Equity Crowdfunding & Digital Capital Formation: Dealmaker’s Playbook (Rebecca Kacaba)

My vision is for everyday Americans to walk into their grocery store and see their favorite bag of chips and scan a QR code and become an owner in that chip company. Instead of a human reading those, we could have an AI tool scan all different forms of documents that are coming in and immediately tell the accredited investor, yes, you're now qualified to invest, or no, that document didn't work, upload a new document.

All right. Welcome to another episode of the Venture Capital Podcast with your host, Peter Harris and Job Bradshaw. Today we're joined by Rebecca Casava, CEO and co-founder of DealMaker. Rebecca's building the infrastructure behind modern capital formation, helping companies raise capital online in a compliant, scalable way. A trailblazer at the intersection of finance and technology, Rebecca turned her expertise as a top securities lawyer into a bold vision to transform the way founders and operators raise capital, fuel growth, and engage with their fans. Under her leadership, DealMaker has powered over $2 billion in digital capital raised, earned recognition as one of Fast Company's Best Workplaces for Innovators, and recently closed a $20 million funding round. Thank you for joining us, Rebecca.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Welcome. Welcome.

Well, to kick it off, you've got kind of an unconventional story, and one of my favorite things to discuss with founders is just hearing their journey. Their, the hero's journey, if you will, of how they went from where they were to where they are today and, and kind of what insights they discovered that, that led them to start the company that they're working at. And so I'd love to kind of maybe start there and, and hear kind of your journey.

Yeah, happy to. So I started as an attorney. Listeners, please don't hold that against me, but I did practiced law for over a decade in the capital markets, doing lots of IPOs and mergers and acquisitions and helping founders raise capital, and eventually built out a practice group focused on that and saw a real pain point with my clients that they were having when they went to raise capital. The, there was a lot of complexity in the process and it was very tough to get from the point at which they had an investor at yes to getting them over the line and closed and the money in the door. And we all know time kills all deals. And so I knew that was a problem that technology could solve. And so my co-founder Matt and I, who were both practicing law, set about to solve that. So I know it seems like an unconventional path to founding a business. You know, I come from a very entrepreneurial family, so I was always commandeered helping my dad get his businesses up off the ground, as good children do. But I really saw from my legal background how the capital markets operated and how complex and exclusionary capital raising could be. And that was really the problem that my co-founder and I wanted to solve. I think our legal background really allowed us to think in terms of risk and structures and how the ecosystem operated on a whole. And when we saw the JOBS Act come out, really turn the business model on its head and say, what is really gonna work for the founders who we're already working with and we know really well, and how can we build a tool that helps solve a problem for them? So because we did that, we came up with a totally different business model than most people who entered the market did based on a financial analysis.

This. Yeah, can you dive into that a little bit more? So there's, um, like, so I guess back up and tell us a little bit about DealMaker and, and what it is and how it works and, and, uh, what it enables.

DealMaker is providing a whole new source of capital for entrepreneurs through the online communities and followings that they have. So my vision is for everyday Americans to walk into their grocery store and see their favorite bag of chips and scan a QR code and become an owner in that chip company, or walk into their favorite sports stadium and get a popup on their phone to become an owner of that sports team. So we're really bridging the gap between the communities and the brands people consume and creating a community around a business. And so that's really exciting and it provides a whole new source of capital for founders from a retail audience that they can't otherwise access. But if you think about it, it's a natural course of disruption that happens in every category of the world, right? We're in a middle of a pattern that repeats every few decades where gatekeepers get displaced. It happened with publishing. With music distribution and with media. And the internet didn't just change how we consume content, it changed who gets to create it and who gets to profit from it. So capital raising has been late to the party, but we're here and DealMaker is facilitating it so that companies can drive their own content and build their own communities around their business that then help the business become more profitable.

Can you tell us a little bit on why capital markets is a little bit late to the party? You know, clearly like John and I are pretty familiar with it, but I don't know if our audience knows all the ins and outs of the JOBS Act and, you know, the CF regs and so forth.

