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Speaker 4: All right, gosh, welcome back, e y l. We are
Speaker 4: in Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: An amazing LA time has been had.
Speaker 4: Every time we come to LA, especially for Grammy Weekend.
Speaker 4: It's always a motion picture event for sure.
Speaker 5: To say the least man to say the least is
Speaker 5: definitely most of the picture, and we're going out with
Speaker 5: a bang.
Speaker 4: It's not over yet, not over, yes, So this is interesting.
Speaker 4: I think the first time that we met was with
Speaker 4: Baron Davis briefly for his event, right yep, that was
Speaker 4: all start Lake City and we want to panel together.
Speaker 3: They were yeah, And.
Speaker 6: Then we met in Davos and then we met.
Speaker 3: You know what.
Speaker 5: They were saying like, you got to meet this guy,
Speaker 5: you got to meet this guy. And I'm looking like,
Speaker 5: all right, who's the I'm like, oh right, we just
Speaker 5: we know, Ryan, we just be We didn't trying to
Speaker 5: make it happen for probably over a year. Yeah, but
Speaker 5: like any other you know, when the time is supposed
Speaker 5: to to come does and it happens in the right time.
Speaker 3: Serious. So we ran into a Davos and it was
Speaker 3: it was love and it was like, we.
Speaker 5: Have to do it now the time.
Speaker 7: Here we are two weeks later.
Speaker 4: So Ryan Breslo is foundering and chairman of Bolt, which
Speaker 4: is revolutionizing e commerce one click check out, you said
Speaker 4: PayPal two point zero.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you can look at it as.
Speaker 8: That, right, Yeah, I think that's the easiest way to
Speaker 8: describe it.
Speaker 4: But you're serial entrepreneur. So you also started a company
Speaker 4: called Love Yeah. Right, that's the newest vibe that you
Speaker 4: got going on. Right, Yeah, that's a marketplace for alternative medicines.
Speaker 8: It's a little different now. I think the last time
Speaker 8: I told you about it, it was but it's actually
Speaker 8: even crazier.
Speaker 7: Idea.
Speaker 8: I was trying to tell Troy at Davos and don't
Speaker 8: tell me. Yeah, You're like, don't tell me, So I
Speaker 8: didn't update you or correct. So it's different than that, all.
Speaker 4: Right, So we'll get into it. And then you have Ego,
Speaker 4: right yep. And that's the crypto savings app.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Crypto savings app and making crypto easier for the
Speaker 8: mainstream consumer.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I feel like that's been your goal.
Speaker 5: When I think about like the history of how you've
Speaker 5: built everything, it started there, right, Like it was how
Speaker 5: do I make things more efficient for the everyday person?
Speaker 5: Even like the one click payment is how to make
Speaker 5: things efficient for the everyday person?
Speaker 8: Exactly? Yeah, how do you make things easy that currently
Speaker 8: aren't easy?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 8: And I just I felt that about online check out,
Speaker 8: I felt that about crypto and so yeah, those and
Speaker 8: now it's love, which is all about conscious shopping and
Speaker 8: making that easier, which we'll talk more about, but yeah,
Speaker 8: making things easier.
Speaker 4: So Forbes last year twenty twenty three, they had you
Speaker 4: had the seventh youngest billionaire in the world.
Speaker 6: For Forbes said.
Speaker 3: Those guys.
Speaker 5: You know, it was also interesting if you ever, like,
Speaker 5: like google yourself, which maybe you don't, when people had
Speaker 5: like their birth date, their birthdate says twenty nine dash dirty,
Speaker 5: so they're not really sure how old you are.
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: There's all types of media press, a lot of things
Speaker 8: that are said.
Speaker 6: M Yeah.
Speaker 8: You know, I got a lot of attention maybe eighteen
Speaker 8: and twenty four months ago because I needed to make
Speaker 8: Bolt and myself known to just get customers. So I
Speaker 8: started doing more publicly, and then Forbes came out with that,
Speaker 8: and there's a bunch of other and the stuff in
Speaker 8: the press, and I realized that the press attention comes
Speaker 8: with a lot of costs. So I've been trying to,
Speaker 8: you know, stay more low profile these days. I'm not
Speaker 8: going completely low profile, dude, you know, I.
Speaker 4: Don't worry nobody's listening. All right, Well, first and foremost,
Speaker 4: thank you for joining us.
Speaker 7: Appreciate it and thanks for having me. It's an honor.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So I think this is gonna be a dope conversation.
Speaker 4: We want to talk about raising money, you want to
Speaker 4: talk about business startups, want to talk about pivoting, all
Speaker 4: of these things that we talk about as far as entrepreneurship,
Speaker 4: and that's what the platform is based on. So we
Speaker 4: actually just got finished watching one of your videos for
Speaker 4: like twenty minutes and Studio told you about it. So
Speaker 4: that actually gave me a lot of questions to ask
Speaker 4: based off of that conversation.
Speaker 5: And I think there's a part of the world of
Speaker 5: business and entrepreneurship that people don't talk about, but I
Speaker 5: love that you do. And that's the mindfulness, right and
Speaker 5: the mental health of it, right, because there's a lot
Speaker 5: that comes on number one, being a founder, but having
Speaker 5: the risk to say I'm about to change the world yep,
Speaker 5: and having that belief in yourself, but sometimes really lies
Speaker 5: in that the people around you don't have a similar belief.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I mean, I think the world's greatest entrepreneurs had a
Speaker 8: deep sense of purpose and I think a lot of
Speaker 8: entrepreneurs do. And then as you get caught up in
Speaker 8: business you start to lose that why, right, and it
Speaker 8: can really suck the soul out of you to a
Speaker 8: point where you're forgetting why you're doing what you're doing
Speaker 8: in the first place. And so you kind of hit
Speaker 8: a glass ceiling. And I think re anchoring in that
Speaker 8: why and staying there as much as you can is
Speaker 8: what leads to that continue success, continue reinventing of yourself,
Speaker 8: as we talked about.
Speaker 7: So yeah, so.
Speaker 4: Let's get into today. So let's talk about bolt start there.
Speaker 4: So what's the idea for both and what's the from
Speaker 4: idea to execution to getting it unicorn status?
Speaker 8: Yeah, so I started this. I was lucky again in Stanford,
Speaker 8: grow up in Miami. I'll go through this a little background.
Speaker 8: Start with Stanford Bitcoin Group in twenty thirteen, eight of
Speaker 8: us on campus.
Speaker 6: A bitcoin like investing group.
Speaker 8: No, it's just like students doing research and projects around bitcoin.
Speaker 8: We're writing papers, we had some professors. We'd get credits
Speaker 8: for researching bitcoin and super cool. Most of the campus
Speaker 8: didn't know what bitcoin was or eight of us in it.
Speaker 8: A couple of years after it was hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 8: of kids, but we were the first one to really
Speaker 8: popularize bitcoin on campus, and I dropped out of school
Speaker 8: to start something and looked kind of like a coinbase,
Speaker 8: like make it easy to buy and sell and all that.
Speaker 8: And I actually went around the country pitching banks on
Speaker 8: why they should work with us, because we need a
Speaker 8: bank to work with us.
Speaker 7: And so did that Throughout a year.
Speaker 8: We lost a couple banking bids to coin base because
Speaker 8: they had the bigger vcs, they felt more trusted with them.
Speaker 8: So I'm like, this is going to take me too
Speaker 8: long to get banks behind me. And so I kind
Speaker 8: of really have always wanted to build a better PayPal
Speaker 8: am I gonna find if I do this, I can
Speaker 8: integrate crypto with it later. And so I had this
Speaker 8: idea of PayPal two point zero. I'd started some e
Speaker 8: commerce sites in middle school and I'm like, the checkout
Speaker 8: is really bad, and so I was like, why don't
Speaker 8: we make a better version of this? And I could
Speaker 8: talk more about how bolt works, but that's that's was
Speaker 8: the inspiration.
Speaker 5: Where did you Because this is early I know now
Speaker 5: everybody bigcoin.
Speaker 3: I mean, if you don't know what it is, it's
Speaker 3: like where have you been?
Speaker 5: But in twenty thirteen, it wasn't very commonly known I
Speaker 5: kind of was introduced to it because of the music scene,
Speaker 5: and it was like that was a way to get
Speaker 5: music from sites that you know, it's almost like illegal
Speaker 5: to get music, so you had to have a different
Speaker 5: form of payment. How did you get introduced it and
Speaker 5: then now bring it to Stanford to say this is
Speaker 5: something that's going to take over the future.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there was this professor whose name was Billagi Shrinovasan
Speaker 8: who's kind of infamous in Silicon Valley, and so he's
Speaker 8: teaching this startup engineering class.
Speaker 7: So I'm very lucky.
Speaker 4: He's the one that, like always he teaches classes and
Speaker 4: then the kids that in his class pitched and then
Speaker 4: he invests in the kids.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, he like in the class, you work on
Speaker 8: different projects and hackathons. He might invest, might not. I
Speaker 8: wasn't a center around him investing. But I got very
Speaker 8: lucky right place, right time. I was very blessed to
Speaker 8: get into into great school. And and then there was
Speaker 8: about eight of us who would do these hackathons. He'd
Speaker 8: have twice a week hackathons because Blagie loved, like, you know,
Speaker 8: young hackers building his crazy ideas. So he'd go and
Speaker 8: we'd build his things. And there are about eight of
Speaker 8: us who were consistently there to like five or six
Speaker 8: in the morning and everyone else that went to bed,
Speaker 8: and so we just started talking and we get a
Speaker 8: lot of time with them. And then eventually the eight
Speaker 8: of us were like, we should just form an official
Speaker 8: club on campus, and this should be around bitcoin. So
Speaker 8: we started Stanford Bitcoin Group. We got it bussed by
Speaker 8: the university. We ended up getting like five credits a
Speaker 8: quarter for doing research papers on it. So we got
Speaker 8: out of some classes and just was able to focus
Speaker 8: on bitcoin, and eventually I was like, this is all
Speaker 8: I want to focus on. And then I ended up
Speaker 8: doing the stereotypical dropout Stanford dropout.
