SPEAKER_00: okay we got a great show for you today vincent slava rubin is on the program you might remember him from his time at indiegogo he was also the co-founder of that and he announces that their new round of funding is happening today and guess who the lead investor is it's your boy jacal yum yum if you don't know what vincent is it's a very cool site that's aggregating all of the different alternative assets in the world including sports memorabilia cars real estate startups crypto nfts all that good stuff i'm really excited about the investment and we go deep into why we led the multi-million dollar round in vincent but before we talk about that i cover cnbc's exclusive interview

SPEAKER_01: with tether cto and general counsel and this was a train wreck of an interview they basically botched

SPEAKER_00: the whole interview now things look even worse and i get into detail about how this might be a giant fraud or a giant cover-up or maybe they're trying to clean it up i hope i hope that it's all on the up and up but boy did this interview make me more nervous than ever and i have a recommendation for anybody who's in business with tether that i'll get into also we break down netflix's q2 earnings which were okay but i'm starting to think that netflix is not going to be the number one or number

SPEAKER_02: two player in streaming content for much longer stick with us this week in startups is brought to

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SPEAKER_07: okay first up tether's cto and general counsel who agreed to be on this program and then decided they

SPEAKER_00: wouldn't come on this program joined cnbc's deirdre bosa you know her from tech check formerly known as squawk alley a show i'm on every two or three weeks uh she got the interview with them congratulations

SPEAKER_02: on that and it didn't disappoint she's the one who always interrupts and grills me on the show uh something we're working on um i know a bunch of complain that we were interrupting each other too

SPEAKER_07: much on cnbc so she asked first about tether's very low us dollar reserves if you don't know what tether is it's a stable coin we've been talking about it here on the program you can do a youtube twitter

SPEAKER_10: search for the hashtag tether or tether investigation and you can follow up on it or you can look at our previous episodes if you scroll through your player you'll see us talking about tether and tether has

SPEAKER_07: very low us dollar reserves they originally started supposedly having one-to-one and then they moved off of that one-to-one promise and now they have very little us dollar reserves and a large amount of

SPEAKER_10: commercial paper and so here is deirdre asking about that this is a two-minute clip i'm going to let it

SPEAKER_14: play through and then we'll talk about it on the other side um we don't disclose our um commercial

SPEAKER_16: partners so that is quite important we want to uh given our um our portfolio composition in commercial papers we believe that is quite important to respect the privacy of the banking partners that

SPEAKER_07: we work with okay i'm going to pause right there you can tell paulo is not making eye contact with the camera and they're talking about how these partners in the commercial paper space want privacy i actually don't buy that um i think that was uh just misdirection on his part and it didn't add up for

SPEAKER_16: me let's listen to the rest of his answer also you you spoke about trust and you know i and the fact that the fact that volume is volume is not um a proxy for trust but when an asset is not trusted and tether is trusted but when an asset is not trusted it gets sold at any price and yet tether holds perfectly the one dollar price on all the crypto exchanges so i believe that it's important to underline how the broader community trusts us so i wouldn't rely on um you know you yeah that's fair but isn't that

SPEAKER_23: trust a little bit fragile you have major people regulators such as treasury secretary janet yellen talking about the risks of stablecoin you've got another fed president rosengren talking about the dangers of tether so is this not an opportunity to come on i'm not going to ask for names who exactly is in your reserves of commercial paper but could you tell us a little bit more information for example

SPEAKER_25: is any commercial paper held in chinese companies so you want to take this one yeah absolutely

SPEAKER_29: george our portfolio contains international commercial paper um as you noted from our public disclosures it is overwhelmingly overwhelmingly rated a2 or better and we think that's the key thing here and we think that transparency with the market and how the market has spoken and decided here is what's really important and what's important for your viewers to understand uh with respect to secretary ellen um and regulation uh we believe we are pioneers in this industry which is all very new regulations rules laws are being made by the day we are leaders in transparency and in getting information to the community and to our stakeholders demonstrating that our issue tokens our issue tokens are fully backed and reserved and we want to preserve that position we are not just keeping up with rules but we are helping to shape them and we're helping law enforcement and

SPEAKER_07: regulators globally so this is a really uh great example of misdirection they keep getting

SPEAKER_01: asked about this commercial paper and is it chinese paper why do people keep asking about that why do they keep saying they don't want to disclose it and why do they keep steering the

SPEAKER_00: conversation from the commercial paper to the market is voting for us why would anybody buy tether if it

David Friedberg: was a scam this would be the equivalent of bernie madoff saying why would all these famous people give me their money if it was a scam right that would be like verano saying why would i have all these famous

SPEAKER_00: people on my board of directors if it was a scam now we don't know that tether's a scam but we get from this interview and great job deirdre um we get from this interview that they don't want to talk about

SPEAKER_07: the commercial paper that leads me to want to know exactly what's in that commercial paper and anybody who is going to be partners with them should look at this red flag of how they keep misdirecting and saying listen we're leaders in transparency one of the ways if you were a fraud to get people off the scent of the fraud is to say what how could this possibly be a fraud if all of these people are using it okay that's number one and we don't know that tether's a fraud but i do think that they're withholding information on commercial paper for a reason and i don't think it's the privacy of the people whose commercial paper they own plenty of other people own commercial paper plenty of other people share what that commercial paper is and when they keep going to china and he says we own

SPEAKER_00: international that's another really interesting way of uh reframing the argument and saying yeah we own international he doesn't want to say china because he knows china is a market that is opaque that's my reading on this and the more they move the discussion off of the commercial paper i think the more people who are tether partners or users of the product should take into account that maybe there's a reason why they don't want to talk about it and they're and they're misdirecting everybody uh additionally him saying we're leaders in transparency is um a way of reframing the argument by saying hey we're leaders in this not only are we not guilty of being opaque we're the leaders in transparency we work with regulators all over the world it's such a generic statement that you're not going to be able to pin them down if they were the leaders in transparency they would say we have 14 china paper 16 canadian paper

SPEAKER_07: 18 german paper and here are what those assets are they would be absolutely giving that information

SPEAKER_01: if they were leaders in transparency then deirdre follows up and asks to define the commercial paper and she says chinese commercial paper is viewed a lot differently than canadian commercial paper

SPEAKER_29: so let's listen to his answer to that as as paolo mentioned we are we guard our counterparty's relationships with great discretion we have a lot of sensitive information inside our companies as uh as retail facing uh as retail facing entrepreneurs and uh we believe we've given sufficient transparency into that and again the market has spoken we're the most popular stable coin

SPEAKER_32: with an excess of 62 billion dollars worth of tethers uh issued not standing in the marketplace look at

SPEAKER_07: how quickly he redirected the conversation from the nature of their commercial paper to hey listen we're

SPEAKER_00: the most popular the market voted for us therefore it cannot be a fraud there's nothing to see over here now is it possible that he's trolling all of us and their paper is amazing i guess but you know when i saw the veranos thing come apart or anybody watched the bernie madoff thing come apart with his uh fraud

SPEAKER_01: they really redirected and attacked the critics and just move the conversation from hey whatever you're

SPEAKER_00: looking to get clarity on let's forget about that and let's talk about something else as retail facing entrepreneurs what does that mean did you hear him say that as retail facing entrepreneurs retail facing would be consumers and entrepreneurs people who build businesses we value and it makes no sense you know this posturing and this positioning that the market has voted for us is i think um something i don't buy later on in the interview tethers general counsel uh stuart hoegner uh was asked about the a

SPEAKER_01: attestations uh over audits and here was his answer this is another thing that people uh are very

SPEAKER_38: confused about releasing a pie chart is not the same as giving us the details as to what tether owns and

SPEAKER_42: so let's hear his answer so the attestations are part of assurance services offered by independent

SPEAKER_29: accountants audits are another form of assurance services deirdre for now we are providing those quarterly attestations those assurance attestations attestations showing that tether is in fact fully backed and reserved we are working towards getting financial audits which by the way no one else in the stablecoin sector has done yet we are seeing uh who will get there first but we are in process we are getting that done um audit services have not been widely available inside the crypto economy as a whole everyone is still learning about this but we are working towards getting those audits now and in the meantime we are providing the assurance attestation so if they are the leaders in transparency why can't they just