Yeah, definitely. It's a regulated industry, right? So at the end of the day, a regulated industry is always gonna be harder to innovate in because you have to think about how to be compliant with the rules. But then because my co-founder and I have legal backgrounds, we knew the rules very well. We knew the ecosystem with a combined couple of decades in the ecosystem, and we knew how to take those rules and bring something different for the clients that we already have that would help those clients. And so we came at it from a very different perspective where we wanted to facilitate the relationship between the founders and their communities rather than stand in between them as an intermediary.

Yeah. Well, I think what's really cool is, you know, several years ago the government in the US made it possible for non-accredited investors to actually invest in startups. And so you had this proliferation of a whole bunch of different platforms like WeFunder, StartEngine, Republic. Um, and to your point, DealMaker has, has approached it from a very different perspective. Can you maybe contrast for our audience how you guys are set up versus those other platforms?

Yeah, the typical approach that we saw when the JOBS Act was passed was an Amazon, a portal model. So basically an online broker-dealer and DealMaker came at it as a technology-first approach, which was more of a Shopify model. We're going to white label, we're going to help facilitate those connections. We're gonna meet investors where they're at online and bring the offerings to them where their intention already lives. And then we're gonna bring them into the community of the business. And you know, this goes back, you know, over 10 years ago when I first saw what Netflix was doing, building, you know, online streaming. And I said, this is a product that I am consuming like crazy. I wanna buy this stock. And there's a lot of people who do that today who say, I consume a product. I wanna be a deeper part of this business, and we can facilitate a way for them to send referrals, be beta testers, do all the things that they can do, even if it's just organic social posting to increase the brand's profile. That can be enormously valuable to Series A and beyond companies like we have in our ecosystem.

That's great. And why, like, why take that approach? Like what, um, I mean, there's, there's, there's value, right? If you're a StartEngine or a WeFunder in that they have like huge communities of millions of people that they can bring to a fundraise. But the alternative, like the downside from my perspective is like, maybe there's some like negative signaling risk there. Um, in terms of like, well, why did you raise on WeFunder? Is that because you couldn't raise from like a traditional venture investor? Um, you have a little less control. Um, you're kind of on their platform as opposed to on your own platform. I, I'd be curious if you can touch on like some of the reasons why your clients like running, uh, their, their fundraising process on DealMaker instead.

Yeah, we have customers, you know, like the Green Bay Packers who are very protective of their fan list. They don't want their fan list going and being, seeing other offerings. So we sit in the market with a larger brand and larger offering. And those types of brands, a lot of the time they have that kind of customer or fan list that they just want help augmenting rather than sharing into a pooled resource. So different set of considerations. It's, it's great that the portals exist and it really helps build that ecosystem. I think Peter, you were touching as well on something. It's, it's a movement I think that's broader than just DealMaker and StartEngine and the WeFunders of the world, what we're doing is in a regulated space. But I think the crypto movement has built something bigger than this where you see people trading and making investments online and building communities around that and talking about them on Reddit threads. And NFTs, you know, were a huge part of that opportunity that people saw to really just get online and try to make some money. So, A lot of the time when I'm in Washington and talking to the rule makers about what we're doing, we have to contextualize what we do, but it's really in a broader concept, concept of crypto and DeFi and all of these online collectibles that are happening regardless.

Yeah. Does DealMaker do much with crypto?

We don't, no. We stay in a very regulated lane. A lot of private companies, Public companies too. We've got, you know, customers like Newsmax that were very intentional about wanting to finance from their community of viewers. You're seeing a lot of a movement of big companies, you know, like Reddit doing it as part of their IPO, Figma, retail really coming back and playing a larger role in the capital markets today than it has over the course of the last 5 or so years. Yeah.

And can you explain when you, when you say community, I think a lot of the users are, or at least in my mind, I think of something like the Circle app where it's specifically designed for an online community. And my understanding is you're doing something completely different.