Speaker 7: So I'm the stereotyped to a t.
Speaker 4: So when you start in a company, you have to
Speaker 4: raise money, you have to like get some help. Like
Speaker 4: what's the process of actually starting the company of you know,
Speaker 4: from idea to actually get it up and running.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean there's a million ways to start a company.
Speaker 8: For me, I I had like a first attempt at
Speaker 8: starting a company and ended up complete disaster. I had
Speaker 8: two other co founders. One was a close friend. One
Speaker 8: was like this billionaire who got interested in what we
Speaker 8: were doing, had all this money lined up because of
Speaker 8: this person's name. That person ended up pulling out for
Speaker 8: reasons I don't I never was able to uncover my
Speaker 8: other co founders, like this is hopeless. I had already
Speaker 8: dropped out of school, so so now I had no money,
Speaker 8: I had no co founders, and but I'm dropped out,
Speaker 8: and so now I look at them like that was
Speaker 8: such a blessing because they weren't the right people to
Speaker 8: do the business with. But at the time, I was like, man,
Speaker 8: I'm super square, dropped out of school, got no money,
Speaker 8: can't pay for rent. I mean, I don't have investors.
Speaker 8: So you know, I built an MVP of an app
Speaker 8: over several months, built it my I then had enough
Speaker 8: momentum I got some users on the app. It was
Speaker 8: a crypto app, kind of like a coinbase or some investors,
Speaker 8: you know, took notice. I was pitching tons of investors.
Speaker 8: I got a lot of nos, and then I refigured
Speaker 8: out how to pitch, and so I got better. I
Speaker 8: could talk for five hours on fundraising strategy. But you know,
Speaker 8: I started to get some investors on board. Then you
Speaker 8: start to hire engineers that are better than you and
Speaker 8: then you know, you start to get customers.
Speaker 7: You know, we went through some pivots. It was really messy.
Speaker 8: It's just extreme perseverance. Sometimes the funding comes first, Sometimes
Speaker 8: the talent comes first, Sometimes the customers come first. Both
Speaker 8: early days were not pretty at all. I mean it
Speaker 8: was trying a lot of different things.
Speaker 5: So you are these things all self talk, right, because
Speaker 5: I'm thinking, this is this young man with my.
Speaker 3: Was coding in eighth grade, which is this like incredible?
Speaker 5: But most times there's a difference, Right, There's a difference
Speaker 5: between being the CEO of a company and being an
Speaker 5: engineer or a coder and then somebody who actually actually
Speaker 5: raised money for that company, right that picture.
Speaker 3: So how were you learning those skills?
Speaker 5: How you're developing them outside of just saying they told
Speaker 5: me no, all right, I can't do that. Like what
Speaker 5: was the strategies and when you were early on trying
Speaker 5: to get this money from people.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Well, the first thing is I got started young in
Speaker 8: terms of being able to talk to business people. I
Speaker 8: started building websites, doing online marketing, found some customers in
Speaker 8: Miami doing this in high school. So by the time
Speaker 8: I got to college, I had some business experience.
Speaker 7: Not in tech.
Speaker 8: But you know, I had some experience when I started
Speaker 8: raising money. I was doing everything wrong. And like, one
Speaker 8: of the first rules that I say in my book
Speaker 8: fundraising is, uh, don't say you're fundraising. As the second
Speaker 8: you say that you're fundraising and you're on the clock,
Speaker 8: meaning people are gonna be like, all right, well his
Speaker 8: round should blow up and be over soon. Because if
Speaker 8: this is a hot company, I'm gonna have a limited window.
Speaker 8: So if in two weeks your round isn't done, people
Speaker 8: are gonna be like, why aren't others investing? And so
Speaker 8: they're gonna, you know, they're gonna walk away. And if
Speaker 8: you build up a bunch of no's around your company
Speaker 8: people are not investing, then that's you know, the network
Speaker 8: becomes aware that all these people didn't invest, and you're
Speaker 8: kind of screwed. So, you know, one of the first
Speaker 8: lessons that I learned from a great mentor of mine,
Speaker 8: his name is Michael Cartery, as this company play Co,
Speaker 8: very successful gaming company. He was giving some talks on fundraising.
Speaker 8: Again he taught me this concept, just don't say you're fundraising.
Speaker 8: Just go build relationships first, go and meet investors and
Speaker 8: get them excited about who you are as a person
Speaker 8: and casually.
Speaker 7: Get them excited about your idea.
Speaker 8: Instead of going and saying I'm pitching you, which automatically
Speaker 8: puts them on a pedestal versus you.
Speaker 7: Right, you're not peers anymore.
Speaker 8: Now they're on a pedestal, and so it sets the
Speaker 8: dynamics incorrectly from the beginning. You're not building a relationship
Speaker 8: and you can get this domino effect of nose which
Speaker 8: could really screw you before you even begin. So I
Speaker 8: did that in the beginning. I learned from those mistakes.
Speaker 8: I had some great mentors who helped me reshape my
Speaker 8: fundraising strategy.
Speaker 4: So you said something, or say when you said, if
Speaker 4: you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice,
Speaker 4: asks for money, Yep, that's how I said it correctly. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so can you elaborate on that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's a pretty common adage in Silicon Valley and
Speaker 8: so I certainly didn't invent that. But if you go
Speaker 8: to someone and you say, hey, I want, you know,
Speaker 8: to pitch you for funding, they're most likely going to
Speaker 8: give you advice. It's going to say, hey, you know,
Speaker 8: I'm not able to fund you right now, but how
Speaker 8: about I give you some advice. Whereas if you go
Speaker 8: to them and you show a genuine interest in their advice,
Speaker 8: but also, potentially even more importantly, you really impress the
Speaker 8: shit out of them with who you are. And that
Speaker 8: person has money or is an investor, they are going
Speaker 8: to organically want to invest in you.
Speaker 4: So let's say I have a company and I'm trying
Speaker 4: to raise money. I know a very wealthy guy. Instead
Speaker 4: of saying, hey, do you want to you know, ham
Speaker 4: I pitched to give me money to put my startup,
Speaker 4: it'll say, you know, I have this idea, da da dad,
Speaker 4: and I really respect your your opinion. Would you want
Speaker 4: to just hear about it just to kind of give
Speaker 4: me some feedback on it? And then you just do
Speaker 4: a really great job presenting it. And then they're like, damn,
Speaker 4: I got to be involved in this situation, but you're not.
Speaker 4: You don't look like you're so eager to just only
Speaker 4: get their money. You really genuinely want their advice. But
Speaker 4: then by you not wanting to take their money, they
Speaker 4: want to give you money even more.
Speaker 8: Exactly, this approaches a win win makes it more comfortable
Speaker 8: for them, right because they don't like saying no to you.
Speaker 8: It makes it more comfortable for you, because if if
Speaker 8: you're doing a good job, they're gonna want invest. If
Speaker 8: you're talking to an investor whose job it is to invest,
Speaker 8: who invests, they need you just as much as you
Speaker 8: need them. So if you're sitting in front of them
Speaker 8: and they're like, oh shit, this dude is going to
Speaker 8: fucking kill it, they will proactively say how can I
Speaker 8: get involved? And they're gonna be just as likely, if
Speaker 8: not more likely, than if you came to them explicitly
Speaker 8: trying to pitch.
Speaker 5: How intentional are you about it? Before you even go
Speaker 5: to get the advice? Are you strategically targeting the people
Speaker 5: that you want to get the advice from?
Speaker 3: Like, is there a list?
Speaker 5: And it's like if I could meet or get in
Speaker 5: front of this ten or twenty people this month, that's
Speaker 5: my target.
Speaker 3: Like, how did you go about it?
Speaker 8: Well, in the beginning, you know, beggars can't be choosers, right,
Speaker 8: so you kind of will try to get meetings with
Speaker 8: anyone who has money, right. I mean, now you can
Speaker 8: be as you go later, Sage, you could be a
Speaker 8: little more picky, and you should be picking. I mean,
Speaker 8: you should try to avoid putting sharks on your cap
Speaker 8: table who are at odds with you or who are
Speaker 8: very short term istic and they're going to create issues
Speaker 8: for you. You should avoid those to the maximum extent possible.
Speaker 8: But you know what I would do is I would
Speaker 8: try to build my network in a very strategic way.
Speaker 8: So I would host like happy hours or dinners. I'd
Speaker 8: do this on a college budget. I mean I didn't
Speaker 8: spend I spent minimal money on it. It's like a
Speaker 8: couple hundred bucks that i'd throw together after a few
Speaker 8: this VC would sponsor them, so they'd throw down three
Speaker 8: four hundred bucks on these dinners right and be at
Speaker 8: my place. Or you know, I didn't spend a lot
Speaker 8: of money, and so I was building network. So first
Speaker 8: step is build network. If people have interconnectivity to investors
Speaker 8: and play the long game, build a relationship with these folks.
Speaker 7: Casually.