SPEAKER_00: have an audit it doesn't make any sense and you notice this like vague language we're working towards it uh the industry is working towards it just get the audit i mean if it's not rocket science here folks you open your books up you have an auditor they audit your books so they're falling back to the attestation which is somebody looks at uh a brief snapshot in time at this moment do you have these assets and do you say you have these assets but has anybody seen the commercial paper has anybody seen those documents i don't think so and that's why people are demanding an audit here i think what's going to happen is they're going to quickly run into that regulation at tether and circle and other places where they just say here's the new rules for stable coins you have to give us every week every day every month whatever it is audits from a legitimate auditor not a cayman islands or an offshore auditor or bahamas whatever just somebody who's actually known here who has a license and could go to jail in the united states if they um don't do the audit properly nobody has done it yet

SPEAKER_07: it's a pretty crazy deflection there i think nobody has done it yet doesn't mean you shouldn't do it and if you have 62 billion dollars in people's money and stable coins like why wouldn't you do it uh and this is what i always get to if if everything's on the up and up people tend to just say here here's the goods right if it was a poker game and you've got the best hand you turn

SPEAKER_00: over your cards as quick as possible you say here's the best hand you're not going to delay you ever be in a po you ever been in a poker game where somebody doesn't want to turn their cards over at the end and people are like oh no you have to turn yours over first it's like just turn your cards

SPEAKER_07: over like let's see open kimono show us what you got if you've got the goods you would show us if you don't have the goods you wouldn't show us is the general rule of thumb you'd have to ask what is the other circumstance in which they wouldn't tell us hey it's time for another our crowd deal of

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SPEAKER_07: about working with a cayman island uh based accounting firm uh more cayman instead of a u.s based one

SPEAKER_00: and it's very interesting they mentioned that more cayman is part of a network of you know tens of thousands of auditors not that they have tens of thousands of orders they're part of a network so that's very weaselly language i don't know if there's something there or not but that would be

SPEAKER_01: something to look into let's listen to his answer about uh their selection of an accounting firm more

SPEAKER_53: cayman instead of a u.s based one for your attestation you're using a cayman island accountant more cayman um and if you're aiming to build trust though and there are all of these questions swirling

SPEAKER_29: why not use an american firm we don't think that trust is necessarily vested in one country or another theodra okay more cayman has a tremendous amount of experience in this sector and they have been excellent partners for us furthermore they are part of more global which is one of the 10 largest accounting networks in the world with more than 30 000 employees worldwide so we think they offer a uh a highly trusted and an authoritative view on the accounting field and on our attestations

SPEAKER_58: at the same time they weren't your first pick you guys were working with the new york based

SPEAKER_23: accountant friedman llp what happened there why did you move away from them in your statement you said that given the excruciatingly detailed procedures friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of tether it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable

SPEAKER_29: time frame a lot has changed in a few years that is that information is a few years old deidre you're you're exactly right you've hit it square in terms of the fact that we had a relationship with friedman llp and in fact friedman offered a consulting report for us some time ago but again that's quite dated information we're happy now with our relationship with more cayman by extension more global and uh we are getting the tests and the market is getting the information and the transparency that it needs to make good efficient decisions about what to hold so we're happy to continue along that path okay

SPEAKER_18: wow what a word salad and a ton of deflection there he keeps referring he doesn't want us to call it more

SPEAKER_00: cayman because he knows cayman island is going to indicate maybe there's something fugazi going on here maybe something shady so he keeps trying to say they're more global they're more global and that they're part of this network which to me i think means more cayman is tiny and then they have partners and they're part of some network that shares uh work with other people but it's not the same company that's kind of what i'm getting and then he keeps saying uh i thought this was very interesting uh in a persuasive kind of way he's really trying to misdirect here by saying trust is not limited to the united states so he's trying to say listen you guys are being really um u.s centric and maybe you're anti-global that's a very weird kind of framing here um it's almost like he's trying to get you to say you're xenophobic by being only uh the trust isn't limited to just the united states um and then he says oh they've been great partners oh they're great they're great partners and you know that we get to they're a part of this global thing that to me is a lot of deflection and trying to get you off the

SPEAKER_07: scent of what's going on here that's my interpretation of it i could be wrong right i'm i'm just asking

SPEAKER_00: questions as a as a kind of quasi journalist myself right i was a journalist for a long time and this show does acts of journalism so deirdre's trying to get some very basic information here why are you not just using a u.s a firm and he's saying well trust isn't limited to the united states and

SPEAKER_07: they've been great partners to us so why would you even ask that question uh from more global's website more came in description founded in 2005 our auto practice is a specialist service provider to the financial industries financial services industry in 2015 our auto practice became an independent member of the more global network and rebranded to more cayman so i don't this is like

SPEAKER_62: a shell game that's kind of confusing this is the big crazy question where is the ceo of tether why is the ceo of tether which the new york attorney general banned from working with new york clients which only has three percent of their reserves in cash and has all this commercial paper that's international but they won't say if it's china and they're very happy with their cayman island accounting firm and they don't need a us one because you are incorrect that trust is limited to the

SPEAKER_00: united states it just happens to be we have one of the most regulated markets and a pretty great justice system but okay let's put that aside where the heck is the ceo jl vanderveld and where is the cfo where are they and here comes the answer look as paulo said jl and giancarlo work very hard as

SPEAKER_29: part of the team behind the scenes they don't need the limelight it is really just a matter of style

SPEAKER_51: theater they don't need the limelight but what about the people that they're trying to serve what if they

SPEAKER_42: want to hear from them well they do hear from them as paulo mentioned our customers have a line

SPEAKER_29: straight to the top they interface and deal with jl and giancarlo all the time and they make a point of referencing that uh when they talk to the media i think sam put that in when he talked to the financial times so they're talking to the people that matter um not say you don't matter we are happy to be here and as the uh head of as the pal is the cto gives media interference all the time we are a tech company fundamentally and the chief technology officer is front and center uh and we're both delighted to be

SPEAKER_18: here and talk to you all right again word salad buzzword bingo we're delighted to talk to you the cto

SPEAKER_00: it's a tech driven company i mean paulo is you know no offense completely not compelling here he looks like a deer in headlamps and sure maybe he's just not used to talking on camera or being under this level of scrutiny but i found him incredibly uncompelling and um not inspiring in terms of trust and how on earth is the ceo and the cfo mia for this company and tether customers interface with the ceo okay if you're a tether customer and you're interfacing with the ceo and the cfo all the time please contact us please contact cnbc please contact anybody and talk about if you're okay with their commercial paper if you're okay with their audit what is going on here a ceo and a cfo are mia and they're sending you know the cto and their general counsel to go on cnbc but don't look over here it has nothing to do with the attorney general settlement the commercial paper is not an issue our offshore accountants are not an issue our mia senior executives are not an issue all that matters is

SPEAKER_01: trust is not limited to the united states and the market has voted the end you do not need to see behind the curtain and we are leaders we're leaders we're leaders in trust we're leaders in regulation okie dokie uh i mean this did not help their cause and this was a terrible decision to go on cnbc because all they did was stir up even more fear and uncertainty and doubt about their holdings are they doing this on purpose is this like a grand troll why are they doing this is this to get

SPEAKER_62: attention it it seems to me like this is a really bad decision if i was the ceo of this company i would fire these two guys you made us look terrible on cnbc and of course deirdre who i think did a solid job

SPEAKER_00: here with the interview i'll give her kudos she got them to come on she i think she played that she was not going to be um very hardcore with them and then she kind of kept at it and kept pounding on this issue of the commercial paper which i think is the right move because if there is a problem here and who knows if there is but the attorney general of new york banned them from working with new yorkers so there's something was wrong here and the transparency is pretty bad and they're using cayman islands it all feels very weird and uh you know she sums it up at the end um and i'm i have to