Yeah. I mean, Circle has been an early mover in the community, online community formation for sure. What we're doing is helping each company build a community around itself. And so we do have a portal where those companies communicate with their investors, post updates, because the knock on retail capital over the last 5 years was really that, oh, it's, it's too hard to manage. Well, that's, that's simply not true in today's day and age where technology regularly facilitates communications from one to many. And so a lot of what brands are doing today and young founders are doing is getting online and building their brand profile. Straight out of the gate. They're investing in the logo, they're investing in the brand, they've got social media accounts up and running almost immediately. So as they figure out who their target user is and their ICP is, that ICP can naturally take a deeper involvement in the business and become a source of capital. So we're simply, as a technology platform, facilitating that relationship.

What are the specific features that the investors would access on your platform? For for, from a community aspect?

Mostly it's getting to get access to their update, their cap table, all their holdings so that they can understand what's going on with the company in a privileged private way.

Okay. Sounds awesome.

And you would be a competitor to Carta in that way, or how are you, how would you be different from them?

Carta a little bit different in that they're focus mainly just on cap table management. I know they went into the secondary trading aspects for a while and then backed out of that. So a little bit of overlap there, but we're really facilitating cap table management with an extremely large community. So a lot of our customers will have, you know, 8,000 to 20,000 followers versus a smaller cap table of, you know, less than 100. Mm-hmm.

All right.

That answered my question.

I'll quit interrupting, Peter. Your turn again.

No, you're good. I am curious. I know that you do a bunch with sports. You mentioned the Green Bay Packers. In Utah, there was a big, big waves made because a private equity firm is coming in and buying a chunk of the University of Utah's football team or sports And I actually don't know all the details there, but there is a huge movement right now around investing in sports. And I'm curious to hear kind of what your perspective is on that and why, why it's happening now and hasn't happened before.

Yeah, sports is really an emerging asset class. There's so many new teams and leagues emerging in America, and of course they're all fighting for attention span now. So it was a strategic move for us as we saw fandom around sports teams as naturally occurring, right? People love their team, they wanna own that asset, and if they can get exclusive access to owners' merch drops, there's a natural way that they can become even more involved and support the teams. And a lot of people don't know that there are over 100 fan-owned sports teams in the world. Some of the biggest brands, that, you know, like the Green Bay Packers, Real Madrid, these are all fandom teams. And there's a reason those teams have outsized brand value, especially if you look at Green Bay. You know, they live in a, a metropolis of 300,000 people, yet they have a brand value that rivals the metropolis of New York and LA. How are they able to accomplish that is with this rabid fan base they've been raising capital from. For over 100 years. So that concept really works well in sports. The economics are there, and it's exciting for people to get opportunity to that new asset class as institutions are also building up their established funds. A lot of the way we get involved is through partnerships with private equity partners and venture partners. You know, in the last 2 years, there has been 3x So 3 times more of the companies that are retail funded are venture-backed. So venture is really partnering here and seeing this as a great way to increase revenue and broaden the capital stack of the portfolio companies that they balance. And that's a natural synergy that's happening because of this merging of the public and private markets. So I've been in the public markets, you know, longer than I care to admit based on my age. And having a retail component of a story was always a main segment of what broker-dealers did in order to make sure stock traded well and the brand performed well. And what I saw over the course of my career is that that really got a little bit lost in with electronic trading. It really started to dwindle down retail involvement. And so, um, we're excited to see that coming back and to be bringing that into the private markets.

What do you say to institutional investors though, that look at these types of fundraising mechanisms and say, well, like it's a negative signal, kind of like what I mentioned earlier, you know, it's like, hey, if you were a really great founder, a really great company, you wouldn't need to raise from retail investors.

I think that's really a legacy and laggard, probably uneducated perspective. So I think they're probably not live to the signals that are happening in the way businesses are built online today, and they're not understanding the power of that digital community. And this is happening in every industry across the board. But I would say that perception has really shifted, Peter, in the last couple of years.