Speaker 8: Make sure all these people in your network are impressed
Speaker 8: by you, right casually, and then at some point you
Speaker 8: can make the asks where you can say, hey, I
Speaker 8: know this person invests in your company. I think they
Speaker 8: have this relevant experience of what I'm doing. Do you
Speaker 8: mind making the intro? And so you do that with
Speaker 8: you know, all founder friends people will raise money before.
Speaker 8: You're trying to build this network to cultivate and then
Speaker 8: eventually make the ask for the introductions. And you know
Speaker 8: you're just doing this on repeat as much as possible.
Speaker 4: So you said something also where it's like you always
Speaker 4: want to avoid try and get a know.
Speaker 7: Yes, you don't. You never want to get to know.
Speaker 8: This is a little bit of the opposite advice that
Speaker 8: some would give you.
Speaker 7: Oh you want to get to know quickly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's what I've heard. I need not I know
Speaker 6: well because I come from sales.
Speaker 4: So that's what I heard all the time, was like
Speaker 4: a no is always one step quicker to a yes,
Speaker 4: or get to the know early or stuff like that.
Speaker 3: But so that's an interesting even it feels contradictory.
Speaker 5: It's like it's because you go this is trial right,
Speaker 5: like you're saying, it's because you've got nos.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly, nose spread.
Speaker 8: So you know, investor community or the community you're raising
Speaker 8: within is small, and so you don't want somebody to
Speaker 8: go to someone you just pitched and that person say
Speaker 8: be like I passed right you. Now, if you follow
Speaker 8: this strategy, you may have had a meeting with that person.
Speaker 8: It may not have went well, so they may not
Speaker 8: have invested, but you were never pitching them, so they
Speaker 8: don't have the ability to say I passed because you
Speaker 8: never went to them officially asking them for money.
Speaker 4: No, It's actually makes a lot of sense psychologically, because
Speaker 4: like you said, it becomes a virus once one person
Speaker 4: says no, and then another person acts. This person even
Speaker 4: if they want to say yes, it's like, well why'd
Speaker 4: you say no?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 4: And then it's like, I don't want to be the
Speaker 4: person that says yes and be an idiot when my
Speaker 4: friend who I'm I have a high level of respect
Speaker 4: for said no. So I'm more likely to lean towards
Speaker 4: the no because that's just where the crowd is going exactly.
Speaker 8: And so what you're trying to create is a crowd
Speaker 8: momentum behind you. The hardest one to get the fall
Speaker 8: is the first one, and you have to get this
Speaker 8: person to fall just through your character and your pitch
Speaker 8: and this strategy that I'm outlining, and then that one
Speaker 8: will hopefully turn to two or three once you have
Speaker 8: like three people is the magic number where three people
Speaker 8: have now casually without you saying you're fundraising, have told
Speaker 8: you they want to get behind you. Now you can
Speaker 8: start a fundraising round with the wind that you're back,
Speaker 8: because you could say. The way I like to sequence
Speaker 8: it generally is, even when these people say I want
Speaker 8: to back you, I won't say, okay, how much? Here's
Speaker 8: the docs you want to then take a step back
Speaker 8: once again and say, okay, I'm honored. I'd love to
Speaker 8: work with you. Let's do another meeting. I'd love to
Speaker 8: get your advice on these other things. I'd love to
Speaker 8: learn how you work with founders. I like to, you know,
Speaker 8: have this discussion on what working together will look like.
Speaker 8: I asked for references. Say hey, can I speak to
Speaker 8: a couple other founders.
Speaker 7: You've worked with?
Speaker 8: So uh, you know, when someone expresses interest.
Speaker 6: You don't just automatically jump and say hey, yeah, I'm ready.
Speaker 7: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think that probably feels like the biggest mistake that
Speaker 5: most people make because you're in so much desperate not
Speaker 5: desperate need, but you're in need of the funds, and
Speaker 5: so once you feel it inklink of somebody who's interested,
Speaker 5: it's like I gotta jump.
Speaker 7: You got desperate. You can't.
Speaker 8: You can't show the desperation even if you are. I've
Speaker 8: been desperate many times in my career, even beyond us
Speaker 8: our seed round, but you can never show it because
Speaker 8: this is what investors are.
Speaker 7: Their job is to sniff out desperation. Ah right. They're
Speaker 7: experts at this so.
Speaker 6: They can get the best deal possible.
Speaker 7: So they can get the best deal possible. Exactly.
Speaker 8: So, no matter what desperate situation you're in, I mean,
Speaker 8: you've got to come in with confidence. It's as simple
Speaker 8: as that. I mean, most people won't give this advice,
Speaker 8: but I mean it's just the truth.
Speaker 5: You said something important, even like you want them to
Speaker 5: be impressed by you. Now when you're speaking in that language,
Speaker 5: are you talking about impressed with your knowledge of obviously
Speaker 5: the business for sure, but the overall sector that you're in,
Speaker 5: or just as the character of the person.
Speaker 8: Predominantly they're going to be investing in you, especially at
Speaker 8: the early stage. Yeah, most good investors, if they're really
Speaker 8: impressed by person, as long as the idea is decent,
Speaker 8: they'll bet on you because they'll bet on your ability
Speaker 8: to pivot and evolve and come up with even better ideas.
Speaker 8: So first they've got to be impressed by you. Now,
Speaker 8: the way you get them impressed by you is by
Speaker 8: how you speak about yourself and your company, and so
Speaker 8: you have to have really good answers to questions that
Speaker 8: they have about your company. You've had to have thought
Speaker 8: deeply about the company. You've had to have researched the space.
Speaker 8: When I talk about my business, I am able to
Speaker 8: talk about the business extremely well. I'm able to go
Speaker 8: super meta in terms of talking about where the business
Speaker 8: fits from a macro lens, in terms of how it
Speaker 8: plays into trends. I'm able to go very micro and
Speaker 8: talk about exactly how the product is going to work.
Speaker 8: I'm able to go horizontal and talk about competition and
Speaker 8: what this one's doing well, but what they're not doing well,
Speaker 8: and what this other one is doing well that you
Speaker 8: want to integrate into this. And so I'm able to
Speaker 8: discuss I'm able to talk very intelligently about what I'm building.
Speaker 8: And this is a reflection of how seriously you know
Speaker 8: I mean, as a founder, I'm going to take my business.
Speaker 4: So this is insightful, not even if you're just raising money,
Speaker 4: but just in general, because like I said, if you're
Speaker 4: in sales, everybody's in sales in some capacity. If you're
Speaker 4: in business, yep, So I mean like the deck. A
Speaker 4: lot of times people have on a deck, like how
Speaker 4: much money looking to raise? Right, I'm looking to raise
Speaker 4: ten million, twenty million? Is that the best way to
Speaker 4: go about it?
Speaker 8: Generally speaking, I say, for seed rounds, no deck, no
Speaker 8: deck at all, no.
Speaker 7: Deck at all.
Speaker 8: I've raised many of my rounds with no decks. Seed
Speaker 8: rounds predominantly because if you haven't impressed the person enough
Speaker 8: on a relationship level and a conversational level with the business,
Speaker 8: It's very rare that they're going to look at a
Speaker 8: deck and be like, oh, I'm this deck is amazing,
Speaker 8: I now want to invest. They're really making a decision
Speaker 8: on your relationship. Maybe you have a deck that you
Speaker 8: go through with them in person. Right, Maybe you're talking
Speaker 8: to someone who's a little more traditional really needs a deck. Fine,
Speaker 8: you can give them a deck, but generally speaking, I
Speaker 8: like to avoid a deck. Now, everything I'm saying is
Speaker 8: talking in terms of broad generalizations. Thousands of companies have
Speaker 8: raised off decks for a seed round. I'm just talking
Speaker 8: about my methodology, which I also know thousands of founders
Speaker 8: have used UH and works far better than most methodologies
Speaker 8: that I've heard. Now fundraising, there's the methodology. And then
Speaker 8: there's the luck aspect. Some people get lucky, and for me,
Speaker 8: I've never really got it just lucky. I've always followed
Speaker 8: a process and the process has produced luck. I've had
Speaker 8: luck within the process, but I've never been one of
Speaker 8: those founders where someone just showed up and was like,
Speaker 8: I want to back you, or I had a really
Speaker 8: deep family relationship or something like that. I mean a
Speaker 8: lot of my rounds that I've raised were just speaking
Speaker 8: to tons and tons of people using this process over
Speaker 8: and over again to generate or effectively party rounds where
Speaker 8: it's no one single person leading the round, where it's
Speaker 8: a bunch of people who get behind the round. Bolt
Speaker 8: I think necessitated me getting very process oriented at fundraising
Speaker 8: because in Silicon Valley there's a company that we're tangentially
Speaker 8: competitive to called Stripe, and all the big vcs are
Speaker 8: in them, which means they're conflicted out of us, and
Speaker 8: so I couldn't get the big names the Sequoia or
Speaker 8: the andreasen Horowitz or Founder's Fund. I couldn't get them
Speaker 8: to come into my company. And usually when these vcs,
Speaker 8: you know, a big name like that, comes in, they
Speaker 8: take most of the round they put a big anchor check,
Speaker 8: and then it's the big vcs who provide most of
Speaker 8: the capital. For me, it was a lot of up
Speaker 8: and coming firms, angel investors, successful entrepreneurs.
Speaker 7: I had to raise party.
Speaker 8: Rounds in the early days, and so I think that
Speaker 8: just made me more systematic and thoughtful.
Speaker 5: You talked about the competition, which is interesting because not
Speaker 5: only do you have to know your business in and out,
Speaker 5: but you have to kind of know this almost create
Speaker 5: a competitive mode to be in the space. So like
Speaker 5: you're you're doing this by yourself, right at this point,
Speaker 5: there's no partner with you, right, it's just you.