SPEAKER_23: say i'm a little disappointed we didn't get any answers to one of the biggest questions that are out there and that is just the makeup of the commercial paper i'll ask you one more time is there any more information whether that be what kind of international commercial paper is there any chinese commercial paper and are you willing to give us any of that i guess that that was sort of my biggest question a lot of folks biggest question coming to this and how do you feel if we don't answer that in terms of trust going forward as we talked about volume does not necessarily equal trust and you do have competitors that are issuing more coins and perhaps seeing more volume than tether just because you guys have led the way and grown to a 62 billion dollar market cap doesn't

SPEAKER_29: mean it'll always be that way right well that's true things may change as they move forward but we have been leaders in transparency we were the first to disclose anything about our reserves so we're happy to see others following in our footsteps and we will look for more ways to be transparent and more ways to push information out to our users to our stakeholders to the public uh as we go forward but as paolo mentioned i think tether deserves a lot of credit for uh bringing this market forward

SPEAKER_00: wow we are leaders in transparency we were the first to disclose stuff just no answer she gave them another window to say if they had chinese paper just that she's giving them every chance and they won't take it just say we own yes 16 chinese or a significant or a small amount or we own uh you know majority in the eu in the us there's so many ways that you could give a little more information here so i'm guessing that the this group of individuals is incompetent um and they created a service that was really great for i think the service was really great for people who were operating in the shadows of regulation and so they became very big and maybe they played fast and loose with the rules as the new york attorney general you know clearly found in their settlement so i think it's a group of people who probably have low uh morals ethics and uh trust they played fast and loose now the noose is tightening the spotlights on them my guess i'm just taking a crazy guess here is that they're in the process of trying to clean things up just like they probably had to clean things up with the new york attorney general they've probably got so many bad uh pieces of paper and questionable practices that there could be a grand cleanup going on here and they're just trying to buy time to clean things up which is typical in frauds i'm not saying tethers are fraud but i do think that when the new york attorney general bans you your ceo is missing and you won't answer simple questions from cnbc something's up that's

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SPEAKER_00: amazing episode i hope i'm wrong i hope they turn over their cards and it's four aces they got a royal flush

SPEAKER_01: you know i hope it's all perfect and clean and all their paper is just perfect high grade but uh you know there is very few explanations other than this is a fraud this is a cleanup process that i can think of

SPEAKER_00: now i'm not the smartest guy in the room you know and maybe i'm just too dumb to see it maybe my brain is too limited to understand why the ceo and cfo are missing why they won't say what the commercial paper is why the new york attorney general got it wrong and banned them from you know doing business in new york maybe everybody's got it wrong maybe everybody's wrong and they just figured it all out

SPEAKER_76: but let's just end on this one bonus clip deirdre asks about how nobody in the commercial space that talks with cnbc has ever heard of tether she mentions jim kramer who's got his hooks into this as

SPEAKER_23: well you know one of my colleagues jim kramer um he knows lots of major players in the commercial paper industry um and you know lots of other folks say that they ask whether they're doing business with you guys especially because you're one of the now one of the top 10 commercial paper holders in the world how is it though that none of the people we talk to as cnbc have heard of you guys

SPEAKER_42: well deirdre i can't speak to how to what someone else knows or doesn't know or sees or or isn't

SPEAKER_88: seeing well how much understands that are you guys buying through an intermediary right we maintain

SPEAKER_29: that's exactly right we maintain accounts in a number of banks financial institutions they request quotes for commercial paper offerings from their banks who in turn uh request those from brokers and other counterparties both direct from issuers and on secondary markets um so i can't speak to i'd be speculating if i talk about uh how people see that or or aren't seeing that in the cp markets but that is how we are operating that's how we're buying our commercial paper uh which again is rated overwhelmingly

SPEAKER_90: a2 or better okay uh good moment deirdre i'll give you credit for that one obviously when you ask him

SPEAKER_00: to help us understand my belief is that somebody who's on the up and up would help you understand he did not help you understand he said like i can't tell you what other people think if you're a top 10 holder of commercial paper in the world and nobody has heard of you and you're buying through intermediaries what this seems very fugazi this seems not on the up and up your ceo and cfo are mia they don't like the limelight okay maybe in isolation we could buy that you know larry and sergey don't do a lot of press anymore but they did in the beginning uh but sundar is out there okay but maybe okay maybe we'll give you that okay you won't do an audit okay now it's adding up but you'll do an attestation but you're only doing the attestation because you lost a case with the new york attorney general and you settled and you're banned from doing any kind of trading with new yorkers okay wait those three things seem really weird okay you're one of the top 10 owners of commercial paper and nobody knows what it is and you won't tell us if it's in china why not what's wrong with owning chinese commercial paper are you afraid that once you say you have chinese commercial paper that maybe this holding unravels are you trying to keep this all together so that you can clean stuff up that's where my mind goes and again it's pure speculation but if things are tight then people flip over their cards and say here it is show us and until they do a proper audit until we know these answers until their ceo goes on cnbc or talks to the new york times or financial times economist whatever i would stay as far away from this as possible if you are in the

SPEAKER_01: crypto space if you are looking for a business partner why on earth would anybody pick a business partner who will not answer these basic questions and the ceo and the cfo are missing why on earth are any of you in the crypto space partnering with this company are you crazy why would you risk your money working with a company that will not answer basic questions it makes me wonder if the people who are

SPEAKER_00: willing to work with them are willing to work with them because they won't answer the basic questions and who would be willing to work with somebody who's offshore who won't do an audit who's ceo and cfo or

SPEAKER_07: mia and who's banned in new york and the attorney general's got their hooks into them and they won't answer questions for basic questions about where their paper exists who would want a partner like that who would want a partner i wonder could it be money launderers want a partner like that

SPEAKER_00: could it be dark money could it be terrorists could it be drug traffickers could it be

SPEAKER_93: authoritarian governments who would want a business partner who is not on the up and up is the question

SPEAKER_07: i'm asking so if you have a choice between using other stable coins or fiat currency or other technologies

SPEAKER_00: why would you use tether and i think that might be why tether is going downhill now i think that this is the end for tether i think this is going to be um a slow unraveling until it's a very quick unraveling and if my friend or a family member owned tether i would say get out of that as quick as possible and replace it with another technology i have no horse in this race i don't own i don't own any stable coins i own a little bit of bitcoin a little bit of doge uh which i bought the doge as a

SPEAKER_96: joke and my wife bought the bitcoin because she's brilliant uh and and she heard me talking about it constantly and and all of her friends were talking about and she bought it for under 100 i think uh so we made a ton of money on bitcoin uh even at 30 000 so uh the case continues and if you have

SPEAKER_00: any uh information please let us know i still invite the ceo cfo anybody from tether any tether partners on this program to talk about what we just talked about talk about this interview and keep the conversation moving forward and jeremy allaire who is going public with circle which has usdc and 60 of it is cash or cash equivalents it looks like he's um really moving uh quickly to be the anti-tether and i think the the slam dunk for jeremy if you're listening or somebody could send this to jeremy allaire who i am not friends with but i've known over three companies because we're both in the industry for 30 years i guess hey jeremy if you want to be baller and you want to dunk on

SPEAKER_96: these guys uh why don't you just share what your commercial paper is show us your commercial paper what a great move that would be by you you've already got these guys on the ropes because

SPEAKER_00: you you've got them what 20x on cash cash right they have three percent you have 60 so you're already dunking on them that way why not start turning over your commercial paper give us the breakdown of where it is by region who does your buying of commercial paper you can beat them just by doing this jeremy okay and only nine percent of circle is in commercial paper nine percent uh versus 40 percent of tether that's pretty crazy when you think about that disparity and then circle is 60 cash and cash equivalents and tether was three percent i mean two and a half three percent so i mean we're looking at these numbers and you know it's kind of funky uh so let's keep telling the story and let's hope that tether uh has done everything perfectly and that when they do their audit it's just magically unicorns and sunshine and everything's great i doubt it but let's hope for that i want to welcome harry hurst

SPEAKER_99: you know him as the co-ceo and co-founder of the company pipe you've been on twitter over the past year you've probably heard me and my besties a number of which got their beaks wet talking about all the excitement around pipe and their fundraising and the product they're bringing to market i thought i'd have harry come on and explain it to you all harry welcome to the program thank you jason what kind