Yeah.

You know, in Washington, on Wall Street, people are very much dialed in on the power of the retail investor. And how active they can be and how positive it can be for the brands themselves. Because a lot of these brands are requesting it, it's fundamental to their business model. And so that is a natural transition. They see that should transition into their capital stack.

Yeah. Are there any like great case studies that you can point to of, of successes where, you know, a company did one of these raises and, you know, saw outsized outcomes from it beyond just the capital raised?

Yeah, I think Revolut, you know, out of the UK was one of the early funders and they've been around long enough to really prove out that model. And some of the early retail investors in that will make hundreds of X return on that story. And the community really powered that. We've got customers like Monogram who, you know, were powered by the community from day one. That community took them all the way to a NASDAQ listing and an eventual acquisition. And we've seen the benefits of that in terms of communities making connections for new pilot testing, acting as beta users. So we're really dialing in on now in this era of how the community can be supportive and putting numbers behind that to expand the thesis.

Yeah, it does feel so. I've been a huge proponent of equity crowdfunding for a long time. It does feel to me though, like, I don't know, like maybe it, it's plateaued a little bit and I'm, I'm curious, like what are the things that we need to do to help encourage more people to see this as a, as a place to invest and participate? Because I feel like you, you mentioned crypto earlier, right? And to a certain extent, like crypto is way, way larger. For what I consider to be, like, to be frank, fairly speculative investing. Um, it's hard to point to very many crypto-based companies that are actually creating real tangible value in, in society. Uh, whereas I can point to a lot of companies that have raised money on platforms like, um, DealMaker that are creating real tangible value. And yet it feels like there's a bit of this, like, disconnect between retail investors and, and some of these platforms, right? You don't have quite as much money for flowing in through these mechanisms yet. And I'm curious what your perspective is on that and like what needs to change or what can we do to encourage more participation?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a lot of new business models emerging. There are apps that connect investors with the brands they love. There are different portals that are highly focused on different segments of the market. I, so I do think it's a natural evolution that is happening. Is it slower than many in the industry would've expected? I think it took a while for it to ramp up, but I do think Robinhood's making significant moves in offering privates on their platform. A lot of the regulations didn't allow this activity to happen in America. So I think that's part of why when you dampen the activity, You know, it goes outside America's borders and it does sort of seem to occur, but America has the best, most robust capital market ecosystem. So if we can bring that activity in and then put the right guardrails around it, that's how we can get the activity more frothy. A lot of what I talk to Washington about is looking at the rules and saying, okay, if you— we could tweak this here or there. There are different ways that we can make the ecosystem more robust. For example, the cap on Regulation A+ at $75 million. $75 million isn't a drop in the bucket for someone to build a new sports stadium. So we regularly talk to people who need, you know, half a billion dollars. The retail component at $75 million just doesn't really scratch the surface. So that's one of the things we're talking to Washington about. Okay, has the ecosystem proven out enough that we can lift caps like that? Get bigger brands using the exemptions that you've designed, which are really well designed and protect the non-accredited investors. And if we can do that, I believe bigger brands will now come to the space and that will really allow us to shoot the lights out. So there's a big component of that, of making sure we keep investors safe, which the ecosystem is doing, giving them access to these opportunities because they can access crypto and NFTs and DeFi trading all day long. So let's give them access to these and allow this ecosystem to flourish a little bit more.

That's interesting. Do you feel like there's half a billion dollars worth of retail interest in building a stadium out there? Are you seeing that?

Yeah, I mean, when I say retail interest, like a lot of it is accredited too. So it's really just allowing people to have that access to make their own investment selection choices. Directly with the companies.

Yeah, but I mean, are accredited investors not able to invest in, in that sort of opportunity already?

It's just about getting access, right? So like, it's not like if someone's building a sports stadium, they're going to go and tap a pool of accredited investors. They're going to go to a big institution and take one check, which is what we can change with our technology.