Speaker 8: I had a early co founder who was with us
Speaker 8: for about four years, so it was involved in this
Speaker 8: early fundraising. We sparred a lot on this and traded
Speaker 8: notes and really played off each other super well. And
Speaker 8: then after they departed, then it was just me on
Speaker 8: all of my other rounds. Since then, I was always
Speaker 8: leading the fundraise, so you know, that's why I have
Speaker 8: a particular depth. And then I ended up writing a playbook.
Speaker 3: I wanted to get to that.
Speaker 5: I wanted to get to that, but because I want
Speaker 5: people to really understand the amount of time that goes
Speaker 5: into this. The amount of sacrifice, it's insane, right, Like
Speaker 5: there's relationships, get sacrifice, friendships, all these sacrifices that no
Speaker 5: one sees on the front end, but like you're actually
Speaker 5: dealing with that on top of trying to create something
Speaker 5: that again is going to be a game changer.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean everything I'm describing took in extraordinary amount
Speaker 8: of time. I mean, you know, both seed around probably
Speaker 8: span three years of doing small check after small check
Speaker 8: until we had enough traction to raise like an A
Speaker 8: round which was a little bit bigger, and then our
Speaker 8: B and C and D round.
Speaker 7: We started to get.
Speaker 8: Institutional backers who would take big pieces of the round,
Speaker 8: but in the beginning they were long drawn out or
Speaker 8: raising on safe which is this instrument called a simple
Speaker 8: Agreement for future equity, few page agreements that we were
Speaker 8: raising money onto. And you know another thing that I
Speaker 8: did is everyone gets consumed with round size.
Speaker 7: What's the round size?
Speaker 3: For me?
Speaker 8: I've always I've raised incrementally, so you know, for both
Speaker 8: Initially I got a few. Once I started to realize
Speaker 8: a strategy, I got a few people to lean in.
Speaker 8: You know, it was like, we're gonna raise a million
Speaker 8: that filled up pretty quickly, and then you know, we're like, yeah,
Speaker 8: might as well open another million, as more people became
Speaker 8: interested or raised another half a million and so.
Speaker 7: And then.
Speaker 8: When you say, oh, we're you know, we're actually going
Speaker 8: to raise two We've already raised one. I are fifty
Speaker 8: percent complete. Versus you know, starting around saying I'm raising
Speaker 8: two million and I have none. I'd rather start around
Speaker 8: and say, all right, I have a few people for leading.
Speaker 8: They're probably good for half a million, So we're gonna
Speaker 8: raise a million or seven to fifty k. So the
Speaker 8: next person I go to, the round's almost done already
Speaker 8: Versus how most founders saw it off of is there
Speaker 8: go to someone and none of the round is done.
Speaker 8: If I'm going to talk to you about around, it's
Speaker 8: going to be mostly done already before I'm like talking
Speaker 8: economics with you, even those people are forward leaning. I'm
Speaker 8: gonna wait till a few others are forward leaning, and
Speaker 8: then I'm gonna say, hey, we're doing a million, but
Speaker 8: I've got about six or seven hundred already circled up.
Speaker 8: You were one of my early conversations. I'm really excited
Speaker 8: to have you involved. Let's talk about formalizing your investment.
Speaker 4: Good ratey so, and you've raised a lot of money
Speaker 4: just to put it in contact with people because you're
Speaker 4: speaking from first hand experience, right. So you talked about
Speaker 4: the time, but can you like say, like how much
Speaker 4: time for a founder that's looking to what should they
Speaker 4: expect they should expect to put two hours out of
Speaker 4: the day, they should expect to put.
Speaker 6: Twelve hours out of the day. Like what's the.
Speaker 4: Realistic expectation as far as the time commitment for a
Speaker 4: founder that is trying to raise money.
Speaker 8: I mean, if you're trying to do it properly, it's
Speaker 8: one hundred of your life.
Speaker 3: That's the time for me.
Speaker 7: That's the time commitment. You know.
Speaker 8: And ideally you have a partner or a head of
Speaker 8: operations or a CTO that can hold over the fort.
Speaker 4: That's running the business, running the business, or you should
Speaker 4: just be focused on You can't. You can't split your
Speaker 4: time between running the business and raising money.
Speaker 3: This is it.
Speaker 7: This is it.
Speaker 8: I mean, once you get the hang of it and
Speaker 8: pass a critical threshold and you're cool to just take
Speaker 8: some checks casually here and there. Once you're casual and
Speaker 8: you've you've already crossed the chasm. Great, but until that point,
Speaker 8: you're one hundred percent. Get someone else in your company,
Speaker 8: give everyone a heads up that you're going to be
Speaker 8: off the grid for a bit. Fundraising. This is all
Speaker 8: you're focused on, one hundred percent of the focus, and
Speaker 8: you know, spend a couple hours a day on the
Speaker 8: business and so you know a lot of people get
Speaker 8: nervous about fundraising purely because they're not focused on it.
Speaker 8: So it's never going to happen because this is a
Speaker 8: thing that requires such intense focus. Need to block off
Speaker 8: everything else in your life spending on one hundred percent
Speaker 8: of your time on this thing. You need to go
Speaker 8: read my book, which not something I did. This is
Speaker 8: a labor of love.
Speaker 6: What's a book.
Speaker 8: It's called Fundraising by Ryan Breslo. Start off as a
Speaker 8: playbook that I wrote a Google doc that I gave
Speaker 8: to my friends.
Speaker 7: This is a labor of love.
Speaker 8: I had no time to write this book, but I
Speaker 8: made the time because founders needed this wisdom, because I
Speaker 8: saw too many making the same mistakes over and over again.
Speaker 8: And so you need to memorize this book, follow it
Speaker 8: to a t. You put your own style and flavor
Speaker 8: on it, of course, but really understand it and dedicate
Speaker 8: one hundred percent of your time to this.
Speaker 5: So while you're doing the fundraising and you're one hundred
Speaker 5: percent dedicated to it, right before this is this when
Speaker 5: you're the Conscious Culture playbook, because you know that you're
Speaker 5: not going to be there on a day to day
Speaker 5: the way that you probably would be if you weren't
Speaker 5: trying to raise.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so that came later for me, but I was
Speaker 8: creating a playbook on culture. I like systems. Systems scale.
Speaker 8: If your team doesn't know how it's going to operate
Speaker 8: what it values, it's very hard to scale your company.
Speaker 8: And so I don't like repeating myself.
Speaker 7: I like.
Speaker 8: I like methodology and formula as you can tell for
Speaker 8: things that I know work.
Speaker 7: And so I had a great CEO.
Speaker 8: Coach's name is Matt Matari's got a great book, Machari
Speaker 8: Method that everybody should read on ceoing. He gave me
Speaker 8: his method, which was my Foundations of Conscious Culture, and
Speaker 8: then I made it my own. I mean he taught
Speaker 8: it to me intensively for about three months, and then
Speaker 8: over the next five years, I kept the document being like,
Speaker 8: this is what works, this is what doesn't work for me.
Speaker 8: And so I created my own playbook and then I
Speaker 8: ended up publishing that to the world on the conscious
Speaker 8: dot org, which we're doing we're going to relaunch. It's
Speaker 8: not where it needs to be right now. But and
Speaker 8: this is the playbook we used to build and scale
Speaker 8: Bolt and the Conscious Culture came from more of a
Speaker 8: spiritual aspiration to bridge humanity with execution. This is this
Speaker 8: is the marriage that I really wanted to facilitate, and
Speaker 8: I think Conscious Culture gets to that.
Speaker 4: So we talked about raising money, but just business infrastructure.
Speaker 4: Something else that I heard you say that was pretty
Speaker 4: insightful as far as you got to be careful with partnerships, right,
Speaker 4: And a lot of businesses have partners you have a
Speaker 4: philosophy that's not always the best way to go about it, right.
Speaker 8: Yeah. So there's the traditional advice on starting companies, find
Speaker 8: a co founder.
Speaker 7: I give the opposite advice.
Speaker 8: I say, don't find the co founder unless you know
Speaker 8: you're ready to marry somebody. Because this is a marriage.
Speaker 8: This is even more significant in your marriage. You could
Speaker 8: have this relation for the next thirty years, for the
Speaker 8: rest of your life. This is going to define the
Speaker 8: success of your business. It can also ruin your business.
Speaker 8: It could ruin your life. This is the most important
Speaker 8: decision that you're making. For me, I prefer this concept
Speaker 8: of a founding rule. So a founding CTO, a founding COO,
Speaker 8: a founding head of operations where you've made some progress
Speaker 8: enough to recruit someone exceptional to take a founding X role.
Speaker 8: It's different than co founder. A co founder implies a
Speaker 8: double digit percentage of your company that you're sharing with
Speaker 8: that person. A founding role may be single digits and
Speaker 8: maybe mid single digits. It could be considerable percentage of
Speaker 8: your company, but it at least lets you hedge your
Speaker 8: bets or not. It protects you because they're probably not
Speaker 8: on the board initially, they don't have voting control of
Speaker 8: your company, so you can effectively they're fireable. They're on
Speaker 8: a vesting schedule, which means if you fire them early,
Speaker 8: they don't get all their equity. And so I would
Speaker 8: highly recommend this strategy as the safest strategy. And you
Speaker 8: can always give that person more. Right, if you give
Speaker 8: them five percent of your company, well you can always
Speaker 8: raise it to ten and then to fifteen and twenty.
Speaker 8: But it's very hard to strip away take out a
Speaker 8: co founder. They have rights, they could sue you. You've
Speaker 8: given a big chunk of the company. You may have
Speaker 8: wrestled for voting control, So this is much safer path.
