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Speaker 3: Today, you say you raised thirty million, what's the processes
Speaker 3: of raising money? Like, how do you who is in
Speaker 3: your circle of investors? And how do you network and
Speaker 3: promote your fund to actually get money into it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it started out with that woman who it
Speaker 4: started out with that woman who didn't have a lot
Speaker 4: of network and so was she worked at a big
Speaker 4: company and then she had some money from that, so
Speaker 4: she put in like an angel investor. But then she introduced
Speaker 4: me to her friend who happened to just be in
Speaker 4: a network. That friend happened to be like a tech
Speaker 4: person from Facebook who knew a man named Lars Resmussen
Speaker 4: who co founded with his brother Google Maps. So that
Speaker 4: third investor in twenty fifteen or the twenty sixteen that
Speaker 4: and he's a very early investor in Canva. So he's
Speaker 4: just very very successful and he sees things early. But
Speaker 4: that was kind of like the first like like that
Speaker 4: I could see, Oh, I'm going to be talking to
Speaker 4: people who have a lot of money and you know,
Speaker 4: connection here, so I just spent you know, every day,
Speaker 4: every waking hour, reaching out to people, working with people.
Speaker 4: Then like maybe mid twenty sixteen, Stuart Butterfield reached out
Speaker 4: the founder of Slack. He just saw what I was
Speaker 4: doing and he wanted to be part of it. I
Speaker 4: reached out to Mark and Dreson because he he said
Speaker 4: that something I wrote was interesting, and I use that
Speaker 4: as an opportunity to ask him to invest and he
Speaker 4: ended up investing in three of my funds, like the
Speaker 4: smaller funds, which was has been really cool. He has
Speaker 4: also blocked me on Twitter, so that tells you my life. Like,
Speaker 4: I have no idea to ask him. I don't know
Speaker 4: I should ask what Chris? I should ask Chris any? Yeah,
Speaker 4: you should ask Chris. I know y'all are friendly with him,
Speaker 4: but Marcus he blocks everybody. He blocks everybody. But I
Speaker 4: must have said something one day that upset him, because
Speaker 4: I will call like, I will call people out, like
Speaker 4: I call out Peter Till, I'll call out people who
Speaker 4: are like friendly. I'll call out and reason I've called
Speaker 4: them out before. I've had conversations with.
Speaker 1: Chris about what did you call them all for?
Speaker 4: And when George Floyd was murdered and Dreason Horowitz, which
Speaker 4: is a multi billion dollar fund, announced their cultural.
Speaker 3: Fund Culture Leadership.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then they also, I mean they also announced
Speaker 4: this like one or two million dollar fund, and I
Speaker 4: just it hurts me to say that word because it's
Speaker 4: not to me a fund that invests in black people.
Speaker 4: I know what it's like to put together a million dollars,
Speaker 4: So I'm not saying it's nothing. But when you have
Speaker 4: multiple billions under management, and your response to a black
Speaker 4: man being murdered on TV is to say, here's this
Speaker 4: penny less than a penny, I was offended. As someone
Speaker 4: who had invested at that point in maybe one hundred
Speaker 4: and forty companies led by underrepresented founders. I still am
Speaker 4: offended by it. And in fact, I mean I know
Speaker 4: the people who are all part of it. It's not
Speaker 4: like I'm over here just like mad at them and
Speaker 4: yelling at them. I've talked to all of them. I
Speaker 4: appreciate the work that Chris is doing. I appreciate the
Speaker 4: work that Nate did. You black men in these organizations.
Speaker 4: I just think that the organizations are it's really interesting
Speaker 4: to me that they're run by white people, white men,
Speaker 4: and they especially Ben Horwitz wants to be so close
Speaker 4: to the culture. And if he's your friend, I'm not
Speaker 4: trying to offend you, but he wants to be so
Speaker 4: close to the culture. But tell me, besides, like two
Speaker 4: founders that I can think of right now, how many
Speaker 4: times do they put more than ten million dollars in
Speaker 4: to a black founder's company when they are those two
Speaker 4: invest in. It's their business, it's their money. But just
Speaker 4: like it's their business to not do that, it's my
Speaker 4: business to talk about it and to say wow to.
