-in-a-lifetime experiences. I was at a dinner that you hosted with Carmelo and, you know, everybody was kind of dressed up in— it was Great Gatsby. Yeah, Great Gatsby themed, you know, cigars. You know, we're in this Priscilla's, you know, bourbon library where— how many bottles does he have there?

Oh, he's got thousands.

It's like the craziest.

We had flappers, Al Capone gangsters,

and we had, you know, full casino night. We had the best time ever. Talk about like why those type of moments are important to your brand. And, you know, how do you think about ROI on that? It was awesome.

Yeah. And we've done a handful of those and you're coming to the next one again. I think COVID fucked everyone up. And, you know, I love experiences. I love getting people together in a room, interesting people from all different backgrounds. There was tech people, there was industry people, there was politicians, NBA players. Our top customers, brands that we get to engage with, that got to come there and see, oh my God, this is amazing. I think for me, it's, you know, the ROI on it is just seeing smiles on people's faces, like, to be honest. And they felt like they had such a great time. And, you know, we're being intentional with how much we're spending on these. Like, we get to bring the epic booze that maybe they haven't gotten to try. There's no hard sell there. It's purely just thank you for the support. And how do we bring— how do we continue to do this at scale? So We do about 3 or 4 of these a year, and they take a lot of time and energy, but it's so worth it in the end. I think you get people that bond over, you know, a bottle of whiskey that they just tried or, you know, we brought $100,000 worth of whiskey and we have our whiskey experts behind the bar. They're pouring stuff. And then you just see 2 people who have never met and they're like, what did you think about that one? What did you think about this one? And seeing that, that's what Unicorn is about. It's about bringing people together and and cracking a bottle. And it's also, you know, part of the reason that we've grown almost organically. It's like, it's fun to have these social events and crack it and enjoy it together. And so not everything needs to be ultra elaborate like that. It could just be a casual one. But those are ones that we love and we want to bring that, you know, on, on the road show. You know, Melo was like, hey, how do I bring this to the All-Star Game and down to Super Bowl? Yeah. And, you know, they saw it, they felt it, and they were like, this is amazing. And that's what we hope to recreate. And I'm also intentional about doing it at, you know, I think there's a size, like you don't want to have 200 people and it's just walking around and tasting something. I think 20, 30 people in a room is the perfect amount. And, you know, it's good food. We've been fortunate to be able to work with great chefs like Paul Cahon from the Publican Group and Donnie Madia and some of those guys. And then we've also been fortunate to have like other chefs, but it's fun to mix food people, alcohol, and just make it a really fun social event.

I've been to a lot of events like that. I've thrown a lot. I think that was the one I went to is one of the best I've ever been and was like clearly one of those moments that everybody there will remember forever. At Cameo, we talk about creating magical moments. We've been doing similar things in New York City with different— we'll bring a bunch of CMOs and like we just did this last week where we had you know, 30 CMOs of top brands, but then also, you know, Mischa Barton from The O.C.

That's awesome.

And Dorinda Medley from The Real Housewives. And, you know, these people that it can be so hard to like get a hold of, all of a sudden, you know, they're asking for selfies with everybody and then they're engaging our team. So we found really high ROI on it. But it's really about like making your customers, you know, feel that thinking of magical moments. Different businesses have, you know, you'll see whether it, especially on like the retention side, there'll be like a specific metric where you're like, if I can only get this person to do X, then I know I've got them as a customer for life. Talk to me about like the early, you know, magic metrics that you've found in the business so far.