Uh, what, what do you say to the, you know, taking the other side of this fence, not the venture fund side, but the founder side? Um, you know, maybe the skeptical founder who's like, well, you know, if I'm really good, I just, you know, I go talk to Sequoia and they cut me a check and I'm done. Um, what, what's kind of the, what's, what's the story for them, uh, as to why they should consider, this path?

It's different. Capital has different strategic value, right? So, so if Sequoia is aligned with your mission and going to help you in your skill set and their skill set get the business to succeed, that is a very good choice. We have lots of founders who want complementary sources of capital. They have institutional for that knowledge in sitting on the board and helping them build the business, and then they have retail for all the reasons that I mentioned, where they might help with a brand lift, help be a user source, and different aspects like that. So, um, I think that is the way people are considering it, as different strategic choices. Some business models also just are more lent to a community-driven model, and so community capital makes a lot more sense. And then we have multi-time founders who say, look, I had a bad experience with someone taking control of my company, and I want to set my own valuation. I want to keep control. And this is a good way for them to do it because it's not someone handing you a term sheet. It's you going out to the world and saying, these are the terms I'm willing to offer an investment in my business on. And I'm a big proponent of that, you know, founder first. I think a lot of founders can really benefit from that kind of strategic capital. And picking their own path and making their own decisions.

Yeah, makes sense. What are some of your strategic initiatives for 2026? What are you excited about? What are you working on?

We're really excited about AI. It's a huge opportunity for what we do, which is so complex and is bringing together a highly regulated space with digital marketing, with other components of our technology, and AI can just make everything faster, smoother, and more easy. So that's a big focus for us as well. Ongoing conversations with Washington about how we can streamline the rules and continue to make access to this capital easier for founders.

Are there specific ways in which you're envisioning how AI will, will impact your business? And kind of this community at large?

There's so many ways. One example is, you know, on an accredited investor raise, a lot of the time the accredited investors will have to upload documentation to validate their income or a net worth asset status. Instead of a human reading those, we could have an AI tool scan all different forms of documents that are coming in and immediately tell the accredited investor, Yes, you're now qualified to invest, or no, that document didn't work, upload a new document. So we take something where a person's waiting 48 hours for feedback and we've made it instantaneous. So those kinds of improvements are really exciting for us because we can help people close more capital faster.

Yep. No, that's, that's great. So one of my thesis around, uh, AI is that, uh, and this is like probably a fairly obvious one, is that like we are going to get flooded. We already are getting flooded with content. Uh, there's just more and more distracting us from different things. And that companies that have maybe like an attention advantage ultimately have like a massive advantage because one of the things that'll be the most difficult is acquiring customers. As I think about the the equity crowdfunding space, and in particular a company like DealMaker, you know, one of the things that's like, like the benefit is that you can build this community and they become invested, literally invested in your company and in its success. The flip side though is like you have to go out and build that community. And as things become more and more crowded and more and more noisy, that becomes more challenging to do. Um, I'm just curious, like, how are you talking to your founders around navigating that and, and how to effectively build communities in this day and age?

Yeah, I think AI, you're right, does everything you described. How we can leverage it is to create more customized content for individuals so that we can really help our founders hone in on the exact investor persona that they have and speak to that individual. So we're creating a highly customized audience for them that really believes in their business, and that's the way things need to go. You're right, when there is more content out there, is knowing with even more precision who you're speaking to and how to speak to them. And then you're absolutely right, Peter, you get those people invested. They're 80% more engaged with the brand. So now you've got huge leverage in the attention war that's happening online because those people are 80% more engaged with your brand. You're sending them updates, they're reading them. You're asking them to post, they're posting. You ask them to post a referral link for more investors, they do it, and other people listen because they're all their own mini influencers. So in that way, you can really give yourself leverage in the attention war. And as I mentioned, especially in sports when every new league and team is competing to carve out that attention warcare from the existing incumbent brands, that's a great way to do it.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Trying to think what, so you've built a really interesting business, kind of shifting gears a little bit and just going back to being a great founder and entrepreneur. Talk to us about what it's like, you know, what are some of the things you've learned along the journey of building DealMaker and running teams?