SPEAKER_103: of vetting do you do on the companies and what size company is it best for so the beauty of being a

SPEAKER_107: trading platform is that we can serve as companies of all shapes and sizes you know we've got companies that are just getting started out have a hundred thousand in ar all the way up to publicly traded companies on the platform with hundreds of millions in ar and every company in between so there's you know a different offering in terms of trading limit size and bid price for each company stage in terms of vetting the way that we work with the companies that when you sign up for pipe uh you connect your bank account your accounting system and your payment processor and within 24 hours the next business morning we're going to give you your trading limit the amount that you're able to trade at any one time and the bid price the amount of cents on the dollar that the capital markets are willing to pay for the annualized value of your revenue streams all right thanks again harry for

SPEAKER_99: coming on the pod and explaining that with pipe.com there is no debt no loans and most importantly to me as an angel investor no delusion if you sign up at pipe.com twist they'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year what a generous offer pipe.com twist so you can save up to tens of thousands of

SPEAKER_07: dollars happy piping everybody all right netflix has announced their earnings for q2 and their growth

SPEAKER_00: seems to be stalling yes netflix had a slightly disappointing earnings reveal for q2 on tuesday they barely beat revenue expectations of 7.34 billion uh versus the 7.32 and that was expected and they're on a 29 billion dollar run rate for 2021 it's super extraordinary their market cap is about 10 times that 225 billion and uh here's the bad news they only added 1.5 million new

SPEAKER_02: subscribers globally uh which is their lowest number of net news subscribers since 2017.

SPEAKER_01: and uh this chart from cnbc basically tells the story and they attributed this to the choppiness

SPEAKER_00: of covet on streaming so maybe uh or they're reaching their natural audience or there's headwinds from other services that have a more compelling offering and there are so many other folks now in the game netflix was one of one and now they're one of a dozen so uh netflix lost and this is where

SPEAKER_01: it gets a little crazy they lost 430 000 paid subscribers in the us and canada bringing its total to just under 74 million which is extraordinary to be clear uh they have 209 million worldwide paid subscribers but disney plus just passed 100 million subs in may and i've been telling folks for a long time that these will be 250 million 500 million uh subscriber services which is mind-blowing but i

SPEAKER_00: believe disney is going to blow past netflix uh and netflix stock is down almost four percent today i don't think netflix goes away i think they're spending so heavily on content they've got such a great archive they're building i think they'll be one of the top two or three players of course and i would not uh discount reed hastings and his hunger to be a competitor here but hbo max disney and hulu are really compelling and i have to tell you in our household uh netflix is not the first service we open uh for me it's kind of hbo max and uh hulu are the ones i open most often and then i fall back to disney uh

SPEAKER_01: and uh netflix but that's just my personal but the kids obviously are starting with disney plus and so i think this is a lot of headwinds against netflix and i don't know that they will be the number one or number two player now i think they might wind up being the third player second or third and i think you know hbo has a good shot at this and obviously hulu is doing a lot of great originals and disney is doing really great and there's other competitors on the horizon so netflix has hit critical mass in north america clearly so uh maybe there's some more tricks up their sleeves uh they've confirmed that they're going into gaming uh which i think is brilliant i'll be totally honest we have a subscription a family subscription to apple arcade and it's fantastic for the kids and it's super

SPEAKER_00: affordable and you can share it with your whole family so i think adding casual gaming into netflix would be great for the offering because maybe some kids will want to watch the animation or the unscripted and parents might want the original films and the more adult themed uh series and dramas but gaming would make it pretty sticky because you could open up the netflix gaming app and if you pay 12 bucks or 15 bucks a month for netflix and you get some games with it and you find one game or two games a year you like man that that would reduce churn so i think games are very sticky and this could be a really interesting approach netflix poach facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality mike verdue according to cnbc that's kind of interesting as well so i wonder if they have visions of maybe playing in that space as well their only goal is to make the core offering better according to reed hastings and netflix believes their big different biggest differentiator in gaming is their large library of ip here's the quote we are in the business of making these amazing worlds and great storylines and incredible characters and we know the fans of those stories want to go deeper and they will engage further uh said netflix coo greg peters uh so they have some interesting ip of course stranger things umbrella academy black mirror narcos queen's gambit mindhunter so are they going to make a queen's

SPEAKER_02: gambit you know chess.com competitor are they going to make a black mirror you know uh world or mind hunter you know serial killer world who knows um but they're also dipping their toe into podcasting so

SPEAKER_00: i think it's interesting that they're starting to think about their ip in the way disney does

SPEAKER_96: some day maybe we'll all go to netflix land and we'll get to go on the narcos ride who knows um but i do think you know competitions is coming to the space i think disney wins hands down and i think

SPEAKER_00: disney's got to figure out espn hulu and this offering and make some sort of cleaner bundle i know they like disney to be just family fare and then hulu i guess could have things like the hands may tell which is i don't know why i watch this show because it's so disturbing and i you know it's so graphic and uh demented in in terms of the the sadistic nature of the program but it also is so compelling when you're thinking about how things could go wrong in society it's just it's like one

SPEAKER_114: of these dystopian movies i can't uh not watch like the walking dead in its prime but uh yeah i wonder

SPEAKER_76: if gaming is the right answer here if that makes it stickier um i do think that netflix has to start

SPEAKER_00: thinking like disney more uh and that could mean owning some rights to live television getting more into podcasting i think these media companies if you're going to have spotify get into podcasting then maybe netflix has to be in podcasting and apple is big in podcasting apple's big in gaming apple's big now we're trying they're not big they're trying to get into original content amazon has some gaming assets obviously and amazon has uh their own streaming services so maybe this is all coming together and there's going to just be entertainment conglomerates that do video games uh narrative content and podcasting as well so maybe this is all going to be under one umbrella uh which is really interesting okay let me know what you think of the new format where we do some news up top and then we do the interview basically made the show twice as long in some days and so if you really like this i'm enjoying doing it uh got a great research team here justin rachel and nick and charles on the ones and the twos editing the show to get it out for you really quick let us know what you think at twi startups is our twitter handle uh and if you like the show do us a favor go ahead and subscribe on youtube um and put that like alert bell on or whatever it is so you know when the new episode comes in post a comment uh maybe write a review do any of that things if that if you like the show to help us move up the rankings and spread the word about what we're doing if you have any information on tether that you want to share you can always dm me i'm taking a twitter break but i do check my dms from time to time and next up is my interview with slava rubin i'm super excited to be the lead investor

SPEAKER_01: in vincent you're gonna love this uh interview and you're gonna love this uh company i think okay everybody next up on the program is slava rubin he is the co-founder of vincent which you can go check out at with vincent.com this is a company in the alternative assets space what are alternative assets very simply if you think about what's not alternative it's real estate your home

SPEAKER_93: equities and stocks right those are two words for the same thing stocks that you buy you own some disney maybe you own some bonds municipal bonds or treasuries maybe you have some cash and some people have commodities so if you go on wealth front and you set your perfect portfolio on a scale

SPEAKER_96: of one to ten full disclosure we are shareholders in that company uh you would have your traditional

SPEAKER_01: your traditional assets alternative assets are a category which is everything else that could go up in value that could include art you might own a picasso or a print of a picasso that's going up you might own an old corvette from 1965 with split windows and all kinds of uh great features and it's appreciating in value baseball cards crypto certainly falls into this and nfts all kinds of alternative assets have emerged over time and people have become very interested in these why have people become interested in alternative assets because they might appreciate at a pace which is greater than the other assets you have and because there are more and more portals websites offerings to allow you to have access to them in fact one of those is the syndicate.com my angel syndicate which gives you access not to public equities but to private company equities now these equities tend to be these alternative assets tend to be a little more complex and there are different reasons why you might invest in them you might invest in them because you get passion and joy from owning that corvette or the first you know comic book of uh you know the x-man whatever it happens to be you might get joy from buying nfts and art certainly falls into that category another reason might be that they are correlated differently than public market assets or other assets in your portfolio there are so many different types that have emerged and so many different portals uh that somebody had to make sense of all this and i have been thinking somebody will at some point make sense of this and when slava rubin who i met at his previous