The awesome stat that I see is 75% of people make a second purchase within the first 4 weeks. And so that's where we pride ourselves on immediately once an auction ends, get everything packed up, have it ready for a customer to pick up or drop off. Or, you know, we had a guy who just spent 10 grand on his first purchase last week, and I had the team, hey guys, he lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, drive it up there. And I leave the note. And so I'm very big on the notes. Sometimes people are like, how did you just write 100 notes this week? And the other thing that I do is every single week, we get between 800 to 1,200 new customers signed up organically. And I send an email, personal email to all of them just saying, thank you for supporting Unicorn. I add my Calendly link and I ask for a 15 or 30-minute call just to introduce myself. People think I'm nuts that I do so many of those calls, but it's all about product-market fit and the product. And so if I can hear what we could be doing better and actually relay that feedback loop right to the engineers, and then we actually make that change and come back and say, hey, just pushed this out. They go out and tell 10 or 12 people. So those magic moments are, first of all, they can't even believe that they're talking to the CEO. Yeah. They're making it seem like I'm an untouchable person or an inaccessible person. I want to hear that. I'm not removed from the business. I care a ton about our product. And so, yeah, I think on the retention front, the only thing that we could continue to focus is just delivering that best experience. And I feel like when customer support or having slow shipping or the operation is just strained from a scale perspective, that's when customers feel it. And so sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, and it's okay to suppress your growth a little bit if you're fixing the customer experience to really accelerate it.

So in all these listening calls, what has been, what's your best story of a very specific piece of customer feedback that ended up like shaping the business in some way. On the last episode, Sean Reilly was talking about a DM that he got from John Mayer, and John said, love Dude Wipes, but we live in a 2-wipe world. And that has directly led to their newest product, which is one package with 2 wipes, which has been a bestseller for them. But also it's more efficient because it costs less to ship when you're putting multiple things in one. Yeah. Has there been any, like, from all these Calendlys that you've taken, what's been like the single killer piece of feedback that you've actioned? Yeah,

and first of all, shout out to Sean. That was an awesome podcast. That guy's content fucking crushes. He's unbelievable. I love it. He's amazing. He's a machine. And I love to see what they've built. Another great Chicago company. The number one piece of feedback that we heard from customers was we want a seller's portal. A seller's tool, almost like a Bloomberg terminal. I'm selling. Show me how much. Where are my bids at? How much am I making? Let me download my 1099. Let me download everything. And it seems like such a you know easy thing, and I'm like, wow! I can't believe we didn't create that. And so we went all hands on deck and said, build the best-in-class sellers portal. Not one auction house has that.

Right.

But hearing that for three months consistently, putting it on the product roadmap when it wasn't on there, deploying it, and then emailing thousands of people after being like, hey. We heard you, this was the feedback, we pushed it out and the reception's been amazing because we've actually seen the direct response that every week now we get between 500 and 1,000 inbound leads just saying, hey, I want to sell. So 99% of our business is inbound. And so they're like, okay, I can see what I have, I see what I have in storage and now I'm selling something. I can see how it's tracking. And so the next kind of thing that people are asking for is some sort of financial tools. Can we get instant payout? Can we get, you know, Uber offers it, StockX offers it for an extra percent or whatever. You can get instant payouts. What we've seen is that in the short period of time, $150 million has transacted through the platform and that money's going into consignors' pockets. You know, what really pumps me up is this one guy emailed me yesterday saying, Phil, thank you so much. I bought these bottles for $1,000. I just paid for my daughter's first year of college tuition. Someone else just dropped off bottles last week. He's like, it's helped me pay for my surgery or just putting extra money in their pocket. So it's really evolved from just the collectors to everyday people that are finding ways to make extra money. And if we can get them paid faster, give them the tools. And the next thing that we're launching that I'm really excited about, I listened to a podcast with the founder of Zillow. I think he was on the All In podcast or one of those. But he was saying the thing that made their business take off was Zestimate. Everyone knows what their house is worth. And it, I just had this light bulb moment that's like, how do we create an instant pricer? You could just walk through an airport, through a store, go to your friend's bar cart, take a picture of that bottle, see what it's worth on Unicorn, and just unlock cash. And so that's like the next thing that we're launching. But you don't, unless you're talking to customers, you don't hear that.