Speaker 5: Could you break down because even the vesting thing is
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Speaker 1: An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child
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Speaker 1: accused of murdering a Texas. Man of Venezuelan charged with
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Speaker 1: Donald J.
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Speaker 1: Under President Trump, attempted illegal border crossings are at the
Speaker 1: lowest levels ever recorded, and over one hundred thousand illegal
Speaker 1: aliens have been arrested. If you are here illegally, your
Speaker 1: next you will be fined nearly one thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: A day, imprisoned, and deported. You will never return.
Speaker 1: But if you register using our CBP home app and
Speaker 1: leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.
Speaker 2: Do what's right. Leave now.
Speaker 1: Under President Trump, America's laws, border and families.
Speaker 2: Will be protected.
Speaker 3: About the United States Department of.
Speaker 5: Homeland Security here you talk about the I'm like, that's
Speaker 5: pretty brilliant, right, Like you offer equity low digits, maybe
Speaker 5: it's anywhere between. Would you say anywhere between five, well,
Speaker 5: one to five percent, or would you even go higher?
Speaker 8: It entirely is dependent on the person, their experience, how
Speaker 8: much they typically get paid, their role, how exceptional they are. Yeah,
Speaker 8: but by vessel five is a range of it's meant
Speaker 8: for an exceptional founding role.
Speaker 5: Right, But they don't get the five. It has to
Speaker 5: be worked out where if they're there for a certain
Speaker 5: amount of time, then it's earned, right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, standard is four years. Sometimes I do five years.
Speaker 8: There's a one year cliff, meaning if they don't make
Speaker 8: it to at least a year, they don't get anything.
Speaker 8: It's typically a very bad practice to fire them a
Speaker 8: month eleven. If you fire them a month eleven, give
Speaker 8: them eleven months worth you sign off the paperwork. But
Speaker 8: if they don't make it past six months, they typically
Speaker 8: don't deserve anything because they weren't a good enough fit.
Speaker 8: But if it make it past six months, you know
Speaker 8: you should give them. You should even though you don't
Speaker 8: have to until a year, should give them what they
Speaker 8: earned proportionally. And then yeah, they earn, you know, they earn.
Speaker 8: Typically it's a monthly vest.
Speaker 5: So do you find that I mean, obviously you're hiring
Speaker 5: these people because you see something in them, but do
Speaker 5: you see the return is that the dedication to the
Speaker 5: company has changed because of the equity that can be
Speaker 5: gained if they potentially obviously outworked what they you saw
Speaker 5: in them. But long term what this company can potentially.
Speaker 7: Be Yeah, uh.
Speaker 8: You, I mean I generally like to give people lower salary,
Speaker 8: higher equity, make sure they're owners in this thing with me.
Speaker 8: There's some exceptions to that rule, but you know you
Speaker 8: want missionaries, not mercenaries. You want someone who's all in
Speaker 8: behind the purpose behind you, who believes you need believer
Speaker 8: in order to build something from scratch. It's just too
Speaker 8: hard to hire mercenaries who are just doing it to
Speaker 8: get paid. Building STARp is too hard someone who's just
Speaker 8: doing it to get paid, even if they're one of
Speaker 8: your employees. It's just they're not going to put in
Speaker 8: the work required to help make you successful.
Speaker 4: So debt equity, that's an interesting term. What does that mean?
Speaker 7: So dead dead?
Speaker 8: Yeah, debt equity is equity you've mismanaged, meaning you've given
Speaker 8: it to somebody who is no longer.
Speaker 7: A value to your business.
Speaker 8: And so if you pick the wrong co founder and
Speaker 8: they don't do anything when not all of their equity
Speaker 8: is debt equity, debt equity will destroy your business. The
Speaker 8: number one thing you need to be striving for is
Speaker 8: fairness across the cap table that is directly tied to
Speaker 8: value in the business.
Speaker 7: And so.
Speaker 8: Fairness is a is a topic that is also rarely discussed,
Speaker 8: but it's a very important meaning. If you have an
Speaker 8: a player who has this much equity and they're sitting
Speaker 8: next to a B player with the same amount of equity,
Speaker 8: they're gonna be like demoralizing, demoralizing, they're not gonna work
Speaker 8: as hard. You want your A player to be all in,
Speaker 8: and so they even if they don't have transparency into
Speaker 8: the cap table, people whisper and people talk, and they
Speaker 8: share notes and they share their information, so they'll find out.
Speaker 8: You hope they don't find out, but you have to
Speaker 8: expect that everyone will find out. And you have to
Speaker 8: have a cap table even if you don't share it
Speaker 8: with the team, which you shouldn't because it creates too
Speaker 8: much controversy, but if it was to be shared, you
Speaker 8: can stand behind it. This sense of fairness is everything.
Speaker 8: There's a great sales adage which is feed your eagles,
Speaker 8: starve your turkeys, so your A players roll out the
Speaker 8: red carpet. If you're A players, be very generous with
Speaker 8: them and be players.
Speaker 7: You got to get rid of them.
Speaker 8: You only you don't have the capacity at a startup
Speaker 8: to have be players around. That's what other corporations are for, right,
Speaker 8: That's what those jobs are for. When you're trying to
Speaker 8: build something from nothing, it is so hard it takes
Speaker 8: such exceptional ability and effort that you're not in the
Speaker 8: charity business of job creation. You can do that later
Speaker 8: on your thousands of people, but there's no charity seat
Speaker 8: on your team when you're trying to create something out
Speaker 8: of nothing.
Speaker 6: That's a fact.
Speaker 5: That's a big fact. You mentioned the cap table and
Speaker 5: so kind of two fold question. How do you vet
Speaker 5: I mean early days and now how do you go
Speaker 5: about vetting who belongs and whos?
Speaker 3: How many people are going to be on the cap table?
Speaker 5: And then the other part is the board right because
Speaker 5: most people are not even familiar with what that process
Speaker 5: is and how many people you should have. The different
Speaker 5: roles of the board members give a little bit of
Speaker 5: information about that.
Speaker 8: Board is the governing body of your company. It's where
Speaker 8: votes take place on important corporate decisions. Do we create
Speaker 8: more option pool, do we prove this round of funding,
Speaker 8: do we take on this new capital all? The board
Speaker 8: makes those decisions how much budget do we spend every year?
Speaker 8: The board is very important from a governance standpoint, but
Speaker 8: if you set it up wrong could destroy your business.
Speaker 7: So if you have the.
Speaker 8: Wrong people on there who are out voting you as
Speaker 8: a founder, don't have the context who aren't in the
Speaker 8: trenches day in and day out, your business is screwed.
Speaker 6: And so.
Speaker 7: I believe in found under led boards.
Speaker 8: I believe that founders a lot of the great great
Speaker 8: companies have, you know, initially founder led boards that eventually
Speaker 8: have some diversification on it. But the simplest way to
Speaker 8: set up a board is you as a founder. It's
Speaker 8: just you don't be putting anyone on your board. I
Speaker 8: don't care how much of a hotshot they are, how
Speaker 8: big their name is. There's no quicker way to destroy
Speaker 8: your business than putting somebody with a pedigree on your
Speaker 8: board too early, because now that person has more gravitas
Speaker 8: than you, and they have ego. Typically I'm making generalizations,
Speaker 8: but I've seen this happen far too many times, and
Speaker 8: so you've you got to keep things tight in the
Speaker 8: beginning because you have a vision that is very hard
Speaker 8: for others to see, and you've got to have ball
Speaker 8: control to get this to a pretty substantial place before
Speaker 8: you start to mature.
Speaker 4: What about like taking money, Like a lot of times
Speaker 4: people don't realize, like if you take money too early
Speaker 4: out of a company, it could it could ruin the company,
Speaker 4: right like, what's your advice for founders that, But it's
Speaker 4: still difficult because you still have to eat and you
Speaker 4: still have to provide for yourself, or if you have
Speaker 4: a family, you got to prove off for your family too.
Speaker 3: So how do you.
Speaker 4: Balance that reinvesting money in the company to grow it,
Speaker 4: but still kind of maintaining your life as well.
Speaker 8: You as a founder, you're going to become an expert
Speaker 8: at balancing and juggling and many things in your life.
Speaker 8: I wish that someone taught me the importance of health
Speaker 8: early on. I didn't know the first thing about health,
Speaker 8: so I was you know, nowadays I focus deeply on health,
Speaker 8: family friendships, you know, my nonprofit work business I'm able
Speaker 8: to balance. In the beginning, I had no balance. I mean,
Speaker 8: I was just abusing my body to just crank on
Speaker 8: the business. To some degree that that is necessary. And
Speaker 8: on the other hand, if I were to go back
Speaker 8: to my younger self, I would say focus on some
Speaker 8: of these other things too. But generally speaking, yeah, to
Speaker 8: get something, to create something from nothing, which we've all
Speaker 8: done here, we know the sacrifice required. It's an extraordinary
Speaker 8: level of sacrifice and there's really no way around that.
Speaker 3: Well, let's get to where we left off and dovels.
Speaker 5: You were super excited and you were telling me about
Speaker 5: the one thing that the world needs. I told you love.
Speaker 5: You're like exactly, and I was like, you like, when
Speaker 5: you hear it, what do you think. I'm like, it's
Speaker 5: the universal language. It's what gets everybody through part of
Speaker 5: their life. And you're like yeah, And then you were
Speaker 5: about to go into this. I said, save it. We
Speaker 5: got to sit down and record it. So talk to
Speaker 5: us about love, its mission and how you got to
Speaker 5: this point.