SPEAKER_93: gig indiegogo which i did not invest in which has turned out to be a mistake uh even though i met him back in the day and probably did have an opportunity to invest um when i was just starting my angel career uh when he told me that he was doing vincent and he explained to me what it was i was like i've been

SPEAKER_01: waiting for somebody to do this since that happened i said hey i love to invest he said we're raising

SPEAKER_93: around i said i'd love to lead the next round and sure enough my alternative asset platform the syndicate.com had the greatest interest in vincent in this startup than any other startup we've ever syndicated and i think up until that point we had 175 or so deals that we syndicated in fact they had 6.3 million dollars in interest which was the most ever we were over subscribed by 3x it's never happened before 292 investors were involved and we in fact spin we spun up two svps one for the accredited investors one for the qualified purchasers long way of saying we're very excited today to have slava on the program to announce the six million dollar round that in fact i'm leading and

SPEAKER_78: i'm joining the board of vincent welcome to the program slava yeah thank you for having me that was

SPEAKER_01: a great uh introduction i'm trying to do a little introduction to these sometimes to kind of start us on second base you and i met i think long ago at south by southwest you were doing indiegogo i was just starting to be an angel investor and i i kind of didn't understand exactly what you were doing

SPEAKER_93: because at the time you weren't correct me if i'm wrong indiegogo was not for equity it was not equity

SPEAKER_96: crowdfunding it was just back a project and maybe get a t-shirt or one of the early versions of the

SPEAKER_123: of the product correct that's exactly right it was very early indiegogo very early crowdfunding um

SPEAKER_129: we met a long time ago probably i would say a decade if not more than maybe 2009 2008 something that could feel right indiegogo launched uh early 2008 uh we had traded a couple notes via email we were both a south by and uh you know i already thought that you had interesting perspective and a broad distribution platform in terms of voice yeah i thought could be very helpful as part of what indiegogo was trying to accomplish uh equity crowdfunding was a hope a twinkle in our eye uh the jobs act had not passed yet and here we are now fast forward alternative investments are are becoming very very much a

SPEAKER_132: reality with all these uh you know fragmented platforms across the entire market how has indiegogo been

SPEAKER_93: doing i know kickstarter never ever joined the equity crowdfunding space correct they stayed pure to

SPEAKER_129: you're just pre-ordering products right that's correct so uh kickstarter stayed just in the um perks uh model obviously you have the gofundmes of the world who have gone more cause and donation model uh you have the patreons who have carved out a nice space in the uh creator economy for indiegogo we really then focused on the entrepreneur uh with the perks uh and really donation model uh really helping them from pre-orders inception of idea all the way through validation to the manufacturing their product or people are actually selling their products uh as an alternative distribution channel to other options um indiegogo is doing quite well uh we're profitable uh very sustainable uh creating cash

SPEAKER_137: which is uh crazy not and i was i like that decade two correcting generating cash uh it's a fascinating

SPEAKER_138: concept uh indiegogo has been around for you know 13 years so we're geriatric but you know we're

SPEAKER_129: sustainable and still figuring out what we want to be when we grow up and helping many entrepreneurs

SPEAKER_93: that we've distributed billions of dollars around the world and you mentioned in there that uh regulations have changed and that did change the entire uh ecosystem and over the last decade indiegogo kickstarter seed invest republic angel list the syndicate.com all of these things have heightened interest in alternative assets and in risk taking to back new ideas in the world what you know in terms of the legal framework what's important that changed here in the united states and then my second piece before we get into your approach with vincent is just to set the stage here what has changed and in your mind what still needs to evolve here in the united states with investing in alternative assets and

SPEAKER_138: startups yeah i mean there's a lot of questions there just to try to back up you know 1933 uh the

SPEAKER_129: securities acts come out what really creates the accredited investor creates kind of the ipo markets of people needing to uh create their products be public before grandma and you know random folks are allowed to invest there was a lot of fraud that was happening through public solicitation someone would knock on your door and say i could sell you some oil in oklahoma and they would believe them but they weren't actually giving the money to anybody and they weren't investing with it they were just running away so uh the folks just decided a long time ago back in 33 and the time that you know you

SPEAKER_142: need to be sophisticated and you need to be accredited and they created these thresholds 250 000 of uh income or net worth uh over a million dollars today outside of your primary home um they really

SPEAKER_129: limited who can have access to these private investments and a lot of this changed uh come the jobs act so when we launched indiegogo it was still the same you know as a matter of fact a lot of people don't know this v1 of indiegogo back when we came up with the idea of 2006 was we want to create a small marketplace of investments um many new york stock exchange and we just thought it was a good idea and then we ran up oh yeah probably other people thought it was a good idea but there's regulations that just don't allow it so uh we were there was actually a meta campaign which is a crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo to crowdfund the legal submission to try to change the laws around

SPEAKER_142: crowdfunding so that was submitted and then fast forward uh 2012 the jobs act was passed and the jobs act was a huge change uh in 2012 there was reggae plus which moved from 5 million cap to a 50

SPEAKER_129: million cap you went from the facebook rule of only allowing 500 investors on your cap table before you have to go public to 2000 and really the big one there was an ipo ramp up uh ramp on um uh rule

SPEAKER_142: that passed which allows you to have your financials be a little bit more hidden before you have to go public uh kind of how groupon used to get you know pulled apart and everything now you're

SPEAKER_129: allowed to hide a little bit more before uh you go public but the rule that really was big for us was the equity crowdfunding one where you were actually able to now as a unaccredited investor be a part of these uh investment rounds and only up to a million bucks uh which was a big deal because before it was zero and fast forward it actually went live it took four years for the sec and finra to approve all these things and for the portals to be approved and to figure out how to do it and then 2016 finally these things went live in america and i at indiegogo spearheaded the effort to actually create one of these origination platforms these equity crowdfunding origination platforms at our company we did 150 deals 97 of them funded and we saw what it was like to try to originate these deals and help people get

SPEAKER_93: investments yeah and in general it was a multi-part act and for people who don't understand what the reason this act was created was we were very concerned after the great recession that you know there wouldn't be enough economic activity so that crisis uh then caused obama to sign into law this bipartisan act called the jobs act uh which was jumpstart our business startups act and it also included many different ideas one of them was general solicitation which we're now seeing that people can go and tweet i'm raising money for my rolling fund i'm raising money um for my startup and be able to um raise with limits it was originally a million dollar limit from non-accredited investors and it just went to five million as well and exactly we had two people on the program who benefited from that uh arlen hamilton uh with backstage capital raised five million dollars in like under two weeks to fund backstage capital and promised a percentage of revenue share and carry share and then sahil loving mia i hope i'm pronouncing it sahil sorry um with gumroad raised five million dollars in 24 hours i think both of those occurred on republic and so it's really amazing how this has changed it was slow

SPEAKER_96: and then uh obviously now it's had a big impact let's talk about vincent tell us the origin story of

SPEAKER_129: vincent yeah so it goes back to indiegogo we had that experience with origination we decided at the indiegogo level to really focus on the path to profitability really stick to our core so we decided to shut down the equity crowdfunding platform um but then i was still thinking about it as to what's

SPEAKER_142: possible uh there were a lot of different platforms that were in the market that were reaching out to me to potentially become an investor an advisor a board member etc with my experience from indiegogo

SPEAKER_129: and i was thinking to myself i'm not so excited to create another origination platform you know it's it's there's already hundreds that are out there uh it's not a massively scalable business it's a

SPEAKER_142: scalable business but it's not a massively scalable business because it's not a pure software play and i was trying to think of what is possible to you know help more people to get access and