I just gave, I mentioned we have these 150 customers that have spent over $100,000 with us. When I invited them to the loyalty program by personal email, I gave them my cell phone number too, right? And it's just like, these people should have my cell phone number if they need something. Like, call me. I love that. And I think that, you know, no matter how big you get, like listening to your customers is the lifeblood. Like, as CEO, the most important thing that you've got to do is ensure that you've got product-market fit. And when you have it, thinking about how to keep it because it can be fleeting. One thing I was, you know, you touched on like briefly, COVID obviously changed a lot in the whole world of collections. It changed a lot of habits. Your business was also kind of like born kind of in the midst of all that. Talk about like what, how COVID, like even as you think about as a collector yourself, you know, how did, how did COVID kind of change the game for collections and ultimately, you know, what How's Unicorn different because it was built during that era?

It was 2 things. One, everything moved online. You know, I worked at Gopuff and the Gopuff founders are amazing and I learned so much from them. And that business was, I had a lot of adjacencies to Unicorn, which is physical warehouse, last mile delivery, and getting people the essential products that they wanted. When you're at home, you know, you're in your whatever, 1,000 square foot, 2,000 square foot, apartment and you're just finding ways to do something. And that's where, you know, people started getting into trading cards. People started buying stocks. The whole, you know,

the whole collectibles market just exploded during that.

And so, you know, that was right place, right time. But, you know, whatever that quote is, it's like luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

Absolutely.

And I 100% believe in that. And so I think it was, you know, Alcohol at that point was also inaccessible. You needed to go to a store. How did you make it easier to just bring something online? And every other category was already 2 steps ahead. Baseball cards and watches and everything already had some platform, but it kind of shifted towards that. Spirits wasn't there. And so we launched this third-party platform and that's where I always say like done is better than perfect. And you just have to launch it, learn, talk to customers, Know that, tell them that it's going to get better and then actually show them that it's getting better.

I remember when I was starting Cameo, they used to talk about how many billion-dollar opportunities there were within Craigslist, right? So like the marketplace, like 1.0 businesses online were basically like, you know, deconstructing Craigslist and going like very deep in particular segments and verticals that they sent. As you're thinking about, you know, the collectible space in general, You know, there have been some amazing, like, very specific StockX, you know, these, these marketplaces that are very, very highly tailored to the connoisseur. What are some other, like, parts of the collectibles industry that you just look at as, like, fairly ripe for disruption, even if you're not going to pursue it?

StockX is just like the gold standard for everything. I, I use it every single day. Almost, which is crazy just to see what's out there. And I use StockX. I know their CEO just came on CNBC and he was saying that like 50% of their transactions recently were things that were under retail.

Yeah.

And so people are not just using it to get that ultra-rare shoe, but I think that there's a few other categories that particularly excite me. I think the antiques and memorabilia world is very interesting. I think that the art market sub-million dollars is very interesting. I was with a friend yesterday who owns an art gallery here in Chicago, and he told me his entire business is comprised of 30 customers. And he goes, Phil, if I can get 2 more of those customers—

Changes the game.

Changes the game. And I was like, well, what if we put that awesome Hebrew Brantley piece or whatever he has On Unicorn, and there's 100,000 eyeballs and the content and the education. I feel like there—it's a very similar thing where it's just it's a visibility and an accessibility issue. Where you think art's just expensive.

My old chief of staff Gordon Sun left Cameo to go start a business called Maestro a couple years ago, and you know, and it's the type of thing that everybody wants. But of course, like a lot of these marketplaces. Especially if you're trying to go for a long tail, more affordable price point, like the amount of art that's out there, it's just, it's, it's so hard. And ultimately he pivoted to go do something else. But I totally, I totally agree. I think, you know, memorabilia is another category that like we've even looked at, you know, we have all these talent, like, you know, we own a merch company, but like, why don't we sell autographs, experiences like meetups, etc.? So and then obviously Airbnb, you know, had their big release just this week. announcing the all-new Airbnb, which was repackaging a lot of things that they've had out there all the time. But, you know, I know Brian's very much trying to become like, you know, a super app for, you know, any type of experiences, et cetera. When you saw like where they're going, you know, how did you like, what were your initial thoughts on that?