Speaker 8: So I have been on my own spiritual journey, health, family,
Speaker 8: different communities that I'm involved in, and the last three years,
Speaker 8: I say that's become a bigger part of my life.
Speaker 8: I call spirituality broadly. And what I've learned is that
Speaker 8: there are a lot of problems we have in the
Speaker 8: world today that the many of us are that our government,
Speaker 8: our society, our corporations are largely ignoring one hundred and
Speaker 8: thirty million Americans are chronically ill. A massive chunk of
Speaker 8: those to a more chronic illness. I think it's like
Speaker 8: fifty million have four more, thirty million out five or more.
Speaker 8: We're sicker than ever before. If you go and look
Speaker 8: at the charts around Crone's disease, Celiacs, autism, Parkinson's diabetes.
Speaker 8: They're they're through the roof. It's one in thirty kids
Speaker 8: are being born with autism these days. Used to be
Speaker 8: one in thirty thousand. On the flip side, our planet
Speaker 8: is getting destroyed. Forty five trillion dollars I think I
Speaker 8: saw stat recently. Forty five trillion dollars of our global
Speaker 8: annual GDP is made in an unsustainable way, meaning it's
Speaker 8: extracted from nature. So you know what this wall is
Speaker 8: made out of, and that lamp and this microphone and
Speaker 8: this table all came from nature. It came from somewhere
Speaker 8: that was once natural habitat with animals and insects and
Speaker 8: all this gorgeous nature, and that was ripped apart to
Speaker 8: put these things here. Our couch is everything right, and
Speaker 8: so we're doing we're taking from the sure we're nature's
Speaker 8: getting destroyed. We're using very harmful chemicals. And all of
Speaker 8: our products, our soaps or shampoos or toothpaste or laundry
Speaker 8: detergent or linens, the furniture, the toxins that are emitted
Speaker 8: as fumes into our households were breathing in all day
Speaker 8: or getting absorbed into our skin and our blood all day,
Speaker 8: which is creating the sickness. So I became frankly petrified
Speaker 8: about where our planet is headache, and so I asked
Speaker 8: the question. I was like, how do we solve these
Speaker 8: gargantuan problems? And I realized that nothing is going to
Speaker 8: change until a change where our money goes. Where money
Speaker 8: goes is where energy flows. So if they say you
Speaker 8: vote once every four years for your president, well you're
Speaker 8: voting every single day for what corporations you support and
Speaker 8: what practices you support. So if you're trying to vote
Speaker 8: good in politics, but every day you're buying things on
Speaker 8: Amazon that are made for chemicals that are bad for
Speaker 8: your health, that are bad for the planet, that's destroying
Speaker 8: the planet, that's eviscerating small businesses who try to innovate
Speaker 8: and get ripped off, which is what's happening with most
Speaker 8: of our dollars, horrible work conditions. We're voting for all
Speaker 8: these things every single day, and so we wonder why
Speaker 8: the world is in such a bad shape when we're
Speaker 8: voting for these horrible things. We're voting for illness, destruction
Speaker 8: of nature, horrible work conditions, and a visceration of small business.
Speaker 8: We're voting for that every day when we shop, and
Speaker 8: we wonder why these problems exist. So I had this
Speaker 8: crazy idea of building an inverted Amazon or instead of
Speaker 8: the it's the cheapest, lowest cost, you know, suppliers, it's not.
Speaker 8: We're not gonna make it more expensive. We're going to
Speaker 8: prioritize small businesses. Instead of ripping off the small businesses,
Speaker 8: We're going to prioritize small businesses. Instead of letting anything
Speaker 8: on the store, We're gonna let only products that pass
Speaker 8: our standards around uh chemicals, toxins. We're gonna do the
Speaker 8: homework on behalf of consumers, and we're gonna look at
Speaker 8: sustainability and so we're gonna hold high standards and build
Speaker 8: a new everything store. We call it the clean green
Speaker 8: Everything Store, which is love dot com. When you think
Speaker 8: of the name love dot com, so or love meets commerce.
Speaker 7: And so this is.
Speaker 8: The bridge that we're building. And I'm sorry if I'm
Speaker 8: talking a little too long on just finish for consumers,
Speaker 8: where today it's way too hard. Let's say you want
Speaker 8: to vote with your dollars and vote for better values. Well,
Speaker 8: if you're gonna search non toxic deodoran or sustainable furniture,
Speaker 8: it's too much work like Google search and find the brands,
Speaker 8: research the brand, separate site, separate shopping experiences, one stop shop.
Speaker 8: With love dot Com, you can search for anything and
Speaker 8: everything you find is passed a certain threshold of our
Speaker 8: Love standards and it's generally speaking, good for your body,
Speaker 8: good for a planet, good for small business.
Speaker 4: So it's all is there a name for that? Like
Speaker 4: environmental friendly?
Speaker 6: Is it? What's the name? Like?
Speaker 8: Like, yeah, we're calling it the clean Green Everything Store.
Speaker 6: So anything in society that you want but done ethically.
Speaker 8: Yeah, made with love. All products that are made with
Speaker 8: love are made ethically. Now, not everything is perfect. We
Speaker 8: have a page that describes our standards. Not everything is
Speaker 8: perfectly sustainable or perfectly organic, but it has enough the
Speaker 8: businesses are trying hard enough where we say, all right,
Speaker 8: they're trying hard enough, They've done enough things where it's
Speaker 8: past our standards and they can make it on the
Speaker 8: Love marketplace.
Speaker 4: So this is like Amazon for companies that operate at
Speaker 4: the highest ethical.
Speaker 8: Level exactly exactly, and to give the ethical consumers the
Speaker 8: same shopping experience as Amazon, because right now they have
Speaker 8: to spend way too much time shopping, discovering, research. Now
Speaker 8: they have one place to go for everything they need
Speaker 8: to purchase.
Speaker 3: Focusing on small businesses specific.
Speaker 8: YEP, ninety five plus percent of the brands and products
Speaker 8: on our site are made by small businesses.
Speaker 6: And it's everything from clothing to groceries.
Speaker 8: Yeah, clothing, groceries, bedding, beauty, bath baby. We're adding we
Speaker 8: have over ten thousand skews on the site now. We
Speaker 8: want to be at thirty thousand by end of this month,
Speaker 8: sixty thousand by the following month. So we're sourcing products
Speaker 8: morning till night, and uh yeah, I'm super excited about it.
Speaker 5: I think the first thing we laughed about, I'm like,
Speaker 5: love dot you trademarked that.
Speaker 3: I'm like, how did you get love do? Nobody had that?
Speaker 5: And then I was like, okay, I first thought maybe
Speaker 5: you said you wanted to solve something in the world,
Speaker 5: and you said, what's the number one thing that affects
Speaker 5: our world?
Speaker 3: And we left there and I was when I left.
Speaker 5: I'm like, I must be talking about health, but the
Speaker 5: health of the environment, the health of the world really
Speaker 5: in a sense so you have both and you have
Speaker 5: love dot com. Is this now all the practices that
Speaker 5: you've learned, you're now implementing them in real time and
Speaker 5: I'm doing this again.
Speaker 8: I can do it again exactly because with both, we're
Speaker 8: giving every shop the Amazon.
Speaker 7: One click experience.
Speaker 8: So we have some great customers like Revolve, Fanatics, Asper
Speaker 8: Sacks off Fifth who. Now when you go in your shop,
Speaker 8: there you have this incredible one click Amazon one click experience.
Speaker 8: It's powered by bolts. So I've been spending the last
Speaker 8: ten years building streamline and commerce experience.
Speaker 5: Who are your other clients because everything you just said,
Speaker 5: I've shopped in the last month, and I even have
Speaker 5: any idea.
Speaker 8: Well, see, it works in a this kind of magical
Speaker 8: way where we're not like a PayPal or an Apple
Speaker 8: pay or Google pay, where the button is front and center,
Speaker 8: it redirects you somewhere else.
Speaker 7: It's just native on the site.
Speaker 8: So if you start typing in your email and we
Speaker 8: have your account, we'll be like, hey, you already have
Speaker 8: an account. Enter one time code sent your phone, You
Speaker 8: enter one time code, all of your information is preloaded.
Speaker 7: And then you click pay.
Speaker 8: And so the bolt as opposed to these other wallets
Speaker 8: is embedded and native to the merchant site. That's our
Speaker 8: unique innovation. And so yeah, we've got hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 8: of retailers.
Speaker 7: Both is.
Speaker 8: God willn't going to have a breakout year this year.
Speaker 8: We're signing major brands as the ones I've listed and
Speaker 8: many others, and we're just there's a domino effect of retailers.
Speaker 8: We've got eighty million shoppers on the network now, which
Speaker 8: is massive. You know, two years ago, I think it
Speaker 8: was like eleven or twelve million shoppers on our network.
Speaker 8: So the network is expanding rapidly. The goal with both
Speaker 8: is to build is to let everyone build their own
Speaker 8: have their own Amazon one click checkout experience where there's
Speaker 8: no different shopping from Reva to Casper to Amazon.
Speaker 5: So are you now splitting the time on the how
Speaker 5: are you balancing that?
Speaker 7: So I'm very lucky.
Speaker 8: I've got a CEO named Madu and a president named
Speaker 8: cal who are very senior executives at Amazon on uh
Speaker 8: think of them as like unhireable executives. Col is an
Speaker 8: SVP at Amazon, reported directly from Bezos to Bezos with
Speaker 8: CEO Drugstore dot Com and Besos on is board. Modu
Speaker 8: in all global logistics at Amazon, domestic and international. So
Speaker 8: their toughest business unit arguably that they put like their
Speaker 8: best executive into that was Maju, So Modu and Cal
Speaker 8: basically run circles around me at the higher stages of scaling.