Well, I would say that the number one thing that I've learned is ruthless prioritization. When you're a founder, there are so many things coming at you day in, day out, so many decisions to be made. It's really important to say no and to outsource tasks that shouldn't be taking up your time. So that's something I'm constantly revisiting and trying to find ways to gain leverage and making sure that I'm focused on the most important tasks that I should be.

Are there any frameworks or tools or are there things that have helped you do that more effectively?

Yeah, I'm a huge proponent of scaling up. So it's framed around the one-page strategic plan, the Rockefeller Habits. Rockefeller used it to build all his businesses and said, if you can't say what you're doing on one page that everybody in the company can have in front of them in every meeting, then you're not clear about your priorities and what you're doing.. And I have found, you know, being a founder, there's a lot of different directions that you wanna go to, um, because you constantly have new ideas and you constantly believe that you will be successful at all of them. Yep. So, I, you know, it was also said, um, to, uh, what the Amazon founder, you know, you have so many ideas, you have enough ideas to kill this business. And I think that's true of a lot of us founders for sure. My co-founder and I,. And so we have to be ruthless in terms of what is the strategy and how do we stay on strategy and give everybody else, you know, the company is now 160 people, make sure that they have enough clarity on how they can contribute to the mission and what the areas of decision-making are for them so that we can all be rowing the boat in the same direction. 'Cause I always say, you know, if we're not rowing in the same direction, One paddle's moving too fast and the boat is spinning.

Yep.

Yep.

Digging on that a little bit more, you've won awards for building a really innovative culture. What are like some of the, I don't know, the key things that you've done or discovered that have helped you build that culture and maintain it over time?

A big piece of our values is driving outcomes and finding a way. So, really just having that approach where people can drive to success and they feel confident doing that because there are no failures. We don't look at anything as failure. We look at it as we're running experiments and not every experiment is expected to succeed and we're going to dial in on the ones that do. So we run 5 experiments or bets, 4 are going to fail and we're going to lean into the first one. And if you take that approach, not just as a founder, but as, you know, a team in a growth company, it allows you the freedom to learn and continue to learn from the experiments that you're running, which you always see value and you always continue to grow and evolve as a business. And I think especially in our business in DealMaker, you know, we're not in an established category, right? We're building a new frontier of online capital. That ability to experiment is really important. Another thing we're doing this year is really trying to make sure that everybody is set up to succeed with AI. So running AI hackathons, we just partnered with builder.io so the entire team could experiment and build the tools that they needed to solve the problems in their day-to-day job. And so I'm a big proponent of everybody's the boss of their own job, regardless of the levels that they're at. And they can only see the problems that exist in their area of function, and they should be empowered to solve them because no one else is gonna come and solve it for them.

Yep. Yeah, it makes sense. No, I love, I love this idea of giving people a lot of autonomy and also the room to make mistakes and fail without feeling like, you know, they're gonna lose their job or whatever, right? So that they can actually, you know, push, push the boundaries forward a little bit.

So, yeah, the delicate balance in that is finding the time and carving out the, the space to do it rather than just getting, you know, focused on the day-to-day. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a tightrope to walk, right? Because, you know, John and I were even talking about this the other day. It's like, if you're not focused, right, you're just going to get distracted. You won't get anything done. So you want to be focused, but you also want to have enough experiments out there that you're, you're testing and improving and growing. So yeah, it's a tight rope to walk, but it sounds like you guys are doing a great job of doing that, so.

Yeah, we ran a hackathon recently. It's hard to find the time to do those, but when we do it, it was really gratifying. We came up with incredible solutions and is it 20% time like Google has? There's lots of different ways that we experiment with it structurally to try and make sure. That we're meeting the growth and hiring at the right velocity so people continue to have that time.