SPEAKER_129: democratize these opportunities so i was speaking uh with my peers from indiegogo they're helping build my equity crowdfunding platform and we decided you know what if we weren't just trying to compete with all these other platforms what if we were trying to help all these other platforms and aggregate this market which right now is still very fragmented and still lacks a lot of trust and education and very few people are out there very few companies are out there saying you know what i objectively i'm just trying to help you the investor to navigate what is best for you of how to add alternatives to your portfolio and that was missing and often people are saying you know i have an extra you know hundred dollars i just got an extra ten thousand dollar bonus i happen to be sitting on too much cash or over allocated already into my public equities how can i diversify a little bit further the family offices and the ultra high net worth individuals they already know that you need to be diversified into these higher alpha assets that you know are higher risk but can have massive return which you obviously personally know very well with your investments and this hasn't really been democratized the normal person has done a great job of learning that they should have cash their savings accounts or checking accounts some roth ira the retirement accounts get into a nice mix of 60 40 equities bonds but it's still new to them to get into alternatives and we want to become that on-ramp across the entire market so like you mentioned go ahead oh i was going to say and i know

SPEAKER_96: you have masterworks uh which we've had the founder on this podcast before you've got rally road we've had the founder on the podcast before um and uh funders club other uh platforms what is the business

SPEAKER_93: model there because it is in one way a search engine you showed me that early on and i was like well this is fantastic i can see all the assets and there is an educational component but you know a search engine and educational component for this is not a business in and of itself i don't see much of a business model there what is the business of vincent going to be and for people who don't know you can

SPEAKER_96: go to with vincent.com to go ahead and start searching all these different assets that are on there and that is a delightful experience i will say that but what and it does keep you up to date and sort of familiarize yourself with that but that's not a giant business what is the big business idea here

SPEAKER_138: in terms of business model yeah i mean and i'll answer that question in just a second so we have

SPEAKER_142: over a hundred thousand uh investors that have already used it over a million searches over 75

SPEAKER_129: platforms that we're already partnered with and we have something that's unique that no one else has is we know what people are looking at across the various assets very rarely can you compare are you interested in collectibles versus crypto and we have those percentages and it's very interesting to use that because we're able to create an experience by having our design that people can go from one asset to another in seconds as opposed to logging into a new tab having to do aml kyc and figuring this all out so the average user is looking at 25 deals across seven platforms in three asset classes in a matter of minutes and that experience was not possible before vincent and what we believe is if we can still become the trusted partner to the investors there's a lot of monetization opportunities the obvious ones are potentially a sas play off of the supply side which is the originators being able to get paid per click or being able to get paid per lead for the originators there's an investor pro model that it's possible there's a lot of investors are asking us to do more and provide more feedback and more diligence and more support and the holy grail is that we're able to leverage the data that we're getting to create potentially some proprietary products which we're navigating all of that we also already have some large banks that are reaching out to us that want to have access to our alternative investment data uh their pwm teams or their high network teams are trying to source unique deals for their clients or they want to be able to see this quickly or understand the trends and we have that trends and we have access to the data quickly you know at our platform so uh we're young we just launched on november 1st uh so i wouldn't say the monetization is our number one thing i would call this year a building year but if we're able to become the destination of where you think about alts still start with vincent uh we think there's a lot of opportunities of how to

SPEAKER_96: monetize i think just normalizing the data is also like a really interesting component of this you will you can sort hey i want real estate deals hey i want deals that are high alpha or you know a lower return profile or potential return profile you can sort them by what the minimum investment is right because some of the minimums are 500 other ones are 50 000 so depending on what your goals are uh and you know you you you may want to see different types of offerings so in a way it's kind

SPEAKER_93: of like zillow or redfin where if you're searching you say you know i really need four bedrooms because i got three kids and i need a home office and i don't even look at anything under four bedrooms and uh there's some normalization that occurs here i wonder about the community aspect to this have you thought about people discussing deals and you know handicapping them etc i know on angel list when i started we had message boards on each of the deals but over time they removed those um and the

SPEAKER_96: back channel i got was it was just when you know most startups fail so when they fail there was just a ton of bickering and back and forth and finger pointing and you know i think naval and the team at angel list was just like it's easier to not have community discussing stuff and in fact we created a

SPEAKER_93: slack channel for our top members of our syndicate and it's been a little bit of a process to think do we want people actually kvetching and debating and you know um complaining about a founder who doesn't send

SPEAKER_96: updates etc it's been a lot of work for me to keep it in a positive direction so i kind of understand why there weren't um comments etc but what are your thoughts on that and the community building aspect

SPEAKER_129: yeah it's a great question i mean our product queue and our product prioritization process is very active right now um we don't even have a share button yet where you can even share the deal so we're very

SPEAKER_142: early in our features obviously you know mvp trying to get it out quickly and get feedback definitely people are asking for those opportunities to communicate and i think what you've mentioned in terms of the confession is something you need to manage against and figure out how you want to um you know get ahead of it so yes we've talked about discords or slacks or you know uh able to have discussions right there we've also been having some of that dialogue uh on twitter or do we push that into uh other

SPEAKER_129: forums you know that's still tbd i can tell you that there definitely is uh a market of folks that want to learn they want to talk to each other they want to share with each other because we're seeing that even with our pulse newsletter the simplicity of pulling together the the most interesting 15 articles in all across all of all and sending it out for free once a week is something that we're getting love notes back about oh this is so helpful you saved me three hours of research that i just don't wouldn't want to have to do that work or i would do it and i the fact that you did this for me in one email in a second is great and back what you were saying about the house the four bedrooms a perfect example of that is you know trading cards are very hot right now and whether you're going to rally whether you're going to collectible whether you're going uh to otis whether you're going to dibs whether you're going to these other platforms you know you kind of want to know what are all my options and it's not as if rally is going to tell you what's on otis and otis is not going to tell you what's on collectible but you know that you're looking for a certain price deal but you want to

SPEAKER_164: see all of them you can just put that search in vincent save it and we just send it to you

SPEAKER_166: you know and there you have it so that's kind of like you know your real estate broker might tell

SPEAKER_93: you about certain homes but they might leave out a couple because oh they're getting you know they're repping this home and they're selling it they get the double commission whatever it is they don't want competition and uh you know then you go to one of these sites and you search and you find other homes that were i noticed on zillow or one of the sites they're like other homes for

SPEAKER_167: sale and those were homes that were for sale by owner but they kind of like put them in a little

SPEAKER_96: ghetto like you have to click twice to get to them uh and you're right like people do not want the competition it's it's pretty clear what about rating the deals and rating the platforms this has been

SPEAKER_93: something that is uh i know my lps are always asking me hey what's your performance tell me about

SPEAKER_96: the previous deals and how they did how do i compare to other angel list syndicates you know obviously we left angel list to create our own at the syndicate.com but you know people do want to

SPEAKER_93: know what is the performance of these and then maybe even rating the process for example with our syndicate we require monthly updates from the founders and we make sure the founders are willing to take uh questions directly from syndicate members i.e you you agreed to that as well bit of a pain in the neck um potentially um was what we were told it turns out most founders found it delightful but this idea of rating the quality of the platforms are you going to do that um or is that another thing

SPEAKER_129: that could be incredibly divisive yeah i mean again this is right in the product queue and um the tricky part about that is yes we're getting a lot of requests and questions so part of it is people know that the

SPEAKER_173: platform is a good platform but they also appreciate who the founders are so they're almost asking us

SPEAKER_129: like oh would you invest into this like should i invest in this yeah and the balancing act there is outside of those bits and bytes of the actual software we have to make sure we're navigating you know the sec rules around advisory and what are we allowed to say and what are we not allowed to say and is this an accredited deal that we're marketing potentially to folks uh or is this an undercred where anybody can have access to it so we definitely want to find our solution there there's the potential for um a kind of vincent pro offering yeah you'll be able to sign up

SPEAKER_142: for a certain amount of money a month that you will get access to more proprietary diligence where you'll have analysts be giving you great idea per deal per vertical uh what's hot where's it trending

SPEAKER_129: um and and that's the sort of thing that we'll know once you're behind the wall we'll know you signed up um and you know we just need to manage make sure we're doing it correctly from a regulatory perspective but again off the foundation of the search engine and off the foundation of having

SPEAKER_142: objective uh information and not having to push our own stuff um is a really unique place in the market um and that's why we think we could be the on-ramp um for alternatives that to me the good