Speaker 8: So I basically I'm chairman of both, but I'm not CEO,
Speaker 8: I'm not president. I'm not operating day to day. I
Speaker 8: check in with them regularly, we do board meetings, I
Speaker 8: get updates constantly, and I'm kind of actively overseeing as
Speaker 8: a chairman. Uh. And then Love, I'm the CEO, so
Speaker 8: I'm doing one on ones with the team every day.
Speaker 8: I'm running, you know, I'm spending you know, morning till
Speaker 8: night on. So Love is my main operational folk Gus.
Speaker 6: But a few questions, So, yeah, how did you trademark Love?
Speaker 6: Did you trade? Can you trademark Love?
Speaker 8: You can trademarket and certain classifications so we can use
Speaker 8: Love in certain capacities and more to comm as we're
Speaker 8: applying for it. But it's an interesting question, r can
Speaker 8: you actually trademark Love? We actually had some companies who
Speaker 8: were who were also named Love who tried to challenge
Speaker 8: us on this and say, oh you can't use love
Speaker 8: We're already using it. We worked out some settlements with
Speaker 8: them to say, hey, we won't use it in these
Speaker 8: categories for this amount of time. But it is an
Speaker 8: interesting question. Can you actually trademark Love? What matters to
Speaker 8: me is I had that Love dot com.
Speaker 6: So so you pay.
Speaker 7: You had to pay for that, though we had to
Speaker 7: pay off.
Speaker 6: I know that somebody had it already. Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yahoo had it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh man, Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 6: Was it an active site or they just was.
Speaker 7: No, they weren't using it.
Speaker 8: There was some old Yahoo email addresses where you could
Speaker 8: choose love as you're like, they had Yahoo and a
Speaker 8: million other bell South, all these options, right, you could
Speaker 8: choose love dot com as one of your options, as
Speaker 8: your extension. But they had mostly stopped using it, and
Speaker 8: so when I found out they owned it, I was like,
Speaker 8: this is good news and bad news. The good news
Speaker 8: is they're kind of I think they're run by this group,
Speaker 8: Apollo Group, and there's very financially minded folks, which means
Speaker 8: they're not planning on doing anything creative with it, right,
Speaker 8: It's just a private equity operation. So I was like,
Speaker 8: all right, well, there might actually be willing to sell it.
Speaker 8: They're just going to charge a high price. That's exactly
Speaker 8: what happened. That's a bad news exactly.
Speaker 6: So you built both up. What's bolt valuation now.
Speaker 7: Well, our last investor around was there, seriously round it
Speaker 7: was about two years ago, and that was an eleven
Speaker 7: billion valuation.
Speaker 6: So you built both up. Eleven billion valuation. That's up
Speaker 6: and running.
Speaker 4: You stepped away in the swords because you have management
Speaker 4: team that's running the company. You're not running it, and
Speaker 4: now you're focusing on love. Right, that's your new So
Speaker 4: what's the brain process of building something that's you know,
Speaker 4: very few people are going to reach that level of
Speaker 4: successful one company, right, and then now you have to
Speaker 4: go and start the process all over again. Right, it's
Speaker 4: a lot of work. Now you're kind of back to
Speaker 4: day one as far as not back to day one
Speaker 4: as far as resources, but back to theay one as
Speaker 4: far as doing the work.
Speaker 6: What's the thought.
Speaker 4: Process Because a lot of people would think, if I've
Speaker 4: reached that level of success, then I'll just ride it
Speaker 4: out until I sell the company or take a public
Speaker 4: corgeous whatever like you know.
Speaker 5: And can we add that, yeah, you're not even in
Speaker 5: I guess a prime of life yet, right, Like you're
Speaker 5: not thirty five yet. Like when most people reach millionaire
Speaker 5: status that they hit that it's around that time or
Speaker 5: they have the creative idea to do it, so it's again.
Speaker 8: Yeah, sometimes I wonder what got into me. It's a
Speaker 8: crazy idea that I just can't get out of my head,
Speaker 8: this idea for love dot com. And I say it
Speaker 8: was very blessed. The universe blessed me because this wasn't
Speaker 8: the plan. I was going to operate both till the
Speaker 8: end of time. And my COO was Madju. One of
Speaker 8: my biggest biggest hires was Modu as my COO andto
Speaker 8: but then more and more people I wanted to report
Speaker 8: into him.
Speaker 7: He was so good.
Speaker 8: I was just like, all right, well, you can take
Speaker 8: customer success all right, you can take engineering, all right,
Speaker 8: you can take finance all right, you can take legal
Speaker 8: all right. Well I kind of just want to have
Speaker 8: the whole company report into you because you're so much
Speaker 8: better at managing than I am. And then I was like,
Speaker 8: I'm like, Maji, you're basically running the company. I should
Speaker 8: just help empower you and unleash the beast because he's
Speaker 8: a beast and you step into CEO and I'll be
Speaker 8: chairman and I'll open doors for customers, I'll help with raises,
Speaker 8: I'll help, I'll help accelerate things, and I'm gonna go
Speaker 8: work on some other ideas at the same time. And
Speaker 8: then Modu hired cal And and then you know, now
Speaker 8: these guys are ripping, and so I got lucky, very
Speaker 8: very lucky.
Speaker 7: This wasn't the plan at all.
Speaker 6: So what about the crypto savings.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so Eco is a whole separate story. But I
Speaker 8: basically didn't want my crypto ideas around ease of use
Speaker 8: in crypto to go to have to wait or to die.
Speaker 8: So in parallel, I got some friends together and I said,
Speaker 8: let's do this thing. It was originally called Beam, and
Speaker 8: then we had this one of the founders of Uber,
Speaker 8: the original founder, Garrett Camp, was working on something called Eco,
Speaker 8: and we decided to join forces and he'd give us
Speaker 8: the brand, we'd give him some piece of what we
Speaker 8: were doing, so it became Eco. It's a much longer story,
Speaker 8: but it's run by one of my closest friends in
Speaker 8: the world named Andy Bromberg, who's a Stanford friend of mine,
Speaker 8: also in the Stanford Bitcoin group. So I ran it
Speaker 8: with a few other friends in the beginning. Andy then
Speaker 8: joined fears in took over a CEO. So there's about
Speaker 8: four or five. There's about five of us as co
Speaker 8: founders there. I originated it, but these guys get all
Speaker 8: the credit. I kind of got it going. It was
Speaker 8: a ton of work. And but yeah, they have a
Speaker 8: wallet called Beam. Beam is like Venmo, but on chain,
Speaker 8: so it's the easiest way to use crypto on the
Speaker 8: chain versus coinbase, which is off chain. And they have
Speaker 8: a currency called eco Currency, which is super cool. It's
Speaker 8: like a semi stable coin. There's a panel of economists
Speaker 8: who vote on the monetary policy, so it's kind of
Speaker 8: it's a decentralized governance around inflation of the coin and
Speaker 8: all of this. So it's an amazing project and I
Speaker 8: think is going to have some big years coming up.
Speaker 3: You started the Bitcoin Board in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 5: I wonder what your thoughts around the space as you
Speaker 5: watch you know, most recently the Bitcoin etf could pass,
Speaker 5: and that, you know, just the hype around it. Knowing
Speaker 5: that in twenty thirteen you are trying to convince people
Speaker 5: that this is the thing of the future. You're going
Speaker 5: to financial institutions. You're probably like, kid, get out of here.
Speaker 5: You know what I'm talking about, And now here we
Speaker 5: are regulation ETFs.
Speaker 3: What was going through your mind during that time?
Speaker 8: Well, in twenty thirteen, I remember we had a dinner
Speaker 8: and or maybe it's twenty fourteen, and a bunch of
Speaker 8: people asked, or I think bitcoin will be in a decade,
Speaker 8: and I said, And at the time it was maybe
Speaker 8: tens of dollars, and I said, I think it's going
Speaker 8: to be one hundred thousand dollars a coin. And it's
Speaker 8: kind of been tracking to that almost exactly to the decades.
Speaker 8: So it's not quite there yet, but it's getting pretty close.
Speaker 8: And so I mean, it's been an amazing journey. I
Speaker 8: think we saw in the beginning merchant adoption we thought
Speaker 8: was going to be the big thing. Then that didn't
Speaker 8: have a lot of volume. Then then there's a second
Speaker 8: way of merchant adoption. It started to get some volume.
Speaker 7: We now have.
Speaker 8: Obviously ordinals on bitcoin, we have THEEUM which is doing
Speaker 8: remarkably well, which provides all this new functionality on top
Speaker 8: of the chain. I think ETFs are huge because the
Speaker 8: number one value prop of bitcoin and crypto is being
Speaker 8: able to store it yourself. But the reality is not
Speaker 8: everybody wants to. So just to have a financially regulated
Speaker 8: security that you can buy that gives you exposure for
Speaker 8: a ninety percent of people who don't want to manage
Speaker 8: a wallet off chain or on chain is uh is massive.
Speaker 8: It's it's beyond massive.
Speaker 5: I can imagine how surreal it is, as you know,
Speaker 5: as somebody who was trying to build a wallet so
Speaker 5: that people could sympathize and have their crypto coin bitcoin
Speaker 5: store to now saying all right, well there's an ETF
Speaker 5: here you go.
Speaker 7: It's a dream come true. It's incredible.
Speaker 4: So so you also champion a four week, a four
Speaker 4: day work week.