Yeah. I think like being really intentional about setting the time for it is maybe like one of the best unlocks because you could either get like, you know, buried in the day-to-day and never make time for it, which, you know, it just makes it hard to do those types of things. But if you actually like dedicate time to it, usually you still get all the other stuff done, but now you also have this time dedicated to doing stuff that's like, I think about it more as like you're working on the business instead of in the business. And it's so easy to get distracted by all the things in the business that have to get done that if you don't, you're not super intentional about setting aside time to work on the business, it just never happens.

So, and you might find a way to save yourself a lot of time when you really take a step back and look at it. A lot of the times the conversation is, Well, do we really need to do it that way or is there an even more efficient low-touch way that we could be doing this?

Right, right. Yeah. I think a lot about the Eisenhower Matrix of just like you're spending all of your time in like the urgent things, you know, and not enough time in the non-urgent important stuff. If, if you spend your time in the non-urgent important stuff, you can build systems that will take care of the, the urgent stuff that's hitting your plate every day. But again, you have to be intentional about setting up that time to, to work on it. So I love it. Um, so as we wrap up the podcast, I'm just curious, you know, there's a lot happening, it feels like, in fundraising right now, uh, for startups. So, you know, we've talked and others have talked at length about how there's now creating this, there's this bifurcation in funds. So you've got small niche funds that focus on specific verticals and are go very early stage. So pre-seed, seed, some Series A, and then you've got like the mega funds that are managing billions of dollars and act very differently. They're kind of asset managers first versus venture funds, in my opinion. Um, and then you've got AI and what's happening there. You know, you, you, We've had a challenging liquidity market in venture for the last several years, uh, and then you've got these companies in AI that are going from, you know, $0 to $100 million in, in like 12 months or less, uh, and raising at, you know, eye-watering valuations. And then you've got what you're building as well, right? And bringing kind of retail investors to, to all of this, right? I'm curious, what is you know, your prediction on, on where all of this is going and what is your advice to founders who are trying to navigate all of it?

I think we are seeing across the capital markets this bifurcation with the large end getting larger and then the rest of the market proceeding not at, not the same velocity. And I think Washington's keenly aware of that and trying to think about what we can do about that. I see public markets can be the answer to that, but I think the regulation challenges are forcing this stay-private situation. And as a result, you know, companies like DealMaker and a lot of other companies exist that service the private markets. So that is resulting in this merging of the public and private markets in a really interesting way that should smoothen out that on-ramp where you see, you know, secondary trading activity in private markets, for example. For founders negotiating it, I think the path continues to be to find the partners that are right and aligned with your strategic vision. Because if partners or investors have a different perception about where the company's going to go compared to the founder, that's going to lead to friction and a lack of success and, and lack of a fun journey as a founder, frankly, too. So I think really being diligent about self-reflecting about what you want and what you think the growth path is for your business and talking to a lot of people and talking to AI, of course, as as well. And then really diligencing out the sources of capital that are right for you is how you can make sure that you keep your company on a good trajectory of where you want it to go.

Yeah, I love it. Any other kind of parting thoughts as, as we wrap up?

I think we're in an exciting time. The retail revolution is upon us and it's picking up steam. Seeing a lot of companies trade in the space, seeing a lot of online community building happening. So, uh, we're excited to see what the future holds.

Awesome. Well, one, really appreciate you joining us today for the podcast, um, but also, you know, really appreciative of all your hard work to bring this asset class to them, to everybody, to those that, you know, may not have had access to be able to invest in these types of companies before and gain this type of exposure. And also, you know, for the companies that are looking to raise, because I think oftentimes, you know, if you look at Silicon Valley investors, they all kind of look the same and they tend to fund the same kind of stuff and they don't really— they're not very representative of the broader population. And so I think there's also a lot of great founders out there that, to your point, are looking for really mission-aligned partners, uh, that look like them, that appreciate, like, their approach to solving the problems that they face every day, and are able to find those within kind of the retail investor market.

So thank you. Awesome. Thank you very much, you guys.