With Airbnb?

Yeah.

Yeah. I think Airbnb has been amazing, you know, from a design perspective. I know my designers were like, I didn't love this new change or this. I'm like, well, you saw it coming. I feel like what Airbnb has done is become more utilitarian. Yeah. And make it very easy to be like, here's the price, here's the map, here's where it is. You know, I don't really care too much about how the icons look and things like that. I'm like, it gives me exactly what I need. And I feel like that's where they've been focused. And I'm sure they have a ton of very talented product researchers and product folks that have made the decision for a reason. But I love that company just because every single time you're getting a good experience and you know what you're getting. With it. And it's also similar to unicorn unlocked, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars into people's pockets and allowed them to monetize. But yeah, I think for Airbnb, what the one great thing that they have for them is that they're able to scale pretty easily without holding the product and going out. For us, we have a little bit more of a barrier. And so there are other categories and one in particular that you asked about that I really want to get into is experiences. You know, I would love to be able to unlock the experience for you to go to a UFC fight and hang out with Dana White and, you know, have a drink with him or go to a Bulls game and have the most epic seats. And no matter how rich you are or whatever it is like, it's still inaccessible to get some of those tickets. And I do think that there's a huge opportunity to unlock those kind of experiences. And it could be as simple as picking a barrel. It could be as simple as, you know, whatever, going to a Cubs game and taking a few swings on the field. But I think experiences is what people want. They want that You know, you can't pay for an experience. And yeah, I think that's something that I'd love to do.

Sounds like a Unicorn Cameo live experiences platform coming soon. So look out for that. All right. Couple last questions. I know first off, you brought some other really special bottles as much as that's there, and I'd be remiss. I mean, we could go drink this without our viewers But I'd love you to share what you brought.

All right. First thing that we'll try, this bottle is an Evan Williams 23-year-old bottle from the '70s. Why is this epic? So about 5% of the bourbon supply came from Heaven Hill, which owns Evan Williams. In 1996, they had an insane fire and every one of their barrels burned down. It was the craziest. So 5% of the world's bourbon, just burned down. And so this is called a pre-fire Heaven Hill bottle, and this was exported to Japan. So made in Kentucky, exported to Japan, which you just came from, and brought back. And so this is one of my favorite pours of all time. This bottle goes now for $3,000 plus. But the reason that this bottle goes for so much is, A, all that bourbon burned down. 2, this bottle was like $12 or $11 on the shelf, and most people just cracked it and had it. And so the fact that some of these are still lingering around, uh, makes it pretty epic. So that's the first one that we'll crack.

Amazing. And it's Cubby Blue as well.

Cubby Blue.

Yeah, going— for any of you guys that haven't had the opportunity to go down to the Bourbon Trail, I highly, highly recommend it. You know, going into the barrel houses and watching how, you know, how the sausage gets made. It's, it's really amazing. And, you know, Angel's Envy in Louisville, if you don't want to go all the way out, is another one to go check out.

Cheers. Very different than the first one. A, this is very smooth.

It's so smooth,

like crazy

smooth. So smooth. And you know, one, one other thing I was thinking about. So you mentioned, obviously, like as you're auctioning off, right, it's really hard. Like the second this seal's cracked, it, it kind of, there's not a resale value for it. But at the same time, when you go to a bar, right, it's open, it's there. Have you thought at all about like how you make sure that That bottle that would have been three thousand if it was sealed. Like if I wanted to auction half my bottle out, how would you authenticate something like that? Is there is that ever going to happen?