Speaker 6: Right, yep, So talk about that.
Speaker 8: So what I realized is that we have a big
Speaker 8: problem in the typical workplace, which is that most of
Speaker 8: corporate America, at least what I've seen is that everyone
Speaker 8: is perpetually exhausted, and so they're work in five days
Speaker 8: a week. They're in a bunch of monotonous meetings of
Speaker 8: doing work. They're not even sure as important. They have
Speaker 8: to catch up on work on the weekends while they
Speaker 8: take care of their families, and you know, no one
Speaker 8: can ever catch up.
Speaker 7: And so.
Speaker 8: Forty work week is tied in with a few concepts,
Speaker 8: but the underpinning is that I've tried to figure out
Speaker 8: in my companies is how to eliminate what I call
Speaker 8: work theater. And this is a phrase that most of
Speaker 8: the things I talk about I've used from others. This
Speaker 8: is a phrase that I coined work theater. Most of
Speaker 8: the work that people do doesn't matter. I'd say ninety
Speaker 8: percent is work theater, meaning it's work that just looks
Speaker 8: good but doesn't actually accomplish anything.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: And so people working so much, they're so exhausted, and
Speaker 8: they're getting nothing done for the company because they're consumed
Speaker 8: with red tape and bureaucracy. And so what I found
Speaker 8: is by shortening the work week and say no, you
Speaker 8: don't have five days to get everything done. You've got
Speaker 8: four days to get everything done. You can't schedule meetings
Speaker 8: Friday through Sunday. You need to expect people are going
Speaker 8: to be off these four days. You're going to be
Speaker 8: present focused. This I took from Twitter is not mine.
Speaker 8: It's called work like a lion, not like a cow.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: I want my team to come in and work like lions.
Speaker 8: For four days as much as they can, and then
Speaker 8: I want them to go relax, be with their family,
Speaker 8: be with their friends, enjoy life, heal so that they
Speaker 8: can come and work like lions. I think as human beings,
Speaker 8: we're supposed to go hunt and then we're supposed to
Speaker 8: go relax. We spend too much time in this middle ground.
Speaker 8: So to me, I found much more productivity when we
Speaker 8: have these intense spurts of hunting and then were ever
Speaker 8: people have their own lives, So.
Speaker 6: All your employees work for four days?
Speaker 7: Yes and no?
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 8: We try to adhere to it with love. With both,
Speaker 8: it's been experiments, so both has it rolled out, but
Speaker 8: both his later stage could maybe afford to do it
Speaker 8: a little bit more love. We're trying to do it,
Speaker 8: but we still end up working a lot of fridays.
Speaker 8: So I can't say fully that we're doing it with
Speaker 8: love right now, but we're trying. We're being mindful of it.
Speaker 6: And you champion remote work, right Yeah.
Speaker 8: All my companies are one hundred percent remote. I never
Speaker 8: want to go back to an office again, and that's
Speaker 8: just the personal choice that I made.
Speaker 7: And other hubs.
Speaker 8: So some folks, there's a cluster in San Francisco, or
Speaker 8: a cluster in New York or cluster in LA and
Speaker 8: they meet up. They may have shared workspaces. So there's
Speaker 8: certain clusters that like to come together into my various
Speaker 8: companies and work a prism. Another one of my companies
Speaker 8: has a bona fide office, but they have a pretty
Speaker 8: kind of hardcore sales culture and it fits them.
Speaker 7: So you know, I do.
Speaker 8: One of my companies does have a bona fide office,
Speaker 8: but it's not something that I'm that I'm married to
Speaker 8: at all, and I typically prefer remote.
Speaker 3: So you got both has eight hundred employees.
Speaker 7: No, both has gone down by quite a bit.
Speaker 8: We've just realized that with our narrow focus on going
Speaker 8: after the world's largest customers, we didn't need as many
Speaker 8: people and many headcounts. So we actually completely removed our
Speaker 8: focus on SMB just small, small and medium sized businesses
Speaker 8: to focus on big accounts. So we brought the company.
Speaker 8: Now it's below two hundred. How many you d love
Speaker 8: about fifteen.
Speaker 5: Right, And so you have that, but you also have
Speaker 5: the nonprofit work, yes, and I know that's very important
Speaker 5: to you talk about that.
Speaker 8: I believe that spiritually we're supposed to give at least
Speaker 8: ten percent, if not twenty percent, of what you make back.
Speaker 8: This is my fundamental belief. I believe if you don't
Speaker 8: do that, you're hurting yourself because you're gonna have you're
Speaker 8: creating karma. And so selfishly, I want to stay healthy,
Speaker 8: I want to stay safe.
Speaker 7: I want my.
Speaker 8: Businesses to be successful. So so I try to give
Speaker 8: back as much as I can because I know spiritually
Speaker 8: you have to. It's not a lot of people say, oh,
Speaker 8: we're going to wait until later in life, that's a
Speaker 8: proven thing to do. I don't believe in that at all.
Speaker 8: I think you have to always be giving back to
Speaker 8: the community. It has to become a muscle that becomes
Speaker 8: ingrained in you. So I have a few different impactulated initiatives.
Speaker 8: My most prominent nonprofit is called the Movement. So dance
Speaker 8: has completely changed my life. It was a healthy outlet
Speaker 8: for me that got me through many tough times in
Speaker 8: a very healthy way. And so I realized that dancing
Speaker 8: is one of the most scalable ways to spread happiness
Speaker 8: and mental health because all you.
Speaker 7: Need is a floor and a speaker.
Speaker 8: So if you're going to try to solve a mental
Speaker 8: health crisis at a homeless shelter, refugee camp, it's very difficult.
Speaker 8: You have to hire if you're gonna have to hire
Speaker 8: a psychiatrists, it's one on one or one hundred of
Speaker 8: dollars per hour. Other methodologies are not very scalable or
Speaker 8: very expensive. Dance you know, flour in a speaker, and
Speaker 8: so we started. We did some work with some homeless shelter,
Speaker 8: some disabled centers, after school programs, and then we realize
Speaker 8: that we can go do refugee camps where there's one
Speaker 8: hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering. So we've
Speaker 8: picked one of the largest in Africa called Biddy Biddy
Speaker 8: and two hundred and fifty thousand refugees in Uganda. Then
Speaker 8: a massive suicide crisis, a massive mental health crisis. I
Speaker 8: think it's something like thirty or forty percent of their
Speaker 8: residents is they are depressed. It's like a ten percent
Speaker 8: annual suicide right, don't quote me on that, but I
Speaker 8: mean it's those proportions and a lot of the folks
Speaker 8: that have nothing to live for, and so the goal
Speaker 8: is to give them something to live for. That is
Speaker 8: a force that we could afford. So we partnered with
Speaker 8: another nonprofit who created. This stage is like performance stage,
Speaker 8: and we do the programming, dance programming, and we have
Speaker 8: people coming say this is what they now live for.
Speaker 8: This has changed their life. They didn't take their life
Speaker 8: because of this. Emma is flourishing and we did almost nothing.
Speaker 8: We created some curriculum, we trained some people on the ground.
Speaker 8: We're not fishing for them. We don't hire people to
Speaker 8: go out and teach me. There's thousands of incredible dancers
Speaker 8: already as refugees. So we just put a little program
Speaker 8: together and they've taken the ball and they run with
Speaker 8: And now we go back every six months check in,
Speaker 8: help give them advice on how to manage the program.
Speaker 8: So now I want to scale this to shelters, homeless,
Speaker 8: refugee schools. This is my biggest passion for charity.
Speaker 4: Well, it was extremely insightful conversation for sure. Anything any
Speaker 4: last words you want to leave the audience.
Speaker 8: With, Well, once again, so honored to be here. Uh,
Speaker 8: so grateful that we're doing this. After giving our talk,
Speaker 8: I know we've we've all three of us have been
Speaker 8: through similar journeys. So you guys have built such an
Speaker 8: incredible platform that's lifting others up. Too many of us
Speaker 8: become successful. We don't share the secrets. We don't build
Speaker 8: the bridges. I know a lot of folks who want
Speaker 8: to burn the bridges to get to where they are, right,
Speaker 8: and so I think you guys are building tons of
Speaker 8: bridges and just excited to build some great bridges and
Speaker 8: share some great knowledge with you guys.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it. Appreciate appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Like I said, it was extremely insightful. So thank you
Speaker 4: for taking the time out of your schedule. And you
Speaker 4: you got a lot going on, and I look forward to,
Speaker 4: you know, doing some other stuff, but you're in the future.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Likewise, all right, God, thank you for rocking us. We'll
Speaker 6: see you next week.
Speaker 3: Pete, please love.
Speaker 1: An illegal alien from Guatemala charged with raping a child
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts. An MS thirteen gang member from Al Salvador
Speaker 1: accused of murdering a Texas man of Venezuelan charged with
Speaker 1: filming and selling child pornography in Michigan. These are just
Speaker 1: some of the heinous migrant criminals caught because of President
Speaker 1: Donald J.
Speaker 2: Trump's leadership. I'm Christy Noman, the United States.
Speaker 1: Secretary of Homeland Security under President Trump. Attempted illegal border
Speaker 1: crossings are at the lowest levels ever recorded, and over
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand illegal aliens have been arrested. If you
Speaker 1: are here illegally, your next you will be fine nearly
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars a day, imprisoned, and deported.
Speaker 2: You will never return.
Speaker 1: But if you register using our CBP home app and
Speaker 1: leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.
Speaker 2: Do what's right, leave now.
Speaker 1: Under President Trump America's laws, border and families will be protected.
Speaker 3: Sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security,