SPEAKER_93: housekeeping seal of approval the consumer reports the wire cutter you know best pick if you were to tell me hey listen we looked at all the major baseball cards all the major collectible cars artwork whatever it is and this is the one that we're most um interested in or we think is the most um you know the most well constructed deal i'm trying to think about a way to phrase it that doesn't guarantee returns but we think this is the highest quality offering that we saw this month in art it's this masterworks basquiat and here's why we came to that conclusion exactly and here's what they said that to me seems like something well worth paying for and that exists in the real world you have people uh who are analysts who say here's our price target for uber and amazon and disney and here's how we came to that conclusion and obviously things can change but you know i don't think

SPEAKER_129: that yeah i love that you just brought up the disney example so that's exactly right the market for research and the analysts on the public markets is huge and all the time you have cnbc where they're talking about hey earnings just came out what does it mean what do we do is it buy sell hold yada yada yada there is no real research market uh that's established at scale in the alternative space and we think there's a huge opportunity now again can it live by itself it can live by itself but if we become the place that has all the data has all the information and is objectively able to compare and contrast uh we think that can be really interesting to combo that as the next layer

SPEAKER_93: uh it's also extremely time consuming you have to look at all these deals sign up etc if i wanted to

SPEAKER_96: put a quarter million dollars to work and my net worth was 10 million and it wanted to put 2.5

SPEAKER_93: percent of it into you know alternatives or let's say 10 a million would it not make sense for me to just give vincent the million bucks and say hey you manage since you're already using analysts to pick why don't you create a mutual fund of you know the 10 assets each month you pick then you got 120 assets a year over two years 240 i give you a million you put 4k on average into each of those 250 would that not be a potential huge win for family offices etc who don't want to do this work i mean you're

SPEAKER_129: literally hitting each question is our product here i mean it's all a matter of like wearing the product queue um you know this is something that we've had an excessive amount of demand coming in because it doesn't exist on our website so nowhere on our website does it say give vincent money we'll put it to work for you and we've been just getting a bunch of feedback saying hey this platform is done really nicely i feel much more empowered but i just don't know i want to do all the work like can i give it to you because i don't know who to give it to and uh yeah i mean that is definitely something to think about because where can you get a diversified basket across alts nowhere nowhere i mean it doesn't exist so i mean you would have to find who do you give money to for nfts who do you give money to for venture who do you give money to for real estate who do you give money to for debt who do you give money to for collectibles who do you give money to for art who do you give money to for crypto and a lot of the good funds or a lot of good opportunities have expensive minimums and are you even gonna be able to get into those minimums so i think there is a really exciting opportunity on exactly what you're

SPEAKER_195: talking about and you know we're taking one step at a time but uh that's something we're looking at

SPEAKER_93: well i mean think about it with our relationship if you said to me hey you're gonna we want to have

SPEAKER_96: access we want a guaranteed allotment of 50k um in the next 50 deals you do at the syndicate.com or the 100 deals you do we're willing to put 5 million to work we obviously want to be able to pick and choose but generally speaking it's going to be you know we're betting on you as a fund manager as that and then you go to you know rally road and to um you know something like uh you know masterworks and

SPEAKER_93: you do the same exact thing now you could have startups art collectibles you know and some family office could give you 10 million and say hey yeah you do it and there is a corollary to this there is something called funds of funds which are people who raise two or three billion dollars like

SPEAKER_96: horsley bridge or there's other people in the industry green spring uh which is an lp in my fund they just got bought just got bought by a bigger firm and they will look at new fund managers which i am one of under 10 years uh running funds would be new fund managers and they just make bets because

SPEAKER_93: who has the time to go find all these new fund managers all these new platforms and do it it seems

SPEAKER_129: like that might be your best business model yeah um definitely seems interesting obviously there's the wealth fronts and the betterments and then more recently you see the titans and others you're really seeing this democratization of access into these uh various types of deals or more the empowerment of the investor to take more ownership over it and you know this decade i really do think will be the decade of alts um you know it's we started seeing this with crypto and trading cards and obviously all the angel investing and everything's so hot right now um even if the market doesn't uh stay this hot

SPEAKER_142: i still think at the end of this decade in 2030 we're going to see a massive secular move into alts

SPEAKER_48: by everybody so uh you've raised this series a we're part of it what does the next year look like for you who do you have to hire what are the next couple of steps here and if somebody was looking

SPEAKER_96: to come work with you uh what positions are open yeah so uh we raised six million uh which was a

SPEAKER_129: little bit more than we expected to raise just because demand was so high really excited we got incredible investors uh joe lonsdale came in and then we got great partners

SPEAKER_142: uh coming in as well like barry silber um or um who founded second market yep that's right and then

SPEAKER_129: grayscale um and um you know several of the ceos from our platforms uh melton uh or n sahil both came in who are both awesome influencers out in the market and you know for us uh we have a lot of building to do we want to make sure the product's working and really the things that you mentioned i mean we got to navigate that product here and as part of that we need to hire engineers we need more designers uh we need to really own data and you know if you want to be a consumer-facing business you need to be good at marketing and customer acquisition and i think we're already doing a great job which is how we've gotten here but we need to add more to those muscles for me i think just

SPEAKER_96: i'm uh putting aside the fact that you know i led this round you know with the syndicate.com

SPEAKER_93: we're a bit um too big right now we have 8 000 members uh but you've got a hundred thousand accredited members we're kind of not adding too many more people because we had two or three hundred a month and we're over subscribed constantly which leads to frustration so i'm trying to have more quality deals on the platform putting that aside there was a time where i would have paid to add a thousand accredited investors to our list and i think i probably would have paid 50 bucks or 100 bucks for each of them um how do you think about that if a platform came to you and said hey we would like to get more accredited investors to join our platform or at least um you know come to a webinar can i feature my last deal in other words if i was doing vincent it's kind of circular here but if i previously had done let's pick another company uh com.com could i say hey can i put my com.com deal on the top level or jason calacanis is doing a deal in the meditation space clicker to

SPEAKER_01: unlock or and then i got that person you know to join my platform i could just pay you 50 bucks per lead

SPEAKER_138: is that a possible business model yeah i mean people are already paying us per lead oh it exists

SPEAKER_129: already that's great some yeah platforms are already paying us uh per lead uh this is uh still an experimentation so the value there is quite strong um we also get the benefit of being able to fish with wide nets and what i mean by that is most of these platforms have to be very homogeneous with who they're going after because they have homogeneous supply so they have to find the demand

SPEAKER_142: specifically for what they want and if it's not specifically that it's hard for them to cross sell

SPEAKER_129: because they usually don't have those other offerings to cross them against for us when we're acquiring customers we can bring them in through any vertical and be able to move them over so sometimes there's a really nice arbitrage opportunity um and in the early days we're really providing great deals to our supply side in terms of potential for pay-per-click etc uh but yeah i mean right now we're still doing a lot of it organically we really believe in an seo play for the long term and also a content play for education we're putting out blogs about every other day we're putting out you know social we're doing our proprietary newsletter we're coming out with our own proprietary um monthly report where we show what are the trends and alts how does it compare is is demand for crypto going up or down is demand for collectibles going up or down how does it compare in terms of the trends of crypto versus art and believe it or not it's really interesting so in the when we just launched uh crypto was pretty small as an example uh in in november and not surprisingly because in retrospect this is obvious but in the early part of this year crypto digital assets nfts took off and you saw a little bit of a drop in the real estate and the debts because they were boring lower yield no no interest coming through and now all of a sudden in the last couple months where you see the interest rates starting to go up things becoming a little riskier with crypto obviously the balloon kind of deflating a little bit out of the 60 bitcoin going from 60 to 30 exactly going down to 30. all of a sudden you see the real estate and the debt number research is starting to go up the venture numbers that are still quite high so not a surprise angel investing is hot as ever you know robin hood's about to go ipo if they don't go ipo the day this this you know announces and uh it's you know we can show those trends right so it's just fascinating that's fascinating yes you could tell people hey listen