Yeah, it sucks, and we'd love to do that. But just from I don't know. You know, no matter how much you trust a person or that it was at the bar, if they put their lips on it. Fortunately, we cracked that one at our event when you were there. So this is one of the bottles that we actually got to crack. But yeah, I don't know if someone poured you know Crown Royal in there or Arizona Iced Tea. And so sampling is a big part of the industry, but that's left for the face. Facebook gray market. And for us, everything's sealed. Everything is in its original packaging. And so, yeah, that's something that we can't do.

Once oxygen's in the bottle like that, like happens there, is there a natural decay of that?

So, on these, we parafilm them. So, very little oxygen is getting in. And you would be able to tell because, I mean, the color on this is so brown. But yeah, bottles can get oxidized. The other thing about spirits that I love more than wine, even though I'm a big wine guy, is that spirits is like a movie. It's done, it's cut, final production, it's ready. And it's very resilient. It could be, as long as it's not in direct sunlight and it's not in heat, but wine needs to be temperature controlled and it's living and evolving in that bottle. And so you're buying something from 2022 or 2023, but it's sitting there for 5 years until it's really ready to drink. So it just needs so much more care. Versus this is an everyday man or woman's, you know, drink. And no matter if you're a high-profile attorney or an everyday warehouse worker, you know, you know what an Evan Williams is or a Knob Creek. It's a very attainable bottle. You know, this one's obviously more, but you can get the modern version of this now for like $15 at a store.

All right. This has been amazing. And we're going to end with the question that I ask everybody on there, but we're going to do a special little twist. For you, so number one, I want to hear your death row meal. But I want you—you can like mix and match. She could be like, "I want you know this steak from here," and you know the buffalo wings from Buff Chick. Like whatever it is, I want you to create like a perfect four-person dinner party. What are you drinking? What are you eating? And it's your last meal. And who—who else is sitting at that table with you?

Love that question. It's great. All right. So the meal, can I make it breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

Yeah, you can. You can go all in. You know, this is your last day on earth. So what are you eating? From where?

I'd probably go to Sarkis and have a bacon loretta and cheesy hash for breakfast. Just a greasy diner meal.

The best.

I would probably say I would have the veal tonnato from Cipriani, and I would have the—

I just had that. Number one, that's one of the best dishes in the world.

Absolutely.

Like that veal. And for Mother's Day, we were at Casa Cipriani and literally I introduced my parents to it and they just loved it.

Oh, that thing is amazing. And then I would have, yeah, I'd probably have, you know, the veal parm or the veal Milanese from Cipriani as well. And who would be at the table? It would have to be MJ. Love to have wine and a cigar with him. And I love that he loves both.

Quick on that, in your authentic— in your autograph business, did you ever Did you ever get MJ?

I've gotten, I've gotten several MJ autographs. MJ, didn't get any chance, you know, any time to spend with him or anything, but that was one that I did not sell, personally kept. And there's very few pieces of memorabilia that I kept, but MJ's the GOAT and, you know, absolute legend. So I would need to have a dinner and a cigar with him.

All right. So we've got MJ.

I'd love to have— who are the other 3 people? Damn. I'd love to have my grandpa there. My grandpa's been with me on the journey from driving me to downtown or train stations to seeing the autograph business to— he came to Unicorn for the first time on his walker last week and he was crying and he was just like, you know, just so proud. And it'd be epic to have him at one of these dinners. He's one of my best friends. And then would love to have Mac Miller at that dinner. Big Mac Miller guy. And Frank Sinatra.

Is Frank singing or he's eating or both?

A little bit of both.

And maybe

if I throw in one, if I can have a surprise guest, I'd love Dave Chappelle there too. You know, I feel like he'd make the room perfect.

I mean, that sounds like a perfect death row meal. Phil, thank you so much. We've learned a lot. And where can people learn more about Unicorn and you?

Download Unicorn in the App Store, Unicorn Auctions. Go to unicornauctions.com. Follow Unicorn on Unicorn Auctions on Instagram. And thank you so much for having me. Cheers.

Cheers.