Speaker 1: The overall goal for backstage capital, you said you raised
Speaker 1: thirty million should be valued at one hundred million? Is
Speaker 1: there a number? Should it? Are you looking to be
Speaker 1: a billion dollar fund? Like? What is the goal? Right?
Speaker 1: Because obviously as you have more capital you can deploy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it won't be a thousand new millionaires, It'll be yeah million.
Speaker 4: Well, the thousand new millionaires comes from me teaching people
Speaker 4: how to fish. That's straight up. It's not about how
Speaker 4: many people can invest in. But I think I think
Speaker 4: for everyone involved, our founders, for the LPs who've already
Speaker 4: invested in, the ones who could invest based on the
Speaker 4: deal flow that we have, the people we get to
Speaker 4: see the access we have. I just told you I
Speaker 4: invested in open Ai. Nobody else got to invest in
Speaker 4: open Ai, you know, directly through them, right, unless you
Speaker 4: had like one hundred million dollars fifty million dollars this year. Yeah,
Speaker 4: just yeah, I mean, you know, obviously wish it was sooner.
Speaker 4: But it's the thing though. It's like when Troy invested
Speaker 4: in Uber and Lyft. But anyway, I think for everybody involved,
Speaker 4: we should be at least the three hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: five hundred million dollar fund under management within the next
Speaker 4: five years. That's what we should be because we can
Speaker 4: deploy it, We have the access, we have the skills
Speaker 4: to deploy that you don't all. You don't always have
Speaker 4: to have so much money, Like Robert Smith has billions
Speaker 4: under management, your friend, right, because he's a private equity investor,
Speaker 4: so he's making investments that are so much bigger than
Speaker 4: the kind we're making. So we don't have to be
Speaker 4: a billion dollar fund to be super successful. But I
Speaker 4: think that a three hundred four hundred million dollar assets
Speaker 4: under management is something that's exactly where we should be
Speaker 4: in the pocket.
Speaker 3: So what's should track record for your fund?
Speaker 4: The track record is that we're about well, it's called
Speaker 4: TVPI total value paid in. That means that for every
Speaker 4: dollar that you've put in, what is that dollar worth
Speaker 4: on paper? Essentially, So we're somewhere around one point four
Speaker 4: one point five x hovering across two hundred companies, which
Speaker 4: is pretty hard to track. But across that so we
Speaker 4: haven't had any major exits. We have like three exits
Speaker 4: that have been small or aqua hires. We invest at
Speaker 4: the earliest stages, but if you look at the enterprise
Speaker 4: value of our portfolio, it's in the billions, which is incredible. Hundreds,
Speaker 4: if not thousands of jobs created directly from our investment
Speaker 4: and revenue is in you know, the hundreds of millions.
Speaker 3: So what will be your pitch for investors to invest
Speaker 3: in your fund? Like, what's the main thing.
Speaker 4: That you would I certainly cannot pitch to investors. I
Speaker 4: can tell you hypothetically because I'm not allowed by the
Speaker 4: SEC to.
Speaker 3: What makes your fun attractive? In your opinion?
Speaker 4: We were you know, the thesis that I had ten
Speaker 4: years ago or twelve years ago played out. I said,
Speaker 4: you can either be you know, we've done so much
Speaker 4: or so little. You can either be crashed by the
Speaker 4: way that's coming or you can write it. It's everything
Speaker 4: I've said has happened. It's a video of me in
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen talking about what happened in twenty twenty two
Speaker 4: and twenty twenty one. Like it's just it keeps happening.
Speaker 4: So it's been proven out. On top of that, there
Speaker 4: are multiple funds that have been created after us and
Speaker 4: with our mandate in our blueprint that are have gone
Speaker 4: on to do well and who look to us for guidance.
Speaker 4: So we actually have all of the touch points. We
Speaker 4: have all of the deal flow and the network and
Speaker 4: the infrastructure that we've built manually essentially, so everything that
Speaker 4: they're looking for for those to find the companies, they
Speaker 4: don't have to do a thing, you know, come find
Speaker 4: the companies through us. Then we nurture the companies. They
Speaker 4: don't have to do that either, and then we are
Speaker 4: able to the way we've already done, source the companyanies
Speaker 4: that then go on to have high enterprise value.
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