SPEAKER_93: crypto and nfts they were hot now it's real estate and people can infer what they want from it is there a

SPEAKER_96: category that you personally putting aside your role as uh you know the founder here uh or the

SPEAKER_93: co-founder of vincent is there a category that you think personally is super fascinating and has some great ability to accelerate or that you if you were talking to a close family member or friend and they said hey where should i think about you know spending some time where would you tell them um if you were to

SPEAKER_96: we just tell them nfts we'd tell them real estate would you tell them startups where would you point a close friend who said i really only have the ability to focus on one thing so um first i just

SPEAKER_142: want to give a shout out to my three co-founders yeah so eric um and evan and ross who are awesome um and that's how we've gotten to this great product you know i'm biased um and um first i would say that the way you should play alts is not pick one because i think that's too risky and too volatile i would try to peanut butter across and try to get a little bit across everywhere which is hard but that's the way i would think about it now if i was going to go into one i've been collecting

SPEAKER_129: trading cards since i was a kid so what what got me into all says it is today was not anything that i knew was an alt it was just a david robinson rookie card from 1989 hoops uh and next thing you know i'm buying the old school um jordan's and then the oscar robertson rookie which is like one of my prized possessions but i'm biased but i really do think trading cards still have a huge opportunity because there's a lot of trends there one sports are only becoming bigger in terms of content they're becoming much more of a business you're starting to see the gambling the fantasy the trading cards all becoming the the uh sportspreneur so more people trying to figure out how to make money off of sports uh plus it's such proprietary content people love being fans and the business model in more recent years trading cards has done a great job of creating exclusive product you know in the 80s you had this proliferation of cards which really diluted the product but now there's these exclusive contracts across the top player and regularly you're seeing the most expensive card sold probably like the top 15 most expensive cards have all been sold in the last year and a half wow and even the most expensive uh contemporary card i think happened last week which is the steph curry for like a little over five million bucks bonkers yeah yeah yeah for a steph curry one of one uh one out of one population but usually you talk about the old cards the mickey maniles the baby bruce the etc is the expensive ones you know it used to be that you hit a million dollars on a trading card that was a lot now five million is a lot i wouldn't be surprised by the end of the year if we're talking 10 million and i think it's gonna be like paintings these exclusive trading cards low populations it's gonna be like art you're just gonna say look at my piece of art like you said with masterworks which obviously art is an amazing category i think nfts could be huge uh but massive you know uncertainty there i'm super biased on trading

SPEAKER_93: cards yeah so that's fascinating to me because now we're getting to the level where an individual can't afford to own one of these they must be owned in a fractional basis and like masterworks is saying hey listen we know you can't afford a picasso or basquiat uh or a warhol we'll buy it and we'll let you buy a share in it so you can put ten thousand dollars into it as opposed to ten million

SPEAKER_215: or a million that that's that's where this is headed right somebody's going to absolutely and then where

SPEAKER_129: it's headed is because it's fractionalized now you create the secondary markets and now you got liquidity and instead of having to say hey i need to buy a mickey mantle it's gonna be hard to unload my five million for seven million or fifteen million well you could actually just have this endless liquid market of exactly what's going to happen with robin hood you know in a few days or in a few weeks and that becomes super interesting because now um you have a lot more opportunity to

SPEAKER_176: exit and you can get a lot more people involved in other words you have barry silbert as an investor he created second market sold it to nasdaq a secondary market for these is another possibility

SPEAKER_93: for vincent where people could be trading their percentage ownership in that step curry card if somebody put a hundred thousand into it it's now worth five hundred thousand that person could say hey i'm going to put it up for sale in the classifieds on uh vincent as opposed to you know the platform where it originated that you could have an open market for those right well to be clear the

SPEAKER_129: platforms today are already starting to explore secondaries so the otis is the collectibles the masterworks and are the rallies they're already all starting to explore secondaries but again we can aggregate all of this and help people see all of your options and maybe the transaction isn't happening on our site which is fine uh but we're pushing to where your options are and if there's two different step curries on two different sites at two different prices or nevertheless the same card maybe trading at different prices it's nice to see that uh in one place that's what i'm thinking of

SPEAKER_96: doing with my roadster i have the 16th roadster ever made by tesla and it's in my garage i don't drive it it's too valuable to drive and i've been talking to rally road it's probably worth a quarter million

SPEAKER_93: dollars or something like that and i was like you know what i i want to own it i still want to own it but i kind of think it'd be fun for other people to own it so i was like well maybe we'll put it up for 250k i'll keep 125 i sell 125 what's that like own 51 or whatever it is 49 50 51 whatever

David Friedberg: it is and then they can trade the other half and then over time if i want to sell my shares on rally

SPEAKER_93: road i could or i could buy more shares in my own car but i could get the car out of my garage and have somebody storing it properly not that i'm not storing it properly but it's taking up space and like at any point in time the roof could collapse or somebody could drop a bowling ball on it or

David Friedberg: something earthquake and i'd rather have them taking care of it for me i think that's literally what

SPEAKER_129: just happened with the babe ruth card uh that just sold a few weeks ago so sold like just under six

SPEAKER_142: million uh they sold a portion of it on collectible uh but the owner uh you know still owns it but they

David Friedberg: sold a slice off yeah and the owner's probably like i don't want to have this in my house like

SPEAKER_93: somebody's going to i mean nobody's going to come to my house to rob the car unwise move but um but you know certainly if it's if you had a six million dollar babe ruth card or a 10 million dollar lebron card it's quite possible somebody could hop your fence and want to rob your house for it and then what do you know all of a sudden you're running like a bank and you have to have a vault for your cards it's better those cards be in some vault that somebody else maintains i think yeah there was

SPEAKER_129: that literally just happened yesterday so the all-star game they were uh highlighting some awesome stuff so they created a little museum at the all-star game and one of the things they brought was um a mickey mantle one of the main like the most prestigious mickey mantle cards that some people were saying is worth like 15 million dollars because it's only like one of two population and it's like a perfect like mint whatever uh and they literally came with one of those like brinkers

SPEAKER_226: you know bank trucks with six guards and all the nonsense i mean this is where this is headed

SPEAKER_227: like it's definitely where it's headed um and gambling now is also becoming legalized here and wagering in the united states so that's that i would think that's also driving the interest in sports

SPEAKER_129: absolutely it's just another vector exactly really these trends uh i wish these trends happened when i was a kid i could have uh been monetizing off of this when i was you know younger but the sports preneur is not going away it's it's really here to stay and only getting stronger i wouldn't be surprised if more people get quote unquote jobs as sportspreneurs like i'm just i know sports i could

SPEAKER_142: get a good job and that will become more valuable every day when when we were young we knew sports great we got to talk trash about how our favorite team was doing great yeah you can work in a sports collector

SPEAKER_93: store you can work at a comic book store for a minimum wage or less now you could literally work at marvel writing the timeline for you know their 75th movie or 87 series it's like literally our childhoods have um i guess since we're in charge now our childhoods have now become mainstreamed we literally have every single character in the marvel universe is and the disney and the dc universe is being realized i can't i'm like really you guys are doing teen titans oh you've got five different versions of teen titans there's like a live action teen titans there's a comic there's four different comic book there's four different animated teen titans i'm like what is it gonna be a teen titans

SPEAKER_129: movie and they're like oh yeah that's in the works now the nintendo cartridges that you know you have to blow in to make sure they worked when they went in are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars

SPEAKER_93: that's hilarious i did see alexis ohanian um showing his cartridges with the plastic covers on them and i was like really okay here i guess that's where we are well listen it's great to invest in the company and it's great to be in business together very excited about your future and i'm delighted that

SPEAKER_96: we were able to participate in the round and for people who are thinking of joining or maybe applying to work at vincent uh any place they can visit a url or an email oh just go to uh with vincent.com they

SPEAKER_129: can see there or if anybody wants to send me an email it's just slava my first name at with vincent.com

SPEAKER_79: happy to respond to any questions slava at with vincent.com you got it all right slava congratulations

SPEAKER_96: on the race today and announcing it here on this week in startups and across a couple of other news outlets continued success and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye